Fraternity

by Diane Brady

  In a June 2011 essay in The New Yorker, Jones recalled a letter-writing campaign he’d launched with a young woman he’d gone to high school with in Washington. While he had never kissed her or even touched the back of her hand, he wrote, “I cared for her, and the only way I knew how to express what I felt at that point in my life was to write letters.” Unlike Grayson’s contact, this young woman did respond to the voluminous correspondence from Jones, if only with what he describes as crumbs about her life. But the mere act of unloading his thoughts and feelings on a remote figure he’d probably never see again was a comfort in the wilderness of Worcester.

  The overall experience of being at Holy Cross left Jones cold. Had he gone to Father Brooks’s office to discuss it, he wouldn’t have known what to say. It didn’t occur to him that anyone would want to hear his complaints, and he couldn’t think of any way to resolve them. Jones thought a few times of transferring but then dismissed the idea. He wasn’t sure where he would go, or who would take him. Instead he switched his major from math to English, where he found more satisfaction, not to mention a way to express his alienation and uncertainty through his writing.

  Ed Jones found the social world of Holy Cross stifling. He felt enveloped by his blackness, as though his skin color were always broadcasting itself. Despite the rhetoric about tolerance on campus, he witnessed interactions that made him wonder if the black students’ presence at the school was helping to combat racism or making it worse. He heard a student respond, when solicited for the scholarship fund, “tell the niggers to do their own begging.” The student then shouted the epithet “nigger lover” as the fund-raiser walked away. The Black Student Union couldn’t possibly provide a refuge from that kind of environment. Like Ted Wells, Jones had grown up in all-black neighborhoods. While Jones’s experience was far different from that of the high school football star, growing up he had never had to face the kind of blatant intolerance that he felt at Holy Cross. Some of the other black students didn’t seem to notice it, or maybe they just didn’t let it affect them, but Jones felt a constant chill.

  Jones had found an Eldridge Cleaver poster with the message, ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, WELCOME HERE in a Black Panther newspaper and had taped it to the outside of his door. Cleaver was on the lam at that point and nobody knew where he was. His book Soul on Ice had become a bestseller, made famous in part by Cleaver’s description of the rape of white women as an “insurrectionary act.” To some students the poster was the most powerful statement Jones had made all year. They hadn’t realized that their quiet and somewhat sullen hallmate was such a radical. Jones liked that fact: He had put up the poster as much to prod the sensibilities of his classmates as to express himself.

  On one windy February morning in 1969, Jones returned to his room to find his poster ripped down. Whoever had done it, he thought, had probably done it to make a point about black power. Jones reported the act, and when Brooks learned of it he took it seriously. Although Brooks didn’t support the views of Eldridge Cleaver, he saw no harm in displaying an image of the man. Many students had read Soul on Ice, and Jones was hardly alone in his admiration for Cleaver and the Black Panthers. Brooks felt strongly that the students needed to respect one another’s political views, especially the views of a minority that hadn’t necessarily been made to feel welcome. He wanted a more formal inquiry and a chance for Jones to receive an apology. The school couldn’t support any act of vandalism or violation of a student’s freedom of expression.

  A white student down the hall eventually admitted to tearing the poster down and claimed that he had been drunk at the time, though he added that even if he hadn’t been he would have torn it down. The student said his roommate had goaded him because four blacks had jumped him a few years earlier. The House Judicial Board ruled that the student had to replace the poster. He never did. With Brooks’s encouragement, the board also told the student and his roommate to set up a conference on race relations. Only thirteen of the 140 students in the house came. Jones and the defiant vandal sat down with psychology professor Paul Rosenkrantz to hash things out. But the whole exercise seemed futile and hopeless to Jones. After the discussion, the perpetrators didn’t speak to Jones again for months. He felt piercing, condemning looks from others in the hall, as if he himself was the one at fault for having made an issue of the situation.

  Other students came to Brooks over incidents of racism. One complained that a carload of white students had tried to run him down—or at least scare him—as he was walking on campus. Another mentioned that white students often got up from dining tables when a black student sat down, or walked out of rooms when black students walked in. Brooks knew the black students genuinely felt racism on campus, but he wasn’t convinced that their white classmates were always aware of their offenses. As he later told the Worcester Evening Gazette, “White racism is to the white man as original sin is to mankind.”

  With two dozen black students on campus and efforts to recruit many more for the class of 1973, Brooks wanted to promote more open debate about the state of racial relations at Holy Cross. He was also determined to help raise the profile of campus leaders like Art Martin, who was president of the BSU. He invited Martin, along with other student leaders, to a black-tie dinner for the President’s Council, a committee that had been established by President Raymond Swords in 1967 to honor alumni who pledged significant gifts to the college each year. Martin immediately accepted. It meant getting a free seat at the exclusive affair and taking part in a panel discussion the next day, where he planned to raise some of the BSU’s issues.

  That Friday Martin wore a rented tuxedo, and the men at the dinner, many of them older, treated him as one of their own, as if he were just another promising student attending Holy Cross. He enjoyed the dinner and the experience of being among those with money and power. The next day, however, he showed up on the panel in a dashiki and sandals. He stood and addressed the crowd. “Last night, you didn’t see me,” he began. “You didn’t see me because I was in a suit and tie. I blended in.” Some of the alumni shifted uncomfortably as Martin continued. “But now I’m up here in a dashiki, and you notice me. You see I’m different. You see a black man.”

  Brooks was amused by the proceedings. One man stood up in the room and said that he had sent his son to Holy Cross because he wanted the young man to have a Catholic education, and a good Christian life that would end with him going to heaven. Holy Cross was supposed to be the place, the man argued, where his son would get a moral education and avoid dealing with hippies, protesters, and the ugliness that was happening on the streets. Martin told the man to forget about his son getting into heaven. His kid needed exposure to the real world, and hiding from it wouldn’t get anyone into heaven. Martin felt strong and confident as he spoke. He sensed that the world was changing faster than many of the alumni in the room could bear. Even so, when he finished, a number of people in the room applauded.

  Brooks often heard similar fears from alumni who came to him in private, sometimes with less civility. One man accused him of risking the school’s reputation on a foolish experiment. “I think our reputation is more at risk if we do nothing, don’t you?” Brooks had replied. He was in a difficult position. Holy Cross needed the alumni’s financial and moral support, especially at a time when the school’s finances were so strained—in part because of the generous scholarships Brooks had given out. But Brooks wanted the alumni and the school’s trustees to understand the realities of the world. Many of them did, of course: It was hard to escape the revolution. But far too many insisted that Holy Cross remain a refuge, a place where their sons could experience the kind of tough but comfortable education they had received as young men. If black men wanted to enroll, they argued, they were welcome to apply like anyone else; there was no need to seek them out.

  Many of the black students were more interested in figuring out how they could escape the real world of Holy Cross than in defending their right to be there. Several of them wanted to esta
blish a “black corridor” where they could live together. They were tired of feeling like they were under surveillance, and the fastest way to get the sense of community they craved would be to create their own physical community.

  When the idea had come up at one of the first BSU meetings, Clarence Thomas was immediately opposed. He felt that the plan was equivalent to signing up for segregation. “We fought hard to get into places like this and now we want to segregate ourselves? That’s plain stupid,” he argued. “We don’t need Jim Crow anymore. We’re just doing it to ourselves.” Thomas knew the rest of the world wasn’t going to accommodate whatever needs the black students thought they had. At some point they would all have to deal with the world, and the world would have to deal with them. Thomas was fighting to make it in the world, not just in the black world. What kind of message would the black students send, he argued, if they just shut themselves off from the rest of the college?

  Stan Grayson initially leaned toward Thomas’s view that integration was best. Like Thomas, he had a number of white friends. And unlike many of the others, he was used to being a highly visible minority from his days at Detroit’s All Saints High School. He had coped in that environment and he could cope at Holy Cross, too. He was getting along fine with his white roommate, and he liked the other players on the basketball team. He was also friendly with other athletes, as well as with a number of white classmates from Detroit. In fact, as far as anyone on campus could see, Grayson appeared to have no complaints with the status quo. He was friendly and easygoing with everyone he met.

  But though Grayson was used to the occasional ignorant and racist comment from high school, it sometimes still shocked him to hear it at Holy Cross. Some of the other students implied that he wouldn’t have been admitted to Holy Cross without his basketball scholarship. They occasionally made snide remarks about the riots in Detroit, mocking “the revolution.” The digs didn’t happen that often, and they were sometimes said in jest, but the message was clear: Grayson should feel grateful that Holy Cross had allowed him to enroll.

  In fact, Grayson was worried about his ability to keep up. Along with his major, economics, he was taking English and the required philosophy and theology courses. When he wasn’t at practice, he was at the library studying, but he still ended the first semester of his freshman year with an embarrassing 2.1 grade point average. The problem was that he had never learned how to study. He went to the library, feverishly read everything, and was overwhelmed by the amount of information he found. He hadn’t learned to be strategic, to learn only what he needed to know. He realized that he needed to be smarter about what and how he studied.

  But Grayson’s concerns over his academic performance and misgivings about creating a black corridor were now taking a backseat. He knew having the black students living together probably wouldn’t help the cause of racial harmony, but he was under so much academic pressure and felt it would be nice to live in a residence where he could listen to his own music, chat with the brothers, and relax. He had become close friends with Ted Wells and Eddie Jenkins and enjoyed the BSU’s Sunday meetings. They were the one time he felt he could kick back and be himself. As he found himself spending more time with the other black students, the thought of living as a group became increasingly appealing.

  During their discussions about the dorm, Wells pointed out that they weren’t the only black college students calling for some form of community. Across the country, a number of groups were setting up black-only unions and residences. At the University of Michigan, the black students had even established their own table in the dining room. It wasn’t segregation, Wells argued. It was sanctuary.

  When the final vote for the corridor came up at a BSU meeting, all members were in favor, with one exception: Clarence Thomas. While some of the other men had expressed hesitation over the idea, they didn’t feel strongly enough to oppose it. But although the vote was all but unanimous, it created a chasm in the BSU. Some members hadn’t shown up for the vote. Others who weren’t comfortable with the idea began to drift away from the union.

  Nobody was surprised that Thomas’s was the sole dissenting vote. Being the dissenter had become a role he assumed at many of their meetings. Once, Thomas decided to defend Booker T. Washington, a former slave and African American leader who had promoted education for blacks around the turn of the century. Some of the other men thought Thomas was incapable of shutting up at BSU meetings, and they found it ironic that he chose to defend Washington for not speaking out against the indignities of forced segregation. W.E.B. Du Bois, a fellow activist at the time, had scornfully labeled Washington “The Great Accommodator” and in 1968, many young blacks were inclined to agree. But Thomas saw Washington as someone forced to do what was necessary to survive. Like Thomas, Washington believed in self-reliance and hard work. He knew the value of getting support from whites. “He was misunderstood,” Thomas had said, to hoots of derision from fellow BSU members. Sometimes the opposition was lighthearted, but it could also be heated and verge on real anger. Thomas became used to standing alone.

  For his part, Father Brooks was passionately opposed to the idea of the black corridor when Ted Wells and Art Martin first presented it to him. He thought it idiotic and self-destructive. They were raging against apartheid in South Africa and discrimination against blacks in America, yet the students wanted to bring a form of it on themselves. If they wanted to be surrounded by people who looked like them, they should have enrolled at a black college, Brooks thought. Holy Cross was supposed to be a different experience. Everyone found college life unsettling—black, white, rich, poor; it was part of growing up. Brooks had been looking for ways to build bridges and integrate the black students, not the opposite. Nonetheless, he was torn. While he vehemently disagreed with their decision, he nevertheless didn’t think it was solely his decision to make. And as much as Brooks was against the notion of black-only housing, he understood the students’ reasoning. He knew that many of them were finding the adjustment to Holy Cross harder than they had expected. If the corridor experiment failed, they would only have themselves to blame. If it worked, it might help them achieve the level of comfort that was so far proving elusive.

  Brooks suspected that Raymond Swords wouldn’t be quite as understanding on the issue. In fact, the president was even more opposed than Brooks. Despite his misgivings, Brooks lobbied the president and the other administrators on behalf of the BSU. At this point, he felt, what mattered was alleviating whatever strains the BSU members were feeling. They had been recruited to get an education, not to prove a point. Brooks didn’t think anyone should expect the young men to put their own needs aside in the interest of greater integration. The black students did that every day in their classes. While Wells and Martin liked to talk about empowerment, Brooks understood that what the men really wanted was more comfort, a place where they felt free to be themselves.

  The decision to grant the students a corridor set off an inevitable bout of soul-searching and editorials in the student newspaper that questioned both the BSU’s request for such housing and the administration’s willingness to provide it. Brooks again came out in support of the decision, repeating the arguments he had made to the president. He hoped that the college’s efforts to bring in more black recruits in the future might alleviate the need for a black corridor, and he took comfort in the fact that the corridor couldn’t be limited to black students alone—there simply weren’t enough of them to fill the entire hall. A handful of white students—from the men’s existing roommates to others who liked the concept of living with a black majority—had asked to move onto the corridor, too.

  A mood of anticipation began to permeate the BSU meetings. Just the idea of having a shared space created a stronger sense of community, and they felt a sense of victory at having achieved their goal. Still, despite the promise of a corridor, some of the recruits simply didn’t want to stay on at Holy Cross. It wasn’t just the pressure to succeed academically; some of the brigh
test men were finding it hard to resist the distractions of campus life. What was going on outside the classroom—the parties, protests, and drugs—was far more compelling for many students, black and white, than their coursework. Brooks had tried to reach out to all of the black men in the class of 1972, but some of them weren’t interested in speaking with a middle-aged priest. Brooks didn’t know who was not planning to come back for the fall of 1969, or who was wavering but might still be convinced. The timing and circumstances around each exit became anecdotal—the student who just stopped coming to class, the one who decided he’d prefer to be closer to home, the one who’d tried and failed to live up to the expectations that Brooks had placed on him. While Brooks could recall the men who came to him when they were having trouble, it was the ones who didn’t that would later fill him with angst. He never knew how much some of them were struggling, and he would wonder if he had failed them in some fundamental way.

  After he became dean, Brooks found himself dealing with a number of issues in addition to his teaching and religious duties. He was a favorite with many student leaders on campus who found that even if he didn’t meet their demands, he would listen and advise. The same was true for students who were struggling with poor grades, a pregnant girlfriend, or any of the other problems that could derail a college education. Brooks was also at the center of discussions about the religious role of the college. With fewer mandatory requirements of students, whether daily Mass or theology courses, the Jesuits were trying to figure out a way to maintain the college’s religious identity and values while adapting to the times. They were grappling with how to manage protests against the war overseas while doing more in the war on poverty at home. And while Holy Cross’s role in the civil rights struggle might have centered on the recruitment of black students, Brooks and his colleagues were also trying to hire black professors and diversify the curriculum, not because the BSU wanted it but because it was right. What he could do, Brooks believed, was help to move the college in the right direction and be available for the black students whenever they wanted to talk. What he couldn’t do, he discovered, was succeed with those who had given up, or change the campus overnight.