Like most Townies, the McGoffs were resisting Garrity’s order as best they could. Alice had sworn she would never put her children on a bus to Roxbury, and even before her three youngest were assigned there, she’d enrolled them in Catholic schools in Malden and Everett, nearby working-class suburbs—Tommy at Immaculate Conception, the twins at St. Anthony’s.
Under Garrity’s plan—which designated certain age groups in each “geo-code” to be bused and others to remain in their neighborhood schools—Billy, Lisa, and Kevin were assigned to Charlestown High. Anti-busing leaders had called for a boycott of all Charlestown schools that first week to express the community’s determined opposition to the judge’s order, and many of the McGoffs’ classmates—under pressure from their parents—had already pledged not to go to school that morning. Alice had left the decision up to her kids. “I hope you won’t go,” she said. “It’ll show the judge we mean business. But I won’t stop you. You’re old enough to make up your own minds.”
Billy and Lisa decided to go. A senior that year, Billy had already been elected co-captain of the football team; he would probably be co-captain in basketball as well, and he expected to be chosen senior class president as his brother Danny had been before him. Busing or not, it was going to be a good year and he was eager to get started.
Lisa felt even more strongly about it. As she told her mother that morning, “If we don’t go, we’re letting Garrity and all those police keep us out of our own school. I don’t care if they bring the whole Army in here, I’m going to school.”
A few minutes before eight, Lisa looked at her watch. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s time.”
Alice sat at the kitchen table, rubbing her aching neck with both hands. “Oh God,” she moaned. “I’m frightened for you kids. Please, stay out of trouble. If any fighting starts, just come home. And, Billy, for crying out loud, look out for your sister!”
Then the two of them set off along Bunker Hill Street. At Monument Street, where the Red Store and the Green Store manned the corner like old friends, they paused for a moment to gather their courage—buying some candy at the Red Store, exchanging greetings with the regulars around the counter—before starting up the hill. As they reached Monument Square, their path was barred by three policemen demanding identification. When they produced cards stating their names, grades, and school assignments, the cops waved them through.
Before them lay the grassy flanks of the Monument grounds, enclosed by a high wrought-iron fence and now by another wall of Metropolitan District Commission police, standing guard at ten-foot intervals. As the McGoffs turned right and headed toward the high school, whose gray granite façade dominated the northwest corner of Monument Square, they noticed for the first time a huge throng of press people massed behind the fence. There were newspapermen scribbling in stenographer’s pads, photographers festooned with cameras, television cameramen with Minicams strapped to their shoulders, sound men with long black booms which they poked between the rungs of the fence, hoping to capture some murmur of approaching confrontation. The principal object of their attention was a group of about seventy-five Townies, most of them women, who had gathered on the corner of Concord Street as it emptied into the square, hard by the high school. Brandishing homemade placards with messages like “No forced busing!” and “Never!” the women were straining against another line of police thrown up across the intersection.
As the McGoffs reached the corner, they were halted again by a police sergeant who asked once more for their identity cards, then waved them through a cordon of police toward the school’s front door. Passing along the corridor of blue uniforms, Lisa was simultaneously excited and terrified. Never in her young life had she been the center of such a maelstrom of activity; never before had so many people seemed so passionately interested in what she was doing. Yet the very passion, the intensity, the sheer physical presence of so many armed men intimidated her, and she hurried toward the safety of the familiar school door, Billy close at her heels.
But as she stepped through the doorway into the gloomy marble lobby, the scene confronting her was anything but reassuring. Immediately in front of the door stood three large, rectangular metal detectors—like those she had seen at airports—through which her schoolmates were now filing one by one, closely scrutinized by teachers and school administrators. And suspended above the detectors was a cardboard sign, hand-lettered in bold, black characters:
NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL MAY CARRY ONTO SCHOOL PROPERTY, CARRY ON HIS PERSON, OR USE WITHIN SCHOOL PROPERTY ANY ITEM OR ARTICLE THAT MAY BE USED AS A WEAPON.
THE FOLLOWING ITEMS ARE TO BE CONSIDERED WEAPONS:
A. Firearms of any kind.
B. Any knives, razors, or other objects sharpened into blades.
C. Clubs, athletic equipment such as baseball bats, hockey sticks, umbrellas, karate sticks (moonchucks), or rods of any kind.
D. Pipes, brass knuckles, and other metal objects (screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, other metal tools).
E. Chains, whips, ropes, or any object fashioned into such.
F. Combs with metal teeth, rat tails.
G. Scissors, metal nail files, hatpins.
H. Mace and other chemical sprays such as spray paint and spray deodorants.
I. Bottles.
J. All other instruments or articles not listed above which may inflict bodily harm upon another.
Lisa stared at the sign in disbelief. This wasn’t the school she had left the June before—it wasn’t her school at all anymore. It was an alien place, ruled by judges, bureaucrats, police, and criminals with knives, pipes, bottles, and clubs intent on doing her harm. With clenched teeth, she submitted to the metal detectors and a long, painstaking search of her handbag. Then, filled with anxiety, she climbed the marble steps toward her homeroom.
From the corner of Concord Street, Danny McGoff watched his sister and brother enter the school, almost wishing he was going with them. He’d had a hell of a good time up there and put together an impressive extracurricular record—president of the senior class, editor of the school paper, manager of the hockey team. He’d hoped to be the second member of his family—after his uncle Jim—to go to college, but he’d squandered so much of his energy on the hockey team and hanging out on the corner with his friends that his grades and board scores had been too low to get him in anywhere decent. The guidance counselors said he needed a year to “brush up” his English and math, so when the 520 Club—a group of teamsters up in Sullivan Square—offered him their annual scholarship, he grabbed it and selected Berwick Academy in Maine. For weeks now he’d been so busy getting his school gear together he hadn’t had much time to think about busing, but as he stood on the corner surveying the massive display of city, state, and federal power drawn up around his old school, he could feel the anger rising in him. He’d always thought the job of the police was to catch crooks, not to ram unpopular laws down people’s throats. Turning away in disgust, he jogged down the hill toward Bunker Hill Street, where a group of his pals had gathered outside the Green Store, restless and looking for action, hungry to vent their anger at the alien presence in their town. Many were already pulling on cans of Bud or bottles of Narragansett beer. And there were younger kids as well—among them his two youngest brothers, fourteen-year-old Kevin, who had stayed out of Charlestown High to see what was happening on the streets, and thirteen-year-old Tommy, whose classes at Immaculate Conception hadn’t yet begun.
An impish-looking sophomore named Jimmy Walsh had an idea. Together with a friend, he ran down the street to his family’s apartment in the Bunker Hill project, pulled an old pair of jeans and a sweatshirt from a closet, and stuffed them with wadded newspapers. Fashioning a head from a black plastic garbage bag, they hung a cardboard sign: “Nigger beware!” around its neck. Tying a rope around the effigy, they climbed to the project roof and flung it over the edge. “Look at the nigger!” Walsh shouted as the crowd below cheered.
On the first throw, the du
mmy caught in the limbs of a tree and dangled there for a few minutes. Soon the boys retrieved it and tossed it further out onto the street. The crowd in front of the Green Store broke and ran toward the dummy, kicking and stomping it in a frenzy of release. “Let’s burn it!” someone shouted. A match was produced. The dummy, doused with gasoline, erupted in flame. Prancing around the fiery “corpse,” the boys shouted, “Burn, nigger, burn!”
Several patrol cars came screeching up Bunker Hill Street, as Captain William MacDonald, Charlestown’s police commander, hurried down the hill to take charge of the situation. At once he ordered the crowd to disperse, but by then the burning effigy and police sirens had drawn still more youths out of the housing project. Sensing a confrontation, they refused to move.
MacDonald seized a bullhorn and shouted, “This intersection must be cleared immediately. You have five minutes to comply with this order or the police will move you.” But that brought only a chorus of jeers: “We ain’t going nowhere!” “This is our town, you get out!” Abruptly, down the street in Hayes Square, appeared a squad of the dreaded Tactical Patrol Force, visors in place, ready to move. “Sit down!” a man shouted, and most of the teenagers obeyed, squatting in the street around the blackened object on the pavement. On a signal from MacDonald, the TPF began jogging up the street, and from around the corner came six motorcycles of the Mobile Operations Patrol, driving straight for the kids, scattering them right and left.
Until then, Danny McGoff had been merely a spectator. He kept telling himself: “I’m not going to get arrested today. I’m going to school in a week and I don’t want to come down here to court. I’d better stay out of this.” But now as the battle was joined, as friends all around him began pelting the police with beer bottles, rocks, and pieces of wood, Danny heaved a Narragansett bottle at the police cars in the intersection and watched it shatter against a fender. Aroused, he charged into the fray, heaving whatever came to hand.
All around him, others—even grown men—were losing control. Vinnie Donovan, a beefy neighbor of the McGoffs, charged Captain MacDonald and kicked him in the groin. As the captain doubled up in pain, two policemen seized Vinnie by the arm, but his friends grabbed him by the other arm and for a few seconds a bizarre tug-of-war ensued, each side hauling at him until the weight of the crowd prevailed and they pulled him back into their midst. By now, the TPF were angry too, flailing about them with their nightsticks, drawing blood. The motorcyclists roared onto the sidewalks, chasing some of the crowd into the project.
Danny, Tommy, and Kevin McGoff scrambled down Carney Court and into O’Reilly Way, a narrow road behind the first row of project buildings. There they were relatively safe, for they knew all the project’s alleys and courtyards, all the doors and passageways which led ever deeper into its protective maze.
So the battle became a game which Danny and Tommy joined with gusto while Kevin maintained his usual role of detached observer. The kids would sneak down an alley, jump onto Bunker Hill Street, and heave a barrage of rocks and bottles at the police, but once the cops gave chase, they would dart back into the project and disappear into a building, only to reappear a few minutes later two blocks away. For most of the morning and into the afternoon, the McGoffs and their friends played cat and mouse with the police.
But eventually they tired of that. In midafternoon, about three hundred Townies, most of them teenagers, staged a march up Breed’s Hill, chanting the high school football cheer, “Here we go, Charlestown, here we go!” Along the way, they overturned five small cars and set fire to a sixth. On the other side of the hill, demonstrators forced their way into the lobby of the Bunker Hill Community College and assaulted a nineteen-year-old black student, knocking him to the ground and injuring his arm. Then, their anger spent, the crowd drifted back up the hill, heading home through the gathering dusk.
Still immobilized by her aching neck, Alice hadn’t moved from her apartment, where she followed the day’s events on radio and television. Several local stations had preempted their normal programming for coverage of the crisis. Prone in bed, her neck cradled by four pillows, she viewed with growing horror the massive array of forces around Monument Square, the frightening scene outside the high school, the battle of Bunker Hill Street, the march to the community college. As she watched the images flickering across the screen, and listened to the newsmen summing it all up in their Harvard accents, she thought: The scene they’re showing is barely three hundred yards up the hill, but for all these guys know, it might as well be on the other side of the moon. They just don’t understand. By the time her children straggled home, Alice was deeply agitated and she pleaded with them to stay in that evening, to keep off the streets. But soon most of the boys had rushed out again, unable to resist the skirmishes still sputtering along Bunker Hill Street. At about ten o’clock, somebody threw two firebombs into the Warren Prescott School, and when firemen arrived they were stoned by a hostile crowd. Another group set up a barricade of blazing trash barrels, which brought the TPF racing back to clear it. Until well past midnight, police cars streamed through the project.
As she lay in bed, watching headlights race across her bedroom ceiling, Alice could feel her neck growing suffer by the minute. It seemed to her as though all the pain of that terrible day had collected in one knot and lodged at the base of her neck.
The pain had been a long time gathering. Alice had paid little attention to the early phases of Boston’s desegregation struggle—preoccupied with raising her seven children, she told herself that the legal battle was unlikely to affect Charlestown for years to come. But by 1973, as both state and federal courts prepared to grapple with the central issue, it suddenly seemed less remote.
In the early seventies, Alice had four of her children at the Harvard-Kent, a new elementary school directly across the street from the Bunker Hill project. Like most of her neighbors, she was delighted to have the new school—the first in Charlestown in more than thirty years—but she was determined to keep a close eye on her children’s education. Having paid her one dollar to join the Harvard-Kent Home and School Association—Boston’s equivalent of the Parent-Teacher Association—she regularly attended its monthly meetings in the school’s spacious auditorium. In March 1973, after the state’s Supreme Judicial Court set an accelerated timetable for “racial balancing” of the city’s schools, Charlestown’s Home and School Association called a mass protest rally. Alice was among five hundred parents who gathered to listen to anti-busing leaders from around the city. The evening’s most rousing address came from Mrs. Olive Costello, a Dorchester mother, who warned that indiscriminate mixing of blacks and whites would be a disaster. “The three R’s will be turned to Riot, Rape, and Robbery,” she said. “Wake up Charlestown, before it’s too late!”
To Alice, the idea of sending her children to a school halfway across the city when they had a perfectly good school right across the street was utterly ridiculous. Moreover, what she knew of conditions in Roxbury strengthened her resolve not to put any of her children on a bus. Riot, Rape, and Robbery might be a little strong, but she knew it wasn’t safe over there, and when the chairman asked for recruits to help form a Charlestown chapter of a new statewide organization—Massachusetts Citizens Against Forced Busing—Alice raised her hand.
Charlestown’s nascent anti-busing movement was led by a small circle of women: Gloria Conway, editor of the Charlestown Patriot, the town’s weekly newspaper; Peg Pigott and Ann Doherty, both active in the Home and School Association; and Judy Brennan, a telephone operator. All were mothers from stable “lace curtain” families, public-spirited, moderate, even circumspect. They fitted well into Massachusetts Citizens, a cautious organization which concentrated on public education, lobbying in the state legislature, and orderly demonstrations to capture media attention.
Though Alice lived in the project among a different breed of Townie, she’d been born and raised on Monument Avenue among women much like these. Now she threw herself into Massachusetts
Citizens—signing up new members, handing out leaflets, attending demonstrations. Often she took her older children along—Lisa in particular became a regular in the protests outside City Hall and the State House. On Aprils, 1974, when five hundred Townies marched in the huge procession to Beacon Hill, Alice, Danny, Lisa, and Kevin walked arm in arm in the second row of the Charlestown contingent. And later that afternoon, as the sun set, they were among the 3,000 diehards who remained on the Common singing, to the tune of the World War I song, “Over there, over there, our kids aren’t going over there.”
When Arthur Garrity issued his long-awaited ruling two months later, making it clear that some kids would indeed be going over there, a new desperation crept into Boston’s anti-busing movement. With the federal court order overriding state laws, lobbying was now useless. A new brand of protest was needed to show the judge that Boston’s white neighborhoods would never bow to his dictates. That June, Louise Day Hicks and her advisers pulled together a coalition of anti-busing activists in a new organization. To express the group’s militance, they called it ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). The first demonstration under the new label was scheduled for September 9, 1974, the Monday before the limited first phase of busing was to begin.
With the federal court taking jurisdiction of the case, the September protest focused on Massachusetts’ two U.S. senators—Ted Kennedy and Ed Brooke—who had recently voted against a narrowly defeated anti-busing rider to the federal aid to education bill. The rider wouldn’t have bound a federal court, but ROAR wanted to voice its outrage at the senators’ stand.
Neither man actually advocated busing. In April 1965, Ed Brooke—then the first black to serve as Massachusetts Attorney General—said, “I don’t believe any parent, black or white, wants to have his children bused from a superior school to an inferior school. It’s just not natural. The sane and sensible approach is the destruction of the ghetto.” Ted Kennedy was equally skeptical. On Meet the Press in March 1964, he told a reporter, “If your question is asking me whether I oppose ‘busing’ students, I do.” But as support for busing became a touchstone of commitment to racial equality, both senators gradually altered their positions, and when Arthur Garrity handed down his decision, Kennedy and Brooke rallied round the embattled judge.
Common Ground Page 41