Common Ground (84 page)

She mustered all the courtesy she could. When she knew the answer to a question, she gave it; when she didn’t—and frequently she was as much in the dark as any tenant—she said she couldn’t help. She processed complaints as quickly as possible, but with maintenance money nearly exhausted, broken windows and leaky roofs often went unrepaired for months. When tenants blamed her for the delays, she sometimes lost her temper, venting her anger on friends and neighbors—harsh words which stung. Soon tenants were grumbling, complaining that ever since Rachel took that job in the office she thought she was better than they were. Finally, the Tenants’ Council filed a formal complaint, charging that she was “irreconcilably incompatible” with them.

Rachel’s position at Methunion—halfway between the church and the tenants—had long been tinged with ambiguity. Now it was made even more difficult by the church’s apparent lack of concern over Methunion’s financial crisis. After the board of the Columbus Avenue Housing Corporation, composed entirely of church members, failed to respond to the government’s suit, the Tenants’ Council had angrily demanded that they be given a greater role in running the project. A senior board member replied, “We provided apartments for you people when you were homeless. We kept a roof over your heads all these years. Now you come in and berate us for what we haven’t done. Well, I’ll tell you this. I’d rather sell the project than let you have it.”

Gradually the board relented and eventually six tenants—including Ray Diggs and Adrian du Cille—were elected to serve on it with five church members and Bobby McClain. But by then McClain seemed weary of Methunion and its troubles. For months, government agencies and community organizations tried to negotiate with him on Methunion’s future, but he rebuffed their overtures. A high-ranking HUD official, in a memo to his superior, noted:
“Rev. McClain has been very uncooperative. He never returns any of our phone calls nor answers any of our letters…. It appears that Rev. McClain’s uncooperativeness was a major reason for the default.” Another HUD official wrote: “Rev. McClain has shown no interest at all in this project.”

McClain was as much an enigma to his own congregation as to HUD. In the pulpit he was a dazzling orator who could wring shouts of joy and affirmation from his parishioners. In lay gatherings he was a forceful leader, a committed social activist who reminded some of his followers of Martin Luther King. But he was deeply suspicious of whites, which made it difficult for him to work with government agencies; in addition, he often seemed preoccupied with personal matters. In early 1978, the Pastor-Parish Relations Committee received an unsigned letter from a parishioner complaining about the pastor’s lack of interest in his congregation. The committee had also heard rumors about the pastor’s personal life, including the break-up of his marriage. All this had contributed to substantial defections from the congregation. After the committee met with Rev. McClain in April, he moved to the Methodist Board of Global Ministries in New York.

Before McClain left, however, the long-vacant commercial space was rented at last—part of it for a Head Start school, the rest to a black-owned grocery called the Bargain Store which in turn sublet part of its space to a combination record store and “bar-b-que” calling itself the Soul Center. Methunion’s tenants found it ironic that all the brave talk of “black economic development” should have produced nothing but the Soul Center, for the record store quickly became one of their principal grievances. All day long and into the evening, rhythm and blues pulsed from a loudspeaker installed in the center’s doorway, attracting kids from throughout the neighborhood. Inside they played pool and pinball, listened to records, and gnawed on ribs. But suspicions grew that someone in the store was dispensing something other than soul music and soul food—namely drugs (at least seven drug dealers were known to be operating in the Methunion complex, which came to be known, in some circles, as Methadone Manor). And the teenagers who hung out at the Soul Center were widely held responsible for a rash of crimes in and around the housing project.

Break-ins were continually reported throughout the four buildings, but particularly at 465 Columbus Avenue, which housed the Soul Center. More disconcerting still were the “walk-ins,” burglaries for which no forced entry was required. One of the janitors or maintenance men had apparently sold the burglars a master key and, as a result, every lock in the building had to be changed. Handbag snatchings were common on the streets around the project. Several women reported that the thieves had fled into one of Methunion’s buildings, and handbags were later discovered with the trash in the project’s basements.

More violent crimes proliferated. One winter evening, Adrian du Cille was returning to his fifth-floor apartment at 465 Columbus Avenue with two large
shopping bags in his arms. As usual, the elevator was out of order, so he began climbing the darkened stairwell. Reaching the third floor, he encountered three youths, who were drinking, smoking, and jiving to a transistor radio. When du Cille warned the boys to get out of the building, one of them brandished a shiny object and told him to hand over all his valuables. They took his wallet, containing ten dollars, his Timex watch, and a pocketknife. Running down the stairs, one of them hissed under his breath, “Better not call the police or we’ll come back and kill you.”

Du Cille did call the police, but none of his attackers was ever apprehended. Mindful of the boys’ threat, du Cille began carrying a foot-long iron sash weight, which he wrapped in a piece of brown paper and tucked in his waistband. He carried it everywhere—to the store, to parties, or just out for a walk. One night, coming home from a friend’s house, he encountered one of his attackers in the building lobby. The boy recognized du Cille and growled, “I hear you’re accusing me of robbing you.”

“Yeh,” said du Cille, “you’re a damn thief, and if I have anything to say about it, you’ll be arrested.”

The boy moved toward him, but when du Cille brandished the weight above his head, he turned and fled.

Du Cille wasn’t satisfied with personal defense. A self-educated man, he had a gift for articulating his fellow tenants’ anxieties, which he often did in the pages of Methunion Manor’s Tenant Newsletter. A few weeks after the holdup, he wrote a passionate editorial, warning that Methunion was increasingly vulnerable to “gangs of rotten young degenerates—‘the young dead’—who congregate like vultures around it. Management has thus far made no effort to correct the situation, and the hapless tenants are left to the vile and ruthless elements, thieves and cutthroats, which pervade the area.”

Under du Cille’s prodding, the Tenants’ Council made security a central issue in its continuing negotiations with HUD and HUD complied by granting the council authority to screen prospective tenants for troublemakers and criminals. Eventually, several tenants went a step further. Organizing a Methunion Tenants’ Safety Patrol, they walked the project’s hallways, stairwells, parking lots, and adjacent sidewalks, armed with little silver whistles called Acme Thunderers and, occasionally, more lethal weapons. Its leaders—including Adrian du Cille and Ray Diggs—were deadly serious. “You dope pushers, robbers, rip-off artists, vultures and your kind, beware!” Ray Diggs wrote in the project newsletter. Then, addressing himself to the tenants: “Security is a cause that should rally everyone. If you are lucky enough to have a color TV, we don’t want you ripped off. If you are lucky enough to carry a few dollars in your pocket, we don’t want you robbed. If you have children, we don’t want them DOA because of an OD. In short, we plan to protect ourselves!”

But the patrol barely got started. In a project where single-parent families predominated, few men were available for such duties. Many of the male tenants held two jobs, which left them little time for walking the corridors.
Moreover, management, which had promised to provide badges and walkie-talkies, never came through. The patrol, which began with twenty men and women, quickly dwindled to four. After two months, it disbanded.

Another reason Methunion Manor never organized effectively may have been its recognition that much crime was directed elsewhere, largely against the affluent white world which increasingly hemmed the project in on all sides. Few tenants explicitly supported such forays into the white community, but, understandably enough, few were prepared to devote their evenings to patrolling dangerous streets in order to protect their white neighbors.

The issue of black crime was an explosive one in Boston throughout the seventies. Much of the resistance to busing was rooted in a fear of such crime, a conviction that young blacks were bent on mayhem and pillage against any whites who crossed their paths. Often that anxiety lurked behind elaborate rationalizations, but occasionally it surfaced, as in a document released by Louise Day Hicks and two other South Boston politicians in September 1974:

Criminal statistics appended to the statement showed that, in the previous six months, there had been roughly twice as many murders, eight times as many rapes, and eighteen times as many armed robberies in Roxbury as in South Boston. The statement drew criticism from the black community and the liberal press, much of it focused on the claim that Roxbury harbored one hundred killers of whites. The critics produced police statistics showing that in 1973–74 some 223 murders had been committed in Boston, but that in only 181 cases was the race of the killer even known and, of those, only 23—or 13 percent—involved blacks killing whites.

For South Boston’s indictment reflected a fundamental misconception about black crime. It was true that blacks committed violent crimes out of proportion to their share of the city’s population (per capita arrests for murder were four times as common among blacks as among whites; 5.8 times for aggravated assault; 7.3 times for rape). But most of these crimes were committed by blacks against other blacks. Murder, rape, and assault generally occurred among people who knew each other, often stemming from arguments within families, between neighbors, among drinkers at a bar or kids on a streetcorner. Moreover, a black’s assault on another black frequently received no publicity at all. For years, the Boston
Globe
, like other metropolitan dailies elsewhere in the country, routinely ignored murders in which blacks killed
other blacks. In some cases, such crimes might even go unrecorded by police. An old police maxim went: “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger.”

At least two crimes, however—robbery and burglary—didn’t fit this pattern. For these were crimes, not of proximity or passion, but of profit. Whatever other circumstances might lead the offender to commit such crimes, the ostensible objective was pecuniary. In most American communities, it was whites who had the most money or goods for the taking.

There was still another reason why these crimes—particularly street muggings—tended to be black-on-white. Any mugger knew that his best chance of averting arrest was to rob someone he didn’t know, indeed somebody from a different world; the single greatest inducement to street crime was a breakdown in social ties among neighbors. Holdups, muggings, and purse snatchings breed rapidly in an area whose residents are largely strangers to one another, best of all in a community where races or classes collide, so that the offender can commit his crime in one environment, then quickly find sanctuary in another. Not surprisingly, the South End had long been one of the city’s most crime-ridden sections. A 1970 survey dividing the city into eighty-one neighborhoods showed that the slice of the South End on both sides of Columbus Avenue had the second-highest per capita rate of street crime in the city and the highest rate of residential burglaries.

By the early seventies, Columbus Avenue was a frontier separating two worlds. To the west, between the avenue and the railroad, descendants of the black railway workers who had settled there around the turn of the century still lived in sooty tenements, while newer black and Hispanic tenants occupied the grim slabs of Methunion Manor. To the east, between the avenue and Tremont Street, the young professionals had carved out their territory, graced by bow-front town houses, brick sidewalks, and spreading shade trees. A few aging white roomers still lived out their days in the last of the lodging houses by the tracks; a handful of black teachers and architects had purchased homes among the gentry. Otherwise, the broad cement ribbon, pitted with ruts and potholes, was a no-man’s-land between white and black, prosperous and deprived.

Soon after the Twymons moved into Methunion Manor in June 1971, sixteen-year-old Richard began hanging out with a gang around the corner on Holyoke Street. Every evening they gathered on the steps of the Harriet Tubman House, a community center, to while away the night drinking Cokes, beer, or wine, smoking reefers, jiving to disco music from giant transistor radios, and exchanging invective. Soon they had devised more spirited entertainment—a strenuous version of hide-and-go-seek. The rules required all players to converge on Tubman House at precisely 7:30 p.m. The last two to arrive were “it” for the evening and were given fifteen minutes to conceal themselves somewhere in a six-block area. Prohibited from entering a building, they had to remain at street level—in a basement doorway, under a stoop,
behind a parked vehicle, a fence, or a pile of trash. When the rest of the gang found them—as they almost always did—they beat them up.