Common Ground (106 page)

The priests who manned St. Mark’s knew that times had changed, that their Church no longer played a dominant role in its parishioners’ lives. Attendance at Mass was sharply down, increasingly limited to the halt and the aged. On racial issues, in particular, the priests moved with great circumspection. Pastor Tom Mooney was a cautious man, disinclined to challenge the beliefs of his flock. Among his three curates, only Father Joe Greer showed any impulse to address delicate issues. When Humberto Medeiros established a Cardinal’s Coordinating Committee to mobilize priests and nuns behind Garrity’s order, Greer was one of only two Dorchester clergymen willing to enlist, helping to coordinate a program for priests to ride school buses into South Boston and, on several occasions, preaching on the subject. But after several parishioners called him a Communist and a woman in a neighborhood restaurant threw a salad in his face, even Greer trod more carefully.

The Debnam situation posed a particularly acute problem for St. Mark’s because the family’s house was flanked on two sides by the parish school and its playground. Most of the attacks came from the playground itself, boys heaving rocks and bottles over a ten-foot mesh fence, then fleeing toward the convent at the rear of the compound. On several occasions, the Debnams and their allies approached Father Greer, urging him to use the Church’s moral authority to stop the attacks. “I think you’re exaggerating our power,” Greer told them. “The young people don’t listen to us anymore. Our school has had several hundred windows broken. I’ve been held up myself. My car’s been stolen. What can we do?” When Mike Davis wondered why the neighborhood kids were so hostile to blacks, Greer recalled that when he was growing up in Roxbury, black kids beat him up almost every day. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s the way things are in Boston.” When Otis Debnam complained that vandals used the school yard as a privileged sanctuary for attacks on the house, Greer said, “I sympathize, Mr. Debnam, but there’s not much we can do about that. For centuries the Church has offered sanctuary to outlaws.”

Greer had gladly authorized the first community meeting in the school auditorium, but after receiving heated complaints from neighborhood youths, he was reluctant to make it available again.

“Don’t you think you’re moving a little fast?” he asked a RUN delegation. “It takes a while to undress the human being and put new clothes on him. You have to have education, you have to have environmental change, you have to have theological change. It takes a long time.”

“We don’t have time, Father,” said Eileen Bisson. “We’ve got to change this neighborhood now.”

“Okay,” Greer said, “you can have the hall. But let me warn you, people are getting a little upset. I think you should be very cautious.”

Impatient with Greer’s equivocation, RUN invited Father Bill Mullin of adjacent St. Ambrose’s Parish to address the meeting. The other Dorchester
priest on the Cardinal’s Coordinating Committee, Mullin was a leader of the Association of Boston Urban Priests, an ardent advocate of black rights. Church etiquette required that he inform St. Mark’s priests that he would be speaking in their parish, but Joe Greer hardly put out the welcome mat. “You don’t know the neighborhood,” he said. “It’d be better if you didn’t come.” Never one to shrink from confrontation, Mullin resolved to come anyway.

Perhaps because an outside priest was expected, Father Tom Mooney, St. Mark’s pastor, made a point of appearing at the school hall that Sunday evening. Seventy neighbors filled the front rows as Mooney—standing beneath an American flag and a picture of Jesus Christ—delivered a brief invocation, then excused himself to attend a wake.

Paul Couming of RUN introduced Bill Mullin, who spoke briefly on the Church’s concern for racial equality, citing the Catholic Bishops’ declaration that “segregation cannot be reconciled with the Christian view of our fellow man.” As he moved on to the Debnams’ plight, eight young men carrying beer cans drifted into the rear of the hall, where they struck up a loud conversation with Father Greer. When Mullin tried to make himself heard over their banter, they shouted derisively at him.

“Who are you?” yelled a man in an orange T-shirt. “Where the hell were you when I was growing up around here?”

“I’m Bill Mullin from St. Ambrose.”

“We don’t need any outsiders around here,” yelled a man in a “Spaceman Bill Lee” T-shirt.

The heckling continued as Otis Debnam spoke of his family’s experience. “We came here looking for a new house,” he said. “We weren’t looking for any trouble.”

“Oh yeh?” shouted a man in a green football jersey. “What about that white girl who got burned to death in Roxbury? Who did that? The niggers, that’s who.”

The shouting grew still louder as Tom Couming, Paul’s brother, described the ravages of blockbusting in Mattapan. When Tom appealed for quiet, he met fresh abuse.

“We don’t have to shut up,” said the man in the T-shirt. “This is our hall.”

Paul Couming tried to regain control. “If anybody wants to say anything,” he urged, “ask the chair for recognition.”

“Recognition, shit!” shouted the man in the football jersey, moving down the aisle toward the speakers’ table. “I don’t recognize you!”

Suddenly the T-shirted man grabbed the table and flipped it on its side, sending Father Mullin, Paul Couming, and others sprawling backwards. Wading through the debris, he threw a wild roundhouse at Tom Couming, then wheeled on Otis Debnam. “We don’t want any fucking niggers in this neighborhood,” he shouted. “We’re not going to break your windows anymore. We’re going to burn your house professionally.” With that, he punched Otis in the gut. Otis countered with an overhand right.

Similar fights broke out all over the auditorium. Someone knocked Tom Couming down, then pummeled him about the head. Someone else jumped on Paul Couming’s back, dragging him to the floor. Another man advanced on Sandy McCleary of RUN, bellowing, “You fucking white bitch,” then threw a chair at her.

Most of the audience ran from the hall, several of the women sobbing. One screamed, “For God’s sake, somebody call the police!”

In fact, a plainclothes policeman had been present for most of the meeting. Roy Coveil, community relations officer from District 11, had been assigned to monitor the proceedings. Just before the attack on the speakers’ table, he had realized things were getting out of hand and rushed out to summon reinforcements. After the fighting had raged for five minutes, a half dozen police cruisers converged on St. Mark’s. When the police burst into the hall, several skirmishes were still underway.

“Clear the hall!” a sergeant bellowed. The eight young men rushed out the door, heading toward Dorchester Avenue. “That’s them!” RUN chorused. “Those are the guys who broke up the meeting.”

But the police made no arrests. Later, at an angry meeting in the Debnams’ living room, Roy Covell explained that in neighborhood disputes, it was up to the aggrieved parties to bring their own complaints. The Debnams and their supporters should swear out warrants against the eight men. But when the Debnams and Coumings went to Dorchester Municipal Court the next morning, the clerk refused to issue warrants without the men’s full names and addresses. John Doe warrants were available only to police officers, not private citizens, he said. Although RUN didn’t know who the men were, it had taken the precaution of having a photographer present in the school hall, and came to court that morning armed with pictures showing some of the men’s faces, but the clerk adamantly refused to accept the photographs as identification.

After several hours of fruitless argument, Alva Debnam called the Boston office of the FBI, where she eventually reached Otis Cox, a black agent serving as its civil rights coordinator. Only after Cox called the clerk did the Dorchester court finally issue John Doe and Richard Roe warrants for two men whom the photographs showed assaulting Tom and Paul Couming. When police at District 11 saw the pictures they immediately recognized one of the men as Stephen Mulrey, a twenty-one-year-old former resident of the area who had moved to South Boston but still hung out with his buddies at a private Dorchester Avenue bar called the Shawmut Club.

Once the Shawmut had been an important neighborhood institution. Through the fifties and sixties, the men who congregated there were public-spirited citizens who held Christmas parties and Las Vegas nights, often donating the proceeds to charity. But gradually the club was appropriated by a younger crowd who used it as an after-hours spot for heavy drinking and pool and card games. Many of its members no longer lived in the neighborhood, but returned there regularly, seeking the camaraderie of their youth. And as blacks drew closer to Dorchester Avenue, the Shawmut became a rallying
ground for those who wanted an eleventh-hour stand along the “Irish Maginot Line.”

After police put the word out on the street, Mulrey’s lawyer brought him in. The second man was quickly identified as William J. Flaherty, twenty-two, of Dorchester, also a Shawmut Club habitué. The pair claimed that RUN’s radicals had refused to let them speak and then attacked them, forcing them to strike back in self-defense. The authorities did not believe them. Mulrey was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (to wit, a steel chair), assault with a fist, and threats to commit a crime. Flaherty was charged with assault and battery and threats to commit a crime. The case was assigned to a young district judge named James W. Dolan.

Appointed to the Dorchester Municipal Court in 1974, Jim Dolan set out to restore some measure of authority to a bench badly tarnished by Jerome Troy’s malfeasance. But he soon discovered that his limited powers made it difficult to dispense anything remotely approaching justice. For one thing, district judges couldn’t sentence a juvenile to prison. Any offender under the age of seventeen could be committed only to the Department of Youth Services, which had sole discretion as to how long—if at all—he should remain in custody. It was by no means unusual for the department to release a young person in less than twenty-four hours. Since many crimes which came before district judges—vandalism, malicious destruction of property, larceny, simple assault—were commonly committed by juveniles, Dolan found himself relatively powerless in these areas.

Moreover, under Massachusetts’
de novo
system, any defendant convicted by a district judge had the right to an entirely new trial in Superior Court. Because of the heavy volume of criminal cases passing through Boston’s courts, it was hoped that defendants facing relatively trivial charges would accept disposition by a district judge; yet since every American had a constitutional right to a trial by his peers, they could exercise that right by calling for a jury trial in Superior Court. In practice, many defendants convicted at the district level, and virtually anyone sentenced to prison, demanded a new trial, which, because of the heavy backlog, often was delayed as long as a year. During this time the defendant was on the streets under no supervision, and when the case finally came to trial, it frequently led—because witnesses or police were unavailable or because other events had intervened—to a sharp reduction, even dismissal, of charges.

To keep control of such cases, Judge Dolan often gave a suspended sentence. This put the offender under the Municipal Court’s own probation department and allowed the judge to sentence him directly to jail—with no right of appeal—if he violated the terms of probation. When civic associations complained that Dolan was “soft” on crime, he tried to explain that, whatever sentence he might feel a defendant deserved, he was compelled to make a trade-off between the abstract demands of justice and the realities of an imperfect judicial system.

Dolan had another way of keeping such cases in his jurisdiction, for he had at his disposal a federally subsidized mediation unit called the Urban Court Program. Such operations had cropped up throughout the country, grounded in the notion that many “crimes” which came before local courts were in fact disputes between relatives, friends, and neighbors, better handled through non-punitive mediation. To facilitate that process, the Dorchester Urban Court trained community residents to sit on “mediation panels” which sought to resolve conflicts and “disposition panels” which advised judges on what sentence to impose.

When the Mulrey-Flaherty case came before him on April 1, 1976, Dolan saw it as a perfect opportunity for community mediation. Deep-seated racial hostilities, he believed, could not be corrected by a stretch in prison but might prove amenable to more subtle techniques. That afternoon, Dolan referred the case to the Urban Court.

Leaders of the mediation program disagreed. Mulrey and Flaherty had no prior relationship with the Debnams, they noted; Mulrey didn’t even live in the neighborhood. The case didn’t lend itself to mediation. But in referring the matter back to Dolan for trial, the Urban Court suggested that it tackle the larger issue of the Debnams’ right to peaceful enjoyment of their new home. White youths in the neighborhood must be shown that the Debnams were human beings too, that they had the same rights as other Americans. The Debnams and RUN might benefit from confronting their antagonists across a table, from seeing that they were real people with their own quotient of fears and anxieties. Dolan agreed. On April 3, he authorized the Urban Court to mediate the increasingly violent confrontation on Centre Street.

To Alva, Otis, and their defenders, the situation had long since passed the mediation stage. Between February 29 and April 3, hardly a day had gone by without some sort of attack by whites, whom the Debnams had taken to calling “the Pilgrims.” All through the long winter nights, the family could hear the clatter of missiles on the gray clapboards. Every morning, the three Debnam children—Charlene, Maria, and young Otis—patrolled the yards, collecting rocks, bottles, and beer cans. By March 7, the Hughes Glass Company had replaced seventeen windows at a cost of $302.75. Over the next month, the vandals claimed another nine windows. Eventually the Debnams installed Lexon, a shatterproof plastic, at thirty-three dollars a pane. Even with their double salaries, the cost strained the family budget.