It was an education all right. Ever since the October 20 melee, ten policemen—five plainclothes detectives and five uniformed police—had been stationed in the school every day. But the uniformed police played cards in the auditorium, on call only for emergencies, and the plainclothesmen were spread too thin to be effective. The dark hallways and stairwells, particularly on the upper floors, remained as dangerous as ever. As the jousting continued through the fall and winter, Cassandra and her friends learned how to survive at Charlestown High.
They learned that some whites were friendly enough one-to-one, but turned hostile in larger groups. Knowing how much pressure there was on such students to conform, they didn’t trust them in delicate situations.
They learned never to walk the corridors or the stairways alone. After a student passed through the metal detectors he was supposed to go directly to his homeroom. But after several blacks were jumped, they found ways to linger in the lobby long enough to form small convoys.
They learned to resist provocation. It was hard to be cool when someone shouted “coon” or “bushboogie” at you, but Steve Moss and Nathan Spivey warned that whites wanted them to lose control, to strike back in ways that would discredit them—and desegregation. Moreover, they were vastly outnumbered: by November, daily attendance averaged 292 whites, 77 blacks, and 17 “other minorities.” Charlestown High was enemy territory; it was foolhardy to fight on such terrain. Occasionally, one of the hotheads—Clarence Jefferson, Curt Shepherd, or Eddie Malloy—would defy the odds and lash back at their tormentors. But most blacks growled, “Get off my back, honky,” and walked away.
The Minority Council hadn’t abandoned efforts for redress of its grievances. But it had made little progress that fall, except for the appointment of Alan Cornwall, a black business teacher, as an additional administrative assistant sharing disciplinary duties with Bob Jarvis. Following Frank Power’s resignation, the council took a new tack. Bobby Chin, Clarence Jefferson, Charles Butler, Sheila Keyes, Cassandra, and other council leaders began meeting twice a week in the basement of the Union Methodist Church under the auspices of Lois Dauway, the church’s community worker, who believed that the group would accomplish more by operating in a larger arena. Their first step was to join forces with a similar caucus from South Boston High, an alliance they hoped would lead to formation of a citywide minority students’ organization. Next they sought meetings with officials who could address their problems on the highest level.
One letter went to Arthur Garrity. “Dear Judge Garrity,” they wrote. “We are writing this letter on behalf of the minority students of Charlestown and South Boston High Schools. We, as the black student body, feel that changes should be made now…. There are several blacks and whites that are afraid to attend these schools for the simple reason they know they will get picked on if they are black or white. There have been blacks that have been attacked by three or more whites…. Education is the most important thing to us because we can’t live without it. There is a very weak education going on in Charlestown. When the whites boycott or walk out there isn’t any kind of education going on…. We would like to hold a meeting with you as soon as possible.”
The judge—in keeping with his firm policy of not meeting privately with parties in the case—politely but firmly declined their request.
The next letter went to School Superintendent Marion Fahey, who accepted on condition that the students submit their questions in advance. Back went a long list of queries: “What have you done about the troublemakers in the two schools? Why since September haven’t more materials concerning minorities been added to the schools’ curriculum? Is it possible to have more minority aides in the schools and fewer aides from the neighborhoods? What can the School Department do to make Charlestown High School more attractive and bearable?”
Ms. Fahey spent half an hour with them in the basement of Union Methodist. She was sympathetic, but provided no assurances on any of the students’ complaints. Cassandra left the church that evening fuming with frustration.
The holiday season provided a brief respite, but when the students returned from their ten-day vacation they detected a marked increase in tension. Through January, white students staged a series of increasingly vehement demonstrations in and around the school.
Thursday, January 22, began peacefully enough. Piercing winds and drifting snow kept demonstrators off the Monument grounds as the buses crawled along the icy streets toward the school. Inside the steamy lobby, students clapped mittened hands together and stomped snowy boots. Upstairs in Room 38, Cassandra chatted happily with her seatmates—Josie Flores, Sheila Keyes, and Julia White—largely oblivious by now to the resentful stares from across the room. Sheila, the high scorer on the girls’ basketball team, had made 18 points the night before and the other girls crowded around her, offering their congratulations. “Kareem Abdul Keyes,” Julia called her, and they all guffawed. It was good to know that a black could excel in something at Charlestown High.
History period went quietly. But walking toward her biology class, Cassandra heard a commotion on the floor below and, peering down the stairwell, saw nearly a hundred white students milling around the office. Uh-oh, she thought, here we go again. When she got to the biology room, it was nearly half empty; most of the whites had joined the demonstration. The teacher did his best to keep the remaining students occupied, but it was difficult to concentrate on binary fission in protozoa with all the noise coming from below.
At ten o’clock, Mr. Cornwall interrupted the class to say they had “a bit of a problem” downstairs. For their own safety, he said, all minority students would be concentrated in three classrooms on the upper floors. Cassandra, Sheila, and Josie ended up in Room 36 with Mrs. Mathews, the English teacher. For a few minutes, she read them a short story, something about Puritans in a New England village on the first Thanksgiving. Suddenly there was a clatter in the corridor, the door burst open, and a white boy stood there with a chair poised above his head. With an angry roar, he heaved it across the room at. Mrs. Mathews, who dodged and slipped to the floor as the boy charged off down the hall.
When she regained her composure, Mrs. Mathews ordered someone to barricade the door with a desk. Then she told them what little she knew: The white students were staging a sit-in on the main staircases. A few of the white boys had gotten loose on the upper floors. They were being rounded up by teachers and police—there was nothing to worry about—but they would all have to stay put until the staircase could be cleared.
For the first time in her months at Charlestown High, Cassandra was frightened. The clamor from downstairs grew deafening. First the demonstrators sang a song, then they broke into a rhythmic chant. In the hallway outside, she heard more footsteps, a shout, then the sound of shattering glass. Mrs. Mathews tried to keep the students busy. She read them another short story. They played cards. They sang songs. Some of the younger kids drew pictures. But as the hours went by and nobody came to get them out, they grew increasingly agitated. Tempers flared. Nerves frazzled. Every noise in the hallway made them flinch.
Not until 12:45 did Bob Jarvis knock at the door to report that police had isolated the whites on the staircase, freeing the fire stairs on either side. Buses were drawn up in the adjacent alley, ready to receive the minority students. Detectives would lead them to safety. Cassandra sobbed with relief as she followed a burly cop down the narrow staircase.
Just then, the whites got wind of what was happening. “They’re getting away!” they shouted. “They’re going out the side!” Around the corner raced a dozen white boys, heaving stones at the buses as they rumbled down the alleys.
From her window, Cassandra gazed up the snowy slope toward the high school, hunched there in the shadow of the Monument. Only when the bus had crossed the bridge into the winding alleys of the North End did she stop trembling.
17
McGoff
From the start they knew they were special—“Big ’76,” the “Bicente
nnial Class,” the “Class of Destiny.” For years they had played, fought, and daydreamed beside the granite obelisk. Every morning on their way to school they had walked by the bronze statue of Colonel Prescott, his arm outstretched, surveying the colonial lines. And every evening, descending the central staircase, they had passed beneath Trumbull’s epic painting of Dr. Warren expiring in the arms of his lieutenant as waves of redcoats overran the valiant garrison. So drenched were they in revolutionary mythology they hardly needed to be reminded that they would be graduating two hundred years after the first shots in the struggle for independence.
Unwilling to let the anniversary pass unnoticed, Charlestown High launched “Project ’76,” a three-year program that would culminate in a week-long visit by the entire class to Boston, England. Although the British had agreed to welcome the visitors, the trip would be expensive, and starting in their sophomore year, the class set out to raise funds for the charter flight, hotels, and other expenses. They sold American flags, Bunker Hill flags, red-white-and-blue candles, and sweatshirts emblazoned “Charlestown Townies.” And on June 17, 1975, the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, they sponsored their own float in the Bunker Hill Day parade—a flatbed truck, decked out in bunting, bearing a large model airplane labeled “The Spirit of ’76.”
Nobody was more beguiled by the prospect of a week in England than Billy McGoff. He’d never been farther from home than Worcester, for a Holy Cross football game. Merry Olde England sounded like the perfect way to top off his high school years, and nobody worked harder to make the dream come true. He served on the Project ’76 Committee, sold sweatshirts, ran car washes, and helped build the float. He talked so much about England that his friends said, “For an Irishman, McGoff, you sure talk like a bloody limey.” Then, in September of their senior year, Frank Power passed the word: there would be no trip to England. No reason was given, but Billy and his classmates assumed that busing had killed it. Some said the blacks couldn’t go because they hadn’t worked to pay their way; but if they didn’t go, Garrity would ban the trip as segregated. In fact, the decision had nothing to do with busing. The funds so painfully accumulated had simply disappeared—school officials discovered that the teacher responsible for holding the money had blown it all at the racetrack. One administrator scribbled a fitting epitaph for Project ’76: “Their kingdom for a horse!”
To protect the teacher’s reputation, the incident was never publicized, and the class of ’76 went on believing that busing had cost them the trip for which they had worked so hard. Hurt and angry, Billy and his classmates began to emphasize another of their distinctions. No longer did they call themselves the “Bicentennial Class.” That autumn of 1975, little green-and-white stickers began appearing on walls and lockers at the high school, bearing the initials “TLWC”—“The Last White Class.”
Strictly speaking, the slogan wasn’t accurate—there were three blacks in the class. But Garrity had given that year’s seniors the option of graduating from their present schools, and the class had remained overwhelmingly white, whereas the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors were substantially integrated. This—plus their two years of aborted labor on Project ’76—had lent the 204 white seniors a special sense of mission: they were the last graduates of the real Charlestown High and, by God, they were going down fighting.
Billy McGoff wanted badly to be class president. His brother Danny had been president the year before, and Billy was a leader in his own right: co-captain of the football team, co-captain of the basketball team, editor of the yearbook. But he had strong competition—a lively Townie girl named Michele Barrett, who had been class president for two consecutive years. When the votes were in, Michele had edged Billy once again, carrying with her an all-female slate. That was as it should be, said some Townie girls. The anti-busing movement was largely a woman’s enterprise, led by militant mothers like Louise Day Hicks, Pixie Palladino, and Pat Russell. It was fitting that women should lead The Last White Class into battle.
Billy soon recovered from his disappointment. Now he could concentrate on sports, which had long been his principal interest. A husky kid (six feet one, 175 pounds), with speed and coordination to match, Billy was a four-letter man—in football, basketball, baseball, and track—earning his schoolmates’ respect in the arena which mattered most to Townies.
As a former coach, Frank Power recognized the powerful hold sports had on Charlestown’s imagination. Indeed, he remembered all too well an incident the previous March in which a hockey game had nearly set off a full-scale riot. Now he had visions of similar rioting instigated by Townie sportsmen against the black community, and to neutralize the school’s athletes, he announced that any student who boycotted school was prohibited from practicing that day; anyone who missed a practice couldn’t play in that week’s game.
The year before, South Boston High had been so rattled by desegregation that it had failed to field a football team for the first time in nearly a century. At the same time, the endless boycotts and demonstrations had cost Charlestown the services of Howie Long, an outstanding prospect who simply wanted to play ball (he went on to star for the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League).
It was a matter of pride to The Last White Class that, no matter what happened in the fall of 1975, eleven kids would somehow take the field for every game wearing the red, white, and blue Townie jerseys; Billy and his two co-captains had sworn a solemn compact on that. When practice began in the last week of August, the holdovers from last year’s squad would assemble every afternoon in the choking dust of the J. J. Ryan Playground for two hours of calisthenics and light contact drills. It was murderously hot in the line, where Billy alternated between center and left tackle, but he loved the sweat and stink of the trenches, the surge as the linemen got off the mark together, the thud of shoulder pads as the two lines collided.
The holdovers were all white, but when the first full practice was held on September 15, four blacks showed up. Nobody had expected that. Blacks had played football for Charlestown before, but the team had been all white for three consecutive years and in the new climate of hostility engendered by busing, nobody had imagined blacks would try to crack the Townie monopoly.
That first afternoon, the four blacks practiced separately at one end of the field, most white coaches and players barely acknowledging their presence. Mike Sheeran, beginning his ninth year as the Townie coach, was an opponent of busing, impatient with the complications it required him to deal with. Many of his players were more vociferous. “Only a Townie can make this team,” said defensive back Mark Burns. “The rest of the school is falling apart. They’ve taken everything else away from us. This is the only freedom we have left.”
When Charlestown played its first game against South Boston on September 20, only eighty-four spectators showed up at White Stadium in Roxbury’s Franklin Park. Fourteen white cheerleaders—selected the previous spring to preempt the racial issue—tried to rouse the meager Charlestown rooting section with chants of “Here we go, Townies, here we go!” But South Boston drubbed the Townies, 36–6. At left tackle, Billy McGoff spent a long, frustrating afternoon butting heads with a bruiser from Southie. It must have been a frustrating afternoon for Mike Sheeran too. Disgusted with his team’s performance, unable or unwilling to resolve its racial problems, he approached his principal assistant, John Green, and said, “You’ve always wanted a crack at this job, John. Well, it’s yours. I quit.”
Even John Green, a more relaxed and patient man, couldn’t defuse the racial issue. Confronted with active or passive hostility from most of the white players, the four blacks dropped off the team within a week. And yet Frank Power’s strategy paid off. The Townies suffered through a dismal season—no wins, six losses, and a tie—but all that fall Billy and most of his teammates stayed in school, shunning walkouts and demonstrations.
Billy’s aloofness irritated his sister Lisa as she found herself being drawn more deeply into the anti-bu
sing struggle. Since her father’s death, she had felt particularly close to her mother, and as Alice plunged into the movement, so did Lisa, accompanying her to Powder Keg meetings, ROAR rallies, and innumerable marches to City Hall and the State House.
Lisa had grown up with no intense feelings—one way or the other—about black people. In a town so overwhelmingly white and so insulated from the rest of the city, race wasn’t much of an issue; through most of her childhood, the handful of blacks in the housing project were more curiosities than anything else. But the approaching storm of school desegregation had changed all that. As it swept across South Boston, Hyde Park, and Dorchester, its repercussions were received in Charlestown with profound alarm, and as the adults of Powder Keg girded for battle, they passed their anxieties on to their children.
Ten days before the first buses rolled into Charlestown, rumors had raced through the Bunker Hill project that “the blacks are coming,” that they were going to ride up and down Bunker Hill Street shooting anything that moved. A few kids went down to the bridges to serve as lookouts, and for nearly a week many project families, including the McGoffs, slept with baseball bats by their beds. No carloads of blacks ever showed up, but Lisa never quite forgot that terrible week. Like most of her contemporaries, she believed that when the buses came, the black kids would step off armed to the teeth and ready to rumble. She believed that most black boys were out to molest and rape white girls, that black girls would attack white girls in the ladies’ room, and that blacks of both sexes carried knives, razors, scissors, stickpins, and other weapons with which to assault whites.
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