Fraternity

by Diane Brady

  That September, Jenkins savored a 21–16 victory over Harvard’s football team. It had been 1,036 days since the Holy Cross varsity team had won a game, and the win stunned everyone. The New York Times praised Jenkins and Wilson for their skills and “gung ho attitude.” At the end of the game, the crowd had cheered as the Crusaders hoisted Coach Ed Doherty on their shoulders and carried him off the Harvard field. Holy Cross students rushed out of the stands to lift some of the players onto their shoulders, too.

  With graduation looming, Jenkins found himself thinking more about his future. Law school seemed like a logical option, and he began to hunt for schools. He hadn’t spent his weekends buried in books at the library, but he had worked hard enough during the week to earn decent grades. He had been thinking about the possibility of playing football professionally. He’d have to distinguish himself on the field and hope that the team could win enough games to draw some attention.

  As co-captain of the basketball team, Stan Grayson also began his senior year with high hopes. The team had done well the year before, with 18 wins and 8 losses, but most of their losses had been in the season’s final games, when the stakes were highest. Grayson was confident that the team could do better this year. He was feeling more assertive; he had even challenged Coach Donohue on his strict policy prohibiting facial hair and won the right to sport a well-trimmed mustache.

  Ted Wells was living on the corridor again, now as a resident assistant, along with Grayson, but he was feeling less interested in the campus goings-on. As a Fenwick Scholar he was exempt from classes for the year. Instead he commuted to Boston a few days a week to immerse himself in the nascent cable industry. He found himself fascinated by how entrepreneurs were trying to build a business model around the new networks. While he was still committed to law school, he was increasingly drawn to the business world and was starting to think about a way to combine his two interests.

  Father Brooks had helped nominate Wells for a Rhodes scholarship, one of the most lucrative and coveted international scholarships, which provided funding for two years of study at England’s Oxford University. Though Wells was conflicted about the scholarship, he decided to go for it. He told another student on the corridor that he wanted to get the scholarship so that he could turn it down. It bothered him intensely that the most prestigious postgraduate scholarship in the country honored the memory of Cecil Rhodes, someone he considered to be the worst of the European colonists. Rhodes had openly declared that British-born whites—the Anglo-Saxons—were the finest race in the world. He had colonized large tracts of southern Africa and exploited the region when he founded the diamond company De Beers. It gave Wells immense satisfaction to think that if he got the scholarship, he might have an opportunity to draw attention to its racist history.

  Wells decided to apply out of his home region rather than New England, and when he went down to Baltimore for the final set of interviews at Johns Hopkins University, he began to have doubts about his plan. After speaking with other candidates, he could see clearly how much the award meant to them. They just wanted to study at Oxford. By the time Wells was called into the interview room, his resolve had left him. Having loudly proclaimed his intent to turn the scholarship down, Wells found himself giving lackluster answers to the interviewer, a young politician named Paul Sarbanes. In the end the scholarship was awarded to someone else. Wells later found out that the committee had awarded it to a black man, Kurt Schmoke, a year earlier. Schmoke went on to become the mayor of Baltimore, a state attorney, and dean of the Howard University School of Law, as well as a close friend of Wells.

  Wells was looking forward to marrying Nina Mitchell. He had asked her to marry him the previous spring, having already “pinned” her with the purple-jeweled Holy Cross pin. Though they’d planned to marry after graduation, Wells now wanted to hold the wedding over the Christmas break. He argued that they didn’t have enough money for a big ceremony in any case, and he didn’t understand why they needed to wait. Their families had been getting together for Christmas dinners every year, so he suggested that it would be economical to turn the 1971 dinner into their wedding reception. And one benefit of the otherwise lackluster Rhodes interview experience was that it had allowed Wells to pick up the appropriate paperwork for a marriage certificate in Washington.

  Mitchell didn’t mind; she hadn’t been interested in planning a big wedding. A few weeks before Christmas she went down to the “Hit or Miss” store near Newton College and bought a red dress for fifteen dollars. Wells borrowed a colorful dashiki from a friend on the corridor. He and Mitchell were married in the late afternoon on December 25, 1971, with Stan Grayson and a few other friends on hand to witness the event. The reception was a turkey dinner at Mitchell’s mother’s house. Wells calculated that the entire affair couldn’t have cost more than fifty dollars.

  For his last semester, Wells moved off campus to an apartment in Boston with Mitchell. He had set his sights on a new program at Harvard University—one that offered a joint law degree and a master of business administration. He had briefly considered pursuing a doctorate in economics but abandoned the idea because he had no interest in an academic career. A Holy Cross trustee and federal judge, John Gibbons, had offered to write him a recommendation for Harvard on the condition that he consider interning for him when he finished law school, and Wells had agreed.

  Ted Wells and Nina Mitchell at their wedding

  Meanwhile, faculty and student outrage over the black corridor continued to be an issue, with some arguing to Brooks that it was hypocritical to condemn racial segregation in one place, only to tolerate it somewhere else. Brooks openly admitted that he never liked the idea of the corridor, but found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to defend it. Nevertheless, he stood firm, noting that every resident had made his own decision to live there. Ed Jones, for one, didn’t understand the continued fuss. Every other dorm on campus was just a dorm until he or another black student stepped inside it; then it became a dorm of white people. It was his campus, too, but Jones felt like a visitor on it much of the time. He liked the sense of brotherhood on the corridor, the feeling that he could depend on the guys there. Nobody ever talked about it, but it felt like home.

  There were times when the expectations ran too high, though. By Eddie Jenkins’s final year, he and five Muslims would prepare their own meals on the corridor with special food deliveries authorized by Brooks. With raised eyes and the occasional exasperated sigh, the Kimball staff would hand the men cases of honey, navy beans, frozen okra, asparagus tips, and other vegetables. They had to purchase a vast range of fish, including smoked herring, lake trout, red snapper, and the ubiquitous cans of salmon. The Kimball staff even ordered boxes of a special herbal tea for the men. Brooks fielded complaints that that the men were consuming too much juice—complaints that the Muslim students called “petty and characteristically racist”—and played down the issues in his responses. Nobody was going to quit school or their jobs over juice.

  Brooks was facing a growing tide of discontent on campus. The protests against the war continued, and he couldn’t always be there to help calm things down. At a protest against a visit by Marine recruiters, Brooks was too ill to show up and monitor the situation. The crowd of angry students grew in strength, demanding to speak with Brooks, only to be told that the president was sick. Some of the students then tried to pull down a light pole. From his bed in the Jesuit residence, Brooks directed that a second day of Marine recruitment be postponed. Four students were brought before the College Judicial Board. This time all were found not guilty.

  School officials appeared to be extra cautious about whom they charged. While several black students were involved in the demonstration, none was brought before the board. At another Marine visit in the spring, Brooks even agreed to join in a demonstration as long as the protesters wouldn’t prevent fellow students from meeting with recruiters. Brooks hoped to promote an open dialogue on Vietnam by holding the protest withou
t disturbing the recruitment drive. It was an ambitious aim. Before the event, though, someone called the college switchboard to say that a bomb would explode between 12:45 and 1:00 P.M. at the site. Brooks didn’t want to take any chances, so everyone was cleared out. A few days earlier a vandal had tossed two firebombs in the window of the Air Force ROTC building, causing smoke and other damage. This time, however, no bomb was found.

  Despite the chaotic atmosphere on campus, Brooks refused to cancel classes. He was tired of a handful of protesters disrupting everyone else’s education. He issued a statement stressing the college’s “legal and moral obligation” to the students. “It’s your choice whether you want your feelings about the war to disrupt your education,” wrote Brooks. “Personally, I feel we can make our feelings known without harming our own futures.” A planned campus-wide strike failed when more than three-quarters of students continued attending class.

  On May 3, about eighty black students—the bulk of the BSU—took over the Fenwick-O’Kane complex, two buildings that housed administrative offices. The goal was to highlight their continued demands for black faculty, courses, and other accommodations on campus. Eddie Jenkins, Ed Jones, and Gordon Davis were among the students who snuck into the building at 1:45 A.M., carrying knapsacks, food, rope, and wire. The BSU had been talking about doing something to put black issues back on the college agenda, and it seemed there was a need for a dramatic statement if they wanted to get attention amid the other protests. They weren’t particularly worried about repercussions. The walkout had made it clear that there was safety in numbers, and Holy Cross had taken the stance that the black students were too important to kick out en masse.

  The students planned to take over the complex and hold a press conference after everyone on campus woke up. They expected that their sympathizers would bring them meals but, just in case, they had stocked up on drinks and snacks. As they wandered through the complex, they stationed a few members at every entrance door. But in the ROTC offices of the building, they ran into a group of twenty-five white students staging a sit-in to protest the war. The students told the BSU protesters that they were not leaving until Holy Cross agreed to stop all military recruiting, training, and contracts by September. It seemed like a bad joke to Jenkins. He had no problem with an antiwar protest, but the last thing the black students needed was a group of white hippies getting in the way as they tried to occupy a building.

  The two sides stood arguing. It was too late to go looking for another building to take over, and in any case, a residence building would hardly have the same impact. The two groups finally agreed that the white activists could stay in the ROTC offices, as long as they didn’t go anywhere else in the building, or muscle into the black students’ press conference with their own list of demands.

  Father Brooks heard about the takeover as soon as he woke up. He couldn’t help but think that if Ted Wells had been head of the BSU, rather than Henry De Bernardo, the group might have come up with a different strategy. But Ted, now living in Boston, hadn’t been consulted. He arrived at the front door of O’Kane at 8 A.M. and found Ogretta McNeil trying to deal with the protesters. One of the black students stopped Brooks at the door to tell him that they would be holding a press conference at 10 A.M. to state their position. When Brooks asked him if the takeover was really necessary, the student shrugged.

  At 10 A.M., Eddie Jenkins read a BSU statement to the three hundred students, reporters, and onlookers who were gathered on the steps. “The black community at Holy Cross College has been victimized by the racist tentacles that ensnarl the larger black community in America,” he read. “Increasingly, the administration of this institution has been nonchalant and apathetic to the needs and aspirations of its black community.” He went on to list the students’ grievances, including accusations that the director of financial aid had a negative attitude toward black students, charges of discrimination against black workers at Kimball, inadequate efforts to design a black studies program, and an indifferent attitude toward rewarding BSU efforts to recruit black students. They also believed that the college’s investment in General Tire & Rubber, which had a production facility in South Africa, demonstrated that Holy Cross had “no regard for the welfare of black people.” In summary, the BSU members stated, “we refuse to be written off as mere entities used by this administration to ostensibly cover up its true racist, apathetic nature. We demand to be recognized as viable, positive forces on this campus, and in accordance we will fight with every means available to us to see that we are given that respect we deserve.”

  Bypassing the white ROTC protesters, Brooks and McNeil headed inside to talk to Henry De Bernardo. Brooks knew the young man was upset about the lack of funding to support a bigger expansion in black recruitment, but he hadn’t imagined the students would resort to commandeering campus facilities. Over the next several hours, Brooks reiterated that they were trying to bring in more black professors and staff, and as many qualified black students as the budget would allow. And, said Brooks, they would review stock holdings and discrimination claims. He explained that he and the BSU didn’t have any major differences of opinion in this area.

  That afternoon, Brooks stood on the front steps of the complex to read his own statement, saying that he had “genuine regret” that the black students “thought it necessary to disrupt the normal operations of the college. As president, I fully intend to ensure that all allegations are investigated. At the same time, I retain full faith in the competence and integrity of the individuals involved.” The president then invited several of the students to speak with trustees over the weekend. He told the men that he couldn’t snap his fingers and instantly diversify the faculty any more than he could instantly eliminate racism or expand financial aid. None of the students, Brooks said, would face disciplinary action because of the protest.

  After hearing the president’s statement, the protesters voted by a slim margin to leave the building peacefully. As the numbers of spectators dwindled, De Bernardo made it known that the fight wasn’t over. One of Brooks’s colleagues later joked to the president that the alumni were planning to stage a protest to accuse the president of being anti-white.

  When not participating in demonstrations himself, Ed Jones took to chronicling many of the goings-on about campus in his column in The Crusader. He remained a quiet enigma to the men on the corridor—quiet in person and yet fierce in print. While he may have felt a strong sense of brotherhood with the other men, he rarely let them know it.

  Jones’s views came through in his work. He wrote of a tall, thin, bespectacled man who became the sole protector of the ROTC building during one demonstration, bending down to gently cup a dog’s head in his hands while demonstrators stomped around him. He described priests screaming at students instead of praying their “helpless rosary beads,” as well as middle-class youths aroused to only a fleeting anger before settling back to old routines. In another column, he wrote of “the system of American life where the average white child is brought up hating any color save his own, where whites overly squash black life in every sphere of interaction. Into this hostility is born the black child, soon made to think of himself as inferior.”

  Jones’s mother was sick. She’d had several strokes by his senior year, and it was clear that she was ailing. He wanted to pursue graduate studies and find a way to keep writing, but he needed a job. He thought he would probably head to Washington to look for one—if he didn’t get sent to Vietnam first. That was just the way things were. His mother had taught him that dreams set you up for disappointment.

  In late January 1972, Stan Grayson was in the second half of a game against Georgetown, having racked up 14 points, when he fell on his left knee. It started to swell as soon as he stood up. He knew in his heart that his basketball career was over. He later discovered that the kneecap was fractured and his anterior cruciate ligament was torn. Without him, the Crusaders lost 6 of their last 10 games.

  Grayson was crushed. H
e had hoped to play professionally for a season or two. Now he would never reach what had seemed like an attainable goal of scoring 1,000 points in his three years on the team. Eddie Jenkins tried to console him by pointing out that his broken arm and ribs proved to be only temporary setbacks in his game, but they both knew that Stan’s career as an athlete was over. The basketball star had been approached by football scouts from the New England Patriots, who had been impressed by his size and agility, but now, after the injury, they sent him flowers and a letter saying that he had always been a long shot.

  Father Brooks attended every basketball game he could and had always made a point of complimenting Grayson on his play. After the accident, he called Grayson to his office. As Grayson walked in with his bandaged knee, Brooks could see an uncharacteristic air of sadness in the senior’s eyes. There was one thing he immediately wanted the senior to understand: “You know, Stanley, you’re not here because you play basketball.”

  Brooks’s words gave Grayson great comfort. They talked about what else he was hoping to do with his life. His sights were now set on getting to law school or pursuing a career in education. Brooks offered to write him a recommendation to whichever school he was interested in attending and suggested that he turn up the heat on his studies.

  In April Grayson was named “Crusader of the Year”—an award given to a student who excelled not only in sports but also in the classroom and in campus affairs. An article in The Crusader argued that Grayson “may be the most popular student on the Holy Cross campus and one of the finest basketball players in the East.” Coach Donohue mentioned that Grayson was the first black captain of a major sport at Holy Cross. “But the best thing I can say,” he added, “is that I have two young sons at home and I hope, sincerely hope, they grow up to be the man Stan Grayson is.”