The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (3 page)

When Rosa’s Jewish neighbors put their side on the market, Rosa urged her daughter Bertha and son-in-law to move north, and on January 20, 1955, they bought 60 Winthrop Street. The Coxes paid $6,500, borrowing $5,500 from a Roxbury bank. Everything fell into place nicely. Bertha and David settled into 60 Winthrop, with Rosa right next door. Rosa then persuaded another daughter, Ollie Parks, and her husband to move north; eventually Ollie went to work for the Cahnerses as well.

The Coxes’ Winthrop Street was a one-way street running westerly from Blue Hill Avenue, Roxbury’s main thoroughfare. From the opening at Blue Hill Avenue, the street consisted mostly of small apartment buildings and homes, many in disrepair. The Coxes’ house at 60 Winthrop was toward the other end of the street, a couple of blocks from Dudley Square. The buildings were better kept on this end. Even so, coming upon 60 Winthrop required a double take. The structure was oversized, even for a side-by-side two-family, with the Coxes’ number 60 sharing a center wall with its mirror image at 62 Winthrop Street. But more distinctive than its size was its unusual architectural style. “One of the more robust manifestations of Italianate style in Roxbury and the Boston area,” noted the city’s Landmarks Commission.

The Coxes occupied a home that reflected the full arc of Roxbury’s social and ethnic history—from the original Puritan settlers to Irish, Jewish, and then African American. The land was originally owned by the Reverend Thomas Weld, who, along with his brothers, emigrated from England in the 1630s and came to own hundreds and hundreds of acres of land in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Reverend Weld became the first minister of the First Church in Roxbury in 1632, and the entire Brahmin family became deeply embedded in the state’s history; in modern times, they included the actress Tuesday Weld and the state’s sixty-eighth governor, William F. Weld, who served from 1991 to 1997.

In 1852, Samuel Weld built the large double Italianate on Winthrop Street. Its main entrance—located on the side—had gabled door hoods and an oriel, or bay window, above it. The large pine front door opened to a spacious entry featuring high ceilings and an elliptical staircase curling upward to the second floor. It was the kind of splashy, grand entrance showing off the owners’ standing and wherewithal.

For the remainder of the century and into the 1900s, the house was owned by Charles D. Swain. Swain was a rich man, a prominent merchant who owned one of the largest stores in the bustling and fast-growing Dudley Square nearby. The Swains and later owners of 60 Winthrop Street were insulated from any development by abutters when an order of Carmelite nuns moved next door in the 1890s. The order built a monastery and enclosed the grounds behind a brick wall fifteen feet tall.

The house changed hands, just as the neighborhood did, with the Yankees giving way to the Irish at the turn of the century. In 1914, when he began serving his first term as mayor, the legendary and charismatic James Michael Curley lived one street over on Mount Pleasant Avenue. By the 1920s, the Irish were moving out of Roxbury, replaced by Jews, and during World War II the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan—a three-square-mile area—became home to ninety thousand Jews. Blue Hill Avenue, observed the historian Thomas H. O’Connor, was “often derisively dubbed ‘Jew Hill Avenue’ by members of other ethnic groups.” Following the war, the Jews migrated south into the suburbs, and Roxbury became a black neighborhood.

Many blacks moving to Boston filled the housing projects sprouting up all over Roxbury during the postwar building boom. Owning a home was less typical—and put Mike’s parents squarely in an emerging black middle class. The climb up the economic ladder was nothing less than hard-earned. Mike’s father was known for his work ethic; he went to work as a boy, ending his formal education after the sixth grade. In Boston, he was the first black to own a landscaping business, D. E. Cox Landscaping. He also eventually owned florist stands, one in Dudley Square and one downtown. He was a heavy-smoking man, lean and small, known for his quietness and long hours on the job. In time, Mike’s mother went to work at Raytheon, where she was a wire sorter at the defense technology company in Waltham for nearly three decades. One neighbor said Bertha and David Cox “worked very, very hard to make a better life for their kids.”

When Mike was born he was truly the baby of the family. The three sisters, Cora, Lillian, and Barbara, all born in Tennessee, were in their mid-to-late teens. His brother David was fourteen, and Ricky was seven. Mike was surrounded by women who not only looked after him but told him what to do: his mom, grandmother, and sisters. “I was talked
at
, I wasn’t really talked to,” Mike said. His father, meanwhile, displayed the same firm hand over family affairs as he did with the landscaping business. “He had them all in line,” a neighbor said.

Under a careful eye, Mike was allowed to play at a nearby park. His parents mostly made him stick close to home, where he’d shoot basketball at the hoop in their driveway. Mike had no idea about his home’s fancy bones. The chandelier in the entry was long gone, and the handsome wood floors were covered with wall-to-wall carpet. Even if he noticed it, he never wondered about the remnant wiring still strung along the creases in the walls or ceilings—wiring for the “call bells” the Swains used to summon servants from their quarters on the third floor. The sinks in the bedrooms were left over from when servants carried water to the rooms in buckets because there was no running water. Mike viewed the large house with its three floors and two staircases as a playground.

His bedroom as a boy was the tiny room above the front entry with a country view, completely disconnected from typical Roxbury. The room looked over the high brick walls enclosing the Carmelite monastery: green lawns dotted with maple, oak, and fir trees. In springtime, the apple and cherry trees blossomed pink and white flowers. Bells rang daily, calling people to prayer and, as the nuns would say, “directing their thoughts to the faithful presence of God in their midst.”

The house at 60 Winthrop Street was like a sanctuary, sequestering Mike from the trouble not far away. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Dudley Square area became a no-man’s-land. “A day doesn’t go by without a stabbing or shooting or assault with a baseball bat or club,” a judge in the Roxbury District Court once said. “Unemployment is bad. Housing is bad. The schools are bad. When you have these conditions, you’re going to have crime.” Merchants suffered, and many stores closed and storefronts were boarded up. “People are afraid to walk the street,” complained one merchant to the
Boston Globe
. In 1971, when Mike was five, the city opened a new, $4 million police station across from where Winthrop Street ended at Dudley Square. More than three hundred officers were deployed. Several months later, a new $3.5 million glass and concrete courthouse was built next door. Both were seen as necessary to tackle the sharp rise in murders, rapes, and drugs.

Mike got to know some of the officers, and they seemed nice. He was also drawn to shows on TV about police, and he daydreamed about being a police officer. But the idea felt daring and even intimidated him. “I didn’t really think I could be a police officer for some reason. I didn’t know if I was good enough.” He really liked one officer named Will Saunders, a family friend who made a lasting impression on Mike, mainly because of his race. “There were not very many minority officers then, so he really stood out.”

Father and son shared a number of traits, but most notable was their reserve. In kindergarten, Mike suffered one of his recurring nosebleeds during nap time. He didn’t say anything to the teacher, and just lay there as the blood pooled. When nap time ended, the teacher saw Mike and was aghast. His parents were called in for a meeting. “He doesn’t talk,” Mike recalled the teacher saying with worry. “All he had to do was come get us and he didn’t even do anything.”

Cauterizing resolved the nosebleeds, but Mike’s quietness continued. It was a reason he repeated the first grade. “I was immature,” said Mike. “I didn’t talk. That was a big thing.” For elementary school, Mike followed his older brothers to a private Catholic parochial school in nearby Brookline, St. Mary’s School. “My folks didn’t know much about education, you know, my dad had a sixth-grade education and my mom, I think, eleventh grade. But they knew the Boston public school system wasn’t that good.” In the early 1970s, the escalating battle over forced busing was in the news all the time, and his parents grew alarmed. The Coxes were neither particularly political nor religious; they just wanted something better for Mike and his siblings—so, before there was “white flight,” the name given to waves of white Bostonians fleeing the city school system, there was “Cox flight.” Mike’s grandmother Rosa heard about the Brookline school from her employers, and, Mike said, “She passed that tip on to my mother and father.”

For his parents, the school was a stretch financially—a couple of hundred dollars in tuition plus the cost of school uniforms. He sometimes heard “grumblings” from his father when the bills were due. For his part, Mike just followed along, even if privately he wondered why he had to attend a school so far from home. It seemed so far away because of the family’s early morning routine—Mike was out of the house by 6
A.M
. to ride along in the station wagon while his father drove his mother to work in Waltham and then backtracked to drop him off at school in Brookline. Mike took the bus home from school and went next door to stay with his grandmother. “My mother wouldn’t get home until later, and my dad worked pretty late all the time.”

St. Mary’s had about two hundred students. There was one class for each grade, with fifteen to twenty-five students. Mike realized right away he stood out—he was usually the only black student in his class. But he did get used to his surroundings. “There were a lot of kids who, although we looked different, we had a very similar background. Their parents weren’t wealthy. They were hardworking, middle-class people.” Nonetheless, things happened to remind him he was different from most kids at the school.

It happened once when he was eight when his aunt Ollie landed in the spotlight. Working for the Cahnerses, she answered the front door on January 19, 1974, to find a red-haired woman on the stoop. The Cahnerses were in Florida on vacation. The woman began asking for directions and suddenly pulled a pistol from her coat pocket. At the same time, a man wearing a ski mask stepped into view and pointed a gun at her. The burglars taped Ollie’s hands together, made her sit in the foyer, and stuffed paper into her mouth. They raced from room to room, yanking paintings off of walls. They fled with three, including
The Rustics
, by Winslow Homer, valued at up to $200,000. The next day’s newspaper coverage was extensive. “Masked Pair Loot Brookline Home of Publishing Executive,” ran the
Boston Globe
headline over a story that recounted how Ollie freed herself after the “bandits” left.

In school the next day the armed burglary was a hot topic, and one of Mike’s classmates carried a copy of the newspaper, which included a photo of Ollie.

“That’s my aunt,” Mike said.

Your aunt’s a maid?

Mike was embarrassed. He said no more and realized he should have kept his mouth shut.

By the time Mike was in the seventh and eighth grades—spent at a middle school in the city—teachers were encouraging him to spread his wings. Mike began reading a lot, thanks to an English teacher. “She’d hand me a bag full of books—read these!” His grades were strong and he was a natural athlete. With his teachers’ guidance, he applied to several private schools. Milton Academy offered him a scholarship. Mike liked the school because it was fairly close to home, in the town of Milton south of the city.

In September 1980, Mike began the ninth grade at the elite private school. His father drove him, but the school year was barely under way when David Cox fell ill. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Mike recalled, “He had surgery and they took out part of his stomach, and he was pretty ill. He came home and had lost of a lot of weight, a lot of weight, and he had stopped working.” The family was in crisis.

For Mike, Milton Academy was a crisis—academically and culturally. To get there Mike began traveling a network of buses and trains. He invariably arrived late. He usually got a ride home after playing sports, but it was well after seven o’clock before he could even think about his schoolwork. “But I am flat-out tired, and I’d go upstairs and go to sleep.” If he was lucky, he’d wake up early to do some work. “If I didn’t wake up I’d go to class and now I haven’t done the work. So I’d try to do it between periods.”

His head spun, but given his nature he said nothing. He didn’t ask for help at school. He didn’t say anything to his parents. “I didn’t want to disappoint my father.” He knew his father had cancer, but wasn’t sure what that meant.

“No one really explained it to me, but I could see he was getting sicker.”

Because of the complicated commute, Mike often missed meeting with his adviser before classes—meetings that were part of the fabric of the academy’s day. One day his adviser caught up with him. He pulled Mike aside. Mike rubbed his eyes and sneezed. He’d begun suffering from allergies, although the condition hadn’t yet been diagnosed. Mike just knew his head was stuffy all the time and his eyes watered constantly. The adviser waited a second and then said he had a question to ask.

You smoke a lot of pot, don’t you? Before school?

Mike was dumbfounded.

You can tell me, the adviser said earnestly. It’s okay.

Mike sat there. To him, the world was divided into two groups—kids and grown-ups. With friends, he felt okay, and “I did what I did. Played sports and was friends.” With adults, “I just didn’t talk. Talking wasn’t my thing.” Facing his adviser, Mike basically didn’t say a word. He did not speak up and protest, did not seize the opportunity to discuss his rough start. “I was just sitting there, thinking, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”