Common Ground (108 page)

We don’t like niggers, the kids said. We want them out of our neighborhood. If we throw rocks through their windows night after night, eventually they’ll get the message and move out.

But didn’t they see what havoc they were wreaking in the neighborhood? asked Marie. Weren’t they destroying the very community their parents had worked so hard to develop?

No, sard the kids. Their parents wished they could do the same thing. But grown-ups couldn’t throw rocks, so the kids were doing it for them.

By April 3, David Stratman’s moderate caucus conceded that it could do little to halt the confrontation on Centre Street. The initiative now passed to the Urban Court, which, under Judge Dolan’s auspices, launched its mediation effort. On April 24, the community was summoned to a meeting at Our Saviour’s
Lutheran Church, where Urban Court officials explained the undertaking. The plan called for a negotiating panel of ten persons: Alva and Otis Debnam, four white adults, and representatives from the four street gangs. The community selected a student, a retired fireman, a traffic policewoman, and a housewife as the adult representatives. Two Urban Court mediators, Kathy Grant and Barbara Sullivan, spent hours making the rounds of the gang hangouts, until each contingent chose someone to attend the mediation sessions.

On May 1, the participants gathered at Urban Court headquarters for the first session, which went surprisingly well. All parties showed such willingness to talk that Kathy and Barbara called another session for May 8. But, from the start, the second meeting was a disaster. The Roseland Street gang hadn’t attended the first meeting. This time it sent two youths who began shouting at Alva Debnam, “There isn’t any point in talking, because sooner or later we’re going to get you niggers!” Alva told them, “You better not try. You come anywhere near me or my children, I’ll kick your asses down the avenue!” After an hour of mutual recriminations, the meeting broke up in disarray. A third session was never called.

As long as mediation held any hope of success, Judge Dolan reserved judgment on the Mulrey-Flaherty case, so as not to jeopardize the delicate negotiations. Once those efforts collapsed, he came under heavy pressure from the Debnams’ supporters to give the men prison terms as an object lesson to the community. On June 14, twenty neighbors wrote to Dolan, urging him to “act swiftly” in the case. “Unless the Court makes it known that it will not tolerate actions such as those that occurred February 29,” they wrote, “then not only the Debnams but the entire community will continue to be victimized.”

A week later, Dolan responded by finding both men guilty on all charges. Still seeking to keep jurisdiction over the matter and to involve the community in its resolution, he sent the case to an Urban Court “disposition panel” for a recommended sentence. The panel proposed that the cases be continued without a finding for six months as a means of assuring the men’s good behavior. Dolan agreed, provided the defendants agreed to pay for all windows broken at the Debnams’ house during that period. But Mulrey and Flaherty flatly refused that condition. Reluctantly, Dolan then sentenced Mulrey to twenty days in prison, Flaherty to ten days, suspending both sentences and putting the men on probation for six months. Just as the judge had feared, Mulrey and Flaherty immediately sought new trials in Superior Court, where several months later charges against both were dropped.

The failure of police and courts to deliver a stern warning may have paved the way for a fresh outburst of violence, or perhaps it was only the onset of summer weather which sent the gangs into action. On the evening of June 13, white teenagers drinking beer and watching a softball game at Town Field became embroiled with a group of Puerto Ricans from nearby Geneva Avenue. Before the melee was over, Jackie Pembroke, a seventeen-year-old high school student, lay bleeding to death from a knife wound in the chest. Later in June,
three more youths were stabbed and four policemen injured in three nights of bitter street fighting between roving gangs of whites and blacks.

The renewed racial combat proved particularly discomfiting to organizers of Boston’s Bicentennial celebration. Ever since the elaborate municipal festivities got underway in April 1975, there had been a certain irony in commemorating Boston’s eighteenth-century struggle for the Rights of Man against the background of Boston’s contemporary collision over human rights. But now the celebration was about to culminate in the Bicentennial Moment itself—July 4, 1976—to be marked in Boston by a parade led by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery, a reading of the Declaration of Independence from the State House balcony, a patriotic oration at Faneuil Hall, and, finally, a mammoth concert on the banks of the Charles. Just as thousands of dignitaries, tourists, and newspeople were about to descend on the city, Dorchester’s racial warfare threatened to preempt the headlines. As the great day approached, Mayor White ordered police officials to do everything in their power to halt the violence.

Perhaps because the troubles had spread to other parts of Dorchester, Centre Street was relatively peaceful in those last days of June, and Alva and Otis decided to celebrate the nation’s two hundredth birthday—as well as their own survival—with a giant barbecue in their backyard. “There hasn’t been much reason to party around here these past few months,” Alva told Mike Davis. “We’re going to make up for lost time. It’s going to be a blast!”

For days in advance, the Debnams, their family and friends prepared in earnest. Alva’s mother baked a big chocolate cake. Brother Tommy and his girlfriend bought the bread and rolls. Brother Fred took responsibility for the liquor and beer. Sister Helen got the ice cream. For two straight nights, Alva was in the kitchen nearly nonstop, baking sweet potato pie, white potato pie, coconut pie, and frying up a huge batch of chicken. Early on July 4, brother John—still a soul food cook at Bob the Chef—put coals on the grill and started turning out his succulent barbecued ribs, along with T-bone steaks, hamburgers, and hot dogs. Charlene and Maria set up the stereo system in a window of their parents’ room. Young Otis put on a big stack of disco and rhythm-and-blues records, which were soon resounding through the neighborhood.

By late morning the yard filled up with celebrators. Most of the family was there, with the notable exception of Rachel Twymon, who was in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, George. (Alva’s troubles on Centre Street had done nothing to improve relations between the sisters. As far as Rachel was concerned, Alva had brought the problems down on her own head by her insistence on buying a house in white Dorchester.) But four of Rachel’s children were present: Cassandra, Rachel, Wayne, and Fred. Blacks from the South End and Roxbury mixed easily with white defenders like Eileen Bisson, Sandy McCleary, Janet Connors, and Paul Couming, neighbors like David and Sally
Stratman, David and Ellen Rome, Paul Tafe and Marie Garrett. Two neighborhood kids, Jim Sorenson and Steve Youmans, scampered through the yard with young Otis, setting off Roman candles, shaking up Coke bottles and spraying each other with the brown fizz. Seventy blacks and thirty whites filled the backyard all through the long, lazy afternoon, eating, drinking, talking, and singing, savoring that special moment in American history.

Late in the day, most of the partygoers drifted off, many of them headed for the Boston Pops concert on the Charles. The family and a few friends settled down at three card tables, set up in the shade of a spreading oak, for the Walkers’ traditional round of whist. When the mosquitoes began biting around eight o’clock, they moved the card game up to the kitchen while the kids took the stereo unit into the empty room for a disco party.

The Debnams’ cookout hadn’t gone unnoticed on Centre Street. All through the neighborhood, bedecked that day with American flags and patriotic bunting, whites had grumbled at the commotion around No. 185. Never had anyone at that end of Centre Street seen so many “colored” so close at hand. Their cars were parked in every available spot for blocks around. The music from their stereo could be heard a hundred yards away. Some of the neighbors, busy with their own celebrations, hardly noticed. Others shrugged and said, “Well, it’s a holiday.” But more than a few were furious. “They’re rubbing our noses in it,” one mother told her daughter as they sat in beach chairs on the front lawn. “They’re showing us what it’s going to be like when they take over.”

Two blocks away, in Wainwright Park, a hundred white youths had gathered for another traditional July 4 event. Every year for as long as anyone could remember, the Wainwright Park gang and its friends had celebrated the holiday with a huge bonfire. Early in the afternoon, they began assembling in the park, playing basketball on a court at one end, softball on a rough diamond at the other, drinking beer and smoking dope on a stretch of macadam scrawled with graffiti: “Gays Suck, Liberals Suck, Brits Suck, Niggers Suck.” At dusk, they stacked their wood in a ten-foot pyramid just behind second base, where, doused with gasoline, it ignited with a great rush, the flames leaping fifteen feet in the air, lighting up the severe façades of the three-deckers around the park. Well into the night, the kids cavorted about the blazing pyre, celebrating the day much as colonial youths two hundred years before had marked such occasions.

As Dorchester’s blacks and whites each observed the Bicentennial in their own fashion, more than 400,000 others had gathered on the banks of the Charles for the Boston Pops’ 47th Annual July Fourth Concert. It was an astonishing throng which jammed the esplanade that evening, spreading out on blankets and beach chairs from the Hatch Shell down Storrow Drive and spilling onto the Cambridge shore. More than 25,000 watched from sailboats and motor
launches anchored in the river; hundreds more perched in trees up and down the shore. It was the largest crowd ever to attend a live concert anywhere in the world, the largest assembled for any purpose in Boston history—but an overwhelmingly white middle-class crowd, with nary a black in sight. At 8:30 p.m., to a standing ovation, eighty-two-year-old Arthur Fiedler stepped onto the podium, raised his baton, and launched into Weber’s “Jubilee Overture,” followed by Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor.

About 9:00 p.m., the bonfire in Wainwright Park had begun to die down and a foraging party was dispatched for more wood. Two neighborhood teenagers, Bill Thomason and Jim McCarthy, found their way up Melbourne Street to Centre, then east one block to the Debnams’ house. The yard was deserted by then, the only sounds the disco beat from the front room, the card players’ chatter from the kitchen. Thomason and McCarthy crept along the white picket fence which squared off the front yard. Planting their feet, hauling on the rail, they ripped up an eight-foot section, then raced down Centre Street bearing their prize.

At 9:05, the orchestra in the Hatch Shell brought the Tchaikovsky concerto to a triumphant conclusion and broke for intermission. The vast audience stirred, people reaching into wicker hampers for a sandwich or a deviled egg, grabbing a beer from the cooler, smoking a cigarette. Low murmurs of satisfaction rumbled along the river.

From the windows of the empty room where the young folks were dancing, Cassandra Twymon caught a glimpse of the picket fence being yanked from the lawn. “Somebody’s messing with the fence,” she yelled.

Rushing to the window just in time to see Thomason and McCarthy in flight down Centre Street, the young blacks bolted to the door. As they passed the kitchen, where the adults were still at the whist table, somebody shouted, “Pilgrims outside!”

With instincts honed from months of such alarms, Alva, Otis, Fred, John, Jo-Jo, Tommy, Helen, Mike, and a half dozen others dropped their cards and rushed down the stairs. Soon, some thirty blacks were thundering along Centre Street in hot pursuit of the missing fence.

At 9:22, his snow-white hair and mustache blazing in the arc lights, Arthur Fiedler returned to the podium and, poised before a great mound of white chrysanthemums and red carnations, crashed into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” All along the esplanade and across the river on the Cambridge shore, the crowd rose to their feet. When the last strains of the anthem had washed across the water, Fiedler invited his listeners to “sing the patriotic songs with us, would you, please.”

Consulting printed lyrics distributed earlier, the throng raised its collective
voice, first hesitatingly in “America” and “America the Beautiful,” then more confidently in “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Wheeling from Centre Street onto Melbourne Street, the blacks could see a crowd of whites gathered around the bonfire in the center of the park. As the first wave of black teenagers reached the chain link fence around the basketball court, someone shouted, “Here come the niggers!” With that, the Wainwright Park gang and its friends surged from the park, chasing the blacks back toward Centre Street. Before long, thirty blacks and fifty whites were at war with rocks, bricks, bottles, beer cans, two-by-fours, and porch railings.

At 9:34, Fiedler raised his baton once more and led the eighty white-jacketed musicians into their traditional finale, “The 1812 Overture.” As Tchaikovsky’s heroic phrases swelled toward a climax, they were joined by sixteen cannon shots from a battery of 105-mm. howitzers on the riverbank, a tintinnabulation of bells from the Church of the Advent, geysers of red, white, and blue water from a fireboat behind the band shell, and a shower of feathery white fireworks. As puffs of gray smoke drifted into the black sky, the crowd cheered ecstatically. Long-haired girls perched on their boyfriends’ shoulders, fathers held children aloft, a priest from South Boston waved a huge American flag. From the roof of a nearby building, where a CBS crew was concluding the network’s Bicentennial coverage, correspondent Charles Colling wood said, “Boston has never seen anything like this and probably never will again.” In New York, Walter Cronkite nodded his assent. “In a day marked by Crescendos,” he said, “this is perhaps the high point.”

As the donnybrook on Melbourne Street reached
its
crescendo, Alva’s brother Tommy raced back to the Debnam house, where he had parked his brown Buick sedan. Jumping behind the wheel, he gunned the car down Centre Street and swerved through the melee into Melbourne Street. Misjudging the turn, he crashed into the far curb, coming to rest with one wheel on the sidewalk. Almost immediately the car was surrounded by a swarm of angry whites, pounding on the windows with fists and sticks. When Tommy wrenched open a door and jumped out, one youth heaved a trash barrel at him, while another aimed a porch railing at his head. He ducked back inside.