Common Ground (24 page)

As English remained closed, the protest spread to other city schools. For a week in early February, between a quarter and a third of the city’s 5,000 black high school students stayed out of class. By then, several white administrators at English favored drastic reforms to make the school more responsive to its new clientele. Jim Corascadden, chairman of the Faculty Senate, said, “English is no longer functioning as an educational institution and won’t function until the entire system is reorganized.” But the Boston School Committee rejected such advice, branding it “appeasement.” The committee voted to send police into the troubled schools, to suspend the “troublemakers” and prosecute the “ringleaders.” Joseph Lee, one of the committee’s five members, likened
the school protests to recent kidnappings by French-speaking separatists in Canada. “You can’t give in to kidnappers or protesters,” he said, “or they’ll take over.” The committee drew powerful support from Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, by then a candidate for mayor, and for nearly a decade the symbol of white resistance to black demands in Boston.

T
he graduates sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The glee club sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Francis E. Harrington, principal of Roxbury’s Patrick T. Campbell Junior High School, advanced toward the microphone, when suddenly a figure rose in the audience.

“A foul enemy of ours has been brought into this place!” shouted the Reverend Virgil Wood, Boston representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who only a year before had escorted Martin Luther King to that school. Now the audience sat in stunned silence as Wood made his way to the stage, brushed Harrington aside, and asked:

“If this were a synagogue, would you have invited Adolf Hitler?”

“No!” roared the audience.

“Is Mrs. Hicks interested in our children?”

“No!”

All the while, Louise Day Hicks—the scheduled graduation speaker at Campbell that June day in 1966—sat primly in a powder-blue dress and matching hat, her white-gloved hands folded in her lap, a faint smile on her face. Nor did her expression change when the audience and many of the 146 graduates (143 blacks, 2 whites, and 1 Chinese) began rhythmically chanting, “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

From the wings charged a phalanx of plainclothesmen, assigned to the exercises after black parents had threatened demonstrations against Mrs. Hicks. Two policemen stationed themselves on either side of her. Three others grabbed Wood, hustling him off the stage and out of the auditorium. Several hundred shouting young blacks ran after them. In a corridor outside, the youths surrounded the police, wrestled the minister from their grasp, and triumphantly escorted him back to the stage. Wood, whose blue suit coat had been torn off in the scuffle, stood at the microphone in his shirt sleeves. “I see Mrs. Hicks is still here,” he said. “Do you still have a message for her?”

“Go home, Mrs. Hicks!” thundered the crowd, joined now by all but a few of the graduates.

Turning to Mrs. Hicks, Wood said, “You are a trespasser here. You don’t belong here. Go home. I ask you to leave.” Her hands still folded in her lap, Mrs. Hicks stared blandly back at the minister. Only when students began clambering onto the stage, where they were repelled by police, did Mrs. Hicks allow a captain to lead her to safety.

Later, across the city, Mrs. Hicks told newsmen, “The children were beautifully dressed and behaved. All they wanted was their diplomas. They started crying when that man exploded on the stage like a bomb.” Asked whether her insistence on attending the graduation despite threatened demonstrations hadn’t been a provocation, Mrs. Hicks said she had spoken at other largely black graduations. “Why, at one school,” she said, “a Negro mother came up and threw her arms around me and told me how grateful she was for our work to improve education.”

As so often with Louise Day Hicks, a listener could take his choice. Was she the woman whom Virgil Wood likened to Adolf Hitler, whom James Farmer of CORE called “the Bull Connor of Boston,” whom columnist Joseph Alsop described as “Joseph McCarthy dressed up as Polyanna,” whom others dubbed “the gentle demagogue,” “the sly bigot,” and “the Iron Maiden”? Or was she, as her disciples contended, Boston’s earth mother, a bighearted Lady Bountiful, a dedicated laborer for better schools, a humble woman who had never lost touch with her Irish heritage, her working-class neighborhood, or the “little people” who supported her so fervently?

These same contradictions were to be found in the neighborhood with which she was so closely identified, her beloved South Boston. For a brief period in the 1850s, the peninsula which juts into Boston Harbor seemed destined to become the new home of the city’s Yankee upper class, but by the 1860s, South Boston began filling up with Irish immigrants, people with social distinctions of their own. The Irish middle class settled in the City Point section at the peninsula’s tip, where the grandest of the Yankee estates had been erected along the beaches, while the working-class immigrants gathered further north in a cramped quarter called Little Galway or the Lower End.

Straight off the boat, John and Julia Day settled in the Lower End, where they eked out a meager existence. But their eldest son, William J. Day, was a young man of formidable energy and prodigious charm. After working his way through Boston College and Boston University Law School, he established a law office in Barristers’ Hall, right behind the Suffolk County Courthouse, and soon built a thriving practice, representing among others the Boston Musicians Protective Association, the Motion Picture Operators’ Association, and First National Stores. One of his principal clients was the Mount Washington Cooperative Bank, of which he became counsel, a director, and, ultimately, a major stockholder. His own money went into shrewd real estate investments. In 1910, he married Anna L. McCarron, a fashion model from Charlestown, and after living several years on the slopes of Bunker Hill, they
returned to South Boston, purchasing a three-story, eighteen-room house on Columbia Road, facing the sea. It had taken Billy Day barely thirty years to go from the squalor of the Lower End to the splendor of the Point.

In 1915, Governor David I. Walsh—the Commonwealth’s first Irish governor—named Day a special justice of the South Boston District Court (a part-time job which permitted him to continue his other lucrative activities). He soon built a reputation for leniency, particularly when the defendant was a friend or neighbor. One or two days a week, he sat in the juvenile division, where his compassion was particularly evident. “There’s no such thing as a bad boy, just bad luck,” he would say, finding any excuse not to send a neighborhood youth off to reform school.

As a banker he was equally indulgent. Banking then was almost exclusively a Yankee preserve. South Boston’s other bank was the South Boston Savings Bank, headed by the very Yankee Chandler Bigelow. So it was to Mount Washington—known as “the Irish bank” or simply “Judge Day’s bank”—that the working-class families of the Lower End went for their mortgages, loans, and advice. Unlike the Yankees, the Judge rarely foreclosed a mortgage. If a family fell on hard times, he would suspend payments on the principal so long as the interest charges were met.

Soon the combination of banking, real estate, and law made the Judge one of South Boston’s wealthiest men. He collected diamonds the way other men collect stamps. Once a week, he and a half dozen of South Boston’s leading business and professional men gathered at Gallivan’s Funeral Home to play cards in a group that became known as the Morgue Club. A pious Catholic, a daily communicant at St. Brigid’s Church, and onetime State Deputy of the Knights of Columbus, he was a powerful orator who frequently addressed religious and community groups on the menace of Communism, the evils of divorce, the folly of prohibition, and the rising tide of immorality which was “raising its foul head and challenging the power of God over the hearts of men, perfuming the human emotions with the odor of the pig sty.”

An imposing figure with florid face and curly white hair, Judge Day seemed ideally suited for politics, yet he never showed the slightest interest in running for office. Some of his political friendships were eccentric ones for a South Boston Democrat—notably with the Republican governor, and later President, Calvin Coolidge (it is said that Coolidge wanted to give him a job in Washington, but that Day refused because he didn’t want to leave South Boston). “I think the Judge regarded party politics as beneath him,” recalls John Flaherty, his onetime clerk. “He would walk down the street and people would tip their hat to him, as they would to a priest. He was ‘the Judge,’ a respected figure, and that’s all he ever wanted to be.”

To his daughter, the Judge was “the greatest fellow who ever walked this earth,” “my first and only hero,” and “the greatest influence in my life.” Her, mother had died in 1932, when Louise was sixteen. From then on, Louise was the only woman in a family of four men—her father and three brothers, William Jr., Paul, and John—and she quickly assumed many duties of wife,
mother, cook, and housekeeper. Even after she married John “Jay” Hicks, a former ice-skating champion from Albany, New York, she did not leave her father. When Hicks got out of the Navy in 1945, he moved into the Judge’s house. In 1946, they named their second son William, after the Judge. Louise was surrounded by men and boys, but the Judge remained her first love.

And she was his. He boasted to lawyers in his courtroom when she won a race in the annual swimming competition off City Point. He preened when, as a student at Nazareth parochial school, she won a statewide essay competition sponsored by the Ancient Order of Hibernians on “America’s Debt to Ireland.” When she was twenty-four, he made her a clerk in his law office, where she became expert in searching real estate titles. As a hearing examiner for the Office of Price Administration during World War II, he took her along on his travels. She was with him at the Paddock Club at Suffolk Downs on May 27, 1950, when he suffered a heart attack. She was at his side three days later when he died. And on his deathbed, she says, her father told her, “Take care of my people,” the little people of South Boston who had come to depend on him for mercy in court, easy terms at the bank. No doubt these people genuinely revered the Judge. Shortly after his death, with wide community support, the roadway along the beaches of South Boston was renamed William J. Day Boulevard.

Mrs. Hicks has often called her father’s death the “turning point” in her life. His final admonition, she has said, convinced her to become a lawyer so she could “carry on his work,” though she has probably exaggerated this for political purposes. In fact, she had entered Boston College Law School in February 1949—fully fifteen months before the Judge’s death—remaining there off and on until February 1951, when she dropped out.

Another event which the family doesn’t talk about may have been just as important in nudging her toward a public career. On August 18, 1941, her oldest brother, William Jr., died mysteriously at age twenty-nine. There is strong evidence that he committed suicide. His father’s heir apparent, Bill studied law at Boston College, but quit before receiving a degree. He had been a handsome and popular playboy who courted a show girl named “Bubbles” and drank heavily. Friends suspect his untimely death may have stimulated Louise’s ambition, just as the wartime death of young Joe Kennedy prompted his younger brother John to enter politics. Ultimately, another Day brother, John, did become a lawyer and took over the Judge’s practice. The third son, Paul, followed his father into the Mount Washington Bank. But neither boy had the Judge’s ambition or flair for public life. A longtime friend of Mrs. Hicks says, “Louise loved being Judge Day’s daughter. Growing up in South Boston, she’d been a princess. She might have preferred that one of her brothers carry on that family tradition, but when it became clear that neither of them was going to do it, she decided the torch had been passed to her.”

Her father’s death does seem to have given Mrs. Hicks a new sense of purpose. Until then she had proceeded somewhat aimlessly: a year at Simmons College studying home economics; three years at Wheelock College, where
she got a teacher’s certificate; two years teaching first grade in suburban Brookline, while she studied for an education degree at Boston University; then nearly ten years as a clerk in her father’s law office; finally, her first attempt at law school. But soon after her father’s death, she returned to Boston University to complete her education degree. Then, in the fall of 1952, she plunged into Boston University Law School.

For a thirty-six-year-old mother of two that would be somewhat unusual even today. In the early 1950s, when few women of any age studied law, it was rare indeed. But for a South Boston woman, steeped in the Irish mystique of home and family, it was extraordinary. It meant handing over much of the housework and the care of her children to a family retainer, Mrs. Augusta Manson, who had helped raise Louise and her brothers. John Hicks, never very successful in his “engineering” career, also picked up some of the burden at home. Even then, Louise’s schedule was relentless: up at 4:00 a.m. to study for several hours before attending morning classes, afternoons in her brother’s law office, home in time to have dinner with the family and put her children to bed.

There were only 9 women among the 232 students who started out in the class of 1955. Their male classmates tended to regard them as freaks—ambitious blue stockings tolerated in the classroom but largely ignored outside. So the women huddled together, seeking reassurance from one another. Within a few weeks, Louise had sealed a friendship with two classmates—Elaine Reeder, a Jewish girl from Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Isabel Gates, a black from Durham, North Carolina. They met in the ladies’ lounge and soon were sitting together in classes, studying together, eating together.

Before long, the trio became the nucleus of an informal study group whose members helped one another prepare for examinations. Most of the others were either women or blacks. There was Elaine Sartorelli, an Italian girl from Chelsea, and Eleftheria Themistocles, a Greek girl from Newton. Two black men—Reuben Dawkins and Jim Purdy—were regular members, and the five other blacks in the class all attended from time to time. “It was a coming together of the scorned minorities,” one member recalled years later. “The women knew what the blacks were going through, the blacks knew what the women were going through. The few white males who studied with us were those who could accept us as people; without being blinded by our color or our gender.” The mid-fifties were years in which most Northern whites never exchanged more than a sentence or two with a Negro; for at least three years, Louise Day Hicks had far more contact with blacks than all but a handful of her contemporaries.