Mayor for a New America (8 page)

Well before Election Day someone was stapling
R.I.P.
on Brett lawn signs in West Roxbury. As voters went to the polls, the only question was the size of my victory margin. It was bigger than I expected: 28 points. Eighteen of the city's twenty-two wards.

My one regret was that my friend Tony Crayton, who'd put me first in line to be acting mayor, lost his council seat by 80 votes. “I gave him his dream to be mayor,” he said. Credit was also due to another politician, and when just before midnight he called to congratulate me, I gave it: “Thank you, Mr. President, for making the mayor ambassador.”

Brett later said he thought he was running for an open seat: “But what happened when Tom became acting mayor changed the race. I didn't see that coming.” He was running against an incumbent, a sitting mayor. The last one to lose was Curley, in 1949, when he was old, sick, and lately returned from federal prison.

Ray Flynn knew why Jim Brett lost. It happened the day I became acting mayor and Ray said he was leaving the city in good hands and the media treated it like an endorsement and the cameras zoomed in on the hug: “Jimmy Brett was upset with me for that. . . . I heard him say it cost him the election.”

 

The five thousand friends and supporters attending my inaugural party at the Hynes Convention Center were entertained by representatives of the New America—multiracial, multicultural, LGBT-friendly—rising in the old city. A Roma band performed, followed by two groups of Irish step dancers and a gay country and western dance troupe and actors from the Ramón de los Reyes Spanish Dance Theatre and performers illustrating “The Art of Black Dance and Music.” Sandy Martin sang a selection of songs from
The Best of Patsy Cline
. There was a woodwind quintet. We were treated to a Chinese lion dance. I missed a Frank Sinatra karaoke, but nobody asked me.

The next morning I delivered my inaugural address at Faneuil Hall. Angela introduced me. She described my mother's efforts on behalf of new immigrants. And listening to her, I reflected that the truest line in my speech was “I am here because of my family.”

I wasn't there because I'd been in politics longer than the six other contenders combined—not because, since that day at Kelly Field when I met Joe Timilty, I had played a central role in over a dozen campaigns, including four for mayor of Boston. I wasn't there because of my decade on the City Council, although I knew the people and problems in every department of city government. I wasn't there because of my vision, which wasn't that different from the other candidates'. And although I declared, “I'm the luckiest guy in the world,” I wasn't there because of my luck, the miracle that transformed the shy guy, the mediocre student, “Mumbles” into the mayor.

I was there because of my family. Because of the values passed on from my parents—treat everyone with respect, help others, work hard, sacrifice for your children. To this inheritance I added sympathy with the struggles of ordinary Americans. I think people wanted a ready heart in their mayor. Regardless, they got one.

Angela introduced the theme of my speech—my vision of Hyde Park for all. I called the roll of my memories. My grandmother and grandfather with their stories of the hard life in Grottaminarda. The aunts and uncles and cousins they brought here to make their start in America. The inspiring image of Susan Menino, and of Carl Menino nearly felled by her loss. “The Deacon” walking the beat. The Westinghouse plant. The neighborhood. “You know,” I said, “when I grew up on Hyde Park Ave, we knew everybody who lived there. Now I live in Readville and don't know my next-door neighbor. Angela works, I work. . . . Can we recover that closeness in our neighborhoods? I think we can.” The simple things that make up a good life . . . I wanted them for everybody. In a twenty-minute speech, I used “promise” nineteen times.

I ended with a bow to the Irish American political tradition in Boston, the green tide that washed over the city from Mayor Hugh O'Brien in 1884 to Mayor John F. Fitzgerald in 1906 to his grandson Congressman John F. Kennedy in 1946 and on up through Kevin Hagan White in 1968 and “my predecessor and friend” Ray Flynn in 1984. “But this is a new day,” I said, turning the page of history onto the majority-minority city of the twenty-first century, the Boston of the Haitian, Puerto Rican, Cape Verdean, Somali, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other immigrants whose names in the list of future mayors will look as familiar as Fitzgerald and Flynn do to us. I paused to take in the rows of officials and friends cramming the Great Hall back to the outsize doors hung on iron hinges forged by blacksmiths in Paul Revere's day. Memory supplied the thirteen granite steps (one for each of the colonies) that JFK had descended thirty-three years earlier and the cobblestone street where I had started the long run that returned me to this place as mayor of ­Boston. There was no need to look down at the text. I knew the next lines by heart: “I am the first Italian American to hold this job. Am I proud of that? You bet I am.”

 

UP FROM BUSING

 

Q. What issue is so personal to you, so important, that you'll never change your opinion on it, no matter what?

A. Racism. I will not tolerate it. . . . That's the interesting thing about my life. I was in the first grade—I will always remember this. It's only a little thing, but I always remember it. . . . My name is spelled M-E-N-I-N-O, unlike the “Manino” that's on the mushroom jar. . . . And the first-grade teacher told me that my parents didn't know how to spell my name—that Italians couldn't spell. So she changed the spelling. And I went through the first grade with my name spelled wrong. . . . That's a little thing. But it's always stayed with me. . . . And I will never tolerate people being discriminated against.

 

—
from an interview with me, then acting mayor, in the Boston Globe, July 22, 1993

 

For her first question in my first national television interview as mayor, Katie Couric asked: “You know, many people view Boston as the most racially divided city in the country. Do you think that reputation is deserved?”

“Oh, no,” I said, that perception was out of date—the city had moved on. But I knew she was right.

Boston got that reputation during “busing,” the school desegregation crisis of the 1970s. I served in the trenches of busing as a monitor at Hyde Park High, trying to keep black and white kids from fighting. I saw enough ugliness in those hallways to make me cry for my city.

In June 1974 a federal judge, Arthur W. Garrity, ruled that the Boston School Committee had deliberately segregated the city's public schools. Using a plan thought up by professors of education, he ordered eighteen thousand students bused from segregated to integrated schools starting in September.

The plan paired Roxbury, the center of African American life in Boston, with South Boston, the center of white resistance to “forced busing.” South Boston kids would be bused to Roxbury, Roxbury kids to South Boston.

It did not go unnoticed that this pairing was crazy.

One professor urged the judge to leave Southie out of the first year of the plan because of its “intense hostility to blacks.” Another professor countered that racial hostility had not been allowed to frustrate integration in the South and shouldn't be allowed to in South Boston. Judge Garrity sided with him.

“We're being punished for what we are,” said one of South Boston's state legislators, Michael Flaherty. The professors saw the Southie protesters as racists. The protesters saw themselves as defenders of their neighborhood schools against an unelected judge bent on destroying them.

If the judge had listened to the first professor, busing might not have sparked so much resistance elsewhere in the city. On the first day of classes, in most of the eighty schools affected by the plan, things went comparatively smoothly. TV news, however, focused on Southie, on the angry crowds and the graffiti
(KILL NIGGERS, KKK)
on the walls of South Boston High. And the spirit of Southie spread.

Southie experienced the worst violence. But there was plenty to go around. At Hyde Park High a white kid was stabbed, touching off a racial brawl in the cafeteria. Shortly after, police arrested four white kids driving near the school with Molotov cocktails in their car.

Outside Hyde Park High School, City Councilor Albert “Dapper” O'Neil showed up one day to troll for the hate vote. “I'm not going to stand by and let those niggers take over this school,” he told a reporter.

Boston “got” a reputation for racism in the busing years? No, Boston earned it.

Busing was intended to end school segregation, but it promoted resegregation with only a brief stop at integration. Schools that were 40 percent minority in 1970 were nearly 90 percent minority two decades later. The 1980 census revealed that a third of white and black families with children under eighteen had fled the city. Eight thousand fewer people lived in South Boston and thirteen thousand fewer in Roxbury. Support for Garrity's plan among blacks had fallen to 14 percent.

Busing left Boston's schools segregated by race and class. By 1990, nine in ten students were eligible for free lunches. Six in ten school families made less than $15,000 a year.

Some kids, we discovered, had nothing. Before Christmas 1995, I started a toy drive. On Christmas Eve we walked up Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, handing out toys and clothes donated by Boston retailers and gift-wrapped by volunteers working outside my office at City Hall. A member of my staff, Mike Keneavy, knocked on one door. A little boy appeared. His mother wasn't home, he said. She was out getting his present at McDonald's. Only Mike's Santa act kept him from choking up. The Geneva Avenue walk became a Christmas tradition. So did the toy drive. By my last year in office we were delivering toys to four thousand families.

You can debate whether busing was a justified remedy for Boston's separate and unequal schools. You can't debate whether this experiment in instant social change failed. Busing left me with lasting doubts about “sweeping solutions,” “bold plans,” and “fundamental transformations” for the problems of city life.

 

Today a Dapper O'Neil, who praised Alabama governor George C. Wallace in the City Council, called Boston's growing Asian community “gooks,” and campaigned with Ronald Reagan, couldn't be elected dogcatcher in Boston.

The career of the man who finally unseated Dapper on the City Council reveals the distance Boston has traveled since busing. Michael Flaherty ran against me for mayor in 2009 on a ticket with Sam Yoon, a Korean American lawyer. In 2008 Flaherty campaigned in the Massachusetts primary for Senator Barack Obama. Yet Michael Flaherty is from South Boston, where his father led the respectable anti-busing forces in the 70s and thugs stoned buses carrying black children.

Today Boston is a different city.

I'm as certain of that as I am of the spelling of my own name. So I couldn't believe my ears when the two candidates competing to replace me as mayor were asked in a TV debate if there was racism in the Boston Police Department and City Councilor John R. Connolly said, “There's racism in all of Boston, systemic, institutional, and structural.” State Representative Martin J. Walsh agreed: “We have racism in the city of Boston that we have to deal with. We talk about one Boston, but we don't see one Boston in the city of Boston right now.”

I wanted to shout: You guys don't know what racism is! You should have walked the hallways of Hyde Park High back in the day.

I simmered down when I saw what the candidates were doing: appealing to the swing vote in the election. It's a sign of progress that Boston's minority voters have such clout. Another sign: In winning the November 2013 election, Marty Walsh carried both South Boston and Roxbury. Racial polarization, white against black, gave Boston its bad name. Walsh's biracial vote shows that's history.

In Boston blacks are still likelier than whites to be poor or unemployed, to be discriminated against in housing and employment, to drop out of school, and to be victims of violent crime. Boston is part of America.

But it matters that for twenty years Boston had a mayor committed to lifting the cloud of racism over the city. A mayor who brought people together, reached out, and spoke out. A mayor who appointed persons of color to positions of power. A mayor who steered resources to Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. A mayor who moved the city forward on race.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to an authority, Celtics legend Bill Russell, who battled racism during his long career in Boston. “Today,” he told the press in 2004, “we see a Boston that is making every effort to be one of our country's most inclusive and progressive cities under the leadership of Mayor Menino.”

 

Here are two factual outlines of the difference my mayoralty made to Boston's communities of color. One traces the revival of a neighborhood; the other describes my frustration with a governor caught between his promise to locate a state office building in Roxbury and his ambition for higher office.

The neighborhood was Grove Hall, on the Roxbury-Dorchester border. When I was a kid, my parents would drive the four miles of Blue Hill Avenue from Mattapan Square to buy fresh-baked bread and rolls at Kasanoff's Bakery in Grove Hall. It was a thriving commercial district, with movie theaters, delicatessens, kosher butcher shops, and a supermarket. Two riots in the 60s, one following Martin Luther King's assassination, left it a boarded-up shell.

Driving through Roxbury with Angela after becoming mayor, I said, “You know, all I want to do as mayor is to make Roxbury as good as West Roxbury,” one of Boston's nicest residential neighborhoods. The day after I was elected, I took a victory lap around the city to thank the voters. First stop, Grove Hall. In my inaugural and through my first year, I pledged: “We're going to bring it back to where it was, a neighborhood that has economic development and hope for the people who live there. No, it won't have Kasanoff's Bakery. But we'll have smaller businesses, we'll have residences . . . we'll bring people back to that place.” I was sticking my neck out: “If this works it will be one of the showpieces of my administration. If it doesn't, it will be one of my big failures.”