Fraternity

by Diane Brady

A few days later six black men were killed during a race riot in Augusta, Georgia. Five of them were shot by police. On May 14, police opened fire on Jackson State University students protesting racism on the Mississippi campus, killing two black men and wounding a dozen others. One of the victims was a pre-med student who left behind a baby son and a pregnant wife; the other was just a teenager who had stopped to watch the riots.

  In the spring of 1970, Swords gave what would be his last address to the senior class. He talked about the “catalytic events of the past six weeks” and argued that, “from this point on, there is no turning back, no copping out. You have made your stand, openly and publicly, for all to see. It is a stand for life, for peace, for justice for all men.” Like most colleges across the nation, Holy Cross had coped with escalating political tensions but had been spared any kind of violence. The recent events were largely abstract: There had been no riot police, no National Guard, and nobody had been arrested, beaten, or killed.

  At the end of the school year, the Board of Trustees announced that Father John Brooks, now forty-six, had been chosen to be the twenty-fifth president of Holy Cross College. After a nine-month search involving sixty applicants, the trustees had finally settled on the man Raymond Swords had always wanted to replace him. They noted Brooks’s master of arts degree in philosophy and master of science in geophysics, as well as his doctorate of sacred theology from the Gregorian Pontifical University of Rome. The new president was also an active member of the Worcester NAACP branch.

  While Swords had worked tirelessly to improve the school, it was time for new leadership. The trustees argued that John Brooks was a man who could maintain the intellectual and religious traditions of the college while also leading it in a new direction. As a new decade was beginning, Holy Cross needed a leader who was unafraid to move with the times, and it needed a president who could not only embrace change but accelerate it.

  As he had promised Ted Wells earlier in the year, Brooks allowed the BSU to send letters to the incoming black freshmen in the class of 1974. Malcolm Joseph, the BSU vice chairman, wrote up the letters, informing the recruits that the BSU had “convinced the Administration, that it would be best for your interests if you were given the option of expressing your preference of a black or white roommate before the school year started. This will undoubtedly save you needless aggravation.”

  Art Martin felt wistful as his graduation approached. Four years earlier he had arrived, feeling isolated, until Brooks had reached out to ask for his help in spreading the message of Holy Cross to other black students. The arrival of that first group of recruits had transformed Martin’s life on campus from one of loneliness to one of brotherhood. The founding BSU chairman felt he owed much of that transformation to Father Brooks, who had been there for Martin before and after there was a black community on campus. Brooks hadn’t reached out to Martin because of what he did or who he represented; he had kept his door open, Martin reflected later, because he knew that a young black student from Newark might need to know that there was someone he could turn to. Martin was on his way to Georgetown University’s law school, where he would go on to chair the Black American Law Students Association and eventually become both a lawyer specializing in job discrimination and deputy attorney general for New Jersey. In 1970, as he went by Father Brooks’s office to shake the new president’s hand and say goodbye, Martin felt he was leaving a friend.

  That summer, Brooks had many long conversations with Clarence Thomas and Gil Hardy, whom he’d helped move into a college-owned house over the break. Hardy was dating a local young woman, Vivianne Townes, and Thomas was deeply in love with Ambush. The four of them spent most evenings talking for hours into the night. When there was a fifth member of the group, Townes recalls, it was often Father Brooks, who would drop by for a drink and then stay on to talk about what was happening in the world.

  The priest had come to believe strongly that simply being aware of racism was inadequate. He had been aware of racism all his life, and yet, he realized, for too long he hadn’t done enough to address it. Talk was meaningless if nothing changed. What mattered to Brooks was personal responsibility. Once a person was aware of a problem, it was his or her moral and spiritual responsibility to help solve it. The tragedies of the Holocaust or lynchings or oppression lay not just in the acts, Brooks argued, but in the inaction of the people who stood by. Awareness might help the world, but it would never change it.

  Brooks had come to feel a personal responsibility for the black students at Holy Cross. It wasn’t a responsibility for their success; the choice to study and do the work was theirs alone, as it was for every student. It was a responsibility to acknowledge that the college experience might not be as comfortable for the black students, that they didn’t have the role models in the classroom or the easy comfort of being in the majority. It also wasn’t an impulse to set lower or higher expectations for the students, but to do something that seemed even more difficult for some on campus: to treat them with the same expectations as any other student; to understand where skin color made a difference, and where it did not.

  The Clarence Thomas that Brooks saw that summer was funny, ambitious, relaxed, and in love. His intensity hadn’t diminished, but his anger seemed less corrosive and more in check. Gil Hardy, too, had a confidence and disarming sense of humor that Brooks enjoyed. Several months earlier they might have been scared and angry young men willing to abandon their education to stand on principle. But in the summer of 1970 they were two college kids, working and laughing and hanging out with each other, determined to enjoy their freedom before another year at school.

  ELEVEN

  Eyes on the Prize

  President John Brooks surveyed the campus in September 1970 with the eyes of a new leader. He was taking charge of a school with decaying buildings, budget deficits, and a meager endowment. The political and social unrest of the previous year looked likely to continue, and the level of scholarship support, according to his staff in the admissions office, was unsustainable.

  Despite the myriad of obstacles he was facing, one of Brooks’s first acts was to proceed with his plans to admit female students. Many of his colleagues remained opposed to the idea, which had been rejected by the Board of Trustees a few years earlier. The college had commissioned one report that estimated the cost of coeducation at $2.5 million. In order to fully accommodate women, the report concluded, Holy Cross would have to install a full-length mirror and more closet space in every female’s residence room. Brooks scoffed at the idea. One factor in opposing coeducation was how the administration intended to go about it. Rather than simply expand the total student body to accommodate women, as colleges like Amherst and Bowdoin had done, Holy Cross planned to enroll three hundred fewer men in order to keep the total freshman class at the same size. He promised the trustees that the three hundred women would be at least as good, or better, than their male counterparts. He had also personally taken steps to change the balance of trustees in his favor. When a spot came vacant on the board, he would personally interview alumni about their views on admitting women and only put forward candidates who were in favor of the idea. As a result, Brooks knew the proposal would easily pass when he brought it to the board again, and the new president soon announced that the school would admit women for the fall of 1972. “The educational arguments are persuasive,” he told a student reporter. They were, in fact, the same arguments he had used in recruiting black students: Any college that wanted to stay relevant and in the top tier had to reach out to every group of future leaders. Ted Wells, Eddie Jenkins, Stan Grayson, and Ed Jones would be among the last students to have an all-male education at Holy Cross.

  Clarence Thomas was relieved to be a senior and looked forward to being a resident assistant on the corridor. Along with getting his own room, it meant he could abandon his job as a waiter in the dining hall and he would be paid to dole out advice to other black students. With law school on the horizon, Thomas wanted total freedom t
o study at any hour without having to worry about disturbing a roommate. He’d made a vow just before the summer to stop putting his future at risk by taking part in the angry and increasingly volatile demonstrations against the war, and he had come back to school in the fall determined to keep it. There was too much at stake.

  Another thing had happened over the summer. He had read two books that were to influence his attitude toward life: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. He had first come across the books in high school, but this time Rand’s message of radical individualism and her notion of rational self-interest truly sank in. Thomas agreed with her philosophy that reality was objective and couldn’t be changed just because a majority of people wished it were so. To him it helped explain the disconnect he increasingly felt between his views and those of other black students, and the divide between him and his grandfather. “I started to realize that just because I felt alone in my views of certain things didn’t mean I was wrong,” he recalls. Rand’s idea that being productive was man’s central purpose and noblest ability also helped Thomas to develop an increasing appreciation for Father Brooks, who had long encouraged him to get beyond his angry musings. It was Brooks who had kept telling him that everything would be fine if he just took faith in his own abilities and worked hard. When Thomas would get angry about the perceived arrogance of the other black students or the assumptions that he believed others were making about his skin color, it was Brooks who would shrug and remind him that it was a fool’s mission to try changing anyone in the world but himself. On practically every other matter, from the existence of God to the role of society in helping individuals, John Brooks and Ayn Rand stood apart. But on one matter, they shared a belief: Think for yourself.

  Several men on the corridor noticed a change in the senior. Thomas had become less inclined to participate in protests or other forms of activism on campus. He didn’t join in the student fast when Marine recruiters returned to campus that fall. While he still spoke up at BSU meetings, there were times when he was content just to sit and listen. It wasn’t so much that his views had changed, some members felt, as that he left them with the impression that he no longer really cared. Whatever the BSU was fighting for, it seemed certain that Thomas felt it was no longer fighting on his behalf. He was moving on. He was determined to get a scholarship offer from Harvard or Yale. He planned to marry Kathy Ambush. Yet he hadn’t abandoned his ideals, and he talked to Brooks and others about taking a job in the South after getting a law degree, to promote Dr. King’s message and help defend civil rights.

  As Thomas’s confidence had grown, there was less occasion for the two of them to meet. When he had arrived as a sophomore, Thomas had found in Father Brooks a much-needed pillar of support. With all the anger he’d built up from the seminary and the rigid expectations of his grandfather, he hadn’t recognized how he was feeling about himself. Beneath the vitriol and the resentment, Brooks saw an obstacle bigger than a label that people might impose on him: his own sense that he was unworthy. Even as he worked twice as hard, laughed twice as loud, and tried to form connections well beyond the confines of the BSU, Thomas would fall back to thinking that he wasn’t going to get the grades, the friends, or the respect that seemed to come so easily to others. Brooks had persistently reassured the young man that he was entitled to ask for, and work for, whatever he wanted. While the priest didn’t try to downplay the existence of racism, he encouraged Thomas not to go out of his way to look for it or to give it all that much power. There was only so much that could stop a man who pursued excellence, Brooks believed, and he encouraged Thomas to persevere. With the praise from his professors, the warm embrace he’d received from the Ambushes, and the easy friendship he enjoyed with men like Gil Hardy, Thomas had started to believe Brooks’s message. By his senior year Thomas knew one thing had changed from where he was two years earlier: He had started to grow up.

  Thomas continued to welcome the chance to talk to Father Brooks, but often it would be a smile and a greeting if they ran into each other on campus rather than a long talk in Brooks’s office. When they did meet, the conversation was less focused on Thomas’s insecurities than it was on his plans, or some issue in the news. Brooks recalled a particular interest that the senior took in Philip and Daniel Berrigan, two Roman Catholic priests and brothers who were in the news for burning draft files as part of the Catonsville Nine. Phil, who had attended Holy Cross with Brooks, was also allegedly leading a plot to blow up Washington steam tunnels and kidnap National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The anarchist priest had come to campus in March 1968 to deliver a homily at a Mass, where he spoke against “the U.S. military establishment.” Brooks saw the Berrigans as men whose methods might be suspect but whose hearts were clearly devoted to peace and civil rights. When they had gone missing after their convictions for burning draft files, and briefly appeared as outlaws to give sermons before vanishing again, Brooks had silently cheered. He agreed with their views that the Church and, in fact, the leaders of all denominations hadn’t done enough to speak out against the senseless slaughter of young lives in Vietnam. Brooks later noted with a hint of wistfulness that one of the FBI agents who picked Dan up by posing as a birdwatcher in August 1970 was a Holy Cross graduate. Thomas was decidedly less sympathetic to the brothers’ radical methods than Brooks, who had supported and pushed for a special issue of Holy Cross Quarterly to be devoted to the meaning of the Berrigans in January 1971. The notoriety of the Berrigans would land them on the cover of Time magazine in January 1971, with a story titled “Rebel Priests: The Curious Case of the Berrigans.” (Holy Cross’s role in educating men like Berrigan and The Other America author Michael Harrington would three years later prompt Time to label the college “the cradle of the Catholic Left.”)

  Both Father Brooks and Clarence Thomas were haunted by the specter of Vietnam. When a student came to Brooks or one of the other Jesuit priests in a panic when his number was called, there was little they could do but recommend that the conscientious objector escape to Canada—even though they knew that meant the draft dodger would be dubbed a traitor and would be unlikely to ever return to the States again. Unlike Eddie Jenkins, Thomas had passed the physical. His draft lottery number was a relatively low 109, but he had managed to defer service at least until he graduated in June. At that point, though, his status would automatically convert to 1-A: ready for immediate induction. Even with the United States cutting back troop numbers in Vietnam, it appeared almost certain that he would be deployed. The idea left him frozen with fear.

  Ted Wells was also a resident assistant on the black corridor, and he took on the role of a watchful older brother to the newer students. Students on the corridor would sometimes feel Wells slip an arm around their shoulders and know that a lecture was coming on about a missed English class or a mediocre grade; and if anyone had even the faintest whiff of marijuana on them, they knew to keep Wells at a safe distance. It was one reason, Brooks later concluded, that the black corridor was never a source of complaints or trouble at the school. While drunken rowdiness, fights, or drug use was an issue at other residences from time to time, the black students seemed to demonstrate more discipline. Brooks wasn’t sure if that was because they were less interested in getting falling-down drunk or if people like Wells helped to keep things in line. Unlike Clarence Thomas, Wells had never really gone to Brooks to seek comfort. Even when he’d dropped football his freshman year, his goal in seeking out Brooks hadn’t been to debate the decision but to check the impact it would have on his scholarship. As Brooks saw it, Wells didn’t need a confidence boost, nor did Eddie Jenkins or Stan Grayson. The athletes had either come in with a stronger sense of identity, or they had a well-honed knack for supporting one another. In either case, they typically approached Brooks with a keen understanding of what they or the BSU wanted, and how the president could help.

  Ted Wells stepped back from a formal role in running the BSU during the second semester of his junior year to focus
on his own goals. He had set his sights on becoming a Fenwick Scholar, one of the highest honors at Holy Cross. Each year a department nominated a third-year student to design an independent research project in lieu of coursework for his senior year; the chosen scholar would then present his findings to the college community at the end of the project. With cable television emerging as a new industry, Wells had become fascinated with the way that cities handled the licensing of new TV franchises. Would they consolidate power in the hands of a few or use cable to democratize the media? For his project Wells proposed creating a primer on the emerging issues that were facing cities and examine how they could be handled. He would do his research, he suggested, while working for the city of Boston’s Department of Economic Development. The committee was impressed and promptly chose Wells as the college’s first black Fenwick Scholar.

  Nina Mitchell was spending almost every weekend with Wells at Holy Cross. While she was thriving as a sociology student at Newton, she had found the move to Boston to be a culture shock. All of a sudden, security officers were following her around stores, and the city’s fierce battles over busing had made skin color the only thing some people saw. Worcester, despite its challenges, could feel like an oasis in comparison. But it was a working oasis. Soon after she would arrive on Friday, Mitchell would join Wells at the library, where the two of them would find a spot to study together in the stacks. On Saturdays they would eat breakfast and chat with the men on the corridor before walking back to the library. Sundays were more of the same.

  Mitchell marveled at how much her boyfriend had changed since they had left high school. Wells had always cared about his grades, but he had become much more driven at Holy Cross. There was a sense of purpose about him, a willingness to see himself as a leader and to act like one. She admired his commitment to helping the black community—at Holy Cross, and in the world beyond the college. He had far-reaching ambitions, and his dedication was infectious.