Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  The new headmaster set out to show the activist students and their adult supporters that he meant to enforce the court order at all cost. His hard line quickly surfaced as he dealt with an epidemic of bomb threats that fall. When the first ones occurred, all students had been promptly evacuated, left to mill about on the Monument grounds until the police could search the school. Since no bombs were found, Murphy soon concluded that such threats were mere harassment, designed to keep the school in constant turmoil; moreover, once black students left the school they were particularly vulnerable to attack. So he revised his strategy. At first warning, police were summoned, but no evacuation was ordered unless they actually found a bomb—which they never did.

  The new policy led to an angry confrontation with Tom Johnson. One day in October, after yet another threat was received, Johnson rushed into the headmaster’s office, demanding that the alarm bells be rung immediately. “You’re playing with these children’s lives!” he said. “Get them out of here now!”

  Murphy refused, citing his new policy.

  At that, Johnson put a finger against the headmaster’s chest and growled, “If there is a bomb in here, and if one child gets hurt, you bastard, I’ll be the first in line to punch you out, and there’ll be twenty thousand people behind me waiting their turn.”

  Relations between the two men went from bad to worse. Johnson saw Murphy as a “carpetbagger,” an itinerant bureaucrat ready to sacrifice Charlestown’s interests to advance his career. Murphy regarded Johnson as a troublemaker, an unscrupulous roughneck fomenting unrest. Eventually, the headmaster banned him from the building. When Johnson insisted that his position in the Home and School Association guaranteed him access, Murphy shook his head. “We’re on different teams, Tom,” he said.

  “You’re damn right we are,” Johnson shot back. “Is your NAACP card paid up yet?”

  The battle lines were clearly drawn now. For the first time white activists found themselves pitted not only against the black students but against a school administrator determined to give them no quarter.

  Skirmishing continued through early November. When whites again occupied the front stairs on November 21, the headmaster lost his patience. Turning to Captain MacDonald, he said, “We’ve lost control of this situation, Bill. I think it’s time for the police.” MacDonald addressed the students, warning them to go to class, leave the building, or face arrest. The demonstrators’ only response was a chorus of “God Bless America.” What happened next surprised even the headmaster. The front door burst open and in charged a platoon of the Tactical Patrol Force in their leather jackets, boots, and Plexiglas visors. Wading into the students, they heaved them down the staircase. Girls screamed. Boys who resisted got a billy club on the arm or shoulder. Sitting halfway up the stairs, Lisa McGoff was spared the initial charge, but soon cringing with fear, she permitted herself to be herded out the front door. The students huddled in small groups on the sidewalk, still dazed from the TPF assault and shaking with indignation. What right did the police have to violate their sanctuary? It was their school, wasn’t it? Didn’t they have a right to sit on their own steps?

  In the week that followed, Murphy discovered just how tenacious Townies could be in defense of their children. He was besieged by Charlestown institutions—the Little City Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Education Committee, and Powder Keg—all demanding assurances that the TPF would never again be called into the high school. Murphy insisted that he had no responsibility for the TPF. Once he informed the police that he had lost control of the situation, it was up to them to respond as they saw fit. But that satisfied nobody.

  The students responded with three consecutive days of boycott. Every morning, 150 of them marched up the hill to jeer as the blacks got off the buses, then adjourned to the Knights of Columbus Hall for angry rallies. Murphy retaliated by suspending all the boycotters, imposing a heavy five-day suspension on a student who had pushed him during the November 21 demonstration. The student—a prominent football player—was outraged because he would be prevented from playing the Thanksgiving Day game against Brighton and he warned Murphy that if he wasn’t allowed to play, none of the team would show up for the game. Murphy and Coach Jack Green agreed: they weren’t going to be blackmailed. If the kids didn’t want to play, there wouldn’t be a game.

  Billy McGoff was stunned. The Thanksgiving Day game against Brighton was the traditional climax of the Townies’ season, the last football game he would ever play for Charlestown High. Were they really going to give that up for the sake of another damn boycott? On the other hand, Townies were supposed to stick by their buddies. For twenty-four hours, Billy and his teammates debated what to do. Then back came the answer: they would play. On Thursday morning, all but four of the team turned out, losing to Brighton, 6–0.

  Lisa was furious at her big brother. How could he torpedo the boycott? It was the same dispute which had been simmering between them all fall, but now she’d had enough and a few days after the Brighton game she exploded. “Hey, big shot,” she said, “why can’t you think about anybody but yourself? A few of us are trying to get this school back in shape. You’re the big man on campus around here. If you walked out, a lot of kids would go with you. But, oh no, all you want to do is play your silly game.”

  Billy, as usual, was imperturbable. Smiling back at his younger sister, he said, “You got it. That’s all I care about. My game.”

  By then the game was basketball and it consumed Billy as football had only a few days before. But he knew that this season was going to be different. The football team had stayed white all fall, but the basketball squad was clearly going to be integrated. He had watched some of the black kids bouncing a ball around the gym. They were showboats, but they had some good moves, and one of them could execute a passable slam dunk. There was no way to keep these guys off the team, and even if Billy had wanted to, he knew the coach would never permit it.

  Larry Mathews, a Boston Irishman from St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, had taught business and coached basketball at Charlestown for a dozen years. A John Kennedy liberal, he hoped that blacks and whites could learn at least a grudging respect for each other on the basketball court. In years past, he had tried to recruit black ballplayers for his team, without notable success. Now Garrity had done it for him. Before the first practice that fall, Larry took his returning lettermen—all of them white—into the gym and delivered a stern lecture. This was going to be a difficult year, he warned; people on both sides of the busing issue would try to draw them into it. But racial politics had no place on the basketball court.

  Of the forty players who tried out for the team, about half were white and half black. Ultimately, the starting five had three blacks (Howard Eaves, Joe Strickland, and Roy Bone) and only two whites (Billy McGoff and Wayne Perry). It was the first time in anyone’s memory that a Townie team had a black majority. And when Mathews named Billy, Wayne, and Howard as three co-captains, the school was predictably incredulous. An anonymous note went up on the bulletin board: “Niggers sweat too much to play basketball.” But the commotion subsided almost as quickly as it had begun. Soon the players were joshing with each other in time-honored locker-room style. On the way back from a scrimmage against Natick High, the blacks began asking where the bus was going to leave them off. “We’re going to drop you boys right in front of South Boston High,” said a white player in the exaggerated drawl of a Southern sheriff. Everybody chuckled. Just then, they passed Bromley Heath—a notorious black housing project—and Joe Strickland exclaimed in mock horror: “Don’t leave me off here!” The laughter was louder this time. Then Roy Bone yelled at Billy McGoff, “Hey, Flash, you don’t need to be afraid out here. We’ll just tell ’em you’re our token Irishman.” The bus rocked with laughter.

  Billy and Joe Strickland—the team’s two starting guards—got along especially well. Billy admired Joe’s ability as a ballplayer, but he warmed most of all to Joe’s ebullience, his pure love of the game. Had circumstances
been different, they might have become real friends. Strickland made overtures in that direction: on several occasions he invited Billy to parties at his Lower Roxbury home. Billy was flattered, but he had to say no; he knew how fool-hardy it was for a Townie to set foot in the black community. That was the way to get yourself killed. Strickland seemed disappointed.

  But if the Townie players had come to terms with their black teammates, the same couldn’t be said for the Charlestown community. The high school had no gym, so the team practiced and played its home games at the Harvard-Kent, across from the Bunker Hill project. The black players rode to and from the gym with a police escort. As a further precaution against racial incidents, the School Department had prohibited spectators at all basketball games that season.

  Performing without a rooting section was demoralizing for any team, but it proved excruciating for Jeremiah Burke, a predominantly black high school in North Dorchester, which dominated the league that season. Burke was eager to show off its winning style, so when Charlestown paid them a visit it found the stands filled with Burke fans cheering their team on to a 70–52 victory. There were no disorders and, after the game, the Burke coach readily agreed that Charlestown could admit spectators when his team paid a return call the following week.

  A boisterous crowd packed the stands at the Harvard-Kent for the Burke rematch. When the visitors took a commanding lead in the first half, the crowd turned ugly, showering racial epithets and ripe fruit on the Burke bench. Some of the slurs were directed at Charlestown’s black players. At halftime, Larry Mathews gave his team a pep talk, reminding them that this was their last home game of the season, their last chance to show the home fans what they could do. The Townies went out and played their best ball of the year. With Joe popping jumpers from outside and Billy driving in for lay-ups, they tied the game, 68–68, in regulation time, then outscored the league leaders in overtime to win, 76–71. It was a stunning upset.

  But Townie fans had something else on their minds. Massed out front, they hooted and jeered when Burke’s black players boarded their bus, then pelted the vehicle with rocks as it sped away. The police warned Larry that it would be unsafe for his own black players to leave by the front door, so the triumphant Townies slipped out the back, boarding their bus for a surreptitious getaway. Billy, Joe, and the others rode in glum silence through the dark streets, a humiliating retreat for a team which had just pulled off its biggest victory of the season.

  But the aggravations which beset Larry Mathews were minor compared with the problems his wife faced on the girls’ team. Maryann Mathews, an English teacher, knew nothing about basketball—she’d been drafted at the last moment to assist Irene Kelly, a nun who had long coached the girls’ squad. Sister Irene promptly went into the hospital, leaving Maryann in charge. Larry helped her with strategy—diagramming plays on napkins at the dinner table—but he could do little to ease her racial troubles, which proved far more acute than his own.

  The boys had a big stake in their season—they had trained for years to make the varsity, and some of them hoped to parlay their skills into college scholarships. But most of the girls cared little about the game itself; to them, basketball was partly recreation, partly a social occasion, and—for some—another arena in which to wage the anti-busing struggle.

  The troubles began as soon as three black girls signed up for the first practice. Lisa’s friends, Doris and Trudy, promptly announced they weren’t playing with “niggers” and quit the team. Lisa and the others agreed to give it a try. But when the three blacks all proved they were good enough to make the team, further dissension developed. The Townies dramatized their resentment by refusing to pass the ball to the black girls in practice. Their passing drills locked into racial stalemate, with a cluster of white girls camped under one basket, a clump of blacks under another.

  Gradually the hostility abated as most of the white girls reluctantly accepted their new teammates. But one day, after an orderly practice, some of the white players went out for a Coke and half an hour later Michele Barrett returned to the gym in tears. She’d been accosted by a group of white girls, including Lisa McGoff, who had denounced her as a “nigger lover.” Later that day, Lisa told Maryann she was quitting the team because she couldn’t play with blacks.

  Eventually, Maryann’s team jelled beyond her wildest hopes. One black girl proved a spectacular center; another developed into a high-scoring forward. Three whites, including Michele, rounded out the first string, which ran off twelve straight victories to become Boston’s city champions. In the first round of the state tournament, they demolished Tyngsboro, 49–25, before losing to suburban Ipswich in the quarterfinals.

  Sports were Charlestown’s principal ritual, dramatizing the issues as little else could. But some of the tension at the high school that winter focused on another, purely symbolic question: how much, how often, and in what manner to express patriotic sentiment. In ordinary times, Charlestown’s Irish-Americans were zealous nationalists, determined to prove they cared as much for their country as had the Yankee farmers who first shed their blood on Bunker Hill. Now, with the Bicentennial year only weeks away, patriotic feeling was at fever pitch in Charlestown—and throughout the city.

  For Boston, of course, was the “cradle of liberty.” No city in the nation boasted so many revolutionary events—the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s ride, the battles of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill—America’s ABCs chalked on the blackboard of our collective memory. Any Boston mayor would have ordered up festivities to commemorate such occasions, but to Kevin White they were more than anniversaries—they were God-sent opportunities to draw the nation’s attention to him and his city. He established a public agency—Boston 200—charged with organizing the most elaborate celebration of the nation’s birthday to be held anywhere in the land.

  But White was hardly the only Bostonian seeking to make capital of American history. Bostonians’ stake in their tumultuous past had been reinforced by their turbulent present. Nor surprisingly, the violent anti-busing demonstrations, the sight of police on horseback clattering through the narrow streets, the placards, banners, and effigies, had stirred recollections of an earlier battle over men’s rights. All sides in the Boston busing struggle discerned—or claimed to discern—striking parallels between their own conflict and the revolutionary spectacle of two hundred years before.

  White proponents of school desegregation invoked the liberties for which Americans had fought at Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. Some Boston blacks derided the Bicentennial as “a birthday party for a two-hundred-year-old white man,” but others identified their present struggles with that of Crispus Attucks, the former slave who was one of five men killed in the Boston Massacre.

  Opponents of busing saw themselves as victims of the same oppression which had beset eighteenth-century Bostonians and said they were fighting for the same right to control their own lives. State Representative Ray Flynn warned: “The sacred principles on which this nation was founded are threatened by a new tyranny, a tyranny dressed in judicial robes.”

  But sorting out the lessons of the past wasn’t always so simple for the Townies. Charlestown had its own militia company, patterned after the original Charlestown Militia which fought at Bunker Hill. The modern version had been founded in 1967 by a longshoreman named Jim O’Neil, who hung out at the Thompson Square Tavern, where his obsession with colonial military history had earned him the nickname “General Jim.” Many of the militia’s fourscore members were recruited from the tavern’s regulars. Their wives made their uniforms—cocked hats, ruffled shirts, and breeches—and they brandished replicas of colonial muskets. As the Bicentennial celebrations got underway, the Charlestown Militia was in heavy demand for historical pageantry, starting with the 1975 reenactment of the Boston Massacre.

  Powder Keg and its allies in ROAR had different plans for the occasion. Minutes before the reenactment was to begin at the historic site on the Boston wate
rfront, some 400 anti-busing demonstrators loomed in the street. Led by two drummers beating a funeral dirge, eight black-clad pallbearers carried a pine coffin marked “R.I.P. Liberty, Born 1770–Died 1974.” Behind them came rank upon rank of marchers, keening in the high-pitched wail long used to mourn the Irish dead.

  By then, it was time for the formal ceremonies. Some 150 men in colonial dress—drawn from the Charlestown Militia and suburban minutemen companies—came marching up the street toward the Old State House. But when Dennis Kearney, Charlestown’s state representative, tried to read a proclamation marking the occasion, the anti-busers hooted him down. An ugly confrontation was shaping up between two groups of Irish-Americans—each trying to use history for its own purposes. Then Jack Alves, president of the Charlestown Historical Society, stepped to the microphone in his flowing black cape and cocked hat. “I see you there, Pat Russell,” he said. “And I see you too, Tom Johnson. We all know each other. We let you do your thing. Now let us do ours.”

  The demonstrators grew still. The Massacre proceeded, with Medford’s 64th Regiment of Foot portraying the squadron of seven British soldiers who fired into the crowd of colonials, killing five of them. But as the shots echoed off the glass-and-steel skyscrapers, all 400 demonstrators dropped to the pavement, lying there for a moment as still as Liberty in her coffin, as if to say: We, too, are victims.

  If the Townies differed on how to commemorate the Massacre, there was nothing equivocal about June 17, 1975, the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. This was Charlestown’s big day, its moment in the Bicentennial spotlight, and the Town’s factions temporarily shelved their differences to mount a splendid show. Militia companies from thirteen states took part in a reenactment of the battle—hundreds of defenders in shirt sleeves and red-stained bandages manning a redoubt beneath the Monument, cannon salvos echoing across the harbor, and the relentless line of redcoats pressing up the hill until they overran the gallant defenders. Thousands of onlookers packed the sidewalks to watch the spectacle. But the threat of Garrity’s order hung like the clouds of cannon smoke over the hill, and Powder Keg lost no opportunity to draw parallels with 1775. One large banner draped from a Monument Square rooftop said it all; in bold black letters against a red background it proclaimed: “We’re right back where we began 200 years ago.”