by Diane Brady
The black corridor had moved down a floor to accommodate the larger group of sophomores coming in from the class of ’73, recruits who’d lived in freshman dorms the year before. There was a new feeling of vibrancy to the residence, an energy fueled by numbers and a growing sense of black pride. There also was no need to fill out the corridor with white students now, though a few remained because of their strong ties to their black roommates. The men had painted the hallway in the color of the African Liberation Flag—red, black, and green. The energy level increased as the men new to the corridor seemed less inclined to camp at the library than hang out, listening to James Brown or Sly & the Family Stone. Whether it was Joe Wilson dancing with layers of gold chains around his neck in an impression of soul singer Isaac Hayes, or Gil Hardy cracking jokes, the men kept one another entertained. Ma Wells often visited, serving up the soul food that she now personally delivered in periodic visits to Worcester. In recalling the barbs, the jokes, and the camaraderie, several men compared that time to their version of a fraternity—though a fraternity where even mild debauchery took a clear backseat to getting the work done, especially when Wells was around.
The Black Muslim students who had arrived as freshmen the year before were no longer just new voices at the BSU meetings but a force on the corridor. When not working on their coursework the men could be found circulating copies of Muhammad Speaks or practicing martial arts. While many of the others admired their discipline, they also enjoyed poking fun at their zeal, and the Muslim students sometimes took similar delight in ribbing the men for not following the ways of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Wells, for one, would brace himself in the cafeteria when a Muslim hallmate walked by and looked at his food. “Now, brother, you ain’t eating that pig, are you?” he would ask Wells in mock disdain. Wells would then look down at his meal with raised eyebrows. “Is that pork, brother?” he would respond, pushing the offending meat aside. “No sir, brother. No way am I eating that.”
Eddie Jenkins enjoyed spending time with the Muslim students. While he found them more serious than the other black students—nobody would have ever dared to joke about Louis Farrakhan in their presence—he also discovered that many of them had interesting views on politics and what was happening in the rest of the world. They were well informed and passionate, so much so that Jenkins found himself drifting into their circle. He had even taken to reading the Koran a bit, occasionally joining their trips to the Boston mosque. In addition, he loved the food that the Muslim students prepared: the salmon mixed with mayonnaise and apples or raisins, the brussel sprouts with hot sauce, the bean pies, fresh whole wheat bread, red peppers, and olives.
As president, Brooks made it a point to visit most of the residences, usually at the invitation of the students, though his office would sometimes reach out and solicit an offer. Typically he would chat for a few minutes about what was going on at the college and then take questions. In his frequent visits to the corridor, though, he sometimes started by asking the men questions. He continued to take an interest in BSU issues that could have been handed on to someone else, now that he was college president. When the BSU van broke down on the Massachusetts Turnpike and the director of purchasing argued that it shouldn’t be replaced, Brooks personally ordered a new twelve-passenger van for the BSU at a cost of $3,670.
Some colleagues continued to think that Brooks took too direct an interest in the students. Having fought so hard to bring them back to campus, the president now seemed focused on doing whatever it took to keep them there. It wasn’t so much racism or even the isolation that drove some men to quit or transfer, he suspected, but self-esteem. Although they may have arrived as class valedictorians and A students, a few of the men simply didn’t believe they could keep up. The result was that they didn’t, and that made them isolate themselves even further from campus life. Brooks tried to encourage them to ignore their fears and do the work. But one thing he didn’t intervene in was grades.
It was clear that the obstinate and sometimes high-handed approach Father Brooks took as dean wasn’t going to change now that he had the top job. He spent a lot of time talking to professors, but even he had to admit that he rarely asked them for approval or input. He believed in acting on his own beliefs, without getting bogged down in unnecessary debate. What Holy Cross needed most was money: Having slipped to around $4 million, the school’s endowment was too low to be of any real use. Brooks wanted to upgrade the buildings and maintenance of the grounds, and he wanted to bring in more students on scholarship, but none of that was possible without money. The problem wasn’t that Holy Cross alumni weren’t loyal, he’d decided, it was that they hadn’t been asked to give. One of his immediate priorities as president was to visit alumni across the United States and around the world and simply ask them to give more money to the college. In the meantime, though, there were even harder choices to make. The Crusader published articles stating that Holy Cross might be forced to turn away working-class students who couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. School officials talked about the need for the school to draw on state aid. Brooks personally assured Ted Wells that he didn’t want to cut back on aid to black students, but it would be a strain. The lingering anger of some alumni over the walkout meant that talking about the need to recruit more black students might not yield the best response. Everyone had to be realistic, especially the members of the BSU.
Sophomore Henry De Bernardo, the new head of the union, was pushing for a radical increase in black student enrollment. This time Brooks said it wasn’t feasible. “I am very much aware of the amount of time and effort you and your brothers put into the drafting of this proposal,” Brooks wrote to De Bernardo. “As you might well expect, Henry, my main objection, and it is a major one, is the unrealistic and absolutely impossible obligation to which the proposal would commit the College.” Holy Cross was in its third year of deficit spending and had already committed to give out more than $1.5 million in aid. Regardless of whether he could raise more funds from alumni, Brooks was determined to balance the school’s budget.
Father Brooks had already decided that football was a place to tighten the belt. It turned out to be a good time to question the merits of big-time football. The 1970 season opened with a 26–0 loss against West Point. The hepatitis outbreak had robbed the Crusaders of experience, and it showed. And though Coach Bill Whitton was determined to make a comeback, it didn’t look likely. Early in the year, Eddie Jenkins was heralded in The Crusader as having “all the tools for stardom,” and the much-lauded Joe Wilson was now a starter on the team. As Whitton said to reporters in September, the goal was to show everyone that “Holy Cross football is improving, getting better all the time.”
Still, in the second game the Crusaders lost to Temple, 23–13, and at their game against Boston University in October, Jenkins caught a 99-yard touchdown pass, tying an NCAA record, but the Crusaders still lost, 33–23.
In November a plane carrying the Marshall University football team crashed in West Virginia, killing everyone on board, and the Crusaders dedicated their season to Marshall. Midway through the season, Jenkins broke his arm and had to sit out the final four games. The high point for the team came with a 20–20 tie against Connecticut. The varsity football team from Holy Cross simply couldn’t compete. Jaffe Dickerson decided to quit the team. Standing in the mud and rain at one practice, convinced that Whitton already hated him, Dickerson turned to Jenkins and said, “This is it, man. I’ve had enough.” Jenkins made a halfhearted attempt to talk him out of it, but he could see the frustration in his friend’s eyes. No one on the coaching staff tried to talk Dickerson into staying.
Morale had hit an all-time low, and many were unhappy with Whitton. The goodwill he had enjoyed in the aftermath of the Tom Boisture era was gone. The assistant coaches complained that Whitton’s behavior was erratic and that his drinking had become more frequent. The players, defeated by their string of losses, weren’t inclined to support their coach.
The
final game of the season was the always-popular battle against Boston College. Most of the men were feeling down the morning of the game. They ate breakfast together and one player jokingly referred to the meal as “the Last Supper.” When several players began discussing their lousy odds against the strong Boston team, Whitton exploded. The team had no drive, he screamed. They had no passion. Did they even know what the Holy Cross players of 1942 had achieved when they’d trounced the then-undefeated Boston College team? They had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in college history. Why couldn’t the men on this team be more like that one? Why couldn’t they win just one damn game when it mattered?
If Whitton had intended to motivate his team, he failed. On the bus to Boston College, some players started grumbling. “I’m not playing for that guy,” one said. “Who does he think he is?” A demoralized squad ran onto the field and ended up getting crushed, 54–0. Jenkins saw his future slipping away. It had been more than two years since the team had won a game. He wondered if the team’s setbacks were too serious to recover from. He also began to fear that his next season would be a swan song for his football career.
While Father Brooks was pondering how to deal with an elaborate football infrastructure that no longer suited the school’s needs, the more immediate issue was Whitton. At Brooks’s prompting, the coach resigned in February 1971, citing his health and family concerns. “I leave with no ill feeling to Father Brooks, the athletic department or the college,” Whitton told The Crusader.
Though the basketball team was doing much better than the football team, winning nine of its first eleven games in 1970, Stan Grayson was having frustrations of his own. Despite averaging 21 points a game as a freshman offensive player, Coach Donohue had decided to switch him to a defensive role. The junior could tell that he was no longer playing to his strengths, but he worked hard to make up for it. Unlike some other players, who openly balked at Donohue’s style of coaching, Grayson didn’t complain. It wasn’t his style. The Crusader called him the most underrated performer on the team, noting that he managed to average 11.2 points and 10 rebounds a game even though he was consistently paired off against the opposition’s top scorer. Grayson became known as a defensive workhorse, forcing opposing stars who normally racked up 20 or 25 points a game to average fewer than 12 points when he was guarding them.
Grayson’s most daunting assignment that season was covering a University of Massachusetts junior named Julius Erving. The Crusaders stood at 11 wins and 5 losses when they faced off against the UMass team in Worcester. When Grayson held Erving to two hoops in the first half, the crowd started to sing “Sweet Swingin’ Stan.” The Crusaders were leading 27–26 when Grayson was called on two quick fouls—his third and fourth of the game—and Donohue had to pull him out. In Grayson’s six minutes off the court, Erving scored 12 points. By the time Grayson got back into the game, it was too late. The Crusaders lost by two points, 60–58, and Erving scored 32 points and pulled down 17 rebounds. Donohue told a Holy Cross reporter that “Stan was great. Unfortunately, Julius Erving was just a bit better.”
Grayson had increasingly expanded his focus to pursuits other than basketball. He was still dating Vicki Mitchell, Nina’s sister. He joined the 1843 Club to help organize concerts on campus, which meant he would get good seats to shows and have some say over who played at Holy Cross, from the Fifth Dimension to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. One of club’s coups was getting the band Chicago to play at a bargain price by booking them just before their debut album became a hit. Grayson had to help defuse a near riot when the number of people with tickets was double the number that had been sold. The club had issued black-and-white tickets that could be—and were—easily photocopied.
Ed Jones just wanted to write. After doing well in Maurice Geracht’s Nineteenth-Century Novel class, he had enrolled in the college’s first creative writing course. The class was small, about ten people, and its focus was on reading celebrated short stories in order to understand their structure; then the students would imitate the style of the writers. Geracht was impressed not only with Jones’s ability to stay ahead in the readings but with his ability to adapt his own writing to closely match writers ranging from Charles Dickens to Henry James. Geracht also praised Jones for having a strong voice of his own in his stories, as well as a sensitivity to the characters he chronicled. “It was then that I knew I had talent,” Jones later recalled. He liked the sparse discipline of the short story, the chance to paint textured vignettes and breathe life into the kind of characters who might otherwise disappear in the margins of some epic tale. About twenty years later, that passion was evident when he published his first book, Lost in the City, a collection of poignant short stories about black men and women in Washington, D.C.
Jones wasn’t surprised when Clarence Thomas was accepted to both Harvard and Yale law schools: Thomas had made his aspirations known for some time, telling Gil Hardy that he was tired of being poor. On a trip that Jones, Thomas, Hardy, Ted Wells, and Eddie Jenkins had taken to a conference for potential law students at New York’s Fordham University the year they arrived at Holy Cross, Jones was struck by Clarence’s persistence in gathering material and quizzing the folks from Yale about what it would take to get in. On the drive back to Worcester, Ted Wells was sleeping on Jones’s shoulder and everyone was battling exhaustion, but Thomas, who was behind the wheel, refused to pull over to rest. Instead he stopped six times to buy coffee to keep himself awake. “He was determined to get into Yale,” Jones recalled. “In everything he did, Clarence was determined.”
Thomas received the acceptance letter from Harvard first. When he called his grandmother with the good news, she seemed unimpressed. “That’s nice, son, if that’s what you want to do,” she told him. “But when you going to stop going to school?” His grandfather wouldn’t even come to the phone. When he received that acceptance from Yale, he didn’t call home. At the time, he assumed that his grandparents either didn’t understand the importance of getting into an Ivy League school, or they didn’t care. In their world, men worked hard with their hands from dawn to dusk and made a living for their families if they weren’t going to devote themselves to God. Men didn’t stay in school for years, reading books. He would later discover that his grandfather did care and was deeply proud of his grandson’s accomplishments. The signs were small—his grandfather displayed Holy Cross and Yale bumper stickers on his 1968 Pontiac, and one day when a man asked him why he was driving around with stickers he didn’t deserve, he proudly retorted that his grandson had graduated with honors from those schools. When Myers Anderson told Thomas the story, Thomas choked up with emotion.
In the waning weeks of his senior year, Thomas felt a fresh connection to the men on the corridor. After rereading Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in his last semester, he felt a renewed appreciation for the sense of fraternity that he had built with the men on the corridor. Years later he would reflect fondly on the living arrangement. “We laughed. We teased each other. There could be a real party atmosphere at times. I had no enemies there; we were all good brothers. We worked hard, and we respected each other, even when we didn’t agree. I have all the time in the world for those men. It was a special time in my life.”
As graduation neared, Thomas was especially sad to say goodbye to Father Brooks. Brooks had supported Thomas for three years, helping him express his anger and refine his personal beliefs. More important, Thomas felt that Father Brooks had treated him as an individual, one with anxieties and strengths that had nothing to do with being black. To Thomas the priest was a combination of friend, uncle, priest, father, saint, and Good Samaritan. “He was the one who inspired me there,” Thomas would later say. “You always felt he had your best interests at heart; I wasn’t part of some program to Father Brooks. I was a kid. I was an honors student and I didn’t complain, but I was a kid who found it hard to go to a white college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Somehow, he understood that, and tha
nk God he did. Holy Cross was content to educate me and let me do my own thing. Father Brooks tried to help us, but he never tried to work any issues out through us. He wanted the college to have more black students because it was the right thing to do; it was the right thing for us as individuals. We weren’t symbols to him. We were just kids.”
Clarence Thomas graduated ninth in his class—cum laude—with a degree in English. A day later, on June 5, 1971, he married Kathy Ambush at All Saints Episcopal Church in Worcester. Gil Hardy was his best man. The couple moved into an efficiency apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, where Thomas prepared to attend Yale. That September, Thomas had a medical exam for entry into the service. This time the doctors found a curvature in his spine, and he failed. He wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam after all.
New Haven turned out to be a miserable experience for Thomas. Yale’s law school had an aggressive affirmative action program, and Thomas felt the sting of low expectations every day he was there. He wanted the college to believe he could do anything, that he was as smart and deserving as every other student in his class. At Yale, he realized how much Brooks had given him. For all the angst and isolation he had privately felt during his years in Worcester, not once in his three years there had Thomas doubted his own intelligence.
TWELVE
Moving On
The ten black seniors returning to Holy Cross in the fall of 1971—all who were left of the original nineteen—felt a mix of excitement and urgency. All the hours of studying, debating, laughing, all the moments of frustration, confidence, and doubt had to lead somewhere. Eddie Jenkins let out a whoop when he saw sophomore Ron Lawson move onto the corridor with a color TV. Within weeks, he and Joe Wilson were kicking the young man out of his room on the nights that they wanted to watch football. The two of them would stand at the sophomore’s door with snacks and drinks in hand. “You need to study, man! Get to the library,” they’d say.