Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  Soon, FOR MAYOR MENINO signs sprouted in yards across the city, exploiting the magic of incumbency in Boston elections. Flyers in sixteen languages conveyed my commitment to safe neighborhoods, good schools, and caring government.

  As Rosaria lost ground, Jim Brett gained it. A veteran state legislator representing white Dorchester, Jim was at home in neighborhood taverns and downtown boardrooms, an articulate, attractive candidate and a very good guy.

  Those were some of Jim’s positives. There were three negatives.

  First, although he was a player at the State House, Jim had no name recognition outside Dorchester. Second, he was a close friend of a controversial politician, State Senate President William “Billy” Bulger of South Boston, brother of the famous gangster “Whitey” Bulger. Brett argued that his ties to Billy Bulger would benefit the city. But the Bulger association, which extended through Jim’s wife, who worked for Bulger for twenty years, was a burden to Brett, especially in the minority community, where Bulger’s anti-busing politics of the 1970s was not forgotten or, like Ray Flynn’s, forgiven. Third, Jim’s down-the-line Catholic opposition to abortion, an issue not relevant to city politics, gave this work-and-wages Democrat an undeserved reputation for conservatism. Progressive and minority voters got the impression that he would not be a mayor for them.

  Balancing these negatives was a big cultural positive. Since 1925 Boston had elected seven mayors. All were Irish Americans. So was Jim Brett. The Irish voted above their falling weight in the population: “Heavy-voting ward” was ethnically neutral shorthand for an Irish American neighborhood. Jim Brett was of Irish descent. Former news anchor Christopher Lydon topped that, boasting that he was the only Irish citizen in the race. Mickey Roache, Ray Flynn’s former police commissioner, wanted it known that he received the Blessed Sacrament seven days a week.

  By the 1980s Italian Americans my age were tired of the “Pick-a-Mick” choice of mayors on the ballot and for once wanted to vote for one of their own. I learned that walking house-to-house in my ’83 council race. A man would come to the door, notice the name on my campaign button, and say, “Menino? I’m with ya. I’m Russo.” When I addressed Italian American audiences in ’93, it wasn’t my charisma that excited them. The green tide in Boston politics was receding, and Italians weren’t the only group standing on the beach happy to see it go.*

  Come November 3rd—the day after you elect me mayor—the city of Boston will begin a new era in which the needs of families are given the highest priority.

  —from a speech delivered the night the election became a two-man race

  The winners of the September preliminary were . . . me, with 27 percent of the vote, and Jim Brett, with 23 percent. Rosaria Salerno, with 17 percent, was out of the running.

  Boston would not have its first woman mayor, but it was likely to see its first Italian American one. Polls showed me with a big lead.

  The swing vote was nearly all to Jim Brett’s left. It was now my vote. One poll showed me running 28 points ahead among “liberals” and, reflecting my support for abortion rights, 19 points ahead among women. It didn’t help Jim that Bishop John Patrick Boles picked this moment to endorse him.

  I had a good record on gay issues but, unlike Salerno, I had not supported domestic partner benefits for city employees. That did not matter to the Greater Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. It did not matter when, in a speech to them, I came out for “the distribution of condominiums.” I wasn’t Jim Brett. They endorsed me.

  When Roache called for an end to affirmative action in the Boston Police Department, I said, “We have to have a police department that reflects the diversity of the city.” Salerno, Sheriff Robert Ruffo, City Councilor Bruce Bolling, and Lydon had all taken the same position. Only Brett, “who hails from conservative Dorchester, remained ambiguous on the issue,” the Globe reported. Then at a meeting held in a Roxbury church, Brett, normally a careful speaker, referred to “you people.” This was a year after Ross Perot, addressing the Urban League, had created a furor by speaking of “your people.” The Roxbury audience seemed shocked. “Condominiums” for “condoms” revealed my struggle with language. “You people,” to African Americans, betrayed contempt. In this context it wasn’t surprising that Bolling, the only African American in the race, now endorsed me. So did Mel King, the civil rights legend who ran against Ray Flynn in 1983.

  Jim’s chances of winning were fading fast. A question in our last debate destroyed them. A Herald columnist quoted a Brett campaign slogan calling Jim “a forceful, intelligent voice for Boston.” Picking up on the implied contrast, he asked, “Do you consider yourself more intelligent and articulate than Mr. Menino?” Jim, sensing danger in sounding superior, objected: “I find that question rather insulting. I have never said that and I know Tom would never say that.” The debate was held before a large audience at the Boston Public Library, and there was a rush of applause for Jim. Yet the idea that Jim’s slogan was slyly equating my thick tongue with a thick head was out there.

  It wasn’t as if I was hiding my difficulties as a public speaker. My TV ads included the line “I’m not a fancy talker” (pronounced “talkah”), “but I get the job done.” And in interviews I was careful to say things like “Hey, I’m not the best-looking guy in the world and I know nobody is ever going to ask me to host Masterpiece Theatre.” And then add: “But mayors don’t get paid by the word. You can’t talk a playground into being clean.”

  Well before Election Day someone was stapling R.I.P. on Brett lawn signs in West Roxbury. As voters went to the polls, the only question was the size of my victory margin. It was bigger than I expected: 28 points. Eighteen of the city’s twenty-two wards.

  My one regret was that my friend Tony Crayton, who’d put me first in line to be acting mayor, lost his council seat by 80 votes. “I gave him his dream to be mayor,” he said. Credit was also due to another politician, and when just before midnight he called to congratulate me, I gave it: “Thank you, Mr. President, for making the mayor ambassador.”

  Brett later said he thought he was running for an open seat: “But what happened when Tom became acting mayor changed the race. I didn’t see that coming.” He was running against an incumbent, a sitting mayor. The last one to lose was Curley, in 1949, when he was old, sick, and lately returned from federal prison.

  Ray Flynn knew why Jim Brett lost. It happened the day I became acting mayor and Ray said he was leaving the city in good hands and the media treated it like an endorsement and the cameras zoomed in on the hug: “Jimmy Brett was upset with me for that. . . . I heard him say it cost him the election.”

  The five thousand friends and supporters attending my inaugural party at the Hynes Convention Center were entertained by representatives of the New America—multiracial, multicultural, LGBT-friendly—rising in the old city. A Roma band performed, followed by two groups of Irish step dancers and a gay country and western dance troupe and actors from the Ramón de los Reyes Spanish Dance Theatre and performers illustrating “The Art of Black Dance and Music.” Sandy Martin sang a selection of songs from The Best of Patsy Cline. There was a woodwind quintet. We were treated to a Chinese lion dance. I missed a Frank Sinatra karaoke, but nobody asked me.

  The next morning I delivered my inaugural address at Faneuil Hall. Angela introduced me. She described my mother’s efforts on behalf of new immigrants. And listening to her, I reflected that the truest line in my speech was “I am here because of my family.”

  I wasn’t there because I’d been in politics longer than the six other contenders combined—not because, since that day at Kelly Field when I met Joe Timilty, I had played a central role in over a dozen campaigns, including four for mayor of Boston. I wasn’t there because of my decade on the City Council, although I knew the people and problems in every department of city government. I wasn’t there because of my vision, which wasn’t that different from the other candidates’. And although I declared, “I’m the luckiest guy in the wo
rld,” I wasn’t there because of my luck, the miracle that transformed the shy guy, the mediocre student, “Mumbles” into the mayor.

  I was there because of my family. Because of the values passed on from my parents—treat everyone with respect, help others, work hard, sacrifice for your children. To this inheritance I added sympathy with the struggles of ordinary Americans. I think people wanted a ready heart in their mayor. Regardless, they got one.

  Angela introduced the theme of my speech—my vision of Hyde Park for all. I called the roll of my memories. My grandmother and grandfather with their stories of the hard life in Grottaminarda. The aunts and uncles and cousins they brought here to make their start in America. The inspiring image of Susan Menino, and of Carl Menino nearly felled by her loss. “The Deacon” walking the beat. The Westinghouse plant. The neighborhood. “You know,” I said, “when I grew up on Hyde Park Ave, we knew everybody who lived there. Now I live in Readville and don’t know my next-door neighbor. Angela works, I work. . . . Can we recover that closeness in our neighborhoods? I think we can.” The simple things that make up a good life . . . I wanted them for everybody. In a twenty-minute speech, I used “promise” nineteen times.

  I ended with a bow to the Irish American political tradition in Boston, the green tide that washed over the city from Mayor Hugh O’Brien in 1884 to Mayor John F. Fitzgerald in 1906 to his grandson Congressman John F. Kennedy in 1946 and on up through Kevin Hagan White in 1968 and “my predecessor and friend” Ray Flynn in 1984. “But this is a new day,” I said, turning the page of history onto the majority-minority city of the twenty-first century, the Boston of the Haitian, Puerto Rican, Cape Verdean, Somali, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other immigrants whose names in the list of future mayors will look as familiar as Fitzgerald and Flynn do to us. I paused to take in the rows of officials and friends cramming the Great Hall back to the outsize doors hung on iron hinges forged by blacksmiths in Paul Revere’s day. Memory supplied the thirteen granite steps (one for each of the colonies) that JFK had descended thirty-three years earlier and the cobblestone street where I had started the long run that returned me to this place as mayor of ­Boston. There was no need to look down at the text. I knew the next lines by heart: “I am the first Italian American to hold this job. Am I proud of that? You bet I am.”

  UP FROM BUSING

  Q. What issue is so personal to you, so important, that you’ll never change your opinion on it, no matter what?

  A. Racism. I will not tolerate it. . . . That’s the interesting thing about my life. I was in the first grade—I will always remember this. It’s only a little thing, but I always remember it. . . . My name is spelled M-E-N-I-N-O, unlike the “Manino” that’s on the mushroom jar. . . . And the first-grade teacher told me that my parents didn’t know how to spell my name—that Italians couldn’t spell. So she changed the spelling. And I went through the first grade with my name spelled wrong. . . . That’s a little thing. But it’s always stayed with me. . . . And I will never tolerate people being discriminated against.

  —from an interview with me, then acting mayor, in the Boston Globe, July 22, 1993

  For her first question in my first national television interview as mayor, Katie Couric asked: “You know, many people view Boston as the most racially divided city in the country. Do you think that reputation is deserved?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, that perception was out of date—the city had moved on. But I knew she was right.

  Boston got that reputation during “busing,” the school desegregation crisis of the 1970s. I served in the trenches of busing as a monitor at Hyde Park High, trying to keep black and white kids from fighting. I saw enough ugliness in those hallways to make me cry for my city.

  In June 1974 a federal judge, Arthur W. Garrity, ruled that the Boston School Committee had deliberately segregated the city’s public schools. Using a plan thought up by professors of education, he ordered eighteen thousand students bused from segregated to integrated schools starting in September.

  The plan paired Roxbury, the center of African American life in Boston, with South Boston, the center of white resistance to “forced busing.” South Boston kids would be bused to Roxbury, Roxbury kids to South Boston.

  It did not go unnoticed that this pairing was crazy.

  One professor urged the judge to leave Southie out of the first year of the plan because of its “intense hostility to blacks.” Another professor countered that racial hostility had not been allowed to frustrate integration in the South and shouldn’t be allowed to in South Boston. Judge Garrity sided with him.

  “We’re being punished for what we are,” said one of South Boston’s state legislators, Michael Flaherty. The professors saw the Southie protesters as racists. The protesters saw themselves as defenders of their neighborhood schools against an unelected judge bent on destroying them.

  If the judge had listened to the first professor, busing might not have sparked so much resistance elsewhere in the city. On the first day of classes, in most of the eighty schools affected by the plan, things went comparatively smoothly. TV news, however, focused on Southie, on the angry crowds and the graffiti (KILL NIGGERS, KKK) on the walls of South Boston High. And the spirit of Southie spread.

  Southie experienced the worst violence. But there was plenty to go around. At Hyde Park High a white kid was stabbed, touching off a racial brawl in the cafeteria. Shortly after, police arrested four white kids driving near the school with Molotov cocktails in their car.

  Outside Hyde Park High School, City Councilor Albert “Dapper” O’Neil showed up one day to troll for the hate vote. “I’m not going to stand by and let those niggers take over this school,” he told a reporter.

  Boston “got” a reputation for racism in the busing years? No, Boston earned it.

  Busing was intended to end school segregation, but it promoted resegregation with only a brief stop at integration. Schools that were 40 percent minority in 1970 were nearly 90 percent minority two decades later. The 1980 census revealed that a third of white and black families with children under eighteen had fled the city. Eight thousand fewer people lived in South Boston and thirteen thousand fewer in Roxbury. Support for Garrity’s plan among blacks had fallen to 14 percent.

  Busing left Boston’s schools segregated by race and class. By 1990, nine in ten students were eligible for free lunches. Six in ten school families made less than $15,000 a year.

  Some kids, we discovered, had nothing. Before Christmas 1995, I started a toy drive. On Christmas Eve we walked up Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, handing out toys and clothes donated by Boston retailers and gift-wrapped by volunteers working outside my office at City Hall. A member of my staff, Mike Keneavy, knocked on one door. A little boy appeared. His mother wasn’t home, he said. She was out getting his present at McDonald’s. Only Mike’s Santa act kept him from choking up. The Geneva Avenue walk became a Christmas tradition. So did the toy drive. By my last year in office we were delivering toys to four thousand families.

  You can debate whether busing was a justified remedy for Boston’s separate and unequal schools. You can’t debate whether this experiment in instant social change failed. Busing left me with lasting doubts about “sweeping solutions,” “bold plans,” and “fundamental transformations” for the problems of city life.

  Today a Dapper O’Neil, who praised Alabama governor George C. Wallace in the City Council, called Boston’s growing Asian community “gooks,” and campaigned with Ronald Reagan, couldn’t be elected dogcatcher in Boston.

  The career of the man who finally unseated Dapper on the City Council reveals the distance Boston has traveled since busing. Michael Flaherty ran against me for mayor in 2009 on a ticket with Sam Yoon, a Korean American lawyer. In 2008 Flaherty campaigned in the Massachusetts primary for Senator Barack Obama. Yet Michael Flaherty is from South Boston, where his father led the respectable anti-busing forces in the 70s and thugs stoned buses carrying black children.

  Today Boston is
a different city.

  I’m as certain of that as I am of the spelling of my own name. So I couldn’t believe my ears when the two candidates competing to replace me as mayor were asked in a TV debate if there was racism in the Boston Police Department and City Councilor John R. Connolly said, “There’s racism in all of Boston, systemic, institutional, and structural.” State Representative Martin J. Walsh agreed: “We have racism in the city of Boston that we have to deal with. We talk about one Boston, but we don’t see one Boston in the city of Boston right now.”

  I wanted to shout: You guys don’t know what racism is! You should have walked the hallways of Hyde Park High back in the day.

  I simmered down when I saw what the candidates were doing: appealing to the swing vote in the election. It’s a sign of progress that Boston’s minority voters have such clout. Another sign: In winning the November 2013 election, Marty Walsh carried both South Boston and Roxbury. Racial polarization, white against black, gave Boston its bad name. Walsh’s biracial vote shows that’s history.

  In Boston blacks are still likelier than whites to be poor or unemployed, to be discriminated against in housing and employment, to drop out of school, and to be victims of violent crime. Boston is part of America.

  But it matters that for twenty years Boston had a mayor committed to lifting the cloud of racism over the city. A mayor who brought people together, reached out, and spoke out. A mayor who appointed persons of color to positions of power. A mayor who steered resources to Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. A mayor who moved the city forward on race.