Common Ground (61 page)

Soon Rachel recognized that there was little she could do at Charlestown High. The Parents’ Council was a paper organization; its five black members met once a month at a “neutral site” downtown, but, with whites continuing to boycott the council, it had no real function. Recognizing this, Judge Garrity ordered new elections to fill vacancies in Charlestown and elsewhere. But once again the black turnout was small and the Powder Keg delegation sat stolidly
across the room, determined in their boycott. Frank Power pleaded with the whites to relent; when they persisted, he publicly apologized to the blacks. Rachel felt sorry for him. The headmaster was no longer the bold, confident man she had first seen two months before. In a voice loud enough to carry across the room, she told him, “It’s too bad some people are determined this thing should fail. It’s too bad they insist on teaching their children to hate.”

“Nobody here hates anybody!” one of the Charlestown women shot back. “Everything would be okay if you people just left us alone. And that means you too, Power, you traitor!”

A few days later—on October 23—Frank Power resigned from Charlestown High. The newspaper accounts said he was going on sick leave until the end of the year, when he would become an assistant to Bob Cousy, the former Celtics star, who was then commissioner of the American Soccer League. He was replaced at Charlestown by Bob Murphy, a veteran assistant headmaster at Boston English.

Rachel was sorry to see Power go. He struck her as a well-meaning man who had struggled to find some middle ground on a battlefield where no compromise was possible. His resignation did not bode well.

In late October, Rachel received an invitation from a group of black parents who were meeting at the Cooper Community Center to plan new action on Charlestown High. She was reluctant to attend, particularly when she learned that the parents’ plan included a massive boycott intended to force the closing of Charlestown High and the return of the minority children to schools in their own communities. Soon she began receiving material from one of the meeting’s sponsors, the African Liberation Support Committee, which argued that busing served the needs of “the U.S. Ruling Class, not Third World people.” It had been forced on the people of Boston by “the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Kennedys, the NAACP, etc.” Poor people gained nothing from “the forcible busing of our children from a dilapidated working class school in the black community to one in the white community.” Such measures did nothing but “pit poor and working people from both communities against one another. We can no longer fool ourselves thinking equality of oppressed nationalities will come under capitalist society.”

There was much in the pamphlet with which Rachel agreed. Certainly busing did pit poor whites and poor blacks against each other, and over what? A broken-down old school, worse than many of those in Roxbury. The tract echoed many of the doubts about busing which had been growing in her all fall. Nevertheless, she concluded that the African Liberation people were wrong in demanding that Charlestown High be closed and black children returned to their community. That would be a reversal of everything she had fought for those last ten years.

Cassandra would have been delighted with such a solution. By mid-autumn she was pleading with her mother to use her position on the Parents’ Council to arrange a transfer out of Charlestown. But with Garrity’s experts keeping a tight watch on school assignments, such transfers were virtually impossible to
obtain, and in any case, Rachel would have resisted her daughter’s pleas. One night, as Cassandra renewed her complaints about the school, Rachel explained why she thought it was important to stick it out in Charlestown. The African Liberation Committee might pretend that Boston’s black community was equivalent to an African republic, but this wasn’t Ethiopia or Zambia. Boston was a white city—it always had been and, so far as she could tell, it always would be. So Boston blacks had to learn how to deal with whites, how to jolly them along, how to play their little games. She wasn’t talking about toleration, about Brotherhood Week; she was talking about survival. She had worked in factories where black people had to be careful when they went to the bathroom because whites would smear filth all over the toilets or the faucets when they saw them coming. She had friends who worked in offices where white waitresses would tip coffeepots or jam jars over on tables served by blacks so they would get a reputation as sloppy. There were a lot of good white folks out there, but there were a whole lot of nasty ones too. You couldn’t avoid them by retreating into your own neighborhood the way the African Liberation Committee wanted you to. If you were ever going to make it out there in the big city, you had to know what city life was all about, and for that Charlestown High was the best possible education.

It was an education all right. Ever since the October 20 melee, ten policemen—five plainclothes detectives and five uniformed police—had been stationed in the school every day. But the uniformed police played cards in the auditorium, on call only for emergencies, and the plainclothesmen were spread too thin to be effective. The dark hallways and stairwells, particularly on the upper floors, remained as dangerous as ever. As the jousting continued through the fall and winter, Cassandra and her friends learned how to survive at Charlestown High.

They learned that some whites were friendly enough one-to-one, but turned hostile in larger groups. Knowing how much pressure there was on such students to conform, they didn’t trust them in delicate situations.

They learned never to walk the corridors or the stairways alone. After a student passed through the metal detectors he was supposed to go directly to his homeroom. But after several blacks were jumped, they found ways to linger in the lobby long enough to form small convoys.

They learned to resist provocation. It was hard to be cool when someone shouted “coon” or “bushboogie” at you, but Steve Moss and Nathan Spivey warned that whites wanted them to lose control, to strike back in ways that would discredit them—and desegregation. Moreover, they were vastly outnumbered: by November, daily attendance averaged 292 whites, 77 blacks, and 17 “other minorities.” Charlestown High was enemy territory; it was foolhardy to fight on such terrain. Occasionally, one of the hotheads—Clarence Jefferson, Curt Shepherd, or Eddie Malloy—would defy the odds and lash back at their tormentors. But most blacks growled, “Get off my back, honky,” and walked away.

The Minority Council hadn’t abandoned efforts for redress of its grievances.
But it had made little progress that fall, except for the appointment of Alan Cornwall, a black business teacher, as an additional administrative assistant sharing disciplinary duties with Bob Jarvis. Following Frank Power’s resignation, the council took a new tack. Bobby Chin, Clarence Jefferson, Charles Butler, Sheila Keyes, Cassandra, and other council leaders began meeting twice a week in the basement of the Union Methodist Church under the auspices of Lois Dauway, the church’s community worker, who believed that the group would accomplish more by operating in a larger arena. Their first step was to join forces with a similar caucus from South Boston High, an alliance they hoped would lead to formation of a citywide minority students’ organization. Next they sought meetings with officials who could address their problems on the highest level.

One letter went to Arthur Garrity. “Dear Judge Garrity,” they wrote. “We are writing this letter on behalf of the minority students of Charlestown and South Boston High Schools. We, as the black student body, feel that changes should be made now…. There are several blacks and whites that are afraid to attend these schools for the simple reason they know they will get picked on if they are black or white. There have been blacks that have been attacked by three or more whites…. Education is the most important thing to us because we can’t live without it. There is a very weak education going on in Charlestown. When the whites boycott or walk out there isn’t any kind of education going on…. We would like to hold a meeting with you as soon as possible.”

The judge—in keeping with his firm policy of not meeting privately with parties in the case—politely but firmly declined their request.

The next letter went to School Superintendent Marion Fahey, who accepted on condition that the students submit their questions in advance. Back went a long list of queries: “What have you done about the troublemakers in the two schools? Why since September haven’t more materials concerning minorities been added to the schools’ curriculum? Is it possible to have more minority aides in the schools and fewer aides from the neighborhoods? What can the School Department do to make Charlestown High School more attractive and bearable?”

Ms. Fahey spent half an hour with them in the basement of Union Methodist. She was sympathetic, but provided no assurances on any of the students’ complaints. Cassandra left the church that evening fuming with frustration.

The holiday season provided a brief respite, but when the students returned from their ten-day vacation they detected a marked increase in tension. Through January, white students staged a series of increasingly vehement demonstrations in and around the school.

Thursday, January 22, began peacefully enough. Piercing winds and drifting snow kept demonstrators off the Monument grounds as the buses crawled along the icy streets toward the school. Inside the steamy lobby, students clapped mittened hands together and stomped snowy boots. Upstairs in Room 38, Cassandra chatted happily with her seatmates—Josie Flores, Sheila
Keyes, and Julia White—largely oblivious by now to the resentful stares from across the room. Sheila, the high scorer on the girls’ basketball team, had made 18 points the night before and the other girls crowded around her, offering their congratulations. “Kareem Abdul Keyes,” Julia called her, and they all guffawed. It was good to know that a black could excel in something at Charlestown High.

History period went quietly. But walking toward her biology class, Cassandra heard a commotion on the floor below and, peering down the stairwell, saw nearly a hundred white students milling around the office. Uh-oh, she thought, here we go again. When she got to the biology room, it was nearly half empty; most of the whites had joined the demonstration. The teacher did his best to keep the remaining students occupied, but it was difficult to concentrate on binary fission in protozoa with all the noise coming from below.

At ten o’clock, Mr. Cornwall interrupted the class to say they had “a bit of a problem” downstairs. For their own safety, he said, all minority students would be concentrated in three classrooms on the upper floors. Cassandra, Sheila, and Josie ended up in Room 36 with Mrs. Mathews, the English teacher. For a few minutes, she read them a short story, something about Puritans in a New England village on the first Thanksgiving. Suddenly there was a clatter in the corridor, the door burst open, and a white boy stood there with a chair poised above his head. With an angry roar, he heaved it across the room at. Mrs. Mathews, who dodged and slipped to the floor as the boy charged off down the hall.

When she regained her composure, Mrs. Mathews ordered someone to barricade the door with a desk. Then she told them what little she knew: The white students were staging a sit-in on the main staircases. A few of the white boys had gotten loose on the upper floors. They were being rounded up by teachers and police—there was nothing to worry about—but they would all have to stay put until the staircase could be cleared.

For the first time in her months at Charlestown High, Cassandra was frightened. The clamor from downstairs grew deafening. First the demonstrators sang a song, then they broke into a rhythmic chant. In the hallway outside, she heard more footsteps, a shout, then the sound of shattering glass. Mrs. Mathews tried to keep the students busy. She read them another short story. They played cards. They sang songs. Some of the younger kids drew pictures. But as the hours went by and nobody came to get them out, they grew increasingly agitated. Tempers flared. Nerves frazzled. Every noise in the hallway made them flinch.

Not until 12:45 did Bob Jarvis knock at the door to report that police had isolated the whites on the staircase, freeing the fire stairs on either side. Buses were drawn up in the adjacent alley, ready to receive the minority students. Detectives would lead them to safety. Cassandra sobbed with relief as she followed a burly cop down the narrow staircase.

Just then, the whites got wind of what was happening. “They’re getting away!” they shouted. “They’re going out the side!” Around the corner raced a
dozen white boys, heaving stones at the buses as they rumbled down the alleys.

From her window, Cassandra gazed up the snowy slope toward the high school, hunched there in the shadow of the Monument. Only when the bus had crossed the bridge into the winding alleys of the North End did she stop trembling.

F
rom the start they knew they were special—“Big ’76,” the “Bicentennial Class,” the “Class of Destiny.” For years they had played, fought, and daydreamed beside the granite obelisk. Every morning on their way to school they had walked by the bronze statue of Colonel Prescott, his arm outstretched, surveying the colonial lines. And every evening, descending the central staircase, they had passed beneath Trumbull’s epic painting of Dr. Warren expiring in the arms of his lieutenant as waves of redcoats overran the valiant garrison. So drenched were they in revolutionary mythology they hardly needed to be reminded that they would be graduating two hundred years after the first shots in the struggle for independence.

Unwilling to let the anniversary pass unnoticed, Charlestown High launched “Project ’76,” a three-year program that would culminate in a week-long visit by the entire class to Boston, England. Although the British had agreed to welcome the visitors, the trip would be expensive, and starting in their sophomore year, the class set out to raise funds for the charter flight, hotels, and other expenses. They sold American flags, Bunker Hill flags, red-white-and-blue candles, and sweatshirts emblazoned “Charlestown Townies.” And on June 17, 1975, the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, they sponsored their own float in the Bunker Hill Day parade—a flatbed truck, decked out in bunting, bearing a large model airplane labeled “The Spirit of ’76.”