Common Ground (21 page)

CORE refused. At 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, some thirty demonstrators—most of them from Boston CORE and the NAACP, but a few, like the Petscheks, from the Lexington Civil Rights Committee—set up a picket line on the Battle Green. For two hours they paraded around the green carrying signs that read: “Birthplace of American Liberty???” and “Freedom: Let It Begin Here.” The demonstrators didn’t fail to note that Jim Parker bore the most renowned name in Lexington history. As they passed the statue of Captain John Parker, one protester brandished a sign which read, “If John Parker could live here, why can’t Jim Parker?”

On the sidewalk across the street, townspeople gaped in astonishment at the first political demonstration they had ever witnessed on that hallowed ground. Among the onlookers was Colin Diver, then about to enter his junior year at Amherst. He found the demonstration strange. He had followed the high drama unfolding in the South, where civil rights activists were confronting local authorities armed with whips, cattle prods, and fire hoses. Now here in his own New England village, on the gentle green where he had played as a boy, these demonstrators were suggesting that Massachusetts wasn’t so different from Georgia or Alabama. Somehow the march seemed out of place. A demonstrator handed Colin a leaflet headlined: “There
is
discrimination in the North! It exists in Lexington too!” He stuffed it in his pocket and went downtown.

Among leaders of Lexington’s Civil Rights Committee, the reaction was more intense. In statements to the press, they angrily denounced CORE for exploiting their historic battlefield to score cheap points. Dr. Warren Guild, the committee chairman, said that his group had placed eighteen Negro families in Lexington. “Our work has been quiet, dignified, unsensational, and, most important, effective. I sincerely hope our future usefulness in combating discrimination will not be impaired by unfavorable public reaction to today’s picketing.” Father Thomas E. MacLeod, Jr.—who seven months later was to be arrested during a sit-in at a North Carolina restaurant—said, “I am in complete sympathy with sit-ins in the South where they demonstrate against the laws which are both immoral and unconstitutional, but I deplore the action of CORE in this instance.”

CORE was undeterred. “We go wherever there is discrimination,” a spokesman said. The following Wednesday, they were back on the green for two more hours of picketing.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Jim Parker was equally adamant. He told the State Department that he would abandon his year in Boston unless the government found him appropriate housing. He flatly refused to live in Roxbury, where, he said, the schools were segregated and second-class. The Department was sympathetic. It was preparing a stiff letter of protest from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to Massachusetts’ governor, Endicott Peabody, when word
came that Mark Moore had capitulated. On September 7, just in time for the start of school, the Parkers moved into their pine-shaded cottage.

To Joan Makechnie and Colin Diver, now back at college, the bitter squabble in their hometown was only a passing distraction. The great national struggle over racial segregation was centered in places like Selma and Little Rock. Even the first murmurings of discontent in Boston’s black community didn’t convince Colin and Joan that the race issue had much relevance in their own backyard.

I
n my school, I see dirty boards and I see papers on the floor,” wrote a fourth-grader at the Christopher Gibson School in the spring of 1965. “I see an old broken window with a sign on it saying, Do not unlock this window are browken. And I see cracks in the walls and I see old books with ink poured all over them and I see old painting hanging on the walls. I see old alfurbet letter hanging on one nail on the wall. I see a dirty fire exit I see a old closet with supplys for the class. I see pigons flying all over the school. I see old freght trains throgh the fence of the school yard. I see pictures of contryies hanging on the wall and I see desks with wrighting all over the top of the desks and insited of the desk.”

The Gibson was a crumbling, seventy-two-year-old brick schoolhouse on Ronald Street in the North Dorchester section of Boston. It was only three blocks from Fenelon Street, where the Twymons lived, so five of Mrs. Twymon’s six children went to the Gibson that year: Richard and George in the fifth grade, Frederick in the first grade, Wayne and Cassandra in kindergarten.

They brought home stories which alarmed Rachel Twymon: tales of children being beaten with the “rattan,” a thin bamboo whip still used then in the Boston schools to discipline recalcitrant children; of overcrowding so severe that classes met in the damp basement, which stank of urine and coal dust, or in corners of the auditorium, where glee club rehearsals drowned out most of what their teachers were saying; of shattered windows, broken desks, three-legged chairs; of chronic shortages of pencils, chalk, and erasers; of outdated textbooks, often with covers ripped off, pages missing or obliterated by ink stains; of racial slurs directed by indifferent white teachers at the black pupils who made up 60 percent of the school; and even reports of one teacher whose classroom was segregated, whites seated in front and blacks in the rear.

But when twenty black parents and a few concerned teachers called a meeting at St. Mark’s Church that April to discuss conditions at the Gibson, Rachel
Twymon wasn’t sure she would go. It had been barely a year since she and Magnolia Williams had heatedly debated racial discrimination in Boston, and Rachel was still loath to admit that “Southern” practices and attitudes had invaded her city. She did not see life in racial terms; temperamentally, she wasn’t much of a protester; and the growing activity by the Boston branch of the NAACP made her nervous. Yet the tales her children brought home from school profoundly disturbed her. So she went along to St. Mark’s that night, and gradually, almost against her will, Rachel was drawn into the mounting protest. In May, she joined a small delegation which called on Dorothea Callahan, the Gibson’s principal. Miss Callahan smiled a great deal and shook hands with each of them. She conceded that the school was in disrepair and said she was trying to get funds from the school department for some badly needed improvements. But when the delegation mentioned the racial slurs, Miss Callahan grew aloof, saying that she didn’t believe “any of that.” Rachel left the school that afternoon feeling that changes would be slow in coming.

Then, on June 10, she learned that one of the white teachers who had been present at St. Mark’s—indeed, the teacher most sympathetic with the parents’ concerns—had been abruptly fired by Miss Callahan. His name was Jonathan Kozol, and he stood out among the other teachers at the Gibson, most of them middle-aged Irish women, veterans of some years in the system, strict disciplinarians who seemed resentful at spending their days teaching ill-prepared black children. Kozol was different. Only twenty-eight, a
summa cum laude
graduate of Harvard College, a Rhodes Scholar and published novelist, he was in his first year of teaching, brimming with enthusiasm for the job and concern for his students. At St. Mark’s, he had spoken passionately about how black children were being “short-changed” by the Boston school system, and Rachel Twymon had liked him immediately.

Kozol had taught a fourth-grade class just down the hallway from Richard and George’s fifth-grade classroom. Indeed, they still remember the commotion that afternoon when the school learned what had happened. The popular young teacher, they were told, had been fired for reading to his class a poem not included in the official “course of study.” The poem was unlike most of the reading assigned at the Gibson—stories about characters like Miss Molly, Fluffy Tail, and Miss Valentine of Maple Grove School. It was a poem about the lives of black people in a big city like Boston and some of the black children in Kozol’s class liked it so much they took it home and memorized it. Once Kozol’s firing became known, mimeographed copies of the poem became prized items at the school, and even Richard and George could recite portions of Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of the Landlord.”

Later, a school official told Kozol that Negro poetry was unsuitable for schoolchildren if it described suffering; the only poems acceptable for classroom use were those which “accentuate the positive,” “describe nature,” or “tell of something hopeful.”

The Gibson parents had run out of hope—and patience. After workers from the Congress of Racial Equality knocked on doors in the neighborhood, telling parents what had happened, two hundred of them, including Rachel Twymon, showed up for an angry rally at St. Mark’s. The next Monday, a
dozen parents staged a three-hour sit-in at the school to protest Kozol’s firing and conditions in the building. Their children all stayed home that day while the parents took their places at the battered wooden desks in Kozol’s classroom. Police officers warned that they were violating the law, but the mothers and fathers stolidly refused to budge.

On the sidewalk outside, twenty more parents paraded with picket signs reading: “Harvard Summa Too Good for Negro Children,” “Good Teaching Banned in Boston,” and “Why Are Our Children Taught in a Boiler Room?” Meanwhile, a delegation met with Miss Callahan to present a list of twelve demands, including reinstatement of Kozol; elimination of the rattan; up-to-date, integrated school books; elimination of basement and auditorium classrooms; and more respectful treatment of children and parents.

The demonstration ended after school officials agreed to meet with parents. On Wednesday afternoon, Deputy School Superintendent Marguerite Sullivan met with fifteen mothers in a first-floor classroom and left two hours later, saying “a great deal of progress” had been made. The mothers didn’t agree. They refused to leave the building, threatening to spend the night if their grievances were not attended to. This time, both sides seemed prepared for a long siege. Police ringed the building with orders to let no food or other supplies in. A hundred and fifty parents, children, and community leaders soon gathered outside waving placards and banners—among them Rachel Twymon, with Richard and George in tow. All through the long afternoon and into the evening they marched in a big circle on the sidewalk, singing “Let My People Go” and “We Shall Overcome.” Then, just before 9:00 p.m., Thomas Eisenstadt, a School Committee member, arrived to meet with the demonstrators. After Eisenstadt pledged a “full, personal investigation” of the Kozol case, the sit-in ended. Weeks later, Eisenstadt issued his promised report, finding that school officials had been “fully justified” in dismissing Kozol. But school was out for the summer, the children were splashing in overflowing hydrants along Washington Street, and the parents had other things to worry about.

By then, the Twymons had moved from Fenelon Street to the Orchard Park housing project in Roxbury. Once the neighborhood had been an Irish enclave, fiercely resistant to black intrusion; and even when the project was built in 1942, whites were assigned to buildings east of Albany Street, blacks to the west in a section soon nicknamed “the Jet.” The move was a step down the social scale for the Twymons—from the lower-middle-class single- or two-family housing of North Dorchester to the shabby brick blockhouses of the project, occupied by working-class families, many of them on welfare. But, on welfare herself now, Rachel needed Orchard Park’s heavily subsidized rents.

The move, nearly two miles back into the heart of Roxbury, had a similar effect on her children’s schooling. Starting in the fall of 1965, they went to the Dearborn School, right down the street from the project and attended by many project kids. While the Gibson had been nearly half white, the Dearborn was more than 98 percent black. It was even more shabby, decrepit, and over-crowded
than the Gibson. The Dearborn was typical of the schools in Boston’s predominantly black neighborhoods, and the more Rachel saw of them, the more she despaired of her children’s ever getting a decent education there. They were hardly schools at all, she thought, more like warehouses where the kids were stored for a few years, sorted, labeled, and packed for shipment to the menial, low-paying jobs at which they would be doomed to labor the rest of their lives.

Rachel was ill disposed to raise her children in all-black surroundings. It wasn’t merely because she believed they could get better instruction in integrated schools. She was still her mother’s daughter, inheriting Helen Walker’s pride in her Boston upbringing and in her association with whites. The Dearborn and schools like it were filled with the children of recent Southern migrants, the progeny of folks like her rough-hewn father and her former husband. Rachel wanted something better for her children. In part, she looked back to the genteel mixed community of her youth; in part, forward to a world in which racial discrimination would be systematically eradicated.