Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  In mid-spring, several Black Muslim and Black Nationalist groups from Roxbury approached the Debnams. If nobody else was going to defend the family, they would be happy to oblige. And one of them went further. What the Debnams needed, he said, was a little muscle; smash up a few of those white neighbors’ houses and the assault on the Debnams would stop.

  No, thanks, said Alva and Otis. We don’t need any of that stuff.

  So, as the stones came through their windows night after night, they depended more and more heavily on RUN. When the organization first volunteered to defend the Debnams, it hadn’t expected a protracted siege. As late as March 11, RUN was still reaching out to the community, hoping to mobilize white neighbors with a conciliatory leaflet. But as the assaults continued, RUN gradually developed a paramilitary battle plan. Dividing the night into three shifts—eight to midnight, midnight to three, three to six—it assigned four defenders to each period. Through trial and error, it devised four “battle stations”: two defenders on the top floor, one watching the front, one the rear; someone on the second floor, keeping the troublesome school yard under constant observation; a fourth behind the front door, watching Centre Street.

  The attackers proved remarkably resourceful, however. Noting when the defenders changed shifts, when they seemed to relax their guard, the youths varied their tactics to exploit these moments of vulnerability. RUN then shifted its strategy too, relying increasingly on advanced technology. By April, it had two small vans stationed in the neighborhood, one behind St. Mark’s Church, the other on nearby Nixon Street. From a citizens band “base unit” on the third floor of the Debnams’ house, a “radio coordinator” maintained contact through walkie-talkies with defenders in the vans. With the defense team in constant communication, the vans warned the house of any attacks forming in their sectors, while the base informed the vans when youths were retreating in their direction.

  Just what RUN should do if it cornered one or more of the attackers was a matter of some dispute. From the start, the organization had been split by ideological differences, leading to the resignation of several members who favored a more determined campaign against the “forces of racism.” Similar disputes developed over the Debnam case. RUN’s defenders often carried baseball bats in their cars, potent weapons for self-defense that were easily explainable as innocent sports equipment. A few of the most zealous activists yearned to use their bats on the attackers. Others hoped to capture the youths and place them under citizen’s arrest. But lawyers associated with RUN sternly warned against such “vigilantism,” fearing it could lead to civil suits by aggrieved parties. RUN therefore concentrated on photographic identification of the attackers. Several defenders in the house and one in each van were equipped at all times with a camera and flash equipment. When an attacker got close enough, the defender would leap out and snap his picture. Any shots that came out were turned over to the police, in hopes that they would provide sufficient evidence for prosecution.

  In practice, the picture taking only exacerbated tensions in the neighborhood. Since it was difficult to distinguish attacking youths from innocent passersby, RUN snapped pictures of everyone who went by the house, often provoking strenuous objections. One night, after they had photographed a green Chevrolet making its third pass at the house, six white youths jumped out of the car and angrily confronted the picture takers. From the house burst six defenders, led by a black man carrying a double-barreled shotgun. “Give me those car keys,” he told the driver. “This is the third time you guys have been past here. You aren’t getting these keys back tonight and you aren’t leaving until the Man comes.” When the police arrived, the black gave them the keys and said, “Get these guys out of here. I don’t want to see them again.”

  On March 16, RUN’s strategy provided fresh ammunition to its critics. When a rock went through the Debnams’ living-room window, a RUN sentinel in the front hall spotted several youths scattering down Centre Street. He gave chase, accompanied by Alva’s brother Jo-Jo, while the base unit alerted other defenders in cars and vans. A RUN member named Kathy Navin, cruising the streets in her Toyota sedan, saw a white youth in flight. Drawing alongside, she asked if something was wrong. The boy said two men were chasing him. Eventually he got in the car—whether at his suggestion or hers was a matter of some dispute—and they drove away. A minute later, Kathy picked up Jo-Jo Walker, who identified the boy as one of those he had seen in the street. Kathy then drove to the Debnams’, where RUN photographed the boy, then told him to go away and not come back. The next day, the police charged Kathy Navin with kidnapping Michael McKeon, a fourteen-year-old student at St. Mark’s School. Judge Dolan quickly dismissed the charge, but the incident damaged RUN’s reputation in the community, contributing to a widespread suspicion that something ominous was going on at 185 Centre Street.

  In the wake of such incidents, RUN became increasingly alienated from the neighborhood. Its determined defense of the Debnams had turned 185 Centre Street into a fortress against the outside world. RUN’s most ideological members increasingly saw the white neighbors as unalloyed racists, a hostile force which could not be bargained with, only repelled. This proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some previously sympathetic adults were put off by the armed-camp atmosphere. Rumors that RUN was “a bunch of Communists” made rapprochement still more difficult.

  A handful of white neighbors, sensing that things were getting out of hand, made one last effort to mobilize the community behind the Debnams. In late March, a college professor named David Stratman, who lived around the corner on Samoset Street, invited Alva and Otis—but not RUN—to meet with him and a few sympathetic neighbors. Stratman believed that both RUN and ROAR, for their own reasons, were seeking to make race the central issue in the city. Only by defusing the racial question, he believed, by embedding situations like the Debnams’ in a nexus of common concerns, could the community’s polarization be halted. That meant relying on the best instincts of the neighborhood—not on radical missionaries from Cambridge—to restore a sense of decency and perspective. At the meeting, several participants volunteered to help. One woman active at St. Mark’s said she would speak with the priests, urging them to get more involved. Paul Tafe and Marie Garrett, the youngest members of the group, volunteered to seek out the vandals themselves.

  District 11 maintained a list of 147 locations—street corners, parks, school yards, and drugstores—where Dorchester’s youth gangs customarily hung out. Some 2,580 young people between the ages of ten and twenty-five were said to belong to such gangs, but police cautioned that the word “gang” should be construed loosely to mean any group of youths who hung together for any purpose—from street hockey to smoking dope to merely “messing around.” Few of them bore the colorful names, the bizarre regalia or lethal weapons popularized by West Side Story. Few were regularly involved in overt criminal activity, though many engaged in random vandalism against public buildings or private homes.

  But rapid change in Dorchester’s neighborhoods and the city’s tense racial climate had begun to alter that. The gangs, which generally carried the names of the street or corner on which they hung out, became more aware than ever of their turf. Their members often spoke of themselves as “protectors” of the neighborhood. Those who could remember the days when their parents lived west of Washington Street would say: We didn’t defend ourselves then, we let the colored push us out; now we’re going to fight for our territory. Some gang members no longer lived in Dorchester at all but returned from South Shore communities on weekends or evenings to help defend a turf that was no longer their own. It didn’t take much to move the gangs to action; the slightest alteration in territorial patterns—as simple as blacks hanging a basketball net on a new light pole, or taking their clothes to a new laundromat—could ignite fears of fresh incursions, triggering a racial explosion.

  The Debnams’ house was boxed by four such groups—the Roseland Street gang, which took its name from the street just behind St. Mark’s
Church; the Shawmut Station gang, which hung out at the subway station on Clementine Park; the Mather Street gang, which met on a corner just across Centre Street; and the Wainwright Park gang, named after a grassy rectangle two blocks from the Debnams’.

  One night in late March, Paul Tafe and Marie Garrett strolled across the school yard to the stoop where the Roseland Street gang usually congregated after supper. Only a few years older than the gang members, who ranged from fifteen to twenty, Paul and Marie easily struck up a conversation. As a sociology student at the University of Massachusetts, Paul was interested in what motivated these youngsters, and as the leader of a rock group called Ashmont, he enjoyed a certain prestige in the neighborhood. He told them he’d been up at the Debnams’ recently, where he had seen the ruin caused by their stones. It must be a terrible thing to have rocks crashing through your windows night after night, he said. Why did they do it?

  We don’t like niggers, the kids said. We want them out of our neighborhood. If we throw rocks through their windows night after night, eventually they’ll get the message and move out.

  But didn’t they see what havoc they were wreaking in the neighborhood? asked Marie. Weren’t they destroying the very community their parents had worked so hard to develop?

  No, sard the kids. Their parents wished they could do the same thing. But grown-ups couldn’t throw rocks, so the kids were doing it for them.

  By April 3, David Stratman’s moderate caucus conceded that it could do little to halt the confrontation on Centre Street. The initiative now passed to the Urban Court, which, under Judge Dolan’s auspices, launched its mediation effort. On April 24, the community was summoned to a meeting at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, where Urban Court officials explained the undertaking. The plan called for a negotiating panel of ten persons: Alva and Otis Debnam, four white adults, and representatives from the four street gangs. The community selected a student, a retired fireman, a traffic policewoman, and a housewife as the adult representatives. Two Urban Court mediators, Kathy Grant and Barbara Sullivan, spent hours making the rounds of the gang hangouts, until each contingent chose someone to attend the mediation sessions.

  On May 1, the participants gathered at Urban Court headquarters for the first session, which went surprisingly well. All parties showed such willingness to talk that Kathy and Barbara called another session for May 8. But, from the start, the second meeting was a disaster. The Roseland Street gang hadn’t attended the first meeting. This time it sent two youths who began shouting at Alva Debnam, “There isn’t any point in talking, because sooner or later we’re going to get you niggers!” Alva told them, “You better not try. You come anywhere near me or my children, I’ll kick your asses down the avenue!” After an hour of mutual recriminations, the meeting broke up in disarray. A third session was never called.

  As long as mediation held any hope of success, Judge Dolan reserved judgment on the Mulrey-Flaherty case, so as not to jeopardize the delicate negotiations. Once those efforts collapsed, he came under heavy pressure from the Debnams’ supporters to give the men prison terms as an object lesson to the community. On June 14, twenty neighbors wrote to Dolan, urging him to “act swiftly” in the case. “Unless the Court makes it known that it will not tolerate actions such as those that occurred February 29,” they wrote, “then not only the Debnams but the entire community will continue to be victimized.”

  A week later, Dolan responded by finding both men guilty on all charges. Still seeking to keep jurisdiction over the matter and to involve the community in its resolution, he sent the case to an Urban Court “disposition panel” for a recommended sentence. The panel proposed that the cases be continued without a finding for six months as a means of assuring the men’s good behavior. Dolan agreed, provided the defendants agreed to pay for all windows broken at the Debnams’ house during that period. But Mulrey and Flaherty flatly refused that condition. Reluctantly, Dolan then sentenced Mulrey to twenty days in prison, Flaherty to ten days, suspending both sentences and putting the men on probation for six months. Just as the judge had feared, Mulrey and Flaherty immediately sought new trials in Superior Court, where several months later charges against both were dropped.

  The failure of police and courts to deliver a stern warning may have paved the way for a fresh outburst of violence, or perhaps it was only the onset of summer weather which sent the gangs into action. On the evening of June 13, white teenagers drinking beer and watching a softball game at Town Field became embroiled with a group of Puerto Ricans from nearby Geneva Avenue. Before the melee was over, Jackie Pembroke, a seventeen-year-old high school student, lay bleeding to death from a knife wound in the chest. Later in June, three more youths were stabbed and four policemen injured in three nights of bitter street fighting between roving gangs of whites and blacks.

  The renewed racial combat proved particularly discomfiting to organizers of Boston’s Bicentennial celebration. Ever since the elaborate municipal festivities got underway in April 1975, there had been a certain irony in commemorating Boston’s eighteenth-century struggle for the Rights of Man against the background of Boston’s contemporary collision over human rights. But now the celebration was about to culminate in the Bicentennial Moment itself—July 4, 1976—to be marked in Boston by a parade led by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery, a reading of the Declaration of Independence from the State House balcony, a patriotic oration at Faneuil Hall, and, finally, a mammoth concert on the banks of the Charles. Just as thousands of dignitaries, tourists, and newspeople were about to descend on the city, Dorchester’s racial warfare threatened to preempt the headlines. As the great day approached, Mayor White ordered police officials to do everything in their power to halt the violence.

  Perhaps because the troubles had spread to other parts of Dorchester, Centre Street was relatively peaceful in those last days of June, and Alva and Otis decided to celebrate the nation’s two hundredth birthday—as well as their own survival—with a giant barbecue in their backyard. “There hasn’t been much reason to party around here these past few months,” Alva told Mike Davis. “We’re going to make up for lost time. It’s going to be a blast!”

  For days in advance, the Debnams, their family and friends prepared in earnest. Alva’s mother baked a big chocolate cake. Brother Tommy and his girlfriend bought the bread and rolls. Brother Fred took responsibility for the liquor and beer. Sister Helen got the ice cream. For two straight nights, Alva was in the kitchen nearly nonstop, baking sweet potato pie, white potato pie, coconut pie, and frying up a huge batch of chicken. Early on July 4, brother John—still a soul food cook at Bob the Chef—put coals on the grill and started turning out his succulent barbecued ribs, along with T-bone steaks, hamburgers, and hot dogs. Charlene and Maria set up the stereo system in a window of their parents’ room. Young Otis put on a big stack of disco and rhythm-and-blues records, which were soon resounding through the neighborhood.

  By late morning the yard filled up with celebrators. Most of the family was there, with the notable exception of Rachel Twymon, who was in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, George. (Alva’s troubles on Centre Street had done nothing to improve relations between the sisters. As far as Rachel was concerned, Alva had brought the problems down on her own head by her insistence on buying a house in white Dorchester.) But four of Rachel’s children were present: Cassandra, Rachel, Wayne, and Fred. Blacks from the South End and Roxbury mixed easily with white defenders like Eileen Bisson, Sandy McCleary, Janet Connors, and Paul Couming, neighbors like David and Sally Stratman, David and Ellen Rome, Paul Tafe and Marie Garrett. Two neighborhood kids, Jim Sorenson and Steve Youmans, scampered through the yard with young Otis, setting off Roman candles, shaking up Coke bottles and spraying each other with the brown fizz. Seventy blacks and thirty whites filled the backyard all through the long, lazy afternoon, eating, drinking, talking, and singing, savoring that special moment in American history.

  Late in the day, most of the partygoers drifted off, many of t
hem headed for the Boston Pops concert on the Charles. The family and a few friends settled down at three card tables, set up in the shade of a spreading oak, for the Walkers’ traditional round of whist. When the mosquitoes began biting around eight o’clock, they moved the card game up to the kitchen while the kids took the stereo unit into the empty room for a disco party.

  The Debnams’ cookout hadn’t gone unnoticed on Centre Street. All through the neighborhood, bedecked that day with American flags and patriotic bunting, whites had grumbled at the commotion around No. 185. Never had anyone at that end of Centre Street seen so many “colored” so close at hand. Their cars were parked in every available spot for blocks around. The music from their stereo could be heard a hundred yards away. Some of the neighbors, busy with their own celebrations, hardly noticed. Others shrugged and said, “Well, it’s a holiday.” But more than a few were furious. “They’re rubbing our noses in it,” one mother told her daughter as they sat in beach chairs on the front lawn. “They’re showing us what it’s going to be like when they take over.”

  Two blocks away, in Wainwright Park, a hundred white youths had gathered for another traditional July 4 event. Every year for as long as anyone could remember, the Wainwright Park gang and its friends had celebrated the holiday with a huge bonfire. Early in the afternoon, they began assembling in the park, playing basketball on a court at one end, softball on a rough diamond at the other, drinking beer and smoking dope on a stretch of macadam scrawled with graffiti: “Gays Suck, Liberals Suck, Brits Suck, Niggers Suck.” At dusk, they stacked their wood in a ten-foot pyramid just behind second base, where, doused with gasoline, it ignited with a great rush, the flames leaping fifteen feet in the air, lighting up the severe façades of the three-deckers around the park. Well into the night, the kids cavorted about the blazing pyre, celebrating the day much as colonial youths two hundred years before had marked such occasions.