But if they had to go, she would do what she could to protect them. A few days after the girls got their assignments, Rachel received an invitation to a meeting at City Hall, where parents of children assigned to Charlestown High were to elect a “Racial-Ethnic Parents’ Council.” Judge Garrity had directed that every high school form a council composed of five white parents, five black parents, and—if enough Hispanic or Chinese students were enrolled—five “other minority” parents. Such councils would be elected by separate racial caucuses at the start of each school year. The parent groups, Garrity said, should “help achieve peaceful desegregation [by] meeting regularly to talk frankly and deal with racial problems.” Rachel had served on the council at Brighton High, where black and white parents had worked well together, helping resolve a dispute over racial balance on the basketball team. Believing that this kind of cooperation had contributed to the relative calm at Brighton, Rachel hoped that similar councils might make things easier for her daughters at Charlestown.
But ROAR had condemned the councils, warning that parents who joined them would be “traitors” and urging its supporters throughout the city to boycott the elections. White parents in South Boston had boycotted the councils the year before and now Powder Keg was calling for a similar boycott in Charlestown.
On the evening of July 15, Arnold Walker drove his sister to the meeting. As they approached City Hall along New Congress Street, they could see a cluster of demonstrators in blue Powder Keg jackets, waving placards which read: “A vote for multiracial councils is a vote for forced busing” and “Don’t be a stooge for Garrity!” The protesters jeered as Rachel, alighting from Arnold’s car, hurried through a corridor of policemen toward the glass doors.
Riding the elevator to the eighth floor, she found five other black parents on folding chairs in one corner of a large conference room. Fifteen Charlestown parents huddled in another corner. The no-man’s-land in between was occupied by Charlestown’s headmaster, Frank Power, and a young history teacher named Vince Braudis, the parent council “coordinator.” After Power had welcomed the parents and Braudis distributed guidelines for the election, each race convened in its own corner. The blacks swiftly completed their “election.” With six parents present, they had just enough to fill the required slots—five representatives and an alternate. But one mother, clearly unnerved by the demonstrators outside and the hostile atmosphere across the room, refused to serve, so Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Brown, Mrs. Maríe Eaves, and Mrs. Edythe Lewis filled four of the regular slots, while Rachel, pleading her church commitments and the year she’d already served on the Brighton council, took the alternate’s spot.
Across the room, white parents were embroiled in a fierce debate with Power and Braudis. Occasionally, the blacks in their corner overheard snatches of the exchange. “I ain’t going to sit in the same room with a bunch of niggers,” one Charlestown mother declared. “You’re sitting in the same room with them right now,” Power replied. “Why can’t you work together?”
Nevertheless the whites, led by a Powder Keg contingent, remained adamant. At 9:30, Power gave up and adjourned the meeting. The blacks hurried out to Mr. Brown’s station wagon, while the whites emerged from the hall holding their fists aloft in a sign of victory, provoking cheers from their supporters.
The evening left Rachel deeply apprehensive. If adults couldn’t even discuss their differences, how could they expect children to resolve theirs? And what was the alternative to discussion? Yet she didn’t entirely abandon hope; Charlestown parents must fear for their children’s safety as much as she did for hers. Eager for a look at the places her children would be going, she quickly accepted an invitation to an August 27 “open house” at Charlestown High.
At dusk, just as lamps began to light up the streets, their yellow school bus crawled up the slope of Breed’s Hill. As it swung onto High Street, led by three police motorcycles, Rachel noticed other police lining both sides of the street. When the bus reached the square and turned left, she could see that the near slope of the Monument grounds was thick with men, women, and children, but only as the twenty-five parents disembarked in front of the high school could she hear the rhythmic chant thundering down at them from the hillside: “Niggers, go home! Niggers, go home!”
Forming a cordon between the bus and the crowd on the hill, the police hurried the minority parents inside the school, where Frank Power led them upstairs to the third-floor auditorium. The school had done its best to make them feel welcome. A coffee urn and platters of doughnuts were laid out near the entrance, and around the walls teachers waited behind desks, ready to answer questions about their courses. A few white parents were there too, but they kept to themselves; when Rachel looked toward them, their faces were so filled with cold resentment that she didn’t dare approach them.
Scanning the room for a friendly face, Rachel saw only one. James Howard was a black music teacher who had taught her children ten years before at the Dearborn School. She was so relieved to come upon an old acquaintance there that she rushed to his desk, embraced him, and fell into an animated conversation. Howard was almost as glad to see her. One of three black teachers in the school and the only one there that night, he too felt unwelcome. But he was hardly in a position to offer Rachel the reassurance she so obviously sought.
When Frank Power rose to welcome the parents, he did his best to neutralize their hostile reception. Charlestown High, he told them, was going to carry out the law of the land; administrators, teachers, and aides would do their best to assure the safety and well-being of every child. Violence, intimidation, or racial slurs would not be tolerated. “Charlestown High School is dedicated to providing a quality education for every student,” Power said. “As long as I am its headmaster that’s what we’re going to do. I have too much pride in this school to permit anything less. I hope you and your children will soon be as proud as I am to be members of the Charlestown High School community.”
But as Rachel looked over the school later, she wondered whether she could ever be proud of a place as old, shabby, and dreary as this. Paint peeled from ceilings and walls; windows were broken; linoleum was scraped and worn. When she asked to see the cafeteria, she was told that Charlestown had none, the only high school in the city without a hot-lunch program. On the walls she noticed racial epithets only partially erased or painted over: “Welcome Niggers,” “Niggers suck,” “White Power,” “KKK,” “Bus is for Zulu,” and one she would never forget, “Be illiterate. Fight forced busing ”
When aides began rounding up the parents for their trip home, Rachel was more than ready to leave. But she wasn’t prepared for the roar which went up from the crowd on the Monument grounds. If anything, the crowd had grown during the past two hours, and this time, as the parents boarded the bus, they were met by jeers and catcalls. “That’s right,” people were shouting. “Go home, niggers! Keep going all the way to Africa!” Rachel hunched down in her seat, away from the bus windows, which she feared might shatter at any moment. Outside, she could hear the police radio crackling with urgent communications, then the whine of the sirens as patrol cars joined the procession. All the way down the hill and across the bridge, she thought to herself: My God, what kind of hell am I sending my children into?
When she reached Methunion Manor, young Rachel and Cassandra were waiting for her report. As calmly as possible, she told them. She told Cassandra that Charlestown High was a “raggedy-ass school” which should have been torn down years ago. She told Rachel that, although she hadn’t seen the Edwards, she understood it was somewhat newer and in better condition than the high school. Then she recounted exactly what she had seen at the Monument, sparing her daughters none of the details. “There’s a lot of prejudiced people in Charlestown,” she said. “They don’t want me over there and they don’t want you over there. I’m afraid this isn’t going to be an easy year for either of you. You’re going to be called a lot of ugly names. You’re going to be spat at, maybe pushed around some
. But it’s not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. It’s something we have to go through—something you have to go through—if this city is ever going to get integrated.”
But later, as she lay in bed, Rachel wept bitterly. Her strong faith in integration had been badly rattled that night, the old verities called into question. What good, she wondered, could possibly come from all this? What could her children learn at a school like that, except how to hate?
“Fellow citizens,” Charlestown’s mayor, George Washington Warren, told a large assemblage on Monument Square one morning in October 1847. “When all of us shall have passed away from the stage of life, when there shall not be one of the present generation living to inform the men of the Twentieth Century of the doings of these times, may the Institution this day planted yield its good fruit, and be ever fondly cherished by the people…. As long as this Monument shall commemorate the successful contests of our fathers for National Independence, may the High School standing up proudly by its side, serve, by its generous and ennobling influences, to perpetuate and guaranty the blessings of that Independence to our children’s children unto the remotest generation.”
The new school, a handsome three-story brick building overlooking Monument Square, was dedicated on Bunker Hill Day 1848 and opened to its eighty-eight pupils two days later. Originally its curriculum was heavily weighted toward the classics (Xenophon’s Anabasis, Virgil’s Georgics, Cicero, Greek and Latin composition) as well as rhetoric, natural philosophy, French, ancient history, astronomy, and trigonometry. It was a classical education, appropriate for those who studied on the hilltop called by some “the American Acropolis.” But gradually the high school adapted its offerings to the needs of nineteenth-century commerce, and as the Town’s Yankees fled ever faster from the inrushing Irish, the trend toward vocational education accelerated. By 1906, when planning began for a new Charlestown High, the old vision of a classical education on an American Acropolis had long since given way to the urgent necessity of training the “unlettered, uncouth, unruly immigrant class.”
It is said that one of the first Irishmen to graduate from Charlestown High—Joseph J. Corbett of the class of 1881—was responsible for the school’s being rebuilt in the same white granite used for the adjacent Bunker Hill Monument. By then a judge of the Municipal Court and a member of Boston’s Board of Schoolhouse Commissioners, Corbett lived directly across the square in a fine town house, and he used his position on the schoolhouse board to make certain that the new high school should lend a fitting dignity to its corner of the square. When completed in 1907, the granite facing—embellished with eight Ionic columns, a large clock and matching compass—did give the new school a certain authority. But it was hardly the “architectural gem seemingly from Mars’ hill” acclaimed by the euphoric Charlestown Enterprise. Perhaps its best features were the stately staircases which ascended right and left from the narrow entrance lobby. But the rooms to which they led on the three upper stories were bare, unadorned boxes, with little grace or charm. Indeed, the school’s interior design seems to have been dictated less by Corbett’s pride in his surroundings than by the need for economy and a spare, utilitarian focus on the school’s new function. The education offered at the school was clearly defined by the Boston Globe: “It stands for the training of ordinary boys and girls to do the ordinary work of life…. The ordinary human being, who used to be turned loose upon the work-a-day world at the age of fourteen, to hunt for a job, and perhaps, missing it, to join the ranks of the worthless, here may find occupations for his idle youth and training for his useful manhood.” This emphasis was soon confirmed by the erection of an annex to house the school’s electrical shops. The Charlestown electrician’s course was part of a program in which several Boston high schools provided technical training—sheet-metal work at South Boston, cabinetmaking at Dorchester—open to students from all over the city. Those enrolled in such courses also received academic instruction, but this was clearly peripheral to their preparation for a lifetime of manual labor.
As the high school’s academic offerings shrank, so did its reputation. As early as 1917, the Boston Traveler asked in an editorial, “What’s the matter with this school?” It noted that Charlestown, with 39,601 residents, had only thirty-five high school graduates while Hyde Park High, serving barely half Charlestown’s population, had eighty-three. “Not one of the Charlestown boys and girls graduated this year with ‘honors’ or ‘high honors.’ … Something is wrong somewhere. Where it is the Traveler does not claim to know. But whatever it is it should be corrected before another school year begins, or the school should be closed in the interest of educational efficiency.”
Something was wrong indeed. Charlestown families with aspirations for their children were abandoning the school, sending them to the Boston Latin School, English, Trade, Technical, or one of the new Catholic high schools. But Boston Latin required extra intelligence, the other “in-town” schools took extra initiative, the Catholic schools cost extra money. By 1920, Charlestown High had become a school of last resort for those without such resources.
Yet for some Townies the high school on the hill had its own attractions, less educational than symbolic. Apprehensive of the alien city, they renounced the opportunity, advancement, and adventure Boston offered for the reassurance of community, solidarity, and camaraderie. Rejecting the American imperative to get ahead, they opted for the Charlestown ethic of getting by. Like the Monument itself, the granite school by its side became a rallying point for those who would reaffirm their choice with cries of “Boom Charlestown” and “Townie Pride.” So what if Yankee institutions like the Traveler criticized its academic standards? Who cared if colleges like Harvard and Wellesley ignored Charlestown graduates? What if the lace-curtain Irish preferred Boston Latin or Malden Catholic? The high school was the real Charlestown—tribal, resilient, pugnacious, indomitable. The school cheer might evolve over the years from “Rah, rah, rah for dear old Charlestown” to “Here we go, Charlestown, here we go,” but the message remained the same: the hell with the rest of the world, Charlestown was Number One.
Charlestown’s girls had particular reason for turning necessity into a virtue. Most Townie families of limited means generally allocated tuition money to their sons, which meant that the boys went off to Catholic high schools while the girls went up the hill to Charlestown High. For years, the school was led by a group of bright, restless girls eager to assert their worth.
Most boys who went there were less academically inclined, but they found other fields in which to excel. One was the Charlestown Corps of Cadets, a quasi-military outfit which marched every year in the Bunker Hill Day parade.
Then there were sports, to which the Townies brought a demonic ferocity. Through much of the thirties and forties the school didn’t fare very well in competition. Not only was its male enrollment the smallest of any Boston high school, but most of the Town’s best athletes were siphoned off by the in-town schools or the Catholic powers. Then, in 1951, Frank Power, Jr., became Charlestown’s football and baseball coach. Determined to reverse the school’s athletic fortunes, he worked hard to recruit young Townies. From the mid-fifties through the early sixties, Charlestown produced exceptional teams in all sports, and Frank Power quickly became the Town’s newest hero. He was invited to address banquets of the Knights of Columbus, the Holy Name Society, and virtually anyone who could rustle up some chicken à la king and a Boston cream pie. Down at Sully’s, every longshoreman in the place wanted to buy him a beer. And when he marched in the Bunker Hill Day parade, he got more applause than the pastor of St. Mary’s and the U.S. Marine Band put together.
In 1961, with his reputation at its peak, Power shocked the Town by accepting a similar teaching/coaching job at Hyde Park High, nearer his home in Southwest Boston. But his heart was still at Charlestown High, and seven years later he returned there as headmaster. Taking office at midyear, he bided his time. Then, on September 3, 1968, he w
elcomed his faculty back to school with a speech none of them would ever forget. Power had detected “a certain lack of pedagogic duties, an unnecessary social atmosphere, a country club familiarity.” But teaching was “not just a job from eight to two, an interlude in our more important projects, but a privilege and a solemn duty.” Teachers who “find the job a bore, who are clockwatchers, who do not like children, such people do not belong in education.” To Frank Power it was “a calling as sacred as that of the ministry.” In the summertime and on weekends he took students’ records home with him and, while watching television, thumbed the cards until he knew by heart every student’s name, where he lived, who his parents were, his strengths and weaknesses.
A large man with an athlete’s physical presence and enormous charm, he knew the effect he had on others and used it shrewdly. “Among placid men,” said one teacher, “Frank Power rippled.” But by the late sixties, the problems confronting Charlestown High would have challenged the most forceful personality. First was its continuing slide into academic mediocrity. Scarcely 15 percent of its graduates went on to college, the lowest percentage of any city high school. A few more entered technical or nursing schools, but the vast majority ended their education at Charlestown High. Low expectations had become institutionalized: students who anticipated failure were reinforced by teachers who had come to expect nothing more.
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