by Diane Brady
The rest of the students began to arrive on Labor Day weekend. Jenkins was chatting with a student at his Beaven Hall residence when another family pushed open the door onto his floor. The doors were among the first things Jenkins had liked about the dorm. They swung like the ones in an Old West saloon, letting everyone make a grand entrance. A tall, lanky white student with a mustache and tousled hair came through, followed by his parents. When they entered Jenkins’s room, he strained to hear their conversation: “Hmm. That’s interesting. Who’s that?” Jenkins realized they were talking about the Nancy Wilson album covers on his side of the room. Maybe they hadn’t heard of Wilson? Then he realized that the parents weren’t really interested in his favorite singer: They were just figuring out that their son was sharing his room with a black man.
When Jenkins walked into the room, his roommate introduced himself as Tom Anderson. Although Anderson was about the same height as Jenkins, he looked to be at least thirty pounds lighter. He was enrolled as a pre-med student but harbored a secret love of writing. Anderson, it turned out, had been asked about rooming with a black student. He simply hadn’t bothered to tell his parents.
Holy Cross had called up white students and, in some cases, mailed out letters over the summer to ask if they would mind rooming with a black man. Nobody was quite sure who had suggested the strategy, and the approach was poorly executed; some of the students who ended up with black roommates hadn’t been asked in advance. None of the black students were asked about their preferences. To Father Brooks, who learned of it after the fact, the move seemed ham-handed at best. While he didn’t want any black student in a dorm situation where he’d feel unwelcome, Brooks didn’t like the idea of anyone at Holy Cross offering white freshmen a chance to reject someone based on his skin color. It undermined the college’s values to even ask the question, as if discomfort were valid grounds for discrimination, and not asking black students the same question was proof that their discomfort didn’t matter.
For all his anger over racism, Thomas, for one, didn’t mind rooming with a white man. He had been assigned to live in a residence called Hanselman, and his roommate was John Siraco, who had transferred from Northwestern University. Siraco was a dogged worker, which suited Thomas just fine. Thomas wasn’t interested in socializing with his roommate or hanging out with him to listen to music. He mainly wanted to put his head down and work. He was studying English, which had never been his strongest subject, but he thought he might one day become a journalist. More important, perhaps, he wanted to shed the vestiges of the Gullah dialect he had spoken as a child in coastal Georgia, so he could seamlessly blend—at least vocally—with his college peers.
Like Thomas, Ed Jones came to campus alone, having made his way up from Washington, D.C., on the bus. The idea that his mother might have accompanied him to Worcester was so ridiculous that it had never occurred to him to ask her. The only time Jones had really been in a school residence was as a child, when he and his sister were briefly sent to live in a Maryland children’s center, along with their disabled brother. His mother had been admitted to the hospital, although he was never quite sure why. The complex seemed to house everyone from mentally handicapped kids and orphans to juvenile delinquents, many of whom were black. Jones vividly recalled some young caregivers there who had presented him with a pile of used shoes to pick through, but he couldn’t find his size. Now he was walking into a residence as a college student, wearing a perfectly sized pair of shoes on his feet, the ones he had picked up during the riot that followed King’s death.
Jones felt people staring at him as he headed to his dorm room. He knew that his clothes didn’t look out of place; the days of wearing ties and jackets were rapidly giving way to denim and tie-dyed shirts. He was dressed just like everyone else. The only remarkable thing about him, he figured, was the color of his skin.
Jones’s roommate was a white math major from Fall River, Massachusetts. Jones assumed they were rooming together because his roommate was also planning to major in math—he couldn’t see what else would have brought them together. Jones tried to get used to the feel of his new home. The bed had crisp cotton sheets, the pale blank walls looked freshly painted, and the corridors were filled with laughter as his roommate dashed in and out of the room. Students from the same prep schools had been placed together, and everyone seemed to know one another. Along with the wait service in the dining halls, there was maid service in the residences, which made Jones think about his mother. She could have worked in a place like this, tidying up after rowdy boys who were drunk with their first taste of freedom. She might even have enjoyed it. The thought of that made him smile.
Despite the looks that Jones had gotten on his way up to his room, nobody seemed curious to know much about him. He wondered if maybe they sensed that he was a poor student on a scholarship. It was hard to know for certain, of course, and, anyway, Jones wasn’t much interested in reaching out to the other students. His hallmates struck him as ambitious up-and-comers, future lawyers and doctors and businessmen who knew exactly why they’d come to Holy Cross. Jones, who had no clear idea what his future might look like, realized how isolated he was going to be, but he also wondered if maybe he preferred it that way. In some ways he liked to be left alone. After so many moves in his childhood, he had largely stopped making the effort to meet people he didn’t know. Nevertheless, he felt it would have been nice if someone had reached out to him. No one did. It was more than a week before he discovered that another black man lived at the end of the corridor.
Jones wasn’t sure how long he would last at Holy Cross. Sitting alone in his dorm room, he thought about the anticipation he had felt months earlier on the car trip with Father Brooks. There had been camaraderie, a clear sense from the jokes and the banter that they were welcome. That feeling was missing now. He carefully unpacked the books he had brought, and the clothes that his mother had washed and folded before he left. He preferred reading to conversation; listening to talking. But it gnawed at him that he was so clearly being left out. And it was also clear to him that some questioned his right to be there. It wasn’t long before one of the white students asked the question Jones assumed was on everybody else’s mind: “Is it easy to get in here if you’re colored?” He felt so diminished and ridiculed by the question that he had no response, but he later wrote about his anger in an article in The Crusader. Maybe, because of Brooks, it had arguably become easy for some of them to get in because of their skin color. But the question itself showed why it wouldn’t be easy to stay.
One person Jones felt a connection with was Gil Hardy. The two of them met once classes started. Like Jones, Hardy was serious and he was a big reader. Jones hoped that the two of them might become good friends. Clarence Thomas also found himself drawn to Hardy. Thomas liked the Philadelphia native’s drive and obvious intelligence. Hardy had studied Greek, Latin, and French in high school and decided to take some second-year courses from the start at Holy Cross. He seemed less concerned about maintaining high grades than keeping himself challenged, and he would often come back from class eager to share some piece of knowledge or discussion he’d had with a professor. If Hardy felt any particular disadvantages in being black, he rarely talked about them. He certainly didn’t seem to let it shape his ambitions. Thomas envied Hardy’s optimism and his warmth toward everyone. He was the kind of man everyone would want for a friend.
It was tougher for Thomas to bond with many of the other black students at first, in part because there were so few opportunities to formally interact. They were in different classes during the day and went home to different residences at night. While other black students might nod when they passed him on campus—in recognition or sympathy, he couldn’t be sure—nobody had the time for long conversations between classes. Thomas liked Jenkins, having connected with the smooth-talking football player over the summer, but their interactions were often superficial. From where Thomas sat, Jenkins wasn’t a man who seemed to take life all that
seriously, and he seemed used to being the center of attention. Jenkins certainly hadn’t grown up with an exhausted mother who couldn’t cope and had left her son to be raised in a harsh, demanding household where love came in the form of discipline and idleness was a sin. And Thomas’s childhood hadn’t been filled with block parties and baseball games, a warm, gregarious mother, and a father who never let his own struggles interfere with his bonds to his children. Jenkins might not be able to match Thomas’s academic performance, but he didn’t seem to hold that as an ambition. Thomas found himself envying the easy laugh and gregarious style of the freshman athlete. Even so, Thomas didn’t find it hard to make friends in his classes. Whatever turmoil Thomas may have battled because of his skin color, he didn’t harbor any grudges against the white students. He liked them and quickly made several good friends.
Ted Wells was an enigma. Like Jenkins, he had the confidence of a man who was comfortable with where he was from. But Wells also had an obvious ambition and desire to be respected for his intelligence, a trait that Thomas shared. Where they differed, perhaps, was in approach: While Wells seemed to enjoy the intellectual challenge of his classes, Thomas was more methodical in doing what needed to be done. More important, perhaps, each man had very different reactions to the racial inequality around them. Wells, having grown up in a city that had become a mecca and marching ground for black pride, was looking for ways to re-create that sense of brotherhood at Holy Cross. Thomas had spent much of his life digesting racism on his own. He had learned to move easily in the white community, even if he never felt a part of it, and he didn’t have much interest in making skin color the prime factor in determining his social circle. Thomas wanted to be seen as someone who could fit in and get along with anybody. Let Wells revel in the black identity and push for civil rights. What bothered Thomas wasn’t being black; it was being noticed for being black.
Thomas resigned himself to focusing primarily on his classes and his job in Kimball Dining Hall. He knew he could handle the academic load after the grind of seminary life. What he didn’t know was where he’d feel happy. There were now a handful of black kids in his second-year class of 550 students. He liked having white and black friends, and he made a deliberate effort to get along with everyone. He had hoped that Holy Cross would be a fresh start, a place where he could just be himself. But after a few weeks he began to suspect that it would be a place to be endured, not enjoyed. He didn’t feel the warm embrace of belonging, and his disappointment compounded his anger. At times, though, he found himself forgetting about the issues in his life. When swept up in a conversation or sharing a joke, he showed an enthusiasm that stuck with many of his classmates. Thomas’s laugh soon became famous as perhaps the loudest one on campus.
Others had made an easier adjustment. Despite a fierce case of allergies—the worst he had ever experienced—Grayson was enjoying the kind of welcome afforded to new athletes. He began to meet the various members of the basketball team, including a white freshman on scholarship named Buddy Venne, an impressive shooter and all-state player who would become one of Grayson’s closest friends. Grayson was aware that he drew stares on campus, but it didn’t bother him much. His height and skin color had made him stand out in his white high school, too, and it hadn’t stopped him from being one of the most popular students there. It was certainly a new experience to be living with a white roommate, Thomas A. Fulham, Jr., who smoked cigars and played the Mamas & the Papas every night in their room. His own tastes ran more to Motown. But he’d cope. Grayson hadn’t come this far by raising a stink every time he felt a twinge of discomfort. If there were going to be complaints about how poorly Holy Cross integrated its black students into campus life, they weren’t going to come from Grayson. He had learned to just get along.
As they approached the fall of 1968, Father Brooks made a point of telling many of his colleagues how lucky the college was to have wooed such high achievers. But he could sense that the transition was going to be tougher for the black students than he’d imagined. It wasn’t just the threat of racism that worried him, since most of the black men had had ample experience in dealing with that in their hometowns. What worried him were the academic demands. He had found Holy Cross challenging himself, despite the rigorous high school education he had received at Boston Latin School. The Jesuits prided themselves on making life tougher, not easier, for the young men under their charge. While many freshmen found the adjustment jolting, Brooks suspected it might be tougher for those who came in under greater scrutiny and pressure than many of their peers.
He quietly checked in with some of the professors to see if any of the black students seemed to be having particular difficulty in adjusting. He’d often stop to chat with those students he’d met and recruited the previous spring, and ask them about their workload, their living situation, and their extracurriculars. His goal was less to be their friend than to help remind them of what it would take to succeed. Even the brightest of the recruits would face extra hurdles, he believed, from the affront of low expectations from professors to the chill of being made to feel they didn’t belong.
But Brooks was certain that they would make it. He had met most of them and had seen the ambition in their eyes. He had seen in them the quickness and depth that he looked for in every student coming to Holy Cross. These men weren’t going to crumble under social pressure; most of them had likely been dealing with it for most of their lives. It was sweat and nerves that had helped Brooks get through the long months of running a repeater station in rural France during the war to help keep communications flowing for General Patton’s army, and his faith that had helped him endure frigid cold during the Battle of the Bulge. Intelligence was the easy part. They all had that. The measure of a man was how hard he was willing to work for what he wanted, and he could see that these young men were hungry.
Still, Brooks knew he had to make an extra effort to help them succeed. Nothing heroic; he just wanted to let them know that he was there to listen, even if they weren’t interested in talking. He wanted to keep them on track, the way he did for every student he talked to. For all their bravado and pride and accomplishments, the students entering their first year were just kids. And they were arriving just as many of the old norms of how to behave were falling away. The college was starting to bend on its traditional rules about drinking and having female visitors in the dorms. Expectations about how to dress were changing. The concept of having a mandatory core curriculum was under debate. The Jesuits no longer even forced students to attend church. Whether the students would find the newly relaxed rules liberating remained to be seen, but it certainly made for a less stable environment.
It was a different world from when Brooks had enrolled in the fall of 1942 at the age of nineteen. Back then, Holy Cross had felt almost like a cocoon, with its stringent rules and clear-cut road map to success. But within months of his arrival, Brooks had been shipped off to war. By the time he made it back to Holy Cross four years later, the climate had changed. With a flood of veterans streaming back onto campus, the students weren’t boys anymore; they had come back with life experiences that would forever shape them. The focus was now on moving forward. America had won the war, and the country was flush with optimism.
Two decades later such optimism seemed to be in short supply. Brooks could see that many students had grown distrustful of people like him in the administration, wary of any sign of condescension. Brooks knew himself well enough to realize that his blunt manner could intimidate even his colleagues. He wasn’t one to ask questions and nurture egos. His own sisters liked to joke about how strong-willed he was, how even they didn’t want to get on his bad side. He knew that most freshmen would have neither the courage nor the inclination to approach a middle-aged college administrator. So he would have to go to them.
FIVE
Winds of Change
The black students had come to Holy Cross with an acute awareness of three basic facts about the school: It was white, Cath
olic, and all male. But the college also had a rich history when it came to both race and social justice. From the start, Holy Cross had set itself apart from the city of Worcester, occupying a commanding hilltop position. When the school’s founder, Benedict J. Fenwick, had come upon the Pakachoag tribe’s “Hill of Pleasant Springs,” he was thrilled with the location, declaring in 1843 that “there is not one [location] to surpass it in the United States.” However, the school’s geography merely reinforced what the town’s working-class residents perceived as smugness. They weren’t entirely wrong. Fenwick, a portly, Maryland-born Jesuit who was bishop of Boston, had been looking to establish a Jesuit college in New England that would cater exclusively to Catholic students. It was an odd mission for a man educated at Georgetown University, which was open to all faiths, but Fenwick wanted to create a school that would produce future priests, and a place where students could be free from the rising chorus of anti-Catholic sentiment, which was particularly pronounced around the Boston area. A massive influx of Irish Roman Catholic immigrants in the early nineteenth century had changed the makeup of the city, and the immigrants were blamed for bringing wages down and taxes up, as well as for being violent and spreading diseases like tuberculosis and cholera. There were dozens of popular anti-Catholic publications, which ran lurid tales of convent life that featured allegations of slaughtered babies and promiscuous priests (a hoax perpetrated most famously by a Montreal prostitute-turned-author named Maria Monk) and articles about the Vatican’s alleged conspiracy to “take over the world.” In 1834 a mob burned an Ursuline convent and school just outside Boston. Three years later, a run-in between British firefighters and the members of an Irish funeral procession sparked a massive riot.