by Diane Brady
“You sure you want to do this, man?” Martin had said. “You go to a party around here and there’s not a sister in the place.” The only good thing about Holy Cross, he noted, was that it seemed to put people on a course to get into good law schools.
Jenkins had just laughed. If there was law school in his future, it would be years away. He couldn’t see himself living with a bunch of white men in a frigid city where the planes couldn’t land. Even the buildings looked miserable beneath mounds of snow. And Martin’s words had hit home. Jenkins didn’t see the point in attending a school where meeting a black woman at a party would feel like winning the lottery. Several other schools, including Florida A&M, were also interested in recruiting him. He saw no reason to choose Holy Cross over them.
After that winter visit, Martin had assumed he would never see Jenkins again. And yet here he was back on campus. Jenkins greeted Martin as if they were old friends. Although he still wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of spending four years at Holy Cross, he was starting to see the sense in it. Part of the reason for his change of heart was the encouragement of Vincent O’Connor, his coach at St. Francis Prep. The high school was linked into the Catholic college network and was a popular stop for football recruiters. O’Connor had taken a liking to Jenkins and was trying to give his talented young player as much exposure as possible. He even brought Jenkins to big-name events like the Heisman Trophy dinner at the Downtown Athletic Club in Manhattan. It had been fun until a white club member told Jenkins to take a good look at the trophy because he would never see it again—the implication, Jenkins assumed, being that he would never be good enough to win it or white enough to be invited back. The comment had ruined his night.
O’Connor had also invited Jenkins and his father to another private club in Manhattan, this time to meet with some alumni from Boston College and Holy Cross. The coach had enough experience navigating the scholarship process for young players to know that it was the parents who were critical to reach. That seemed especially true for Jenkins, a teen with remarkable athletic talent who had still managed to maintain a strong B-plus average. On his own, Jenkins might not have seen much sense in sacrificing the big-time football experience to get a top-notch education, but Jenkins’s father was seeking more than just a great sports program for his son. Having struggled to support the family by delivering papers, pumping gas, and doing odd construction jobs until he was hired by the post office, Jenkins’s father understood the value of an education. As they walked to where the small alumni group had gathered, Jenkins tried to hide his discomfort at seeing white men in sport coats and stiff collars, holding tumblers of alcohol in one hand and cigars in the other. O’Connell had told him that some of the men were lieutenants of J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and he was immediately convinced that they were all spies. After some jovial banter about the merits of Boston College versus Holy Cross, one of the men asked Jenkins about his career ambitions beyond football. Jenkins immediately blurted out that his dream was to get a law degree, though he decided to leave out his utter lack of interest in the FBI.
Jenkins wasn’t sure who at Holy Cross was primarily responsible for the interest in him, but it was clear that he had caught someone’s attention. It was true that during one game in his senior year of high school, Jenkins had met Dennis Golden, the Holy Cross freshman football coach, who then convinced him to fly to Worcester for what turned out to be a disheartening midwinter visit, and Jenkins had also met head coach Tom Boisture, who was interested in Jenkins as a wide receiver and who had somehow convinced him to come back for Spring Weekend. But Jenkins sensed there was something more than a coach’s interest going on behind the scenes, a motivation that started to become clear when he was greeted and shown around by one of the only black students on campus. This was a college, he realized, that was desperate to get some brothers on campus. Jenkins wasn’t bothered by that. In fact, he found it heartening that the people running Holy Cross might feel as uncomfortable with its overwhelming whiteness as he did.
Jenkins could at least see that Holy Cross looked much better in the spring. To start with, there were a lot of women milling around, although few were black and he assumed that the energy of Spring Weekend wasn’t an indication of everyday life on campus. Even so, he was warming to the place, especially now that he could speak without his breath forming clouds in the air.
Eddie headed to the top of Mount St. James, as they called the hill where team practices took place, and immediately noticed Ted Wells. They both looked relieved to see a fellow brother on the field and struck up a conversation. Jenkins was impressed by the fact that Wells played center on his high school team; it was a position that required someone to snap the ball to the quarterback and direct the offensive line, a job that could only be done well by someone who understood the playbook and could quickly read the defense’s strategy to make the right call. Wells, meanwhile, immediately liked Jenkins’s sense of humor and easygoing confidence. Eddie Jenkins came across as a man who assumed the world was full of friendships waiting to be formed. The two quickly found themselves laughing and joking with each other. Having Jenkins around would make attending Holy Cross a lot easier, Wells thought.
In truth, Wells was only partly interested in the school’s football team. Blocking and tackling weren’t going to be his life; they were a means to an end. He didn’t want to go to a big football school where he might be stereotyped as a dumb jock. And Wells wasn’t really looking to meet women. He was still dating his high school girlfriend, though that didn’t look so promising now that she was moving to Cincinnati in the fall to attend the College of Mount St. Joseph.
The scholarship offers had started arriving when Wells was a junior in high school: first a pitch from Morgan State, a black college in Baltimore, then offers from Hampton Institute (later Hampton University) and North Carolina A&T State University. The white universities began soliciting Wells during his senior year. When the University of Pittsburgh offered him a football scholarship, it had seemed too good to pass up. Wells agreed to enroll, and the story was covered in the local newspapers. Still, the offers kept coming. Haverford College offered to pay room, board, and tuition for four years. Penn State invited him down for a trial on its team.
Then Boisture had come to see Wells. The Holy Cross coach was able to put together an attractive offer, bolstered by the knowledge that the administration would fully support any effort to recruit black athletes. Even so, Wells had turned the coach down. While academics were his main priority, if he was going to play football, he wanted to play for a team that had more name recognition. But Boisture’s visit, along with the offers from other schools, had made him curious. No longer content to settle on Pittsburgh, Wells had started to consider other options. And being wooed by Holy Cross impressed his Catholic girlfriend, not to mention her father. So he had decided to give the college a serious look.
Until he met Jenkins on the football field, though, Wells felt unsure about Holy Cross. It felt a universe away from his world in Washington. Wells vaguely recalled meeting a few white children in kindergarten, right after the Supreme Court had voted in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional. But by the time he had reached high school, almost all of the white families had left his neighborhood and practically everyone in his classes was black.
Wells found himself to be a little uncomfortable with the prospect of playing on a white team, but he liked Boisture. From what he could see, the low-key coach seemed to have a sixth sense about talent and a real handle on the game. Boisture was thirty-seven and had just been promoted to head coach the year before. Dennis Golden, a decade his junior, would be managing the freshman players. One issue was finding the right role for Wells on the team. His high school coach had recommended to Golden that they consider letting him continue as center. Golden and Boisture seemed skeptical that he could handle it. Penn State hadn’t considered him for that role, either. When Wells’s coach
had asked the recruiters why, he was told that it required a sophisticated understanding of the game. Wells interpreted that to mean they thought the position was too difficult for a black man.
For Jenkins, the quality of the team was a much more important consideration than which position he would play. He was betting on football as a ticket to success, and he knew that a great team and a great coach were going to be critical if he was to have a shot at a professional career. He also wanted to earn a degree that could take him to criminal law; football, if he made it, wouldn’t last forever. The incident that sealed Jenkins’s decision to come to Worcester occurred during a tour of the campus. An assistant coach had been showing Wells and him around, pointing out the facilities and talking about the traditions of Holy Cross. Clearly eager to win over the two young athletes, the coach brought them to the top of Mount St. James, scanned the horizon, and said, “You Nigros, I think you’re really going to like it here.” Jenkins looked over at Wells, who responded with raised eyebrows. It wasn’t the fact that he’d called them both Negroes. Although black had become the preferred term for Jenkins’s generation, Negro was still acceptable enough that Walter Cronkite had even used it on air to describe King on the night of the assassination. But there was something about the way the assistant coach had said it, something about his unwitting mixture of condescension and ignorance that made Jenkins conclude that the revolution on the streets had yet to reach the campus of Holy Cross.
Jenkins was sensitive to such comments. Racial inequality had become a topic of open and contentious debate in New York City, playing out in battles over everything from how black children were being educated in Brooklyn to Columbia University’s real estate ambitions on the edge of Harlem. Jenkins also had family connections to the South. His father had been born into a family of sharecroppers in Georgia, and had grown up largely with a great-aunt in Jacksonville, Florida. His mother was one of twenty-one children of a white Scottish father and a black mother. Eddie was the youngest of four children. In 1954 his father had piled the family in the car, leaving Jenkins’s five-year-old brother behind to keep his grandparents company, and drove up to New York. By moving north, Jenkins’s father had hoped to escape the sting of the South’s Jim Crow laws, which had forced blacks to go to separate schools, restaurants, toilets, and even public spaces. For Jenkins, then four, the most memorable thing about that long ride was watching his parents anxiously drive past a series of gas stations with whites-only public toilets while his older sister kept telling them that she needed to use a bathroom. When they finally found a station that had a facility for “colored” customers, everyone in the car was ordered to use it. The whites-only facilities didn’t seem to fade until they hit northern Virginia. Even as his parents left behind such visible signs of segregation and bigotry, their awareness of it remained. Nobody was going to treat their children as second-class citizens.
For Jenkins, the message had stuck. Holy Cross was a college that seemed eager—more eager than any other school, in fact—to bring him on board, and yet he felt talked down to. He was being called a “Nigro” in the same way that white teenagers might address an older black man as “boy,” and the assistant coach hadn’t even realized he had said anything offensive. Yet Jenkins felt less insulted than empowered. He suddenly sensed that he might be able to make a difference at Holy Cross. He could bring a dose of black reality to the brothers in Worcester.
Wells, too, had decided by the end of the weekend that he wanted to attend Holy Cross. He had looked into the economics program, the major he intended to pursue, and was impressed with the rigor of the program. But he had to go back home to unravel the mess he had created for himself. He had already signed a contract to play for the University of Pittsburgh, and he didn’t know how to get out of it. Holy Cross asked alumnus and board member Edward Bennett Williams to help by looking into what could be done. Williams was part owner of the Washington Redskins football team and a high-powered lawyer who had represented Senator Joe McCarthy and jailed Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. When Williams called Wells at home to tell him he had checked into the Pittsburgh deal and nothing would happen if Wells broke it, the teen had nothing to say. “So my advice,” Williams added, “is that you go to Holy Cross.” After hearing that Wells had signed with Holy Cross, Boston University’s coach upgraded his offer of a half scholarship to a full one. But Wells had made up his mind. He had found a strong school, a talented coach, and the start of a promising friendship, not to mention an institution that could only enhance his image in the eyes of his girlfriend’s father.
The decision was easy for Ed Jones. Nobody was calling him with rival offers. Boston College had already turned him down, but he hadn’t made much of an effort there. In fact, he hadn’t really applied anywhere else except to low-cost public colleges near his home. He had never been the type to pursue bold ambitions. Nobody had ever tried to push him. In many ways Jones felt he was being pulled by Holy Cross. The people he met there, especially Father Brooks, seemed to see more in him than he saw in himself. It was a foreign feeling, but he liked it: the feeling of being wanted.
Jones didn’t know what to expect from a Jesuit college. He had attended a Catholic school briefly as a child, when he was five. His mother had heard it was a good place to learn. One of the nuns, seeing him outside the building one morning, dropped him off at a first-grade classroom, and when he managed to keep up, nobody thought to move him back to kindergarten. Within months, though, he was pulled out of the school. His mother couldn’t afford to pay even the greatly reduced fees on wages that rarely amounted to more than a hundred dollars a month. Jones ended up in a public school, but he never forgot the experience. The nuns had been nice to him, and the classrooms were clean. Though he wasn’t religious, it gave him a good feeling about a Catholic education.
Now his mother seemed pleased, even slightly intimidated, that her son was going to college, especially since she herself had never been able to read or write. As soon as Jones could spell, he had signed his mother’s name on report cards. His mother had learned to keep her own dreams modest, since even the small ones had a habit of being broken. As Jones recalls, anytime he had tried to ask her a question, she would sigh and say: “Why you ask me for?” But when he told her about the offer from Holy Cross, and the fact that they didn’t have to pay, she seemed quietly proud, as if marveling that her long years of hardship and despair had somehow left her eldest boy intact.
Clarence Thomas was preparing to leave Immaculate Conception Seminary in Missouri. In the week after King’s death, he had joined a march to honor King’s life. The sense of brotherhood he felt at the gathering, so missing from the atmosphere at school, had only strengthened his conviction to leave the seminary. Thomas didn’t know what he would do next. He didn’t have money, and he suspected that it was too late to get into a college for the fall. But his biggest fear was telling his grandfather that he had broken his promise to become a priest.
In May, Thomas returned to Savannah and told his grandfather, Myers Anderson, the news. While his grandfather’s wife was sympathetic to Clarence, it didn’t change matters. A day later his grandfather told him to leave. Anderson claimed to be upset that Clarence had stayed out late the night before, but Thomas knew the real reason his grandfather was upset: He had shamed the family. From cloistered preparation for the priesthood, Thomas was suddenly cast out on his own. It was, he recalls, one of the most anxious times of his life. Thomas went to stay with his mother and soon found a summer job proofreading the copy on paper bags at a factory in Savannah. Besides the janitor, he was the only black man there.
He had no intention of spending his life in a factory. A local college seemed like the only option, until a Franciscan nun who had taught him at St. Pius X High School suggested that he look into Holy Cross. She had given the same advice to several other promising black students, including Bob DeShay, a Holy Cross sophomore who had attended St. Pius with Thomas for nine years. While Thomas was too late to a
pply through regular channels, he might be allowed to transfer. Thomas may have hated his experience at the seminary, but that hadn’t curbed his work ethic: His grades had been among the best in his class. When the nun reached out to DeShay, he agreed to give Thomas a call to try to convince him to come to Holy Cross, even though DeShay was far from being a big supporter of the college.
DeShay hadn’t adjusted well to Holy Cross. Although he had entered the college with high grades, he had been “invited” to leave the chemistry program at the end of his first year. His preparation at St. Pius apparently hadn’t brought him up to the speed of the Holy Cross program. He had transferred to economics, where he was deeply unhappy and struggling to hold a B-plus average.
But DeShay knew he couldn’t blame the college for his grades. What angered him was the magic wand that had appeared for black recruits after King’s death. Before that time, Brooks had asked him to help to spread the word about Holy Cross to black students. Brooks had also approached Art Martin and some of the other black students, though he didn’t press the few who clearly had no interest in being part of a black community. He never asked them to paint a rosy picture of life at Holy Cross. If anything, it was the opposite. He said he wanted potential recruits to have a chance to ask the black students about the realities of college life and hear from them about the benefits of an education at Holy Cross.
DeShay had agreed, even though it had struck him as ironic that he was being asked to do volunteer work when the school had sent him a clear message that he wasn’t performing up to academic standards. Still, DeShay understood the value of the education he was getting and had gone out to chat up some promising high school students. Although the effort seemed scattered and somewhat futile without a bold plan to back it all up, DeShay had done his bit to talk up the school. Once the purse strings suddenly loosened after King’s death, however, nobody seemed interested in his help. And DeShay felt he had been played for a fool.