“Let’s go see the Mayor,” someone shouted. It was one thing they hadn’t tried, so off they marched to City Hall, where Louise Day Hicks ushered them into the City Council chamber, served them hot chocolate, and soon returned with Kevin White.
It was a heady moment for Lisa as she rose to tell the Mayor of Boston what was happening at Charlestown High. Once more she ran through the familiar litany of demands and grievances, adding several new ones for the occasion: the School Department’s “refusal to permit our peaceful demonstration this morning,” “the unjustified arrest of six students,” and “several acts of police brutality last week.” She concluded: “Mr. Mayor, your wife is from Charlestown. She knows what it’s like to be a Townie and have everything stacked against you. Ask her whether she would put up with what we’ve had to go through. Please, Mr. Mayor, help us!”
When she finished, the Mayor said, “Thank you, Miss McGoff. My wife understands—and I understand—how you feel. Believe me, I will do everything I can to help you. But you have to understand the limits of my authority. The School Department doesn’t report to me. I have no responsibility whatsoever for busing, which has been ordered, as you know, by a federal district judge. Nor do I control the police in such matters. Only school officials can call police into their buildings. Certainly I will look into your charges of police brutality. If I find the police are guilty, I can assure you they will be disciplined. But I have no way of dealing with most of your grievances.”
Rebuffed yet again, the white students had run out of options. Not until April 5 did they try again, this time with the notion of appealing to the ultimate authority—Judge W. Arthur Garrity himself.
Lisa, Kevin, and Tommy McGoff were among 120 whites who left Charlestown at nine that morning. Carrying American flags, Bicentennial banners, and anti-busing placards, they marched across the bridge to City Hall Plaza, where they joined 150 whites from South Boston High. After a brief meeting with Mrs. Hicks in the City Council chambers, they left for the Federal Courthouse, where they hoped to present their grievances to the judge.
At that moment, Ted Landsmark was hurrying across the plaza, late for a meeting at City Hall. The route which had taken him to that place was an unlikely one for a black man reared in a Harlem tenement. Born Theodore August Burrell, the son of a New York subway conductor, he showed early academic promise and, after graduating from Stuyvesant High in 1963, applied to Yale. The college turned him down, but it was sufficiently impressed to arrange a “transitional year” at St. Paul’s, the New Hampshire prep school, where he learned to play hockey and read J. D. Salinger. Admitted to Yale in 1964—one of 16 blacks in a class of 1,090—he found the ratio unsettling and took two years off before earning his B.A., followed by a joint law and architecture degree from Yale Law School. By then, prestigious law firms throughout the country were looking for young blacks with his credentials. While at Yale, he had married the daughter of a white Massachusetts surgeon, so he accepted an offer from the distinguished Boston firm of Hill & Barlow.
But something was eating at Theodore Burrell. His adoption by the white establishment left him well connected but disinherited. Welcome in New Haven courtyards, Boston clubs, and New York boardrooms, he was no longer at home in the streets of black America. Seeking some part of his heritage with which to identify, he found it in his maternal grandfather, a West Indian Garveyite named Landsmark. As he left for Boston in 1973, he changed his name to Theodore Landsmark.
That was only the beginning of rapid disenchantment with his brave new world. A social chasm divided him from his prosperous white in-laws. His marriage ended in divorce. Hill & Barlow seemed too stiff, too white, too elitist. All this culminated in a visit to his ancestral homeland, the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, where he lunched with the black governor and met dozens of black doctors, lawyers, and bankers, plainly in control of their lives. Returning to Boston, he hailed a cab at Logan Airport. When the white driver asked where he was going, he gave an address on predominantly black Chester Square. The driver nodded, but when Landsmark turned to get his bags, the cab sped off.
In March 1974, he quit Hill & Barlow, becoming executive director of the Contractors’ Association of Boston, a black trade association which sought a greater share of construction contracts for minority builders. At 10:00 a.m. on April 5, 1976, he was scheduled to chair a community liaison meeting at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. When he couldn’t find a parking space and had to leave his car a quarter mile away, he knew he was going to be late, so he steamed along, heading for a side entrance to City Hall. Passing the New England Merchants Bank and entering the plaza, he saw a group of young whites rounding the corner of City Hall, moving toward the Federal Courthouse, brandishing banners and placards. Before he could reach the City Hall steps, someone yelled, “There’s a nigger! Get him!”
The first student hit him from the rear, knocking his glasses off. He tried to right himself, but a second blow from the front brought him to the ground. Other students moved in, kicking him in the ribs, the shoulders, the head. He struggled to his feet, but someone grabbed him around the neck and pulled him down again. Once more he got up. Then he saw a student carrying an American flag on a long staff. Advancing across the plaza, the kid leveled the staff like a spear, as if to impale him. It struck him a glancing blow on the face.
Finally, Landsmark broke free, managing to reach the City Hall steps, where a policeman came to his aid. A moment later they were joined by Deputy Mayor Jeep Jones, who, along with Kevin White, had watched the attack from an upstairs window.
Lisa, Kevin, and Tommy McGoff had been among the stragglers rounding the corner of City Hall. Lisa had looked up in astonishment to see the black man in his three-piece suit walking toward them, and she had watched in horror as some of her Townie friends beat and kicked him. Instinctively fleeing the violence, she ran across the side plaza, hiding behind a wall which skirted the bank and adjacent travel agency. As she huddled there, face in hands, she felt like weeping—from pure shock, from fear, from dismay at the terrible thing happening in front of her. And she understood immediately that whatever was going on out there could only damage the cause she believed in.
She hoped the black man wasn’t hurt seriously, but she didn’t feel much sympathy for him; in fact, her first thought was: This has to be a trick, because no black guy in his right mind would walk smack into the middle of an anti-busing demonstration. He must have done it on purpose, bopping along like that, almost as if he were saying, Hey, come and get me, beat the shit out of me, so you’ll look like a bunch of white racist pigs. If that was his plan, she thought, they’d fallen right into it.
Charlestown took much of the blame for the attack. When the police arrested four youths, two of them proved to be Townies: a fifteen-year-old juvenile whose name has never been released and Eddie Irvin, seventeen, vice-president of Charlestown High’s junior class.
Lisa knew Eddie Irvin well. Although enrolled in the electrical course, he was active throughout the school. A funny guy who clowned around a lot, Eddie liked to boast of how tough he was, but she’d never detected a mean streak in him, never seen him commit a violent act before. That morning on City Hall Plaza he must have felt his bluff being called. Kicking a guy while he was down was no way to prove one’s manhood, Lisa conceded, but Eddie was essentially a good guy who was going to get strung up for one stupid act. Moreover, he was a Townie, a kid from her class. So Lisa attended all the court proceedings in his trial for assault, and when he was convicted—and given a one-year suspended sentence—she felt bad for him.
Ted Landsmark hadn’t anticipated what would happen to him on City Hall Plaza that morning, but once it happened, he was determined that Boston extract the full lesson. Not unwilling to become the city’s black martyr—a twentieth-century Crispus Attucks—he appeared at press conferences and interviews with broad white bandages covering his broken nose and face lacerations (it had taken eight stitches to close his cuts). Relentlessly, he drove
home his message: if a Yale-educated lawyer in a three-piece suit could be attacked on his way into City Hall, then what black was safe in Boston?
The incident’s impact was magnified by a remarkable picture taken that morning by a Herald American photographer. It showed the white student advancing across the plaza, the Star-Spangled Banner billowing in a breeze, the flagstaff leveled at Landsmark’s chest. The picture appeared on front pages across the country and went on to win that year’s Pulitzer Prize for news photography. In America’s Bicentennial year, its symbolism required no commentary.
18
Diver
The mail was splayed across the hallway floor. Returning from work on a muggy July afternoon, Joan Diver stooped to retrieve it, then sank onto the couch to sort through the stack. Ripping open a small envelope marked “Boston Public Schools,” she read: “Official student notification: Bradford Diver is assigned for the school year 1974–75 to the Carter School, 496 Northampton Street.”
There had to be some mistake; it made no sense. Brad was attending the Bancroft, an elementary school scarcely two blocks away on Appleton Street. Although, strictly speaking, the Divers weren’t in the Bancroft district (the district line ran down the middle of West Newton Street), they and fifteen other families in that slice of the South End had routinely sent their children to the school under the city’s “open enrollment” program. For the Bancroft was a most unusual school, an experiment in ungraded, unstructured education, wrenched from a skeptical school system by a group of determined South Enders. Now, after years of skirmishing, the department finally seemed reconciled to the aberration. Moreover, since the South End was the most diverse neighborhood in the city, the Bancroft was one of the few schools in the system already naturally integrated—whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Chinese attended in something very close to their citywide percentages—and the parents had been assured by their friends in the State Education Department that the Bancroft would therefore be exempt from Charlie Glenn’s racial balance plan. Since June, when Arthur Garrity had accepted Glenn’s plan as the basis of his Phase I order, they felt confident that the judge’s decree would leave their children untouched.
Now Brad was to be shunted from the Bancroft to the Carter, of all places, a makeshift school assembled in 1971 from portable classrooms to alleviate overcrowding in the heart of Lower Roxbury’s black community. It was eight long blocks away; to get there, seven-year-old Brad would have to walk down Columbus Avenue, past the Methunion Manor housing project and a line of ramshackle tenements, then across the notorious intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, sometimes called “the drug capital of New England.”
As she sat in the fading light of that summer afternoon, holding the notice in her hand, Joan smoldered; it seemed so silly, so pointless, so unfair. And as she told Colin about it when he got home from work an hour later, he slammed his briefcase down on the dining-room table.
Racial equality had remained one of Colin’s passionate concerns. For a decade he had followed Boston’s school wars with mounting sympathy for the embattled blacks. Only three months earlier, he had watched in distaste as thousands of white demonstrators swarmed across the Common demanding repeal of the Racial Imbalance Act, and after urging the Governor to stand fast, he had been dismayed when Frank Sargent opted for a discredited “freedom of choice” plan. But six weeks later his chagrin had turned to satisfaction as Arthur Garrity cut through the State House debate, finding a clear violation of constitutional rights, and adopting the racial balance plan as a first-stage remedy. He had read the judge’s massive opinion, relishing—as only another lawyer could—the richness of its research, the logical ordering of its arguments, the craftsmanship with which Garrity had marshaled his judicial precedents. At last, Colin thought, the full weight of the federal courts had been thrown behind black demands for racial justice in Boston.
But precisely because he knew the history of the battle so well, Colin found Brad’s assignment inexplicable. The racial imbalance law had been designed to reduce the heavy concentration of Boston blacks in crowded, inadequate ghetto schools by mixing them with white students huddled in their own overwhelmingly white schools. Colin and Joan had once lived in Brighton, one of the city’s white neighborhoods. They had looked at houses in other such communities—Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, and Charlestown—where the schools were almost completely white. Instead, they had chosen to live in Boston’s only integrated neighborhood and to send their children to a fully integrated school. Now they, and others who had made the same decision, were being penalized. Here was Charlie Glenn’s plan, which affected fewer than half the city’s schools, breaking up the Bancroft! What purpose, Colin asked himself, could possibly be served by tearing apart precisely the kind of school that Glenn and Garrity were supposed to be fostering?
Colin was still seething when he went to work the next morning. He had left the state administration that May to manage Bill Cowin’s campaign for Attorney General. They had set up a small office on Boylston Street, from which they were waging a shoestring effort as the underdogs in a three-way race. When Colin told Bill what had happened, his friend couldn’t resist a few gentle jabs. “Ah ha!” he exclaimed. “The brave urban liberal hoist by his own petard!”
“Get off my back, Bill,” Colin growled.
“No, really, this is funny,” Bill went on. “All these years you’re the big liberal, the dedicated city guy, going to change the world. Then the first time they put the screws on you, you’re just like anybody else.”
Bill was enjoying himself, as he often did, at Colin’s expense, a loose irreverence central to their friendship. But his teasing that morning had a cutting edge. Bill was no less supportive of Garrity’s order than Colin was, but he would never have chosen to live in the city, certainly not in a crazy neighborhood like the South End, and he had always been somewhat skeptical about Colin’s insistence on living out the implications of his urban liberalism.
Colin was stung. He knew that he and Joan had options which few other city dwellers enjoyed, and perhaps they were guilty at times of seeking to preserve their advantages at the expense of their ideals. But not this time. The Bancroft was the most thoroughly integrated school in Boston, probably more integrated than the Carter would ever be. In objecting to Brad’s school assignment, the Divers weren’t seeking to avoid integration; of that, Colin was certain.
It was a potent argument, one which the Bancroft parents skillfully mobilized in their struggle that summer to get the school assignments reversed. Only fifteen or so families out of about 150 in the school had been affected by the shift to the Carter, but they included some of the most active participants in the Bancroft experiment. The others rallied around them, barraging school officials and Garrity’s clerks with petitions, letters, phone calls, and personal visits. Joan Diver—who had delivered a petition that spring asking that the Bancroft be preserved intact—weighed in again with calls to friends in city and state government. Eventually, the parents’ hard work and good connections paid off. Late in August, a letter arrived from the School Department stating that any student who had attended the Bancroft the year before would be permitted to return in 1974–75.
The Divers, of course, were enormously relieved. Here was a victory, they thought, not only for common sense and justice, but for the vision of the South End community which they and the other young professionals had cherished. Indeed, the Bancroft was a cornerstone of the New South End; without it, or something very like it, the Divers might never have moved there, and unless it could be preserved they would find it difficult to remain.
By the late 1960s, many Boston parents regarded the public schools as a hostile environment, a rigid, authoritarian structure ruled by shriveled spinsters and timeserving bureaucrats. This perception had originated in the black community, an outgrowth of its long, wearying battle with the School Committee. By 1966, many black parents had abandoned hope of getting a decent education for their children in the public schools and ha
d begun to search for alternatives. Some, like Rachel Twymon, turned to the Catholic schools. Others sent their children to the white suburbs under the Metco program. Still others formed “free schools,” private academies run by black parents but funded by white foundations so that needy students could attend free of charge. The first of Boston’s free schools was the New School for Children, which opened in Roxbury in the fall of 1966 with Jonathan Kozol—late of the Gibson School—as its guiding spirit. Quickly three other black free schools sprang up in Boston.
The blacks’ distrust of the public schools soon converged with a similar brand of white suspicion. Even more than blacks, the young professionals who had staked out a beachhead in the South End in the mid-sixties expected a great deal from education. Most of them were products of suburban school systems or New England private schools who had gone on to college and then to graduate school. When they turned their backs on their parents’ suburban world, their chief misgiving was usually the public schools. Few had school-age children when they began restoring their dilapidated rooming houses, but they realized that it was only a matter of time before they would need a decent school. The problem was particularly acute in the South End, where the public schools were notoriously bad.
One night in August 1967, two dozen young professionals gathered in a Union Park town house to consider founding a private school. As they haggled over curriculum, Susan Thomas whispered to Piers Lewis, “If we put a fraction of this energy into a public school, I bet we could make it into what we want.” Lewis blurted out her proposal and others quickly agreed. Someone suggested that the nearby Charles E. Mackey School might be receptive since its implacably orthodox principal was being replaced by a more flexible man.
Common Ground Page 52