Fraternity

by Diane Brady

  At 4:00 P.M., Swords and Brooks went to a scheduled meeting of the Board of Trustees, which informed Swords that it wasn’t their role to reverse the decision of any campus group. Swords was the only one with the authority to do that.

  Brooks went to see Ted Wells and Art Martin to explain what was going on. They knew John Scott and felt that, as someone who was black and not affiliated with Holy Cross, he would be sympathetic to their arguments. They agreed to negotiate through him. As Brooks turned to leave, he thrust a couple of hundred dollars into Wells’s hand. When Wells looked up in surprise, Brooks asked him to spread it among the men. They wouldn’t be eating on campus for a while, Brooks pointed out, so they could use the money to get some burgers and fries. Wells suspected that the money had come from the priest’s own pocket.

  As Brooks anxiously tried to resolve the situation, he was reminded of the time he had spent in Rome during the early days of Vatican II. When a prominent biblical scholar, Father Stanislas Lyonnet, S.J., had been pulled out of Brooks’s class for being too radical, he and several classmates had printed up bulletins and distributed them around the Vatican to defend his stance. After much lobbying, Brooks and his colleagues had managed to get Lyonnet reinstated. Brooks understood the power of standing together to uphold a principle. He believed that some good could come of the BSU’s protest, but his immediate goal was to make sure that the students’ academic careers weren’t destroyed. What mattered now was that Swords was willing to hear the other side’s arguments.

  Protester in the strike that followed the walkout

  Stan Grayson didn’t learn about the walkout until later that evening, when the basketball players returned from an embarrassing 92–68 loss to Columbia. Grayson was exhausted and bracing himself for some ribbing about the team’s defeat. As he got off the bus, he saw Ted Wells, who explained what had happened. Grayson immediately told his teammates that he had to leave.

  The team was scheduled to play more games in the coming days, but Coach Donohue told him to do whatever he thought was right. Grayson was one of the coach’s favorite players; the coach admired the sophomore’s principles and integrity. Grayson shook his coach’s hand, and the hands of his team members, and immediately headed to the corridor to grab his things.

  Grayson didn’t want to sleep on a floor at Clark University, so he and Eddie Jenkins borrowed a friend’s car and drove to Boston. When they arrived at a nightclub called Estelle’s, they were in an oddly jubilant mood. It struck Grayson that he might never be coming back to Holy Cross, and that thought made him feel free. He didn’t want to contemplate what might come next; he just felt relief to be away from the stress of the crisis in Worcester. He and Jenkins drank and danced, mingling with the locals. The next morning, weary and hungover, they drove back to Worcester to see if anything had been resolved.

  The campus was buzzing with activity. A number of students and faculty had organized a daylong forum to talk about the racism charges. Father Brooks had brought together the advisory committee that morning. President Swords sat silently as John Scott, the arbitrator, got up and warned that “if you let these men quit, then it’s likely that a lot of other students will walk out and you’ll have a general strike on your hands.” That might draw the SDS, Black Panthers, or other activist groups intent on stirring up violence. Swords listened but remained silent. Brooks understood that the president wanted to witness the debate, not influence it. For the rest of Saturday and into the night, Swords didn’t offer a single opinion.

  Clarence Thomas had packed his bags in anticipation of leaving campus forever, but he was relieved to hear that Father Brooks had intervened in the negotiations. While the other men were still talking in apocalyptic terms about their futures, Thomas had a feeling that Holy Cross wasn’t going to let almost all of its black students—the ones they had fought so hard to recruit and accommodate—just walk out the door on principle. There was no way Father Brooks would let that happen. President Swords may have felt a need to stick to the rules, but Thomas trusted Brooks. There was no denying that the suspension had been a racist act; surely Swords would see that the black students had no choice. Thomas was hoping he wouldn’t need to confront his grandfather with another failure.

  At the forum, emotions were still running high. Some faculty members were visibly angry that the black students were getting special treatment; another admitted that he had initially opposed amnesty but then reversed his decision when he saw the severity of the sentence. Now he didn’t see why any of the black students would want to return to Holy Cross after the treatment that they had received.

  A student protest in response to the walkout

  The Worcester Telegram ran an editorial on Saturday praising the board for its “courage” in sticking to its guns and noting that the rules had been “arrogantly flouted by a group of self-styled revolutionary students who almost precipitated mob violence in a crowded corridor.” Black or white, the Telegram wrote, the students deserved to be punished.

  During every break from the council discussions, Father Brooks drove to the Clark campus to tell Ted Wells and Art Martin what had happened in the meetings. He wanted to make sure that the men didn’t lose hope and start to disperse. He asked Wells if the men needed anything. His voice cracking with fatigue, Brooks promised to call with updates. Wells agreed to persuade everyone to stay put; he knew the stakes were too high to do otherwise.

  Although he was moved by the priest’s commitment, Wells was still angry. Brooks might care about the fate of the BSU, but the fact that the president hadn’t reversed his decision yet was upsetting. What was clear-cut racism to the black students seemed to be a gray area to the leaders of Holy Cross. Why else would they still be debating the matter?

  Wells was right—many in the Holy Cross administration saw no need to welcome the black students back. The discussions among members of the advisory group were getting heated. Some faculty members felt that overruling the College Judicial Board would be tantamount to calling it worthless and letting the campus degenerate into mob rule. It would be a victory for the demonstrators. But Brooks didn’t much care about whether the president’s ruling might prompt further demonstrations or damage to the school’s reputation; the real tragedy of getting it wrong would be felt by the students.

  The group took a break at 2:30 A.M., and Brooks drove back to Clark to meet again with Wells and Martin. They told him that many of the black students would head home Sunday night if the president hadn’t reversed his decision by that point, and they would do the same, too. When Brooks let the committee know of the black students’ intentions, several remained unmoved. As he later told Worcester’s Evening Gazette, sometimes whites “couldn’t even see their own bias, never mind overcome it.”

  As the sun was beginning to set on Sunday afternoon, President Swords announced that he had heard enough. Brooks contacted Wells and Martin to ask that they return to the school to hear the president’s decision.

  At 6:30 P.M. on December 14, Swords and Brooks arrived at the ballroom, where hundreds of students and faculty had already gathered. Swords looked somber as he stepped up to the podium. Everyone was silent as the president stood up, adjusted the thick, black frames of his glasses, and read his statement. “I am granting amnesty to the sixteen students of Holy Cross College whose suspension from the College because of their involvement in the General Electric Company incident was previously announced.” Every student who had been charged in the demonstration, black or white, would be exonerated and free to resume their studies.

  The murmurs of the crowd almost drowned out the rest of his words. Swords went on to say that he now agreed with the BSU that the procedures for identifying students weren’t ideal and that every student who had been at the protest should have been charged. While the judicial board may have acted as fairly as it could have under the circumstances, its decision would be reversed. Moreover, all campus recruitment would be postponed and formal classes would be canceled for the following w
eek to allow students and faculty to discuss racial issues on campus. Everyone had been affected by the events of the past three days, and Swords wanted to give the campus time to absorb them and a chance to debate their opinions.

  Brooks felt a wave of relief, and respect for Swords’s courage to reverse his public stance. Art Martin and Ted Wells, standing near the stage, dressed in jackets and ties, were visibly moved. As the crowd cheered, Martin came to the podium to announce that the black students would return to campus after the Christmas break. One of the students saw Brooks standing to the side, slipping out quietly with tears in his eyes.

  TEN

  What Do You Fight For?

  Predictably, anger erupted over President Raymond Swords’s decision. There were pointed editorials in the Worcester Telegram that claimed the amnesty had “severely damaged the credibility of the college administration” and letters printed in The Crusader alleging that Holy Cross had been raped by the president and that “the avowed rapist is one of her own sons.” A businessman propped a casket outside the main gate of the college with a sign that read, “Here lies the corpse of free enterprise, born July 4, 1776, laid to rest by Raymond J. Swords, S.J., Dec. 15, 1969.” Father Brooks stepped up to support the president and handle the criticism. When the letters from irate alumni and parents poured in, demanding answers and accusing Swords of being spineless, Brooks dealt with the critics. The president didn’t have the energy to deal with any more conflict himself.

  As 1969 came to a close and a new decade dawned, the stress of the walkout intensified Swords’s desire to step down as president. Swords wanted Brooks to consider taking over his job and Brooks felt honored. In his view Swords had been magnificent as president, daring to alienate fellow Jesuits by removing them from faculty jobs for more qualified outsiders. He had been willing to test his own boundaries and had exercised his power wisely. The decision to grant amnesty to the GE protesters had gone against Swords’s personal beliefs regarding discipline and respect, but he had done it because it was the right thing to do.

  But while the experience of appeasing angry alumni and weighing moral issues against practical ones may have drained Swords, Brooks had never had a problem defending himself against people he believed were wrong. Arguments that had been percolating during the black student recruitment drive now came out into the open: For many, the amnesty became emblematic of all that was wrong with efforts to accommodate black students. One alumnus accused Brooks of letting the “colored boys” dictate how the college should be run, and argued that he was rewarding the students’ disrespect for the rules. The alumnus claimed that Brooks and Swords had given Holy Cross a reputation for being a place that gave Negroes special treatment, and had put all of its students at a disadvantage by letting recruiters know that the school would tolerate demonstrations.

  Brooks spent weeks traveling around the country to meet with different alumni groups. The angry letters were handed to him to answer, as were the irate phone calls. When newspaper reporters called, they found themselves interviewing Father Brooks. He met with the professors who felt betrayed by the school’s reversal, and with the students who were quietly troubled by the decision. Parents weren’t sure if they should let their sons apply for the following year and called Brooks to demand an explanation. In each case he tried to assure them that the college had not abandoned its standards, stressing that the injustice didn’t lie in the charges against the protesters but in how those charges had been handed out. Were such demonstrations ever to happen again, he assured them, the administration would take extra care to make sure that every perpetrator was punished, black and white. But Brooks refused to tolerate any suggestion that the black students had been wrong to walk out or that Holy Cross had been wrong to accept them back. One student at the time later recalled a conversation with a professor who had complained to Brooks about the perils of rewarding what he saw as the BSU’s tantrum, only to have Brooks respond that he’d love to see that caliber of childish behavior among the faculty. While comforting or cajoling alumni may have been tolerable to Brooks, expending similar energy on his colleagues was out of the question. “You always got the sense he’d forge ahead, whether you liked it or not,” a professor from that period noted. “I remember mentioning a mutual colleague who’d had real qualms about how the walkout was handled, and Father Brooks saying, ‘that’s his problem.’ ”

  The black students returned to Holy Cross with mixed feelings. Some worked harder; others found it difficult to get back into the school routine. Al Coleman, one of the black protesters who had dodged a suspension, had promised Brooks that he would stop cutting classes after his reinstatement. He didn’t. Coleman ended up dropping out of school, though with nowhere to go he continued to live on the black corridor until the end of the year, reading his science fiction books, eating food that the other men brought over from Kimball, and continuing to attend the Sunday BSU meetings. Jenkins suspected that Brooks and others in the administration knew that Coleman was still living on campus but nobody bothered to officially kick him out. Brooks had become a more regular presence on the corridor, stopping by to check in on the men, who greeted him with enthusiasm. Clarence Thomas, in particular, seemed to light up when he saw Father Brooks around the residence. They often sat together and talked about what was going on in the world. Ted Wells’s status had increased on campus because of his prominent role in the walkout; his name had appeared with some frequency in the press, and he continued to speak on behalf of the BSU. During the weeklong forum that Holy Cross held for students and faculty following the walkout, Wells was a commanding presence. “Black students cannot afford the luxury of learning just for the sake of learning,” he told a crowd, according to a report in the Worcester Telegram. They were in college to get the skills to “destroy this sick society and replace it with one that will be functional to the needs of black people,” he added. “The college must realize that black students do not want to be indoctrinated into well-rounded white men, but that we wish to be educated in the art of achieving manhood.” The BSU’s dramatic stance against racism had reinforced in Wells the conviction that he was at Holy Cross not just to get ahead in his career, but to change society. He embraced his leadership role, and other students came to view him as a spokesman on the black student experience.

  The question was whether he had embraced the role too much. While Wells had stepped up his commitment because Art Martin had felt a need to cut back, the younger man hadn’t officially asked the men in the BSU for a bigger role. It was simply a logical transition, given Wells’s position as a deputy the year before, as well as the clear leadership he had displayed during the crisis. But the automatic rise of Wells didn’t go unnoticed by other BSU members. While nobody else had stepped forward to seek the job when the matter came up at a meeting in early 1970, many thought it felt wrong to approach the transfer of power like a coronation instead of putting it to a vote. To some, what had come across as inspiring leadership during the walkout now seemed to teeter on smugness. While Wells didn’t sense that anything had changed, other BSU members thought it might be time to knock the ambitious sophomore down a few pegs.

  Still, when the matter of who would run the union came to a vote, Wells’s was the only name under consideration. In a surprise move, Clarence Thomas suddenly came forward to challenge him. Thomas didn’t particularly want to take a leadership role—he much preferred to stay on the sidelines, tossing barbs to stir things up—but some men in the Georgia contingent had talked him into it. After the men cast their votes, Eddie Jenkins counted the ballots and for a moment looked surprised. When he announced that Thomas had won, the room was quiet. Eddie Jenkins glanced over at Wells, who looked visibly shaken, though he was clearly trying to take the defeat in stride. If the goal had been to humble Wells, Jenkins thought, they had succeeded.

  A mixture of clapping and murmuring broke out, and then one of the men from Georgia approached Jenkins in private to say that Thomas really did not want the
job. He would happily concede the election should some technicality force a new vote. “I wasn’t interested in running anything,” Thomas later recalled. “We just felt someone should give Ted a run for his money, and that ended up being me.”

  They decided that the first vote had in fact been for the nomination. The men would have to cast a second vote for the actual election. There was a motion to cast new ballots. On the second round of voting, Wells won. This time Thomas looked visibly relieved, though some men said they also detected a twinge of irritation on his face. Thomas, though, insisted he felt nothing but relief, saying he didn’t want to hold any official role in the BSU. He had other things on his plate. Kathy Ambush had been feeling unhappy and isolated at Anna Maria, and she and Thomas increasingly opted to spend weekends hanging out at her parents’ house in Worcester. Even after the walkout, Thomas still felt that Holy Cross was a place more to be endured than enjoyed. The comforts of the corridor hadn’t disguised the fact that he found the views of many of his hallmates to be increasingly dogmatic and one-dimensional; his camaraderie with the white students on campus didn’t diminish the discomfort he felt at not belonging.

  Article in The Crusader about Ted Wells being appointed BSU chairman

  If anything, though, the loneliness sharpened his focus. He continued to excel in intramural football and track, though the sight of Eddie Jenkins, Joe Wilson, and Jaffe Dickerson racing by him on the track in jest one day was a reminder that athletics wasn’t his life. Thomas had been invited to join the prestigious Purple Key Society, a group comprised of top-performing students that tried to raise school spirit and help others on campus. He had also been appointed to Alpha Sigma Nu, the national Jesuit college honor society, at Father Brooks’s request. Brooks had written a letter to Raymond Swords, recommending that the president appoint Thomas, as “Clarence has a cumulative quality point index of 3.577 and ranks very high in his class,” adding that Thomas was “genuinely respected by his fellow students.” Brooks believed strongly that the hardworking junior deserved the recognition, but that wasn’t his only motivation. Having spent time talking to Thomas about his frustrations and insecurities, Brooks also sensed that he needed it.