Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  In truth, the police offensive—even the arrests—had done little to curtail crime in the area. All through late winter and early spring, fresh bulletins poured into the Divers’ house. As Joan meticulously recorded them in her notebook—page after page of muggings, holdups, assaults, and burglaries—Colin went on pressuring the police for better protection. By now the policemen of District 4 had grown accustomed to the Divers. They knew Colin and Joan had powerful friends at City Hall and police headquarters, but they were also impressed by the couple’s determination to protect themselves and their friends. Some of them even seemed abashed at the department’s failure to provide better service to the neighborhood, although others defended their performance, laying the blame on other sectors of the criminal justice system.

  One night, Detective Sergeant Frank Coleman turned in exasperation to Joan and said, “Look, Mrs. Diver, maybe we didn’t do too well by you for a while. But you’ve got a lot of help now—the TPF, the decoys, special patrols. We’re getting arrests. The trouble is, we’re getting the same people over and over.” As evidence, he pulled out Anthony Black’s record—a dozen arrests beginning at the age of fifteen. “We pull him in,” Coleman said, “the courts release him. We pull him in again, the courts let him go again. What do you want us to do? Your real beef now is with the courts. You ought to go down there and get a meeting with the judges.”

  Coleman’s remarks echoed much of the Divers’ own experience with the courts, much they had heard from the neighborhood judges, Doerfer and Garrity. In late February, Colin drafted a letter to Judge Jacob Lewitton, chief justice of the Boston Municipal Court. To buttress his position, he had the letter co-signed by six other South End activists, among them two blacks—Adrian du Cille and Willie Mandrell.

  Dear Judge Lewitton [the letter began],

  We are writing to request your help in ending the reign of terror which exists in the South End…. Today the South End is under siege. It is engulfed in an epidemic of crime that threatens to destroy it as a community…. The people of this area have been literally terrorized—imprisoned in their homes—by gangs of young hoodlums who roam the South End casually attacking, threatening, robbing and raping with impunity….

  In recent months, we and many of our neighbors have expended enormous amounts of time and taken often considerable personal risk to combat this menace. The residents of several streets have organized street patrols in early evening hours to help their neighbors return home from work safely. Several residents have personally chased and in at least two cases apprehended muggers…. In the past three weeks, the Police Department has assigned teams of decoys, male and female, and expanded patrols, marked and unmarked, in a search for solutions. Now, at last, these efforts have begun to result in arrests.

  We are now concerned that the familiar patterns of the past will be repeated, whereby many of those who have been arrested and convicted have been returned to the streets only to victimize us further. Too often, we feel, individual criminal acts, perhaps committed unarmed or by persons not previously convicted or by juveniles, are not considered seriously. Low bail is set, cases are continued freely, sentences are suspended, and the wave of terror in our streets and homes continues unabated in spite of these arrests.

  We firmly believe that the Court should see these individual acts of violence in the context of the utter and widespread lawlessness which is destroying our community…. We most earnestly request an opportunity to meet with you and other members of the Court, in order to present the facts and impressions gathered by us during the course of months of dedicated citizen crime fighting.

  In March, Colin and his co-signers met with the judge in his chambers. Lewitton heard them out politely, then launched into an elaborate explanation of the court’s problems in dealing with crime. But Colin was ready with a vigorous rebuttal. Based on his own survey of Massachusetts statutes as well as practices in other communities, he urged that the court tighten bail procedures to keep dangerous criminals off the streets while awaiting trial; his own preference would have been a preventive detention system similar to that recently enacted in the District of Columbia. A few years earlier, Colin couldn’t have imagined himself taking that position, and even now it was widely regarded as heresy for liberals to support such tough measures against crime. But after months of battling the South End’s hoodlums, Colin had lost patience with procedures that set habitual criminals loose on the community to commit one or more additional crimes before being brought to trial on the original charge. Some escaped trial altogether. Take Ruberto Caban, the man he’d chased and captured in January—that was the most open-and-shut case he could imagine. Colin had taken up the chase within seconds of the mugging and had recovered LeSola Morgan’s purse from the man’s grip. Yet Caban had been released on bail and had never shown up for trial in Superior Court. God knew where he was now.

  In a state like Massachusetts, Colin conceded, outright preventive detention wasn’t politically feasible. But given existing statutes, he argued, the courts could do a much better job of protecting the public, while still preserving the constitutional rights of defendants. “It’s a jungle out there,” he warned the judge. “If you don’t do something quickly, we’re going to lose the war against crime. Then we might as well get gun permits and barricade our doors.” Lewitton promised to consider Colin’s point of view, but the South Enders left the judge’s chambers with modest expectations.

  By then, Joan was in a better position than her husband to promote some measure of judicial reform. That January, Governor Michael Dukakis had named former Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to head a blue-ribbon committee on Massachusetts’ antiquated court system. Convinced that judicial unaccountability was aggravating Boston’s crime situation, eager to find a forum for her views, Joan had called Dan Taylor, an old friend then serving as the Governor’s counsel, to ask if Dukakis planned to include on the committee any consumers—rather than dispensers—of justice. Taylor didn’t know but said he’d find out. Barely an hour later he called back to say that the Governor would be delighted to have Joan on the panel.

  On February 4, the Select Committee on Judicial Needs met for the first time at the State Office Building. A formidable group, its twenty members included State Attorney General Frank Bellotti, Supreme Judicial Court Justice Edward Hennessey, and former Senate Judiciary Chairman John Conte. All were lawyers, except Florence Rubin, president of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters, and Joan.

  The committee’s principal assignment was to find ways of reducing the massive backlog of cases in state courts. A survey showed that of the ten slowest courts in the nation, five were in Massachusetts. Suburban Middlesex County was the slowest of all, with a five-year delay before a civil jury trial could be held. “Justice is being denied with each passing day in Massachusetts,” the Governor had said.

  The committee zeroed in on administrative measures to alleviate overcrowding of the dockets: a new chief administrative judge to manage the entire state court system; greater flexibility in assignments, permitting judges to transfer from court to court; and consolidation of court budgets.

  Joan was more interested in strengthening the criminal justice system. She was particularly concerned with lenient bail policies and excessive continuances. In Boston, she knew, one out of every four defendants failed to appear for trial, while the probability of a defendant defaulting increased 10 percent for every month a case was continued. But neither Cox nor his staff was eager to grapple with such divisive issues, afraid that they would make it more difficult to reach a consensus on administrative reforms. Nevertheless, Joan persisted, submitting several lengthy memoranda to the committee which argued, among other things, that the courts should be stricter in granting continuances; that judges should more carefully consider a defendant’s previous arrests, releases, and defaults before setting bail; and that defendants who failed to appear for trial should be more aggressively prosecuted. When Archibald Cox suggested that she fav
ored preventive detention, Joan—like her husband—insisted that she wasn’t going that far. She emphasized that any bail system “must take into account the individual rights of the defendants, such that the imposition of bail is not used as punishment.” But, like Colin, she argued that “the courts must take into account the legitimate demands of the public for accountability and should ensure that the bail system is adequately administered and enforced.” The committee’s report, written by Cox himself, included Joan’s recommendation on continuances, but only a pallid paragraph on bail.

  Joan had other worries that winter and spring of 1976. The Bancroft School, where both her sons were now enrolled, was in greater turmoil than ever. The spring before, parents had prevailed in their effort to preserve the Bancroft as a unique enclave of open education in a sea of traditional scholasticism. But theirs had been a Pyrrhic victory. Forced to choose between a “district” school, to which students would be rigidly assigned by “geocode,” and a “magnet” school, offering special programs and drawing applicants from throughout the city, the parents had opted for district status to guarantee that the Bancroft remain a South End institution. But in June they learned that the geocodes from which the Bancroft would draw had been significantly altered, retaining most of the school’s white students but transferring many of its original blacks and enrolling other blacks whose parents neither sought nor wanted open education for their children. Moreover, the School Department had somehow miscalculated the Bancroft’s enrollment. By opening day, 253 students were assigned to a building with a capacity of barely 200.

  The result was total chaos. With the large new enrollment crammed into seven classrooms, anything approaching organized instruction—much less the Bancroft’s innovative program—proved impossible. Teachers struggled to maintain acceptable levels of noise and discipline. Books and materials were in desperately short supply. To alleviate overcrowding, one teacher gave her classes in a former supply closet.

  These conditions proved especially difficult for Lois Varney, the young primary-grades teacher whose imaginative techniques had drawn Joan Diver to the Bancroft in the first place. Lois had thrived in the old Bancroft, where she could offer her abundant talents to twenty-five children, all of them there because their parents had selected this alternative form of education. It was something quite different to preside over forty youngsters, half of them utterly new to the Bancroft and there against their families’ wishes. It took months to show such children that the unstructured and spontaneous atmosphere carried with it corresponding responsibilities. Meanwhile, Lois was compelled to give the newcomers a disproportionate share of her time, diverting energy from the more settled students who knew what was expected of them. Among these was Brad Diver, at eight years of age a comparative veteran of the Bancroft.

  As always when the Bancroft was in danger, articulate and well-connected South Enders bombarded school officials with demands that the program be preserved. This time, they urged the School Committee to give them part of the Rice Building, barely a hundred feet across the playground. In 1971, determined Bancroft parents seeking space for a junior high component had “liberated” a Rice classroom and held it against all comers. Later, the Bancroft gained a second room at the Rice, moving its two kindergarten classes there. But sixteen Rice classrooms remained occupied by the English-Language Center, Boston’s school for newly arrived immigrants. Contending that such a school could be located anywhere in the city, Bancroft parents now argued that they needed still more of the Rice. Not surprisingly, the English-Language Center vigorously resisted their contention.

  On October 29, 1975, the School Committee met to hear both sides. Dorothy Berman, the Bancroft’s teacher-in-charge, presented her school’s argument. “We are unique,” she said. “That’s why you should consider our problems.” Committeewoman Kathleen Sullivan conceded that the Bancroft was “crowded to the gills.” But Bernie Magooby of the English-Language Center invoked the seizure of the first classroom (“They came and they sat there. Then they took another room. This year they want two more rooms. A few years from now the whole school they will want”) and teacher Mary Duplain pleaded the rights of the immigrants (“Do you wish to prove to the students that democracy and quality of education is for all, or do you wish to prove that might is right?”). Well, thought Joan Diver, she couldn’t blame them for fighting back—she’d do the same in their position. She felt bad about grabbing their space, but the Bancroft’s needs were even more compelling than theirs.

  The School Committee eventually granted the Bancroft two more Rice classrooms, not then being used for English instruction. Lois Varney volunteered to occupy one of them. In mid-December, her class was installed in a jerry-built room carved from a third-floor auditorium judged unsafe for larger groups. A slab of plywood fifteen feet high had been erected down the center aisle, dividing the auditorium into two rectangular spaces, but the ceiling was thirty feet high and sounds from both classrooms mixed in a great hubbub. In the corridors, Lois’ pupils were sometimes harassed by older immigrant youths who resented their presence. It was a terrible atmosphere for learning.

  Arthur Garrity’s order had created such overcrowding and confusion that it led to measures at odds with the school’s founding principles. Even Lois Varney found herself resorting to the very kind of discipline she abhorred in the traditional Boston classroom. In adapting itself to the new exigencies, the Bancroft had sacrificed much of the warmth and spontaneity which had once made it so distinctive.

  Finally, by 1976 many Bancroft students were in academic difficulties, with reading scores a particular focus of concern. Joan and Colin were dismayed to learn that Brad’s scores had actually declined. As a second-grader he had tested as “Third Grade, 7–9 Months”; as a third-grader, he registered only “Third Grade, 2–4 Months.” For a child of Brad’s promise, that was plainly unacceptable. Joan and Colin wondered once again whether they were sacrificing their children’s future on the altar of their social principles.

  Colin had already played with the notion of leaving the South End. All through that grim fall and winter he felt trapped in the city. In November, he and Joan took a half measure, making an offer on a vacation house in Gloucester. Many South Enders owned second homes on the North Shore, Cape Cod, or Martha’s Vineyard to which they retreated on weekends and summer vacations. Somehow just knowing that the clapboard cottage was waiting there by the sea made the daily abrasions of urban life more bearable. At the last moment, the Divers’ deal fell through, and Colin’s dissatisfaction with the South End grew as the winter wore on. It wasn’t only the crime; suddenly, he was less tolerant of all the minor annoyances he’d come to take for granted—the garbage piled in the alleys and backyards, the filth littering the gutters, the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the South End library, the drunks staggering up Tremont Street, the abandoned buildings on Columbus Avenue, the music blaring from a window in Methunion Manor, worst of all, the unresponsiveness of the city and its institutions. He could no longer tolerate this feeling of always fighting his surroundings. He felt that he was shoveling back the ocean with a teaspoon. He wanted out.

  Colin wasn’t the only South Ender with such feelings. Ever since Dick Bluestein had been mugged the previous September, he’d felt uneasy on the South End’s streets, and in February he and his wife, Kate, moved across the railroad tracks into the Back Bay. Other friends of the Divers were contemplating a move as well—Gordon and Jane Doerfer had looked at houses in Ipswich and Newburyport, Steve and Judy Wolfberg were making the rounds in Brookline, Julian and Barbara Cherubini were looking in Newton—but none of them talked about it very much. The rebirth of the South End had been a joint enterprise, an experiment which depended on mutual reinforcement and communal solidarity. Nothing would sap the community’s morale more quickly than word that people were beginning to move out. So until a decision was actually made, nobody said a thing.

  And the Divers were far from reaching a decision. For whatever her h
usband and her neighbors were thinking, Joan Diver stubbornly held such misgivings at bay. Despite everything, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere but the South End. Where else could she hold a responsible job yet be within fifteen minutes of home and school in case her children needed her? Where else could she walk to the symphony, a ball game, a dozen good restaurants? Most important, where could she find the kind of friends she’d made there in the past six years? Yes, there was a lot of dirt, a lot of noise, a lot of crime, but there was a real community as well. If you had troubles, your neighbors were always there to help; if you sounded your Freon horn, there’d be fifty people on the sidewalk within moments. People griped together, organized together, played together. In the summertime, they sat around on their front stoops drinking lemonade and swapping gossip. In the fall, they all pitched in to mount their traditional street fair. Every winter, fifty South Enders trooped off to New Hampshire for a weekend of skiing and skating. How could they give up all of that?

  For months Joan held firm, but eventually the daily assaults, muggings, and purse snatchings on West Newton Street wore her down. During an anguished evening in late February, Colin persuaded her to “examine the alternatives” outside the city. They told themselves they weren’t setting out to buy a house, they just wanted to see what was available, to find out what they could afford.