But Lisa had been raised not to betray her fears and doubts; she prided herself on being a tough Townie chick who gave as good as she got. Moreover, she was a born leader, blessed with a strength of will that made others follow her. Though only a junior, she was accepted on equal terms by the circle of energetic girls who had taken control of that year’s senior class. She felt particularly close to two of them: Trudy, an honor student, basketball and softball player, and leader of Project ’76; and Doris, the class secretary, a cheerleader and three-sport athlete. Trudy, Doris, and Lisa all lived in the Bunker Hill project, and all three had parents active in Powder Keg. Soon they emerged as the acknowledged leaders of the school’s anti-busing activity. Certain teachers labeled them “the unholy trinity.”
But the girls rarely acted on their own. From the start, Powder Keg had called the shots at the high school. The year before—as Charlestown demonstrated its support of embattled Southie and geared up for its own ordeal—Pat Russell had relayed orders to the students through her daughter Patricia. Every morning at 9:40, between the second and third periods, Pat assumed her position on the slope beneath the Monument, while Patricia went to a window facing the Monument grounds. From her mother’s hand signals she could tell whether students loyal to Powder Keg should walk out or stay in school that day. But the “Bunker Hill semaphore,” as it became known, was too crude for the more difficult decisions which had to be reached the following fall, and the Town’s anti-busing forces found more efficient means of getting the word into the high school.
In June 1974—exercising his traditional right to designate the head of the high school’s Home and School Association—Frank Power had selected a maverick. Virginia Winters, a mother of eleven from the Bunker Hill project, didn’t openly favor busing, but she supported peaceful implementation of the court order. That made her useful to the embattled headmaster, but earned her only enmity from most Charlestown parents. The association’s other officers—among them, Alice McGoff as secretary—regarded her as a traitor to their cause. When the time came to elect new officers in June 1975, Alice was returned to office, along with the vice-president and treasurer, but the association defied Frank Power by refusing to reelect Ginny Winters. Instead, it chose Tom Johnson.
It was a crucial choice, for the association president had ready access to the high school and Tom Johnson took full advantage of that privilege. In his blue ROAR jacket, he became a familiar figure in the school lobby, where he served as the white students’ adviser and advocate, and through him, Powder Keg maintained direct contact with student leaders like Lisa, Trudy, and Doris. Frequently, the students attended Powder Keg meetings to plan tactics for the school.
Through September, most of Charlestown’s protests took place on the streets. In the mornings, the now familiar procession of mothers filed up the hill, “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys” sounding in the still autumn air; and at night, the kids in the Bunker Hill project played cat and mouse with the police. For the moment, Charlestown High was a sideshow, its students content with an occasional boycott to demonstrate support for the featured players in these daily dramas.
All that changed abruptly in early October as the Minority Council began making its presence felt. The notion of a black pressure group presenting demands and forcing concessions was offensive to white parents and students alike. For years, they had watched black student organizations in action at Boston’s inner-city schools. It seemed as if they always got their way, that all blacks had to do was grow bushy Afros, brandish their fists, and chant, “Burn, baby, burn,” for white administrators to start caving in. Now this terrifying scenario seemed to be playing itself out right up the hill at Charlestown High.
And who was it making concessions to the blacks but the Town’s old stalwart, Frank Power! The Townies simply couldn’t understand why Frank had deserted them. It had begun back in July when the School Department mailed out the fall’s assignments. In the days that followed, Power had been besieged by Charlestown parents, imploring him to use his influence downtown to get their kids transferred back to Charlestown. Invariably, they invoked a special relationship with the headmaster: they had scored two touchdowns for him in the Eastie game back in 1957, their sister had gotten a B in his advanced geometry class. Frank would greet them warmly, embrace the mothers, wrap a big arm around the fathers. There was nothing he’d rather do than help, he’d say, but what could he do—it was a federal court order. “Come on, Frank,” the parents would say. “You know us. You’ve pulled strings for us before.” Again he would explain: the judge controlled the whole thing. As they left, he could see the wounded look in their eyes.
But that was nothing compared to their sense of betrayal when he began negotiating with the Minority Council. It was one thing for Power to accept the court order, quite another for him to deal with the interlopers themselves, giving away, piece by piece, the time-honored prerogatives of Charlestown High. And none of Power’s dealings with the caucus stayed confidential very long. When he accepted most of their demands in principle, the Townies could not contain their anger. That afternoon, coming into a vacant classroom, he saw scribbled in big block letters on the blackboard: “Mr. Power is a backstabber. He sold us out.” And a few days later, during a white student boycott, a girl he’d known for years spat in his face.
At first, he tried to shrug it all off; the haters might be in control now, he told himself, but eventually the moderates would rally around him as they always had, and Charlestown High would be Frank Power’s school once again. But as Indian summer turned to raw New England autumn, he could feel the resentment congealing into hard rage. He received death threats, half-legible warnings scribbled on postcards, slurred voices on the phone telling his wife he was going to get “a bullet in the head.” The daily confrontations took their toll: dizzy spells and other symptoms which his doctor told him reflected dangerously high blood pressure. Seeking solace, he turned to the priests at St. Mary’s. In the murky light of dawn, after opening the school, he would walk across Monument Square to the rectory. Sitting at the big dining-room table under steel engravings of the saints, he would sip a mug of black coffee and tell the Irish priests about the forces pulling him apart. How, he asked, could he reconcile his deep love of Charlestown, and his personal relationship with hundreds of Townie families, with his commitment to racial justice? “It’s tearing me in two, Father,” he told Pastor Bob Boyle one morning in early October. “I don’t know how much longer I can take it.”
On October 14, some 175 white students walked out of school to protest Power’s meeting with Minority Council representatives. That afternoon, a list of complaints—drawn up by members of The Last White Class—circulated in the school. “The blacks aired their grievances,” it said, “now we would like to air ours.” Among them:
“All the vulgarity by the blacks in the classroom and nothing done about it.
“Obscene gestures and acts against the white girls from black boys. Shoving of white girls in the corridors.
“Metal detectors do not work. The blacks get in with picks concealed in their hair.
“Black aides entering classrooms to talk to black kids.
“Persecuting the whites before the blacks.”
The protest continued the next day as a hundred white students occupied the stairway between the second and third floors, refusing to move until granted an audience with the headmaster. When Power appeared, they complained vehemently about his “favoritism” toward blacks and demanded that he meet immediately with the white students in the school auditorium. Power expressed sympathy for their frustrations, but such a meeting, he said, was out of the question; Judge Garrity had expressly forbidden segregated school assemblies.
That brought a hail of abuse down on the headmaster’s head.
“Who runs this school, you or Garrity?”
“How come you met with the blacks, then?”
“Power, you suck!”
Frank Power glared up the narrow
stairwell. He wasn’t going to take this from the kids. Yet every time he tried to speak, a new volley of catcalls drowned him out.
Lisa McGoff sat halfway up the stairs, wedged between Trudy and Doris. Looking down at the headmaster as he paced uneasily in the dim hallway, she felt sorry for the man. She’d always liked Frank Power—even though he didn’t live in Charlestown, he acted like any of the Townies you met on Bunker Hill Street. But since busing began, something had happened to him: he was definitely favoring the blacks over the whites. So despite her lingering sympathy for the headmaster, Lisa joined in the jeers that were now cascading down the stairway.
Never before in his fifteen years at the school had Frank Power been treated this way. Teachers standing nearby were horrified by the effect it had on him. Once he realized he’d utterly lost control of the situation, his shoulders sagged, the color drained from his face, his hands began to tremble.
Eventually, to get the students back to class, he agreed to meet with a small delegation, and that afternoon Power sat down with twenty members of The Last White Class in the school library. When they accused him again of favoring the blacks, he insisted that he was being evenhanded. Wasn’t he meeting with them, just as he had with the Minority Council? They had to understand, though, that the school couldn’t run without certain rules. They should come in and talk things over with him and they’d work everything out as they always had. That was enough to mollify some of the seniors, among them Billy McGoff. But others wouldn’t be placated. When they renewed their accusations, the headmaster grew testy. “Look,” he said, “I’ve done the best I can. Maybe somebody else should take a crack at it.”
Frank realized that he could no longer hold the school together with personal magnetism alone. Feeling deserted by the moderates who might have helped him isolate the extremists, he would have to fall back on coercion, the naked clout of the federal court, and that wasn’t his style. He had no quarrel with Garrity, but he wasn’t comfortable with judicial authority: it was too abstract, too rigid, too remote. It was one thing to sit up there in black robes passing decrees, quite another to sit here in your shirt sleeves pressing human flesh. Frank had been in Charlestown too long, he was too close to the Townies to be the cool, dispassionate agent of the federal court.
Moreover, he wasn’t well. His doctor had warned him that he was suffering from serious hypertension. “One of these days you’re going to run up those stairs and they’re going to carry you down,” he said. Frank’s wife, Marie, had pleaded with him to quit. On October 17, the headmaster told Superintendent Marion Fahey he was ready to leave.
Once the decision was made, he wanted to turn his back on the old school forever, but he had to stick around another week to break in his successor, Bob Murphy. Finally, during the lunch hour on October 23, he asked to say a few words over the public address system.
“As you know by now,” he said, “this is my last day at Charlestown High. I’m going on sick leave starting Monday. This has been a painful decision for me. I love this school. I love this town. I will always love them. But the federal court has ordered some far-reaching changes. However we may feel personally about those changes, we have no alternative but to obey the law of the land. My position this fall—with which some of you have disagreed—has been that Charlestown High would stay open whether there were five hundred students, fifty teachers, and five police … or five students, fifty teachers, and five hundred police. Goodbye and God bless you all.”
Then he picked up his briefcase, tucked some manila folders under his arm, and walked out the side door.
The Townies were ready for their new headmaster, having moved beyond resentment of black demands to assertion of their own rights. Through mid-October, Lisa, Trudy, and Doris were among twenty white activists who met each evening at the Knights of Columbus Hall to frame a declaration. With Powder Keg’s ample assistance, the “White Caucus” drew up a list of fifteen demands that bore a striking resemblance to a list submitted two weeks before by the whites of South Boston High. They fell into five broad categories: decorum, patriotism, education, security, and community rights.
In the interests of decorum, the Townies wanted “the obscene gestures, abusive language and racial slurs stopped immediately.”
To promote patriotism, they demanded “to be allowed to pledge allegiance to the American flag in the morning, and to sing the National Anthem.”
To improve education, they asked “accelerated education programs for those students who are above the average grade levels” and demanded that “quality education be returned to Charlestown High.”
For improved security, they wanted more “modern and sophisticated metal detectors.” They wanted any student found with an “Afro pick” or knife to be arrested. And they demanded that “when white students wish to leave the school because they feel their safety is in jeopardy they be allowed to do so, instead of being locked in like convicts.”
To secure the rights of the Charlestown community, they demanded that “community representatives”—Powder Keg and its allies—be permitted “access to the school,” be allowed to “act as spokesmen for the white student body,” and be permitted to “negotiate white student grievances.”
The demands were ready for submission to Bob Murphy on October 24, his first day as headmaster. At eight that morning, 125 white students occupied the main stairway, compelling the blacks to stay on their buses for half an hour. (Eventually, the blacks were sent home for the day while Murphy tried to end the sit-in.) The new headmaster offered to discuss the fifteen demands with a small delegation of white leaders, but the demonstrators booed, stomped their feet, and chanted anti-busing slogans until he finally consented to meet them all in the third-floor auditorium.
It was a daunting prospect for Murphy on his first day, and for support he summoned Charlie McGonagle, one of the school’s five Townie teachers and among its most popular figures. McGonagle’s engaging essays and light verse appeared regularly in the Charlestown Patriot. The fall before, his piece called “The Neighborhood Tavern” had become an instant favorite in the Town, where it could be found tacked up above beer-stained counters or taped to barbershop mirrors.
“I’m sorry sir [it went in part] but you can’t come in here anymore.”
“What do you mean CAN’T? I’ve been coming here for years. All I want is a beer.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve been reassigned.”
“Reassigned?… You’re kidding!”
“No, sir. But don’t feel too badly about it. We have a bus to take you there and back again.”
“Hey, I want to drink with my friends, not a bunch of people I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, but I really can’t do anything about the situation. The State Board of Social Drinking, with the support of the Federal Board of Imbibers, has succeeded in getting a court ruling saying all taverns must be ethnically balanced.”
“… What have I been assigned?”
“Well, let’s see, sir … Ah, here we are. Oh yes, Lim Wong’s Bar and Grille, in Chinatown.”
His scorn for Garrity’s order thus established, Charlie enjoyed the trust of the school’s white activists. Knowing this, Bob Murphy asked him to go to the auditorium and try to keep the demonstrators in check while the headmaster and others considered the fifteen demands. As Charlie mounted the stage, there were a few catcalls from the Townies, but he bantered good-naturedly with the kids, assuring them that their demands were being studied.
Down in his office, Murphy huddled with District Superintendent John McGourty and representatives of the Faculty Senate, going over the white students’ grievances. With the sit-in paralyzing the school, they were eager to make concessions which might mollify the demonstrators; but, after reviewing the demands one by one, they found few to which they could accede.
Security was already tight. Airport metal detectors were in place and hand detectors had been ordered. Obscene gestures and racial slurs were already prohibited
. Students couldn’t be permitted to walk out anytime they felt themselves in danger. A daily pledge of allegiance seemed excessive, but once a week might make sense. Murphy saw no justification for dealing with Powder Keg, but he agreed to meet with representatives of the Home and School Association or the Charlestown Education Committee anytime they wished. As for “quality education,” as the day’s events amply demonstrated, it was hard enough in the current climate to guarantee any education at all.
When Murphy and McGourty entered the auditorium, they were greeted with thunderous boos. Virtually every white in the school was there and now they surged to their feet, chanting rhythmically, “Here we go, Townies, here we go!” As the din crashed about her, Lisa felt tears welling in her eyes. God, she was proud to be a Townie! Townies stuck together. They weren’t going to let a judge or a bunch of black kids take their school away from them!
Finally the clamor subsided and Murphy outlined the steps agreed on in the office. As for the remaining demands, he hoped further discussions could take place with student representatives, but he would not stand for this kind of disorder. Nobody was going to drive the blacks out, so they’d better get used to them. At that, more than a hundred of the students—Lisa among them—rose and filed out. In the doorway, one student turned and shouted, “Mr. Power wouldn’t have treated us this way!”
Bob Murphy knew it would be futile to compete with Frank Power’s legend. He wasn’t even going to try. Although he’d been at Charlestown High before—as a science teacher and guidance counselor from 1964 to 1970—he realized that the Townies regarded him as an outsider. But that might prove more an advantage than a handicap, he thought; without encumbering friendships and loyalties, he could play a role foreclosed to Power: the stern, uncompromising disciplinarian.
Common Ground Page 49