Common Ground (109 page)

Tommy “Mugger” Walker had a nasty temper. As a child he had proved so willful he was sent off to the Lyman School, an institution for troubled youths. As a teenager, hanging around the Carter Playground, he was a tough lineman on the Panthers, an even tougher street fighter with the Emperors. Relentless with bat, brick, and knife, he could really hurt you. As a young man, he was in constant trouble with the law, receiving two suspended sentences for assault.

Later, he channeled his anger into more positive enterprises. Since following
his father onto a construction site at the age of eighteen, Tommy had worked in the building trades. But the construction unions and the contractors both resisted black workers. Once, when Tommy approached an Italian builder for a job, the man said, “I already got a minority.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tommy. “I don’t see anybody else around here.”

“Him.”

“He’s a Puerto Rican.”

“Right,” said the builder. “He’s my minority.”

Eventually, Tommy and several friends helped organize the United Community Construction Workers, which picketed building sites demanding that contractors hire black workers and pressured government to guarantee blacks their share of work on publicly funded projects. A determined organizer, he was elected to the UCCW’s board of directors, becoming a familiar figure at job negotiations.

But the Walker clan remained wary of Tommy. They knew things were either right or wrong with him, that he wasn’t strong on subtle shades of gray, and they had tried to keep him away from the situation on Centre Street. Most of Alva’s other brothers had been around the house all spring, but Tommy didn’t turn up there until a couple of weeks before July 4, when Arnold said, “Come on, Tommy. Ma didn’t want you up here, but this is something you ought to see.” Some months later, Tommy said, “Maybe Ma was right. She knew I wouldn’t have much understanding of white folks telling my sister where she could or couldn’t live.”

Slamming the car into reverse, Tommy backed through the intersection, then accelerated into Melbourne Street. Zigzagging down the hill toward Wainwright Park, the car veered to the left, striking sixteen-year-old Richard Moore, tossing him high in the air and catapulting him onto a nearby stoop. Next in the car’s path, Janice Mulkern, nineteen, was hit so hard she landed on the automobile’s hood with both legs mashed against a blue Chevrolet parked at the curb. Finally, the onrushing vehicle struck the Chevrolet with such force that it hit Bill Thomason—one of the youths who had ripped up the Debnams’ fence—crushing his right leg against a light pole.

Somehow eluding the whites milling around the car, Tommy made his way back to the Debnams’ house, where dozens of police and a large contingent of angry neighbors had quickly converged. Scuffles broke out. When a white youth began hassling Alva’s daughter Maria, her cousin Cassandra Twymon knocked the boy off his bike. But when Alva’s brother Fred Walker became embroiled with seventeen-year-old Richard Manning, police arrested both men, charging them with “participating in an affray.” An hour later, Tommy Walker and several other blacks from the Debnam house went to District 11 to bail Fred out. As Tommy stood in the station-house lobby, a white youth pointed him out to police as the driver of the car on Melbourne Street. He was
charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (to wit, an automobile) and held on $50,000 bail.

Tommy’s arrest did nothing to assuage the white neighbors. For the news from Carney Hospital wasn’t good: Richard Moore had a broken cheekbone and a fractured right leg; both of Janice Mulkern’s legs were broken in several places; and, eighteen hours later, Bill Thomason’s crushed right leg was amputated just above the knee.

As word of the amputation raced through the neighborhood, a protest rally was scheduled for Wainwright Park on Friday, July 16. At eight that evening some 125 whites ranging in age from ten to forty gathered by the scorched circle in the park. After a spate of angry speeches, the crowd marched three abreast up Melbourne Street, past the scene of the crash, toward the Debnams’ house. The procession was led by two patrol cars, the rear brought up by four helmeted policemen on motorcycles. Drawing abreast of 185 Centre Street, the marchers raised their fists and chanted, “No more niggers!”

As the Wainwright Park gang passed the house, they added a more pointed epithet. “Give us a leg,” they shouted. “We want a leg!”

From the Debnams’ porch, Alva, Otis, Mike, Jo-Jo, and others responded with a few choice epithets of their own. Several shook baseball bats at the marchers. A rock soared out of the darkness. The blacks on the porch tossed something back. In a minute, rocks and bottles were flying in both directions. It took the police nearly half an hour to restore order.

From his window on Samoset Street, Paul Tafe watched the march with mounting distress. This had gone too far, he thought. Perhaps if he talked with the kids again he could persuade them to back off. Walking to the basketball court, he found a dozen members of the Wainwright Park and Roseland Street gangs drinking beer in the moonlight. They were getting quite a reputation, he told them, but three people had been injured already. If they weren’t careful, somebody was going to get killed. Why didn’t they let things cool down a while? The kids sipped their beer and nodded.

Uneasy, Paul went off to visit his girlfriend. Returning home at 1:00 a.m., he found two members of the Roseland Street gang camped on his doorstep.

“We want to talk to you,” said one.

“Sure,” said Paul.

“Which side are you on?”

“I’m on your side. I’m on the side of that boy who lost his leg. I’m on the Debnams’ side. I’m on the side of anybody who gets hurt in this thing.”

When one of the youths moved menacingly toward him, Paul leapt for the haven of his doorway, but the other kid caught him with a right to the jaw. Trying to put the storm door between himself and his assailants, Paul took another blow in the gut, which doubled him over. He struck out, putting his fist through the glass panel. Only after the two youths had fled did Paul find
he was bleeding not only from the hand but from a deep knife wound in his leg. A friend rushed him to the hospital, where doctors, after giving him a pint of blood, said the knife had severed a large vein. If he hadn’t reached the hospital so quickly, they said, he might have bled to death.

That month’s events provoked a new responsiveness from District 11. Deputy Superintendent Lawrence Quinlan had had enough. Summoning two detectives, Frank Olbrys and Ed Kennealey, he told them, “We need a racial squad. You’re the racial squad. Get up on Centre Street and put a lid on this thing.”

Veteran members of the district’s “juvenile” unit, Olbrys and Kennealey knew many of the gang members and the gangs knew them. Conventional Boston detectives, they decorated their office with signs reading: “This is our flag. Be proud of it” and “Kindness to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Both found Alva Debnam a bit loud and aggressive for their tastes, arid they regarded RUN as “Cambridge-type people out to give the system a good kick in the teeth.” But, once deputized by their superior, they did their job. Instead of sitting outside the Debnams’ house in a conspicuous police car, they stood in the shadows of St. Mark’s school yard or around the corner on Nixon Street, waiting for the youths to strike.

Over the next two months, Olbrys and Kennealey made more than a dozen arrests around the house. On one occasion, lurking behind a tree, Kennealey saw a youth cock his arm as if to throw. The detective seized the kid’s hand, extracted a rock, and placed him under arrest. Some nights later, after a black Plymouth circled the Debnams’ house with three youths shouting, “No more fucking niggers!” Olbrys stopped the car and arrested its occupants. That weekend, he apprehended four kids who had thrown beer bottles against the front porch.

But despite the detectives’ diligence, the culprits rarely received much of a sentence. None of them ever spent a night in jail. The most celebrated incident occurred on September 10, a lively night around the Debnams’ home. Shortly before 1:00 a.m., a firebomb exploded in the driveway, scorching the family car. Three hours later, two figures were seen prowling the yard with a pistol, shouting racial epithets and ultimately firing one shot toward the house. The detectives arrested Fred Gavin, nineteen, and his brother John, eighteen. Originally, both boys were charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and Fred with illegal possession of a gun. But the assault charges were quickly reduced to disorderly conduct. Finding John guilty, Judge Dolan gave him a three-month suspended sentence. He found Fred Gavin guilty of disorderly conduct and illegal possession, which carried a mandatory sentence of one year in prison. But on appeal in Superior Court he was acquitted of both.

By autumn, Tommy Walker’s approaching trial became the focus of attention in the neighborhood. With three of their children still nursing serious injuries, many white neighbors demanded vengeance. Others hoped a guilty verdict
would seal the Debnams’ fate, forcing them off Centre Street. The Walker clan and their supporters—endorsing Tommy’s version that the car had been stolen just before the incident—protested his innocence with equal vehemence.

Some RUN activists had formed the Thomas Walker Defense Committee, raising money to pay his lawyer and distributing a flyer in Dorchester which announced: “Thomas Walker is innocent. Bias and prejudice could put him in jail, despite the testimony that doesn’t identify him. Demand equality and justice for Thomas Walker before you or your own are victimized! Educate yourself and your children on racism—your life may one day depend on it!”

But other RUN members weren’t so sure. All fall, debate raged within the tiny organization, splitting it along class and ideological lines. Many of RUN’s working-class members strongly suspected that Tommy had, indeed, been driving the car on July 4. Others simply didn’t know. Most of those with deep roots in Dorchester argued that to proclaim Tommy’s innocence in that angry neighborhood without being sure of the facts was political suicide. But the Cambridge radicals contended that a determined campaign on Tommy’s behalf was a political imperative. After all, even if Tommy was guilty, none of the whites who had attacked the Debnams for months had gone to jail. Why should he? Moreover, if Tommy was legally responsible for injuring three white youths, he had been morally justified in defending his sister and her family. How long were the Debnams supposed to suffer persecution? they asked. Wasn’t there a natural right of self-defense?

On May 17, 1977, Tommy’s trial opened before Superior Court Judge James P. McGuire. After a prolonged wrangle over jury selection, a panel of ten whites and two blacks was chosen. Prosecutor Tim O’Neill opened his case with the victims. Janice Mulkern, steel braces glinting on both legs, testified that she had seen Tommy Walker deliberately cut the wheel toward her. William Thomason, after hobbling to the witness stand on crutches, said he had seen the car hurtling toward him at great speed. Under cross-examination, Thomason conceded that he and other youths from Wainwright Park had thrown rocks at the Debnams’ house on several occasions. Asked whether he had intended to force the family out of Dorchester, he replied, “In a way.” But Judge McGuire would not let defense attorney Winston Kendell explore the background of attacks on the Debnam house, holding that such testimony was irrelevant to the case at hand. Kendell concentrated instead on demonstrating that Tommy wasn’t driving the car on July 4, presenting several relatives and friends who testified that a white youth had stolen the car minutes before the crash. Tommy himself did not take the stand.

With impassioned pleas for justice from both sides, the jury retired on the morning of May 27. Four hours later it was back with a question: “Is intent necessary to prove assault and battery?” Yes, Judge McGuire told them, “to commit an assault and battery you’ve got to have in your mind the intent to do so.” But, he said, “one cannot read in the mind of another what he intends
 … a man is presumed in the law to have intended to do that which he does, and to have intended its ordinary and natural consequences.”

At eleven the next morning, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and Judge McGuire sentenced Tommy Walker to not less than four and not more than seven years in Walpole Prison.

Well before Tommy went to jail, the attacks on the Debnams’ house had begun to subside. Perhaps it was the sudden police diligence, perhaps the alarm of white adults at the rash of injuries, perhaps simply the boredom of youths tiring of their long campaign. By the end of 1976, Olbrys and Kennealey returned to other duties and RUN withdrew its defenders.

But the siege had taken its toll on 185 Centre Street. In midsummer, Frank Leonard, the Debnams’ white tenant, died of a heart attack brought on, his physician suspected, by the constant turmoil surrounding the house. Meanwhile, the ordeal had helped to blight the Debnams’ marriage. Unable to forgive Otis’ prolonged absences during the worst violence, Alva suspected that he was running around with other women. Otis vehemently denied this, insisting he had been working night and day to support the family. But their differences proved insurmountable. Before long they were separated.

Alva and her children remained on Centre Street. Once every six weeks or so, a rock or bottle came through a window. Occasionally a late drinker on his way home from the Irish Rover or the Emerald Isle would stop outside the house to shout a slurred epithet or two. But, after a time, most of the neighbors learned to ignore the intruders in their midst.

W
atch out, dearie,” a male voice muttered. “I’ve got your number.” “Who’s this?” asked Lisa McGoff. “Never mind,” said the voice. “You just be careful.” Confused, Lisa hung up.

The next night the voice was back, warning: “You’re a little girl with a big mouth. If I were you, I’d keep it shut.” “Who
is
this?” Lisa cried. He hung up.

All that evening in March 1976 the McGoffs debated the mysterious phone calls. At the telephone company, Alice had dealt with her share of cranks, most of them obscene or abusive. But, neither dirty nor angry, Lisa’s caller delivered his warnings in a feathery whisper which lent them a special terror.