Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  On the sidewalk outside, twenty more parents paraded with picket signs reading: “Harvard Summa Too Good for Negro Children,” “Good Teaching Banned in Boston,” and “Why Are Our Children Taught in a Boiler Room?” Meanwhile, a delegation met with Miss Callahan to present a list of twelve demands, including reinstatement of Kozol; elimination of the rattan; up-to-date, integrated school books; elimination of basement and auditorium classrooms; and more respectful treatment of children and parents.

  The demonstration ended after school officials agreed to meet with parents. On Wednesday afternoon, Deputy School Superintendent Marguerite Sullivan met with fifteen mothers in a first-floor classroom and left two hours later, saying “a great deal of progress” had been made. The mothers didn’t agree. They refused to leave the building, threatening to spend the night if their grievances were not attended to. This time, both sides seemed prepared for a long siege. Police ringed the building with orders to let no food or other supplies in. A hundred and fifty parents, children, and community leaders soon gathered outside waving placards and banners—among them Rachel Twymon, with Richard and George in tow. All through the long afternoon and into the evening they marched in a big circle on the sidewalk, singing “Let My People Go” and “We Shall Overcome.” Then, just before 9:00 p.m., Thomas Eisenstadt, a School Committee member, arrived to meet with the demonstrators. After Eisenstadt pledged a “full, personal investigation” of the Kozol case, the sit-in ended. Weeks later, Eisenstadt issued his promised report, finding that school officials had been “fully justified” in dismissing Kozol. But school was out for the summer, the children were splashing in overflowing hydrants along Washington Street, and the parents had other things to worry about.

  By then, the Twymons had moved from Fenelon Street to the Orchard Park housing project in Roxbury. Once the neighborhood had been an Irish enclave, fiercely resistant to black intrusion; and even when the project was built in 1942, whites were assigned to buildings east of Albany Street, blacks to the west in a section soon nicknamed “the Jet.” The move was a step down the social scale for the Twymons—from the lower-middle-class single- or two-family housing of North Dorchester to the shabby brick blockhouses of the project, occupied by working-class families, many of them on welfare. But, on welfare herself now, Rachel needed Orchard Park’s heavily subsidized rents.

  The move, nearly two miles back into the heart of Roxbury, had a similar effect on her children’s schooling. Starting in the fall of 1965, they went to the Dearborn School, right down the street from the project and attended by many project kids. While the Gibson had been nearly half white, the Dearborn was more than 98 percent black. It was even more shabby, decrepit, and over-crowded than the Gibson. The Dearborn was typical of the schools in Boston’s predominantly black neighborhoods, and the more Rachel saw of them, the more she despaired of her children’s ever getting a decent education there. They were hardly schools at all, she thought, more like warehouses where the kids were stored for a few years, sorted, labeled, and packed for shipment to the menial, low-paying jobs at which they would be doomed to labor the rest of their lives.

  Rachel was ill disposed to raise her children in all-black surroundings. It wasn’t merely because she believed they could get better instruction in integrated schools. She was still her mother’s daughter, inheriting Helen Walker’s pride in her Boston upbringing and in her association with whites. The Dearborn and schools like it were filled with the children of recent Southern migrants, the progeny of folks like her rough-hewn father and her former husband. Rachel wanted something better for her children. In part, she looked back to the genteel mixed community of her youth; in part, forward to a world in which racial discrimination would be systematically eradicated.

  Her own impulses were reinforced by her younger brother Arnold. Since her separation from Haywood and her illness, Arnold had become Rachel’s counselor and protector, a sort of surrogate father to her children. Several times a week, he would stop off at her apartment in the project, bringing groceries and advice. And increasingly his advice focused on schools, for Arnold believed body and soul in education. His own start hadn’t been auspicious: a dismal decade at the Asa Gray and the Sherwin, two of Boston’s worst ghetto schools. With deplorable reading and math scores, he had to repeat two grades. A succession of teachers, regarding him as unsuited to scholastic life, nudged him toward trade school.

  But Arnold had two models pulling him in a different direction. One was John Shelbourne, a football All-American at Dartmouth, now a social worker at the Robert Gould Shaw House and director of its Breezy Meadows Camp: a shining exemplar of what a black man could achieve. Another of Shelbourne’s protégés was Carl McCall, a product of Boston’s elite Hill section who had played basketball at Roxbury Memorial High, won a scholarship to Dartmouth, then studied theology at Andover-Newton Seminary and the University of Edinburgh. Five years older than Arnold, Carl had served as head counselor at Breezy Meadows while Arnold was a “work boy” in the camp kitchens. Not surprisingly, Carl was both a model and an object of consuming envy.

  At Boston Trade—where Arnold studied cabinetmaking—he was repeatedly discouraged from seeking a higher education. “Do yourself a favor,” his shop teacher told him, “go out and make some bread and butter.” But Arnold had higher aspirations. For six years, while working at Carroll’s Cut-Rate, he attended remedial classes three nights a week, gaining the basic skills he should have picked up in the public schools. Ultimately, he went on to Boston State, the first member of the Walker clan to attend college.

  As he rose in the world, Arnold was attracted to Audrey McCall, Carl’s demure, sophisticated sister. From New York, where he’d entered politics, Carl expressed little enthusiasm for the relationship, but when the pair were married in April 1966, Carl reluctantly preformed the ceremony. At first his marriage seemed to double Arnold’s self-confidence. Joining Kevin White’s Youth Activities Commission, he earned a master’s degree at the Simmons School of Social Work and was soon attending gatherings of Boston’s black elite. But he was never altogether comfortable in that new world. Every summer Audrey and Arnold visited Carl and his wife at their cottage in Oak Bluffs, the fashionable black enclave on Martha’s Vineyard. Simultaneously attracted by its style and nettled by its pretensions, Arnold threw up a protective shell. At the annual Labor Day tennis tournament, a friend found him “testy and belligerent,” bristling at slights from blacks and whites alike. “Aren’t you Bill Cosby?” a Yankee in J. Press sports clothes asked him on the Vineyard ferry one day. “No, sir,” snapped Arnold, “we niggers just look alike.”

  Arnold grew restless at his painfully slow advance through Boston’s social work bureaucracy. His academic credentials and family connections notwithstanding, he couldn’t seem to break the logjam ahead of him. Increasingly, he seethed at the black “muckamucks” who hadn’t helped him up the ladder more quickly.

  The harder he pushed, the more mixed his feelings about the doors on which he was knocking. The more he felt rejected by the Black Brahmins, the more “street” he became. When Audrey pressed him to join her at the prestigious St. Mark’s Congregational Church, he committed himself further to Louis X’s mosque. Black Congregationalists were merely aping their white counterparts, while the Muslims were in touch with the black experience. Soon he informally changed his name to Hasan Sharif.

  These resentments put a heavy strain on Hasan’s marriage. He identified Carl McCall—by then New York City’s Deputy Administrator of Human Resources—with all the middle-class blacks who’d turned their backs on him. Who the hell did Carl think he was? For that matter, who did Audrey think she was? Gradually Hasan and Audrey went their separate ways.

  None of this did anything to diminish Hasan’s passionate advocacy of education—and integration—for other family members. He arranged for his two daughters to join a voluntary program—Project Metco—under which small numbers of inner-city blacks were bused into Boston’s white suburbs. Meanwh
ile, he urged Rachel to get her children out of Boston’s all-black schools, away from those “Irish biddies” who didn’t give a damn about educating a bunch of niggers. But sometimes Hasan wondered what all his devotion to learning had availed him. Was it really the key to life’s achievements?

  It was a question which, by the mid-sixties, had come to preoccupy many of America’s leading social scientists. No other nation had ever invested so much of its resources—and its hopes—in the public schools. For more than a century, Americans had believed with John Dewey that “the office of the school environment [is] to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born.” Or, with Horace Mann, that “education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

  Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the myth remained largely intact. Each wave of European immigrants was said to have found in American classrooms the skills and assurance with which to launch its assault on the new continent. And nowhere were the schools more highly regarded than in Boston. Even after that confidence had begun to wane, Harvard’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that “no system that produced Leonard Bernstein and Teddy White could be all bad.” Indeed, journalist Theodore White had been educated—four decades before—at the very Gibson School which now drew Jonathan Kozol’s scorn. White credited the Gibson’s sixth-grade teacher, Miss Fuller, with instilling his love of history. “She was probably the first Protestant I ever met; she taught history vigorously; and she was special, the first person who made me think I might make something of myself.” It was an old story—but a powerful one—which reinforced the legend every time it was told.

  Not until black demands for integration found an ally in the burgeoning social sciences did a systematic critique of educational performance begin to develop. As NAACP lawyers framed the attack on school segregation in the fifties, they turned for support to a young social psychologist at New York’s City College. Kenneth Clark and his wife, Mamie, had been playing some interesting games with dolls. Their four baby dolls were identical in every way, except that two were brown and two were white. After showing them to Negro children aged three to seven, the Clarks said, “Give me the doll that looks bad,” “Give me the doll you like best.” The majority of Negro children tested—many of them in Boston and neighboring Worcester—showed “an unmistakable preference for the white doll and a rejection of the brown doll.” The Clarks were surprised by this evidence of “self-rejection,” the “truncating effect” it had on the children’s personalities, and the cruelty of internalized “racism.” With some trepidation—for the fruits of social science research were just beginning to find their way into the courtroom—the lawyers put Clark on the stand. The gamble paid off. In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, it cited Clark’s findings, among others, to support its most sweeping conclusion: “To separate [Negro children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

  Over the following decade, this proposition congealed into an article of faith, which went somewhat as follows: If racial segregation impaired the self-image of Negro students, it must also impair their performance. Thus black schools were inferior to white, or integrated, schools, not simply in physical facilities, curricula, teacher training, and the like, but inherently, precisely because they were black. If Negroes were educated in integrated settings, they would achieve more academically and improve their prospects for a rewarding life.

  As the social sciences became increasingly central to the formulation of public policy, this doctrine reinforced the political and legal drive for school desegregation. So powerful was the presumption that when Congress in 1964 ordered a survey on “the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin,” James Coleman, the study’s director, could tell an interviewer even before the field work was done: “… the study will show the difference in the quality of schools that the average Negro child and the average white child are exposed to. You know yourself that the difference is going to be striking.”

  So Coleman and most of the academic establishment were startled and dismayed eight months later by just how little difference his survey detected. When the results were in from this, the second-largest social science research project in history, they produced conclusions sharply at variance with the reigning doctrine. Popular impressions to the contrary, Coleman’s investigators found little difference between physical facilities and curricula at black and white schools. Moreover, the differences they did recognize had little effect on black and white performance. Even racial integration had relatively little impact on student achievement, as measured by standardized tests. The significant variables lay, not in the schools at all, but in the homes from which the children came and the cultural and class influences surrounding those homes.

  If the Coleman Report—as it came to be known—was a thunderclap in the cloistered world of social science research, its implications for public policy were even more earthshaking. Science magazine called it “a spear pointed at the heart of the cherished American belief that equality of educational opportunity will increase the equality of educational achievements.” But its implications went even deeper than that. For if the family, not the school, made the difference; if the poor, the black, and the disenfranchised were less susceptible to educational influence than hitherto believed; if differences between Americans were rooted in the bedrock of class—then social progress would be far more difficult to achieve than most people of goodwill had assumed.

  At Harvard, where the worlds of academic research and social policy so often converged, the report became a cause célèbre during that fall of 1966. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, professor of education and urban politics, and Thomas Pettigrew, professor of social psychology, convened a faculty seminar on the study. Meeting every week at the Faculty Club, it quickly developed into an intellectual “happening” of astonishing glamour, a cockpit in which the urgent issues of race, poverty, and the cities were thrashed out for hours on end, over brandy and cigars supplied on a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. As word spread, people began approaching Moynihan and Pettigrew in the Yard, asking if they could participate. Professor Abraham Chayes of the Law School—and the Kennedy State Department—was one of the eighty participants. So was Theodore Sizer, dean of the School of Education; Henry Dyer, vice-president of the Educational Testing Service; and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset. Charles Silberman of Fortune magazine and Jason Epstein of Random House shuttled back and forth from New York.

  The Harvard seminar produced no consensus. Instead, it spawned a whole range of recommendations across the ideological spectrum.

  A committed Southern liberal, Tom Pettigrew found nothing in the Coleman Report to shake his faith in integration. He correctly pointed out that Coleman had devoted surprisingly little attention to desegregation; he had simply showed that mixing of social classes was more likely to improve student performance than mixing of the races. But since race and class were so often connected in America, desegregation struck Pettigrew as imperative.

  But a young colleague of Pettigrew’s who also participated in the Harvard seminar drew quite different conclusions. David J. Armor, associate professor of sociology, studied Project Metco, the voluntary busing program in which Arnold Walker had enrolled his two daughters. Using data from that and five other busing programs, Armor found no evidence that integration had improved academic achievement. In a slashing assault on the whole liberal agenda, Armor concluded that “busing is not an effective policy instrument for raising the achievement of blacks or for increasing interracial harmony.”<
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  A third participant in the seminar, Christopher Jencks, associate professor of education, pushed Coleman’s position to its logical extreme. If the roots of inequality lay in family and class, then egalitarians ought to meet the issue head on rather than proceed by “ingenious manipulation of marginal institutions like the schools.” That meant establishing “political control over the economic institutions that shape our society … what other countries usually call socialism.”

  Pat Moynihan and a colleague, Professor Frederick Mosteller, took a more cautious tack. Coleman had demonstrated that increasing the “inputs” (money, buildings, teachers, even racial integration) would have little effect on the “outputs” (educational achievement and equal opportunity). Continuing efforts should be made to “close the gap in educational achievement between the disadvantaged minorities and the white group,” so long as nobody expected dramatic advances.

  All through the late sixties and early seventies, the ideological wars raged on at Harvard, regiments of Left and Right marching and countermarching across the scarred battlefields, with no resolution in sight.

  To Rachel Twymon such abstractions had little meaning. She’d never expected integration—in and of itself—to guarantee her children a better education. She regarded it principally as a means of ensuring that blacks got their equal share of resources which, at least in Boston, tended to go disproportionately to white schools. But she had another, more practical, consideration. For the foreseeable future, she knew, Boston would be a “white world,” in which the Irish would keep their hands on the levers of power. If her children were going to make their living there, they would have to know how to get along with such people.

  It was too late for Richard and George, by then entering junior high school at the Dearborn. All their friends were there and they didn’t want to leave. Richard took the traditional route through the black inner-city schools. George, too, stayed on at the Dearborn several more years, but toward the end of that time he came under the influence of one of its few extraordinary teachers, Harriet Schwartz, who pulled strings to get him into Roslindale High, a better-than-average school in a largely white neighborhood.