Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  It is perhaps noteworthy that the comparable body in New York is the Board of Education while Boston’s remains the School Committee, for the committee seems less interested in education than in employment. Once Boston’s schools had justly claimed to be among the country’s best. But in the thirties—as Puritan rigor was abetted by Irish civil service rigidity—the system began to atrophy. (“We do not need to teach the current economic theories, nor the ever-changing concepts in government, nor the science of tomorrow,” Superintendent Patrick Campbell said in 1935. “Let us remember that man must always learn from the experience of the past.”) The proud boasts of another time (“Our common schools are a system of unsurpassable grandeur and efficacy,” Horace Mann had said) became ritualistic obeisance to “our wonderful system” and “our dedicated teachers.” By 1944, the Boston Finance Commission, a state watchdog agency, concluded: “ ‘Politics’ has dealt a paralyzing blow to progress in Boston schools. ‘Politics’ is given as the cause of relatively incompetent persons holding responsible positions, of decisions being made that are contrary to [educators’] best judgment…. The result is deadly to honest thinking, professional initiative, courageous leadership, and progress in all portions of the school system.”

  A quarter century later, in 1970, the situation was, if anything, worse. Only 14 percent of School Committee votes concerned educational policy and curriculum, while 74 percent dealt with hiring, firing, promotion, and assignment of individual school employees. Appropriately grateful to the member who put them or kept them in office, such employees could be counted on to work on the member’s future campaigns; indeed, elections were often decided by how many jobs a member controlled (the average member appointed 30–40 custodians, aides, or night school teachers during his term on the committee; the chairman up to 200).

  Although members were unpaid, they raised thousands of dollars each year through $25-a-plate “testimonial dinners” to which administrators, teachers, and businessmen seeking contracts with the system were “invited.” (“Dear Friend,” read a typical invitation, “Friends of Boston School Committeeman John J. Kerrigan are planning to honor him with a reception and cocktail party at the New England Aquarium on Thursday evening, October 19, 1972, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The purpose of this party is twofold. The first is to honor John, an outstanding dedicated public official, who is an unpaid member of the Boston School Committee. The second is to honor John on the occasion of his fourteenth Wedding Anniversary…. Enclosed for your convenience you will find both a reservation card and a postage-paid envelope: Gentlemen: please reserve _____tables at $250 each. Please reserve _____tables at $500 each.”) Failure to attend such dinners often resulted in the employee’s demotion or dismissal or the loss of a contract. The funds raised went straight into the member’s pocket for purely personal use or toward the escalating cost of incessant campaigns. For ever since Maurice Tobin had graduated from the School Committee to mayor, governor, and Secretary of Labor in Harry Truman’s Cabinet, members had seen the committee as the ideal launching pad to higher office.

  But in 1961 Louise Hicks gave no sign of such aspirations. She ran as a reformer, pledged to “take politics out of the School Committee.” Indeed, the Judge’s daughter seemed then the very prototype of the “lace curtain” Irish who had long collaborated on school reform with Yankee “Goo-Goos.” She won endorsements from the Boston Teachers’ Alliance and the League for Better Schools. She appealed particularly to women with her campaign slogan: “The only mother on the ballot” (not bothering to mention that her two sons went to parochial school). But her chief political asset was her late father. From the start, she always used her full name, Louise Day Hicks. People would call her campaign headquarters to ask, “Is she really the Judge’s daughter?” The little people the Judge had helped and the big people with whom he had hobnobbed rallied round his little girl. Her campaign organization was rudimentary, built on her family. Her brother John reluctantly served as campaign manager. Her husband ran a sound truck. A neighbor, Marie Whelan, helped organize women’s groups which met in kitchens and parlors across the city. Louise called on two friends from the law school study group—Perri Reeder, who canvassed the Jewish community, and Reuben Dawkins, who worked the black neighborhoods (Louise herself met with black parents at Freedom House, the black community’s principal settlement house, and pledged her support for their objectives). Reform was in the air that fall and four new members were swept onto the five-member committee, among them Louise, who finished third in the balloting.

  During her first year on the committee she was quiet and uncontroversial. At the start of her second year, in January 1963, her colleagues elected her chairwoman and for the first five months her direction of the committee was so unimpeachable that Citizens for Boston Public Schools, the principal reform lobby, contemplated endorsing her for reelection that fall. Then, on May 22, the Citizens released a report charging that thirteen of the city’s schools were over 90 percent black; that eleven of these were at least fifty years old and the newest twenty-six years old; and that all were chronically short-changed on funding (the average cost allocated to pupils in all-white elementary schools was $350 per year, while in predominantly black schools it ranged as low as $228.98). Paul Parks, the group’s black vice-president, who had met Mrs. Hicks during her first campaign, invited her to a meeting at Freedom House that night at which he outlined the report’s finding. Afterwards, Parks drove Louise home to South Boston. In the car, she assured him that she “understood and sympathized” with the black parents’ grievances and would do what she could to alleviate them.

  Three weeks later, on June 11, the NAACP went before the School Committee to call for correction of these conditions. By coincidence, they had chosen a critical moment in the national civil rights struggle. That very morning, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Governor George Wallace stood on the steps of the University of Alabama, symbolically blocking implementation of a court order for admission of two black students. But then, with 600 federal marshals and federalized National Guard units standing by to enforce the order, the Governor backed down, ending weeks of tense confrontation with the White House and Justice Department.

  President Kennedy made it the occasion for his most important proclamation on civil rights. At eight that evening, over national television, he announced that he would introduce legislation to speed school desegregation and guarantee blacks access to all public facilities. Often criticized for being too cool and intellectual on such matters, it was an impassioned President who spoke to the nation that night on “a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” It was not a sectional issue, he said, but “a problem which faces us all—in every city of the North as well as the South…. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”

  At that very moment in Boston, a crowd of 300, unable to gain entrance to School Committee headquarters, stood in the rain singing “We Shall Overcome.” Inside the committee’s grim third-floor meeting room a biracial delegation of 125 massed behind Mrs. Ruth Batson, chairman of the NAACP’s education committee, as she demanded action. “I know that the word ‘demand’ is a word that is disliked by many public officials,” she said, “but I am afraid that it is too late for pleading, begging, requesting, or even reasoning. We are here because the clamor from the community is too anxious to be ignored, the dissatisfaction and complaints too genuine, and the injustices present in our school syst
em hurt our pride, rob us of our dignity, and produce results which are injurious not only to our future but to that of our city, our commonwealth, and our nation.

  “We then make this charge. There is segregation in fact in our Boston public school system. To be sure, the 1954 Supreme Court decision dealt with deliberate segregation, but there can be no misinterpretation of the language used in that decision which stated that ‘the separation of children solely on the basis of race generates a feeling of inferiority that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’ The NAACP’s position on Northern school segregation is clear. We must work to reduce and eliminate school segregation wherever it exists. We do not accept residential segregation as an excuse for countenancing this situation. We feel that it is the responsibility of school officials to take an affirmative stand on the side of the best possible education for all children. This ‘best possible education’ is not possible where segregation exists. Inadequate educational standards, unequal facilities, and discriminatory educational practices exist wherever there is school segregation.”

  When Mrs. Batson had finished, Mrs. Hicks thanked her politely. For the moment, the chairwoman made no comment of her own. Instead, she turned the floor over to School Superintendent Frederick J. Gillis, who indignantly denied the NAACP’s charges. “At no time during my service has any child been deprived of the right of attending any Boston public school because of his or her race, religion, or national background,” said the sixty-four-year-old superintendent. “The Boston public school districts are determined by school population in relation to building capacities, distances between homes and schools, and unusual traffic patterns. They aren’t bound by ethnic or religious factors.”

  The issue was joined. The next day—even as civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi—angry, frustrated blacks announced plans for a symbolic one-day boycott of Boston’s junior and senior high schools. The NAACP balked at first, but militants in the Massachusetts Freedom Movement insisted such tactics were necessary to wake the city’s blacks from their lethargy. Ultimately, the NAACP agreed to support the walkout if the issues couldn’t be resolved through negotiation.

  On Saturday, June 15, the School Committee and four black representatives sought to break the impasse in a seven-hour session. The blacks presented fourteen specific demands, among them new training, counseling, and guidance programs; reduction in class size; new biracial textbooks; and fairer methods of intelligence testing. The committee finally accepted or agreed to study twelve of the demands. It tabled No. 10—“The elimination of discrimination in hiring and assignment of teachers”—which it could hardly be expected to accept since it had never admitted that such discrimination existed. And it flatly rejected No. 1—“An immediate public acknowledgment of the existence of de facto segregation in the Boston Public School system”—the single demand which the blacks regarded as essential to an agreement.

  In part, the dispute was a semantic one. There was no disagreement on the facts: thirteen of the city’s schools were at least 90 percent black. To many, that was de facto segregation—a term which had come into use to distinguish the Northern brand of racial separation from the legally mandated dual school systems of the South. But not to the School Committee. It conceded that “because of concentration of Negroes in certain sections of the city, we have Negroes predominantly in some of our schools,” but it wouldn’t admit that this was de facto segregation. The NAACP’s position was characteristically moderate: it didn’t accuse either the committee or its predecessors of deliberately segregating the system, asking only that it accept a generalized responsibility for the situation. The committee refused. “It’s like a picture on the wall,” one committee member explained. “Once you admit it’s tipped, you have to put it straight. We’re not admitting anything.” Superintendent Gillis, about to retire after eight years in office, was particularly intractable on this point, fearing that any such admission would be a repudiation of his administration. Of the five School Committee members, only Arthur Gartland, a liberal Back Bay insurance executive, was willing to accept demand No. 1. When the dead-locked parties gave up shortly after midnight, Mrs. Hicks emerged grim-faced and obdurate. “All views have been expressed during the past seven hours,” she told newsmen. “There is nothing more to say.”

  But Mrs. Hicks was less adamant than she sounded. The next day she met secretly with three blacks—Paul Parks of the NAACP and Otto and Muriel Snowden of Freedom House. The meetings produced a statement designed to head off the boycott. “This will do it,” the Snowdens assured her. In light of Mrs. Hicks’s later reputation as a confirmed bigot, it was a remarkably conciliatory position.

  Because of social conditions beyond our control, sections of our city have become predominantly Negro areas. These ghettos have caused large numbers of Negro children to be in fact separated from other racial and ethnic groups. Ghetto living presents problems to the Negro family and to the Negro child which necessitate a total community effort to overcome and eradicate.

  Ghetto living, in itself makes unique problems for the Negro youngster. We recognize this as a fact and we dedicate ourselves to the sympathetic, cooperative solution of these problems.

  In this city, so proud of its “Cradle of Liberty” spirit and the home city of the President of the United States, it is only fitting and proper that we take the lead in recognizing the social revolution taking place across this nation for Negro equality. The dignity of all mankind demands that all of us work together with understanding and it is to this end that we dedicate our sincere effort.

  Louise herself described this as “a strong, honest statement of policy and intent designed to show the Negro people I fully understand their position, their grievances, and their problems.” Although it did not include the magic words “de facto segregation,” it went a long way toward meeting the black community’s demands in this area, and might have provided the basis for a compromise.

  But late Sunday evening, Mrs. Hicks angrily withdrew the statement. The reason for her abrupt reversal remains in dispute to this day. According to Mrs. Hicks, a reporter called her that night with a statement released in her name by black leaders. Mrs. Hicks says it resembled the one she had drafted that afternoon, but had been subtly altered—opening, “We regret,” and omitting the phrase “beyond our control”—to suggest greater committee responsibility for segregated schools. Black leaders deny they tampered with her statement. They suggest that she withdrew it when she failed to find majority support on the committee, leaving her uncomfortably isolated as a racial moderate.

  In any case, at a news conference the next day, she utterly disowned any version of the statement. “Let me assure you,” she told reporters, “the School Committee members regret nothing, except that children are being encouraged to remain out of school. If some black leaders would rather ‘play with words,’ then I am indeed disillusioned.”

  On Monday night, Governor Endicott Peabody made an eleventh-hour effort to avert the boycott. He managed to extract relatively conciliatory statements from three members of the committee—Joe Lee, Thomas Eisenstadt, and Gartland—and presented them to black representatives at a midnight meeting in his Beacon Hill apartment. None of the statements mentioned “de facto segregation,” though Arthur Gartland assured the blacks that the statements constituted “a moral commitment that cannot be repudiated.” But the blacks stood firm, perhaps influenced by Chairwoman Hicks’s sudden intransigence (“I repeat what I have said time and again,” her new statement read. “We do not have segregation in the Boston schools”).

  So the boycott began as scheduled on Tuesday morning—8,260 of Boston’s junior and senior high school students remaining at home or attending “freedom schools.” No longer even faintly conciliatory, Mrs. Hicks lashed out. “Our schools and our public officials preach obedience to the law, yet here we have our Negro children being encouraged to flaunt the law.” At a teachers’ meeting, she exclaimed wit
h tears in her eyes, “God help them, they know not what they do!”

  By late June, the two sides had reached an impasse over two small Latin words. To some, the dispute seemed ridiculous. Boston’s Cardinal Cushing urged the School Committee to “at least acknowledge the problem.” The Boston Herald warned that “recognition of the existence of de facto segregation … is the necessary forerunner of appropriate correction action.”

  The strongest pressure came from Washington, where Boston’s conflict was proving acutely embarrassing to John Kennedy. For just as the NAACP’s June 11 challenge had brought Boston’s racial antagonism into the open, so the President’s June 11 address was a watershed in his administration’s stance on racial issues, the start of a concerted drive to get a civil rights bill through Congress. Not surprisingly, Southern Democrats seized on the troubles in Kennedy’s native city to brand him a hypocrite. Starting in midsummer, Mrs. Hicks began getting telephone calls from Presidential Appointments Secretary Kenneth O’Donnell, from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and, ultimately, from the President himself. All delivered the same message: the President would greatly appreciate it if Mrs. Hicks could reach some sort of compromise with the NAACP. Louise, by then a staunch Kennedy supporter, was flattered by the attention; but, even after one presidential aide dangled a judgeship before her, she declined to bend.

  Indeed, the more others pushed, the more the committee, led by its chairwoman, dug in its heels. On August 15, when NAACP members raised the issue again, Mrs. Hicks snapped, “The committee has decided not to discuss the question of de facto segregation. Kindly proceed to educational matters.” The NAACP delegation walked out.