Common Ground (55 page)

The effort was headed up by Walsh, a former Catholic priest. With little knowledge of Boston’s political subculture, Walsh was regarded by the Mayor’s office with ill-disguised contempt, but his five years in the priesthood, his single-minded devotion to desegregation, and his very distance from Boston’s political infighting all commended him to Garrity, who increasingly came to rely on his advice. After observing the violence of that first fall, Walsh concluded that city, state, and federal officials had underestimated South Boston’s capacity for resistance and had done little to contain it. He was determined to avoid that mistake.

In planning for Phase II, Walsh focused on Charlestown. He sought out veteran policemen, who told him stories from the annals of Charlestown crime: tales of the loopers, epic brawls at the Blue Mirror and Alibi Cafe, the feud between the McLaughlins and the McLeans, bodies floating in the harbor or dismembered on vacant lots. The cops passed on rumors that Townie gangs were planning to block Garrity’s order with tactics of their own—that cars would be overturned on bridges to block the school buses, that firebombs would be tossed through bus windows, that machine guns would come out of closets. The former priest concluded that busing into Charlestown could prove “one holy hell.”

So he set to work trying to smother the smoldering fuse. As point man, he selected a thirty-five-year-old Boston Edison meter reader named Moe Gillen.
At first glance, Gillen hardly seemed a likely spearhead for the United States Justice Department. A blunt-spoken Townie, fiercely proud of his community and scornful of the “pointy-heads” who wanted to change it, he was adamantly opposed to the Garrity order. Moreover, his wife, Hunna, was a founding member of Powder Keg. But Moe Gillen’s very pride in the Town had led him to become active in the Kennedy Center, Charlestown’s anti-poverty agency, where he rose to become chairman of its community affairs committee. Gradually he came under the influence of the center’s two professionals, Director John Gardiner and Assistant Director Bob O’Brien, both of whom strongly recommended him to Marty Walsh.

At first Moe distrusted the man from the Justice Department, fearing that Walsh wanted to turn him into “a stooge for Garrity,” but gradually the two Irishmen established a rapport. Walsh made one particularly telling point. At that very moment, Arthur Garrity—with his masters and experts—was devising a full-scale Phase II plan which would certainly include Charlestown. In Eddie McCormack, South Boston had a persuasive advocate within the planning process. But Charlestown had none. Jesus, Moe thought, Charlestown was going to get screwed once again! They’d better get their oar into this thing before it was too late.

In early 1975, Moe formed a group which he hoped could evolve a reasoned community position, and on February 21, the Charlestown Education Committee gathered for the first time in the boardroom of the Kennedy Center. Around the table sat many of Charlestown’s recognized “leaders”: State Representative Dennis Kearney; Little City Hall Manager Bobbie Delaney; John Gardiner and Bob O’Brien; Father Robert Boyle, pastor of St. Mary’s, and Father Lawrence Buckley, a curate at St. Catherine’s; Gloria Conway and Peg Pigott; and representatives of the Boys’ Club, the Bunker Hill Health Center, the Bunker Hill Community College, and Charlestown’s public schools.

Powder Keg was amply represented by Pat Russell and five other parents, but Moe Gillen wanted to deal with “known quantities,” people he trusted. He and Alice McGoff had grown up playing together on Soley Street, and since Alice had recently been elected secretary of the Charlestown High School Home and School Association, he asked her to represent the association on the new committee. At the last moment, he added two Charlestown High School students who would be directly involved if the judge included the town in Phase II. His choices were Lisa McGoff and her friend Trudy. Alice, Lisa, and Trudy sat side by side at the big table, proud to be part of these deliberations.

But at the head of the table sat Marty Walsh as “ex officio” member. Though he was aggressively friendly, calling them all by their first names, Alice couldn’t forget that he was a government agent, there to implement the judge’s order, an edict to which she would never bow. Though they might join forces temporarily, Alice couldn’t bring herself to trust him.

That afternoon, Walsh told the committee it was too late for them to testify
before Garrity’s masters, but they could still submit a written statement. John Gardiner, Bob O’Brien, and Gloria Conway were appointed to draft the statement, and four days later they returned with one which the committee promptly adopted. Charlestown’s “Plea for Mercy” urged the judge to declare a “moratorium” on all compulsory busing in Boston. But its central argument was a plea for preservation of community as a value competitive with—yet ironically essential to—equality. An ethnically or racially homogeneous neighborhood respected another community’s integrity more easily than a weak, threatened neighborhood did. Thus, strong neighborhoods were the solid building blocks of a healthily diverse city. The statement ended on a plaintive note: “We ask the Court to forestall a crisis for our children which, though not of the Court’s making, is within the power of the Court to alleviate.”

But it was too late for such accommodations. Garrity’s masters were concluding their deliberations. And when they submitted their Phase II plan to Garrity on March 31, it did little to relieve Charlestown’s anxiety.

On April 2, the committee met again to assess the plan’s impact on their community. Whatever enthusiasm there might be elsewhere for Eddie McCormack’s political settlement, it didn’t extend to Charlestown. Bob O’Brien told the committee that Charlestown would bear a disproportionate share of the city’s busing, and when he completed his analysis, parents around the table sat in stunned silence. Alice glared angrily up the table at Marty Walsh. Lisa and Trudy were in tears.

So as O’Brien sat down that evening to draft the community’s response, it was edged with frustration and anger. Adopted by the Education Committee on April 7 and entitled “A Cry of Protest,” it called the masters’ treatment of Charlestown “inconsistent, inequitable and counter-productive.” First, it argued that Community School District 8, into which Charlestown fell, failed to meet the masters’ own criteria for a “natural” unit. The unusually diverse district included eight neighborhoods containing, among others, Irish, Italians, Chinese, blacks, and Hispanics. Moreover, while District 8 had only about 10 percent of the city’s students, it accounted for almost one-third of its compulsory busing. “This inequity is compounded by the fact that of all the neighborhoods of Boston, the District 8 communities are among the least able to accommodate the burdens by virtue of their universally low status in terms of economic opportunity and resources.”

The committee also objected to the masters’ recommendations to transform Charlestown High from a district high school into a “magnet” school, offering retailing and electrical training for students from throughout the city.

The protest ended with a thinly veiled warning: “In the absence of constructive action by the Court, we can anticipate a recurrence in our community of the tragic disorders and street protests which characterized the attempted implementation of Phase I in other communities of Boston.”

This time, with Marty Walsh underlining the committee’s warning, Garrity heeded some of Charlestown’s protests—in his revised plan, released on May
10, 1975, Charlestown High was retained as a district school. But the community still bore a heavy share of the Phase II busing. Garrity’s final plan called for 1,209 blacks and Hispanics to be bused into Charlestown High, the Edwards Middle School, and the town’s four elementary schools, while 848 Townies were to be bused into Roxbury and the South End.

But well before Garrity completed his deliberations, Alice McGoff had abandoned hope for justice from the federal bench. As 1975 wore on, she had become exasperated with the notion of a non-elected judge handing down edicts on where, how, and with whom her children should be educated. She found it particularly galling that Garrity didn’t even live in the city on which he was passing judgment. How could a two-toilet Irishman from Wellesley understand what it was like to be a Charlestown widow trying to raise seven children in a five-room apartment in the Bunker Hill housing project? But that was what liberals were like, she had come to understand; it was easy to be a liberal about other people’s problems. Maybe that was why all the problems were in the city and all the liberals in the suburbs.

Alice learned something more about liberals that winter when she and other Bostonians tried to compel the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women to address busing as a women’s issue. The Governor’s Commission, a forty-one-woman advisory body, had called a meeting with two principal purposes: for Governor Michael Dukakis to proclaim 1975 “International Women’s Year” in Massachusetts, and for representatives from Governor’s Commissions throughout New England to confer about issues to be raised at the International Women’s Congress in Mexico City.

But any Massachusetts woman was welcome, and when ROAR heard about the meeting it dispatched its own delegation to City Hall. Alice McGoff had a special reason for wanting to be there. A week earlier she’d seen a photograph of Governor Dukakis walking one of his children to school in suburban Brookline—a provocation to many Boston parents who no longer enjoyed the privilege of walking their children to school.

At eleven that Saturday morning in January 1975, Alice and eighty other ROAR women paraded into the conference room on the eighth floor of City Hall, brandishing placards and small American flags. Alice wore her white tam-o’-shanter and a blue windbreaker with her name stitched in white birthday-cake script on her left shoulder, a big powder keg with a smoldering fuse embroidered on the breast. Taking a seat in the second row, she glanced up at the stage, where the women sat dressed in their Town and Country tweeds, Pierre Cardin silk scarves, and eighty-five-dollar alligator shoes. They seemed to be looking down at her with contempt, and that look caught Alice like a punch beneath the ribs, sucking all the air out of her. My God, she thought, have I really sunk that low? Am I really that disreputable? Then, with a rush of hot, red anger, she thought: No, I may live in the projects. I may be poor. But I’m still a Kirk. A Kirk from Monument Avenue. Nobody was going to look at her that way and get away with it.

For a few moments the commission members ignored the newcomers, proceeding
through their agenda. But the ROAR women wouldn’t be brushed off that easily. At a preordained signal, they launched into their anthem, a parody of the official state song:

This brought a sharp rap of the gavel from Chairwoman Ann Blackham, a Winchester real estate agent and former vice-president of the National Federation of Republican Women. “Ladies,” Mrs. Blackham said sternly, “this is an open meeting. You are welcome to attend as long as you maintain decorum. But I am afraid we cannot permit this kind of disruption.”

Elsewhere in the room, other confrontations broke out. One slim redhead in a cashmere jacket turned to Alice McGoff and demanded, “What are you doing here?”

“Exactly what you are, honey,” she replied.

“But this is the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women.”

“And I’m a woman,” Alice shot back. “Or the last time I looked I was.”

Pixie Palladino, her stocky torso draped in a “Stop Forced Busing” T-shirt, rose in the front row and began reading a prepared statement. The nurturing, raising, and educating of children was a mother’s function, Pixie argued, and it was the duty of a commission on the status of women to defend mothers’ rights against usurpation by the state. Yet, she said, the commission and the Governor had ignored the plight of Boston’s mothers. “Why don’t you represent us? We are poor people locked into an economically miserable situation. All we want is to be mothers to the children God gave us. We are not opposed to anyone’s skin. We are opposed to forced busing of our children to schools other than in our neighborhood. You are supposed to defend women’s rights. Why don’t you defend ours?”

Ann Blackham banged her gavel harder now. “The commission has no mandate to get involved in busing. That has nothing to do with what we’re discussing. Now, please, you are our guests here, and if you don’t behave, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“No!” shouted Pixie, gesturing toward the commission, whose members came principally from such suburban towns as Wellesley, Belmont, Newton, and Lincoln. “You’re
our
guests. This is
our
City Hall. No bunch of ladies from the suburbs is going to kick the women of Boston out of their own City Hall.”

After conferring with her advisers, Mrs. Blackham concluded that the atmosphere
was too tense to risk an appearance by the Governor. A few minutes later the meeting broke up in tumult and acrimony.

Alice was sorry it ended that way. She had nothing in principle against women’s liberation, for she came from a long line of strong, independent women. Her mother had been a gutsy dame who had survived a series of crippling illnesses to raise a houseful of children and keep them on the straight and narrow. Her aunt Mary had held a responsible position in City Hall for years. Cousin Mamie had worked at the Registry of Deeds, been a friend of Mayor Curley’s, a union organizer, and a suffragette. In fact, Alice had always thought of herself as a liberated woman. In one sense, there was nothing quite so liberating as a husband’s death, the burden of supporting your family and raising a bunch of kids by yourself.

As a woman on her own, she could well understand why women like her cousin Mamie had fought for the vote, equal pay for equal work, the right to a good education. But this kooky new movement that had sprung up in recent years made no sense to her at all. It seemed to be led by a bunch of college girls and chichi women from the suburbs who stewed over such burning issues as whether a girl could join an all-male soccer team or whether ads for cosmetics and designer jeans were “demeaning” to women. Once she had seen a bunch of college-age demonstrators of both sexes all pile into a single bathroom to “integrate” the toilet. No wonder these women seemed oblivious to her needs.