Common Ground (57 page)

Abruptly, the Tactical Patrol Force waded into the bobbing sea of women. Quickly, the mothers were herded into two groups, one shoved down the steep hill of Cordis Street, the other pushed back along High Street. Alice had advanced barely four yards when the force of the TPF charge sent her reeling down Cordis Street.

Here and there, the TPF—whose job was to intimidate—used more force than was necessary. Women screamed and stumbled. Some fell against cars or sprawled on the street. A few husbands and sons tried to help their women, but the TPF would brook no male interference. One youth was heaved against an automobile. Several men were arrested.

In five minutes the skirmish was over. For some, good humor returned quickly. Ann Considine, a husky mother of five, had wrested a baton from an MDC policeman. “Yoo-hoo!” she crowed triumphantly. “Anybody lose this?” No policeman would claim it. Finally Superintendent Carpenter stepped forward, while police and women shared a laugh.

On Cordis Street, Alice leaned against a tree, tired but exhilarated. She felt as if she’d just fought the American Revolution. They’d gone up against the toughest cops in the city and survived. For the first time in four days, her neck didn’t hurt at all.

B
orn nine months before John F. Kennedy was elected President, Cassandra Twymon had only the haziest notion of the Southern civil rights movement. Montgomery, Little Rock, Nashville, Greensboro, Birmingham, and Selma were simply names to her, as exotic as Kinshasa and Katmandu. And except for Martin Luther King, most of the blacks who had struggled and prevailed in those places—Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, James Meredith, Fannie Lou Hamer, Hosea Williams—were equally indistinct, so obscured by time that she could never be sure whether the tales she heard about them were fact or fiction.

Once, when she was thirteen, a black teacher assigned her a book about the integration of the University of Georgia. The events which it described took place in January 1961, when Cassandra was not yet a year old. But passages had stayed with her, perhaps because the author, Calvin Trillin, wrote so vividly; perhaps because her mother recalled that the University of Georgia was barely a hundred miles from the family’s early home in Waynesboro; probably because the principal figure was a young black girl with whom she could identify. Years later, Cassandra still remembered Trillin’s evocation of that terrible night on which Georgia students forced Charlayne Hunter and her black classmate Hamilton Holmes out of the university:

“Just after ten a small crowd of students gathered on the lawn in front of Center Myers and unfurled a bed sheet bearing the legend, ‘Nigger Go Home.’ Then three or four of them peeled off from the group, ran toward the dormitory, and flung bricks and Coke bottles through the windows of Charlayne’s room…. As more people came up the hill from the basketball game—a close loss to Georgia Tech—and a few outsiders showed up, the mob grew to about a thousand people, many of them throwing bricks, rocks and firecrackers…. Dean Williams suspended Charlayne and Hamilton, informing them that it was ‘for your own safety and the safety of almost seven thousand other
students.’ … The area around Center Myers looked like a deserted battlefield, with bricks and broken glass on the lawn, small fires in the woods below the dormitory, and the bite of tear gas still in the air [as] Charlayne, who was crying by this time and clutching a statue of the Madonna, walked right out the front door into the state police car, watched only by a few straggling reporters.”

That image lodged somewhere deep in Cassandra’s memory—a lone black girl, frail and defenseless, weeping bitter tears of shame while clasping the Virgin Mary to her breast. It became her private symbol of the civil rights movement, just as for others it was Montgomery mothers walking to work, water hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, or the confrontation at Selma’s Pettus Bridge.

Yet Charlayne’s experience seemed terribly remote, something that had happened very far away and long ago. So as the civil rights movement moved northward and people began talking about a possible battle over school integration in Boston, Cassandra couldn’t imagine that such scenes would actually be repeated there. Her own experience in the Boston schools had been relatively uneventful. She’d always gone to school with whites, and only once—when whites in East Boston sought to retaliate for the killing of René Wagler—had she been the target of racial violence. Although occasionally she still had nightmares about that day, Cassandra wasn’t inclined to worry about such things. By nature cheerful and optimistic—some might say boisterous, even belligerent—she had adopted her mother’s faith in the benefits of integration. Like most of her friends, she was absorbed by rock music, television, clothes, and boys—increasingly boys—but when she paused to think about the schools she supposed things would turn out all right. Indeed, when Arthur Garrity adopted the state racial imbalance plan in 1974, Cassandra and her brother Wayne found themselves on the bus to Brighton High, one of the least troubled of Boston’s high schools. Their younger sister, Rachel, was assigned to Brighton’s equally peaceful William Howard Taft Middle School.

Brighton was the working-class district in northwest Boston where Colin and Joan Diver had lived briefly in 1969–70. Although predominantly white, it was neither as physically isolated nor as ethnically self-conscious as South Boston, Charlestown, and the North End. Irish predominated there, but they were substantially, diluted by Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, even some Hispanics and blacks. Moreover, for years, Brighton High had drawn part of its student body from the black, Hispanic, and Chinese sections of the South End and Lower Roxbury. As early as 1972, 15 percent of its enrollment was black, another 15 percent Chinese. Teachers and students were so accustomed to substantial non-white presence in the school that even when it rose to nearly 50 percent under the state plan, there was remarkably little racial tension.

The Twymons’ year at Brighton was marred by only two incidents. In a corridor on the way to class, an Italian girl once brushed past Cassandra, then turned and said, “Watch out, nigger.” A shoving match developed, but was quickly broken up by teachers. More serious was a prolonged impasse with
one of Wayne’s teachers. First, she refused to accept his transfer into her class; when the office insisted, she told him he’d have to order his own textbook directly from the publisher; and when Wayne complained, she closed the classroom door in his face. Soon the teacher discovered that she had Wayne’s sister in another class and began making derogatory remarks about Cassandra. That was too much for Rachel, who got both children transferred to another teacher.

On balance, the Twymons enjoyed their year at Brighton, especially when they came home each night to watch television coverage of the violence at South Boston and Hyde Park. The kids who braved the fury of those places were street celebrities, seasoned veterans of the school wars. But the Twymons didn’t crave that kind of celebrity. So Cassandra and young Rachel were dismayed when they opened their Phase II assignments on July 7, 1975, to discover that they would be bused into Charlestown that fall—Cassandra to Charlestown High and Rachel to the Edwards Middle School. (Wayne escaped Charlestown altogether by gaining admission to a special pre-college program on Beacon Hill.) Neither girl had ever set foot in Charlestown—by the time they were teenagers, the Town was already regarded as unreceptive to blacks. But their mother had been there—first on school outings to the Bunker Hill Monument and the USS
Constitution;
later when she worked for a time as a packer at Schrafft’s Candy Co. And she vividly remembered the day when cousin Moses Baker had been beaten along the Charlestown docks. She wasn’t very comfortable at the thought of her daughters going to school there.

But if they had to go, she would do what she could to protect them. A few days after the girls got their assignments, Rachel received an invitation to a meeting at City Hall, where parents of children assigned to Charlestown High were to elect a “Racial-Ethnic Parents’ Council.” Judge Garrity had directed that every high school form a council composed of five white parents, five black parents, and—if enough Hispanic or Chinese students were enrolled—five “other minority” parents. Such councils would be elected by separate racial caucuses at the start of each school year. The parent groups, Garrity said, should “help achieve peaceful desegregation [by] meeting regularly to talk frankly and deal with racial problems.” Rachel had served on the council at Brighton High, where black and white parents had worked well together, helping resolve a dispute over racial balance on the basketball team. Believing that this kind of cooperation had contributed to the relative calm at Brighton, Rachel hoped that similar councils might make things easier for her daughters at Charlestown.

But ROAR had condemned the councils, warning that parents who joined them would be “traitors” and urging its supporters throughout the city to boycott the elections. White parents in South Boston had boycotted the councils the year before and now Powder Keg was calling for a similar boycott in Charlestown.

On the evening of July 15, Arnold Walker drove his sister to the meeting. As they approached City Hall along New Congress Street, they could see a cluster of demonstrators in blue Powder Keg jackets, waving placards which
read: “A vote for multiracial councils is a vote for forced busing” and “Don’t be a stooge for Garrity!” The protesters jeered as Rachel, alighting from Arnold’s car, hurried through a corridor of policemen toward the glass doors.

Riding the elevator to the eighth floor, she found five other black parents on folding chairs in one corner of a large conference room. Fifteen Charlestown parents huddled in another corner. The no-man’s-land in between was occupied by Charlestown’s headmaster, Frank Power, and a young history teacher named Vince Braudis, the parent council “coordinator.” After Power had welcomed the parents and Braudis distributed guidelines for the election, each race convened in its own corner. The blacks swiftly completed their “election.” With six parents present, they had just enough to fill the required slots—five representatives and an alternate. But one mother, clearly unnerved by the demonstrators outside and the hostile atmosphere across the room, refused to serve, so Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Brown, Mrs. Maríe Eaves, and Mrs. Edythe Lewis filled four of the regular slots, while Rachel, pleading her church commitments and the year she’d already served on the Brighton council, took the alternate’s spot.

Across the room, white parents were embroiled in a fierce debate with Power and Braudis. Occasionally, the blacks in their corner overheard snatches of the exchange. “I ain’t going to sit in the same room with a bunch of niggers,” one Charlestown mother declared. “You’re sitting in the same room with them right now,” Power replied. “Why can’t you work together?”

Nevertheless the whites, led by a Powder Keg contingent, remained adamant. At 9:30, Power gave up and adjourned the meeting. The blacks hurried out to Mr. Brown’s station wagon, while the whites emerged from the hall holding their fists aloft in a sign of victory, provoking cheers from their supporters.

The evening left Rachel deeply apprehensive. If adults couldn’t even discuss their differences, how could they expect children to resolve theirs? And what was the alternative to discussion? Yet she didn’t entirely abandon hope; Charlestown parents must fear for their children’s safety as much as she did for hers. Eager for a look at the places her children would be going, she quickly accepted an invitation to an August 27 “open house” at Charlestown High.

At dusk, just as lamps began to light up the streets, their yellow school bus crawled up the slope of Breed’s Hill. As it swung onto High Street, led by three police motorcycles, Rachel noticed other police lining both sides of the street. When the bus reached the square and turned left, she could see that the near slope of the Monument grounds was thick with men, women, and children, but only as the twenty-five parents disembarked in front of the high school could she hear the rhythmic chant thundering down at them from the hillside: “Niggers, go home! Niggers, go home!”

Forming a cordon between the bus and the crowd on the hill, the police hurried the minority parents inside the school, where Frank Power led them
upstairs to the third-floor auditorium. The school had done its best to make them feel welcome. A coffee urn and platters of doughnuts were laid out near the entrance, and around the walls teachers waited behind desks, ready to answer questions about their courses. A few white parents were there too, but they kept to themselves; when Rachel looked toward them, their faces were so filled with cold resentment that she didn’t dare approach them.

Scanning the room for a friendly face, Rachel saw only one. James Howard was a black music teacher who had taught her children ten years before at the Dearborn School. She was so relieved to come upon an old acquaintance there that she rushed to his desk, embraced him, and fell into an animated conversation. Howard was almost as glad to see her. One of three black teachers in the school and the only one there that night, he too felt unwelcome. But he was hardly in a position to offer Rachel the reassurance she so obviously sought.

When Frank Power rose to welcome the parents, he did his best to neutralize their hostile reception. Charlestown High, he told them, was going to carry out the law of the land; administrators, teachers, and aides would do their best to assure the safety and well-being of every child. Violence, intimidation, or racial slurs would not be tolerated. “Charlestown High School is dedicated to providing a quality education for every student,” Power said. “As long as I am its headmaster that’s what we’re going to do. I have too much pride in this school to permit anything less. I hope you and your children will soon be as proud as I am to be members of the Charlestown High School community.”

But as Rachel looked over the school later, she wondered whether she could ever be proud of a place as old, shabby, and dreary as this. Paint peeled from ceilings and walls; windows were broken; linoleum was scraped and worn. When she asked to see the cafeteria, she was told that Charlestown had none, the only high school in the city without a hot-lunch program. On the walls she noticed racial epithets only partially erased or painted over: “Welcome Niggers,” “Niggers suck,” “White Power,” “KKK,” “Bus is for Zulu,” and one she would never forget, “Be illiterate. Fight forced busing ”