Common Ground (58 page)

When aides began rounding up the parents for their trip home, Rachel was more than ready to leave. But she wasn’t prepared for the roar which went up from the crowd on the Monument grounds. If anything, the crowd had grown during the past two hours, and this time, as the parents boarded the bus, they were met by jeers and catcalls. “That’s right,” people were shouting. “Go home, niggers! Keep going all the way to Africa!” Rachel hunched down in her seat, away from the bus windows, which she feared might shatter at any moment. Outside, she could hear the police radio crackling with urgent communications, then the whine of the sirens as patrol cars joined the procession. All the way down the hill and across the bridge, she thought to herself: My God, what kind of hell am I sending my children into?

When she reached Methunion Manor, young Rachel and Cassandra were waiting for her report. As calmly as possible, she told them. She told Cassandra
that Charlestown High was a “raggedy-ass school” which should have been torn down years ago. She told Rachel that, although she hadn’t seen the Edwards, she understood it was somewhat newer and in better condition than the high school. Then she recounted exactly what she had seen at the Monument, sparing her daughters none of the details. “There’s a lot of prejudiced people in Charlestown,” she said. “They don’t want me over there and they don’t want you over there. I’m afraid this isn’t going to be an easy year for either of you. You’re going to be called a lot of ugly names. You’re going to be spat at, maybe pushed around some. But it’s not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. It’s something we have to go through—something
you
have to go through—if this city is ever going to get integrated.”

But later, as she lay in bed, Rachel wept bitterly. Her strong faith in integration had been badly rattled that night, the old verities called into question. What good, she wondered, could possibly come from all this? What could her children learn at a school like that, except how to hate?

“Fellow citizens,” Charlestown’s mayor, George Washington Warren, told a large assemblage on Monument Square one morning in October 1847. “When all of us shall have passed away from the stage of life, when there shall not be one of the present generation living to inform the men of the Twentieth Century of the doings of these times, may the Institution this day planted yield its good fruit, and be ever fondly cherished by the people…. As long as this Monument shall commemorate the successful contests of our fathers for National Independence, may the High School standing up proudly by its side, serve, by its generous and ennobling influences, to perpetuate and guaranty the blessings of that Independence to our children’s children unto the remotest generation.”

The new school, a handsome three-story brick building overlooking Monument Square, was dedicated on Bunker Hill Day 1848 and opened to its eighty-eight pupils two days later. Originally its curriculum was heavily weighted toward the classics (Xenophon’s
Anabasis
, Virgil’s
Georgics
, Cicero, Greek and Latin composition) as well as rhetoric, natural philosophy, French, ancient history, astronomy, and trigonometry. It was a classical education, appropriate for those who studied on the hilltop called by some “the American Acropolis.” But gradually the high school adapted its offerings to the needs of nineteenth-century commerce, and as the Town’s Yankees fled ever faster from the inrushing Irish, the trend toward vocational education accelerated. By 1906, when planning began for a new Charlestown High, the old vision of a classical education on an American Acropolis had long since given way to the urgent necessity of training the “unlettered, uncouth, unruly immigrant class.”

It is said that one of the first Irishmen to graduate from Charlestown High—Joseph J. Corbett of the class of 1881—was responsible for the school’s being rebuilt in the same white granite used for the adjacent Bunker
Hill Monument. By then a judge of the Municipal Court and a member of Boston’s Board of Schoolhouse Commissioners, Corbett lived directly across the square in a fine town house, and he used his position on the schoolhouse board to make certain that the new high school should lend a fitting dignity to its corner of the square. When completed in 1907, the granite facing—embellished with eight Ionic columns, a large clock and matching compass—did give the new school a certain authority. But it was hardly the “architectural gem seemingly from Mars’ hill” acclaimed by the euphoric Charlestown
Enterprise
. Perhaps its best features were the stately staircases which ascended right and left from the narrow entrance lobby. But the rooms to which they led on the three upper stories were bare, unadorned boxes, with little grace or charm. Indeed, the school’s interior design seems to have been dictated less by Corbett’s pride in his surroundings than by the need for economy and a spare, utilitarian focus on the school’s new function. The education offered at the school was clearly defined by the Boston
Globe:
“It stands for the training of ordinary boys and girls to do the ordinary work of life…. The ordinary human being, who used to be turned loose upon the work-a-day world at the age of fourteen, to hunt for a job, and perhaps, missing it, to join the ranks of the worthless, here may find occupations for his idle youth and training for his useful manhood.” This emphasis was soon confirmed by the erection of an annex to house the school’s electrical shops. The Charlestown electrician’s course was part of a program in which several Boston high schools provided technical training—sheet-metal work at South Boston, cabinetmaking at Dorchester—open to students from all over the city. Those enrolled in such courses also received academic instruction, but this was clearly peripheral to their preparation for a lifetime of manual labor.

As the high school’s academic offerings shrank, so did its reputation. As early as 1917, the Boston
Traveler
asked in an editorial, “What’s the matter with this school?” It noted that Charlestown, with 39,601 residents, had only thirty-five high school graduates while Hyde Park High, serving barely half Charlestown’s population, had eighty-three. “Not one of the Charlestown boys and girls graduated this year with ‘honors’ or ‘high honors.’ … Something is wrong somewhere. Where it is the
Traveler
does not claim to know. But whatever it is it should be corrected before another school year begins, or the school should be closed in the interest of educational efficiency.”

Something was wrong indeed. Charlestown families with aspirations for their children were abandoning the school, sending them to the Boston Latin School, English, Trade, Technical, or one of the new Catholic high schools. But Boston Latin required extra intelligence, the other “in-town” schools took extra initiative, the Catholic schools cost extra money. By 1920, Charlestown High had become a school of last resort for those without such resources.

Yet for some Townies the high school on the hill had its own attractions, less educational than symbolic. Apprehensive of the alien city, they renounced the opportunity, advancement, and adventure Boston offered for the reassurance
of community, solidarity, and camaraderie. Rejecting the American imperative to get ahead, they opted for the Charlestown ethic of getting by. Like the Monument itself, the granite school by its side became a rallying point for those who would reaffirm their choice with cries of “Boom Charlestown” and “Townie Pride.” So what if Yankee institutions like the
Traveler
criticized its academic standards? Who cared if colleges like Harvard and Wellesley ignored Charlestown graduates? What if the lace-curtain Irish preferred Boston Latin or Malden Catholic? The high school was the real Charlestown—tribal, resilient, pugnacious, indomitable. The school cheer might evolve over the years from “Rah, rah, rah for dear old Charlestown” to “Here we go, Charlestown, here we go,” but the message remained the same: the hell with the rest of the world, Charlestown was Number One.

Charlestown’s girls had particular reason for turning necessity into a virtue. Most Townie families of limited means generally allocated tuition money to their sons, which meant that the boys went off to Catholic high schools while the girls went up the hill to Charlestown High. For years, the school was led by a group of bright, restless girls eager to assert their worth.

Most boys who went there were less academically inclined, but they found other fields in which to excel. One was the Charlestown Corps of Cadets, a quasi-military outfit which marched every year in the Bunker Hill Day parade.

Then there were sports, to which the Townies brought a demonic ferocity. Through much of the thirties and forties the school didn’t fare very well in competition. Not only was its male enrollment the smallest of any Boston high school, but most of the Town’s best athletes were siphoned off by the in-town schools or the Catholic powers. Then, in 1951, Frank Power, Jr., became Charlestown’s football and baseball coach. Determined to reverse the school’s athletic fortunes, he worked hard to recruit young Townies. From the mid-fifties through the early sixties, Charlestown produced exceptional teams in all sports, and Frank Power quickly became the Town’s newest hero. He was invited to address banquets of the Knights of Columbus, the Holy Name Society, and virtually anyone who could rustle up some chicken à la king and a Boston cream pie. Down at Sully’s, every longshoreman in the place wanted to buy him a beer. And when he marched in the Bunker Hill Day parade, he got more applause than the pastor of St. Mary’s and the U.S. Marine Band put together.

In 1961, with his reputation at its peak, Power shocked the Town by accepting a similar teaching/coaching job at Hyde Park High, nearer his home in Southwest Boston. But his heart was still at Charlestown High, and seven years later he returned there as headmaster. Taking office at midyear, he bided his time. Then, on September 3, 1968, he welcomed his faculty back to school with a speech none of them would ever forget. Power had detected “a certain lack of pedagogic duties, an unnecessary social atmosphere, a country club familiarity.” But teaching was “not just a job from eight to two, an interlude in our more important projects, but a privilege and a solemn duty.” Teachers who “find the job a bore, who are clockwatchers, who do not like children, such
people do not belong in education.” To Frank Power it was “a calling as sacred as that of the ministry.” In the summertime and on weekends he took students’ records home with him and, while watching television, thumbed the cards until he knew by heart every student’s name, where he lived, who his parents were, his strengths and weaknesses.

A large man with an athlete’s physical presence and enormous charm, he knew the effect he had on others and used it shrewdly. “Among placid men,” said one teacher, “Frank Power rippled.” But by the late sixties, the problems confronting Charlestown High would have challenged the most forceful personality. First was its continuing slide into academic mediocrity. Scarcely 15 percent of its graduates went on to college, the lowest percentage of any city high school. A few more entered technical or nursing schools, but the vast majority ended their education at Charlestown High. Low expectations had become institutionalized: students who anticipated failure were reinforced by teachers who had come to expect nothing more.

The quality of education was constrained by sheer physical obsolescence. By 1968, the granite fortress on the hill was sixty years old, one of the oldest school buildings in the city. Designed for 450 students, it now held 600 (with 150 more in the Electrical Annex and the Charlestown Boys’ Club). With no cafeteria, no library, no athletic fields, its facilities were clearly inadequate for a modern urban high school. In 1964, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges had warned that unless these deficiencies were promptly corrected the school would lose its accreditation. Even the students—who generally displayed a grudging working-class passivity—became infected by the activism of the era and began agitating for better conditions. On one occasion, 125 of them staged a walkout and rally on the Monument grounds, where they burned their bag lunches to protest the lack of a cafeteria. When Frank Power appeared they chanted, “We like Frank, but we want beans.” Although Power mollified them with promises of a hot-lunch program, the only long-term solution was construction of a new Charlestown High.

But with the state pressing for enforcement of the racial imbalance law, that wouldn’t be easy. Since the law defined racial imbalance as more than 50 percent non-white, Charlestown High itself was not an immediate target. Yet with only ten non-whites out of 721 students enrolled there in 1967, it was clearly the white counterpart of the nearly all-black ghetto schools. The State Board of Education approved funds for a new Charlestown High, on the basis of vague assurances from the Boston School Committee that the school would open 30 percent non-white; but as the board came to question the committee’s good faith, the project bogged down in seemingly endless wrangles between the two bodies.

Frank Power quickly recognized that to get the new school he so badly wanted he would have to demonstrate Charlestown’s willingness to accept minority students, and realizing that the Town wasn’t ready to welcome large numbers of blacks, he concentrated on attracting Chinese and Hispanics. Beginning in the late sixties, he made regular trips to middle schools in those
communities, preaching the virtues of Charlestown. By 1971, he had reaped tangible results: 89 non-whites, of whom 49 were Chinese, 25 Hispanic, and 15 black.

To some this strategy smacked of hypocrisy: “desegregation without blacks,” one critic called it. Certainly it was a convenient delaying tactic. But those who knew the headmaster never questioned his ultimate intent. For Power had grown up intensely aware of the parallel liabilities suffered by blacks and Irish Catholics. In his desk he kept an editorial from the
Irish News
of Belfast, warning: “Prejudice in any form is a dreadful thing,” and under the glass top, the lyrics of a song from
South Pacific:
“You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are ugly made / And people whose skin is a different shade.” Frank Power harbored a private passion for racial justice.