by Diane Brady
Because of the anti-Catholic sentiment plaguing Boston, Fenwick had good reason to look outside the city in his search for land. As a thriving industrial city with easy access to Boston, New York, and Providence, Worcester fit the bill. He chose a charismatic, controversial, big-bellied Jesuit named Thomas F. Mulledy as the college’s first president. Prior to his arrival at the College of the Holy Cross in 1843, Mulledy was best known for his scandal-plagued tenure as a leader of the Church’s Maryland “province,” where he had been in charge of selling off the Jesuit order’s slaves, on the condition that he found new owners who would agree to respect their “religious needs” and family bonds. The Jesuits had deemed slavery to be divinely ordained, a practice that enabled the Church to claim to protect poor black families by placing slaves in the hands of a benevolent owner. Emancipation was seen as tantamount to abandoning people who couldn’t care for themselves. But the financial cost of maintaining slave families, if not the moral one, began to weigh on the Jesuit community. When Mulledy allowed many of the slave families to be split apart and resold to Protestant orders, several of his colleagues were openly outraged.
Among the first students to enroll at Holy Cross were four sons of Michael Morris Healy, an Irish-born planter in Georgia, and Eliza Clark, a mixed-race slave whom Healy owned and had fallen in love with. Their children were considered slaves, making them ineligible to attend school in the South. Instead James, Patrick, Hugh, and Sherwood Healy came to Holy Cross in 1844. The Healy boys did well—Patrick went on to become president of Georgetown University in 1874, James was valedictorian of the first graduating class in 1849 and later became the country’s first African American Catholic bishop, Michael became a celebrated sea captain, and Sherwood became a priest and rector of Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
John Brooks believed that the college’s history demonstrated the power that a Holy Cross education could have. The Healy brothers had thrived against daunting odds and had gone on to achieve great things. Brooks looked to the legacy of the Healy brothers when he thought of Holy Cross’s role in educating black men; he believed, in fact, that all colleges had an obligation to reach out to black students, though they were largely failing on that front. In the fall of 1968, Newsweek estimated that 275,000 black undergraduates were enrolled in U.S. campuses out of a total population of 6.5 million undergrads, and more than half of those students were enrolled at one of the 111 predominantly “Negro colleges” concentrated in the South. Most of the remaining students were enrolled at large state schools. Black students were still an anomaly at small liberal arts colleges.
During Art Martin’s two years at Holy Cross, he had been treated as the invisible man. The other students were friendly, but it was a polite form of civility. Few of his fellow students had ever asked about his background or his beliefs. It was almost as if they were pretending he was one of the guys when everyone knew that he would never really fit in. Now, in his junior year, he was getting a different kind of look as he walked around. It wasn’t the occasional what-are-you-doing-here glance of semesters past. With more than two dozen other black students on campus, the fact that he was black suddenly seemed to give him a new identity. Martin had become part of a group. Other students started asking him about black power and Malcolm X. They began to acknowledge, however awkwardly, that he had unique insights to offer.
The sudden presence of other black men was liberating for Martin. He grew an Afro and wore a dashiki. Before, it hadn’t even occurred to him to express his tastes and heritage. In previous years he had been focused on just trying to get through each day. Now that there were so many other black students on campus, he felt more comfortable standing out.
Like the rest of the country, Holy Cross had entered a new era. While many of the professors still liked to joke that the faculty was far more liberal than the students, a ripple of revolution was slowly making its way to Worcester. Cutoff jeans, sandals, and shoulder-length hair had become more common sights in the classroom. Peace signs and mind-altering drugs were now a part of campus life, and the aroma of marijuana wafted through the residence halls. The activist group Students for a Democratic Society had set up a vigorous chapter at Holy Cross. Although less inclined toward violence than some other SDS chapters, the Worcester group was vocal in everything from blocking Marine recruitment on campus to demonstrating against the Vietnam War. For young men raised in middle-class homes with Virgin Mary statues in every room, it was a heady change of pace.
The faculty was doing its part to further the burgeoning revolution. The incoming students had been assigned to read Michael Harrington’s jolting The Other America: Poverty in the United States over the summer. As dean, Brooks thought it would get the students thinking about what was going on across the country. Brooks had particular respect for Harrington, a Holy Cross graduate whose book chronicled how millions of Americans were struggling under an insidious form of modern poverty. Harrington described them as trapped in urban ghettos or long-forgotten rural towns, far from the manicured lawns of suburbia and “populated by the failures, by those driven from the land and bewildered by the city, by old people suddenly confronted with the torments of loneliness and poverty, and by minorities facing a wall of prejudice.” Moreover, the poor were surrounded by middle-class brethren who no longer understood that poverty existed, in part because cheap mass-market clothing had enabled people of all income levels to dress alike. In twentieth-century America, Harrington concluded, the poor had no political voice because they had no presence.
Harrington’s argument resonated with many of the black students, but people like Ted Wells didn’t feel as helpless as Harrington suggested. In his world the poor and the disenfranchised were starting to be heard. Wells had certainly felt the influence of black power in Washington and would sometimes sneak off to rallies near the White House. He understood the issues that people were fighting for, and he felt very comfortable giving his own opinions about them. Living in an all-black neighborhood hadn’t left Wells feeling marginalized. His teachers were black, his coaches were black, and most of his heroes were black, too. He rarely had to deal with racism because he rarely came into contact with racists. He was acutely aware of the barriers and injustices that black Americans were facing across the country, but when it came to his own life, Wells was used to having a voice.
Holy Cross, however, proved to be a trickier landscape than he’d expected. Suddenly Wells had to navigate a culture in which he was the outsider. If he was going to spend the next four years there, he needed to find a way to thrive. He struck up a friendship with Art Martin, who took on a big brother role, helping many of the black athletes adjust to life on campus. The two had met through Jenkins and Dickerson, both of whom had met Martin the previous winter when he had shown them around the cold, muddy campus. Wells liked Martin’s energy and his conviction that the group of black men should make their presence felt on campus. Wells was deeply interested in the intense debate over achieving racial equality that was raging on every campus. He wasn’t sure yet if he supported working within the system, as King had advocated, or adopting the more militant and separatist stance that leaders such as Stokely Carmichael urged. Wells had also bonded with Jenkins and Dickerson at football practice, and had gotten to know Grayson through the athletics department, but the black students’ interactions were sporadic and didn’t fully compensate for the loneliness of adjusting to a strange environment. Something had to change.
Art Martin, energized by his new sense of identity, started talking to Bob DeShay and Wells about the idea of forming a black student union. Martin had been craving some sort of community for years, and now that there were more than a handful of black students, he saw his opportunity to create one. Although he had been student council president at his largely white all-boys high school in New Jersey, he had never considered seeking a formal leadership role at Holy Cross. But now there was a chance to finally have an impact on a college that had been largely immune to the calls fo
r black power spreading across the country, to raise consciousness about the kinds of injustices that had spurred riots in his hometown of Newark the year before. DeShay, whose sympathies lay with groups like SDS, liked the idea of shaking up the old guard in Worcester. Similar unions were coming together at colleges across the country; Holy Cross needed one of its own.
When Martin mentioned the idea to Brooks, the dean was supportive. A formal union would likely need funding and the support of a faculty adviser, and he wasn’t sure what the mission of the group might be. Still, Brooks wanted the college to support any initiative that might make the black students feel more at ease and empowered.
Wells, for one, felt excited by the prospect of a formal black student union. Although he had kept up a brave face and confident demeanor since coming to Holy Cross, the sudden sense of isolation had been hard to take. He was eager to bring the black students together, both to hang out and to present a united front to the administration on a range of issues. The fact that he had arrived at the college just a few weeks earlier didn’t matter. He had taken on leadership roles in the past, and it felt natural to do so again. Besides, the freshman class alone had more than tripled the size of the school’s black population. He knew a BSU wouldn’t have even been possible the year before.
In early October they met in a room at the Hogan Campus Center. One or two of the older black students had chosen not to come, citing conflicts, though Art Martin suspected they didn’t want to associate themselves with any black cause. The goal was to form a group that could formally raise issues with Father Brooks, from white bias in the curriculum to the absence of any black faculty at the school. Martin took the lead and started writing out by hand a constitution and bylaws for the new Black Student Union. When Thomas mentioned that he had a typewriter, they quickly decided that he would type up the founding document. The list of demands being debated was long: black faculty, courses in black history and literature, black-themed events, representation, a budget, transportation to extend their social lives beyond the white campus, and, of course, many more black students. The men were divided over how much the group should demand and how confrontational they should be. Most of them were, after all, getting a free education from the college they were now complaining about. But that fact didn’t really have much impact on the motivations of young men who had been watching civil rights battles play out on their TV screens and in their communities. They weren’t about to celebrate what the college had done right at a time when so much in the world was wrong.
If some in the administration had expected the black students to feel nothing but gratitude for their scholarships, they were mistaken. Within weeks of arriving at Holy Cross, a number of the recruits were feeling frustrated about everything from the workload to the atmosphere in their dorms. Some had shared their complaints already with Brooks; many had not. Without proof that other students were facing similar difficulties, they didn’t want to look like the only ones who weren’t able to cope. For Thomas there was another dimension to the angst. On the Sunday of his second week on campus, he decided to go to Mass. Having gone to church regularly for most of his life, it felt like second nature. But something had snapped since he had left the seminary. Soon after the priest got up to expand on the readings during the homily, Thomas got up and walked out. During the rest of his time at Holy Cross, Thomas never went to Mass again. The faith that had been so much a part of his life for so long was gone, or at least pushed back to a place where he wouldn’t acknowledge it.
At that first BSU meeting, Jones watched as Thomas and several others jostled for attention. While their fledgling membership would barely fill two lunch tables, he could see cliques already beginning to form. The only thing all of the members knew they had in common was their skin color. The Philadelphia contingent stuck together; the athletes were already tight-knit and prone to joking around; the Savannah boys, especially Thomas, struck Jones as bellicose and argumentative. Everyone seemed passionate about their agenda, yet Ed Jones wasn’t convinced that any of their ideas would be put into action. Why would anyone listen seriously to their demands? “Below our blackness,” Jones would write a year later in The Crusader, “was our natural handicap of being human beings with various viewpoints and we had bitter arguments with excruciating results from the very beginning.”
Still, the BSU’s common desire to drive radical change at Holy Cross—a school that had already left many of them feeling intimidated and small—brought them together. They felt part of something bigger, part of a movement that was inspiring students to demonstrate not just at Holy Cross and other American campuses but in practically every part of the world. The Northern Irish resistance to British rule and anti-Soviet protests in Poland and Czechoslovakia showed that disenfranchised people were embracing their rights. Feminism, socialism, and black oppression had become part of everyday conversation. The young felt increasingly powerful, convinced that the world was on the cusp of change. In that environment, even two dozen black men attending a conservative white college could see the power they might wield if they came together.
Grayson found the early BSU meetings immensely enjoyable. It was like watching theater. There was an immediate friction, sometimes good-natured, sometimes not, between Thomas and Wells. If one said yes, the other almost automatically said no. While Thomas was initially reticent at meetings, he soon started to spar with Wells over various ideas. Rarely did Thomas himself ever suggest an idea; he merely liked to shoot them down. Grayson sensed that Wells was speaking from his heart, but he often wondered if Thomas was being contrarian just to keep things lively. One minute Thomas preached solidarity and brotherhood; the next he would launch a blistering attack against other students for assuming that all black students had to think alike. But Thomas also pointed to a very real problem: As the roomful of mostly teenagers began to articulate what they needed to make the school livable, the list kept getting longer.
Thomas argued that the group had to focus on what they needed instead of what they wanted. They decided that they needed a vehicle so that they could go off campus to meet black women. They needed an office, money, black professors, and black authors in the curriculum, not to mention more black students. Grayson wanted to remove the reference to “Old Black Joe” from the school’s beloved rallying song, “Mamie Reilly.” They wanted Holy Cross to take a stronger stance against the Vietnam War, which was putting too many brothers into body bags; many of the men feared they might be called to fight.
That first meeting, though hardly decisive, set the structure of the BSU. Thomas agreed to become the correspondence secretary. Martin would be the president and Wells would be second in charge. There wasn’t much competition for the leadership roles. Though many of the freshmen had met and liked Brooks, they didn’t particularly want to be spending time with people in the administration, and the older students were too focused on keeping up their grades to take on heavy responsibilities. Everyone decided that Martin and Wells would represent the group together since Wells was so persuasive and Martin was a junior who already had a relationship with the dean.
When Martin told Brooks about the outcome of the first meeting, the priest immediately suggested a dinner meeting with the president. He wanted Father Swords to hear about the black students’ experience and have a chance to share his own views with Wells and Martin. Brooks knew that the group had strength in its unity, but he also knew that they would need a direct line to the administration or else their requests would likely fall on deaf ears. With demonstrations against the war and calls for change coming from other groups on campus, the BSU could easily become part of the cacophony. Brooks felt the college had a special responsibility to the black students. It may have taken a risk in bringing some of them in, but the students had also taken a risk in agreeing to come. Issues like Vietnam and poverty were important but largely beyond his control; the steps that Holy Cross could take to promote civil rights and the success of its black students on campus were not.
Brooks immediately warmed to Wells when Martin introduced him at their dinner that fall. Behind the young man’s composure, Brooks sensed a quick and curious mind. He asked Wells what he was planning to do when he finished school, and how he was doing so far in his classes. Brooks started most conversations with students that way: a mild grilling on academics, followed by questions about their ambitions. He never wanted them to forget why they were enrolled. Wells didn’t have a concrete answer. Law school was an option, but he was also interested in business school or perhaps in pursuing a Ph.D. All he knew at that point was that his academic ambitions extended beyond getting an undergraduate degree at Holy Cross.
The conversation was a bit stilted at the start. Swords had indicated before the meeting that he was willing to listen to what the students wanted, but Brooks could see that the president wasn’t terribly happy with the concept of a black student union. The name immediately evoked images of black power and angry rhetoric, not to mention the demonstrations that had been disrupting campuses across the Northeast. Holy Cross was already dealing with its own chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. The last thing the president wanted was another angry student group that might issue demands and stir up trouble.
It didn’t help, then, that Martin and Wells began the dinner by asking for an office and a budget, a modest one to start. Brooks was impressed by their negotiating skills: The two had already established an informal good cop/bad cop dynamic between them. Wells would go for what Martin saw as the outlandish proposal—the big money, the audacious position—and Martin would be the one to suggest a compromise that reflected what they actually expected to get.