Common Ground (62 page)

Nobody was more beguiled by the prospect of a week in England than Billy McGoff. He’d never been farther from home than Worcester, for a Holy Cross football game. Merry Olde England sounded like the perfect way to top off his high school years, and nobody worked harder to make the dream come true. He served on the Project ’76 Committee, sold sweatshirts, ran car washes, and
helped build the float. He talked so much about England that his friends said, “For an Irishman, McGoff, you sure talk like a bloody limey.” Then, in September of their senior year, Frank Power passed the word: there would be no trip to England. No reason was given, but Billy and his classmates assumed that busing had killed it. Some said the blacks couldn’t go because they hadn’t worked to pay their way; but if they
didn’t
go, Garrity would ban the trip as segregated. In fact, the decision had nothing to do with busing. The funds so painfully accumulated had simply disappeared—school officials discovered that the teacher responsible for holding the money had blown it all at the racetrack. One administrator scribbled a fitting epitaph for Project ’76: “Their kingdom for a horse!”

To protect the teacher’s reputation, the incident was never publicized, and the class of ’76 went on believing that busing had cost them the trip for which they had worked so hard. Hurt and angry, Billy and his classmates began to emphasize another of their distinctions. No longer did they call themselves the “Bicentennial Class.” That autumn of 1975, little green-and-white stickers began appearing on walls and lockers at the high school, bearing the initials “TLWC”—“The Last White Class.”

Strictly speaking, the slogan wasn’t accurate—there were three blacks in the class. But Garrity had given that year’s seniors the option of graduating from their present schools, and the class had remained overwhelmingly white, whereas the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors were substantially integrated. This—plus their two years of aborted labor on Project ’76—had lent the 204 white seniors a special sense of mission: they were the last graduates of the real Charlestown High and, by God, they were going down fighting.

Billy McGoff wanted badly to be class president. His brother Danny had been president the year before, and Billy was a leader in his own right: co-captain of the football team, co-captain of the basketball team, editor of the yearbook. But he had strong competition—a lively Townie girl named Michele Barrett, who had been class president for two consecutive years. When the votes were in, Michele had edged Billy once again, carrying with her an all-female slate. That was as it should be, said some Townie girls. The anti-busing movement was largely a woman’s enterprise, led by militant mothers like Louise Day Hicks, Pixie Palladino, and Pat Russell. It was fitting that women should lead The Last White Class into battle.

Billy soon recovered from his disappointment. Now he could concentrate on sports, which had long been his principal interest. A husky kid (six feet one, 175 pounds), with speed and coordination to match, Billy was a four-letter man—in football, basketball, baseball, and track—earning his schoolmates’ respect in the arena which mattered most to Townies.

As a former coach, Frank Power recognized the powerful hold sports had on Charlestown’s imagination. Indeed, he remembered all too well an incident the previous March in which a hockey game had nearly set off a full-scale riot. Now he had visions of similar rioting instigated by Townie sportsmen against the black community, and to neutralize the school’s athletes, he announced
that any student who boycotted school was prohibited from practicing that day; anyone who missed a practice couldn’t play in that week’s game.

The year before, South Boston High had been so rattled by desegregation that it had failed to field a football team for the first time in nearly a century. At the same time, the endless boycotts and demonstrations had cost Charlestown the services of Howie Long, an outstanding prospect who simply wanted to play ball (he went on to star for the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League).

It was a matter of pride to The Last White Class that, no matter what happened in the fall of 1975, eleven kids would somehow take the field for every game wearing the red, white, and blue Townie jerseys; Billy and his two co-captains had sworn a solemn compact on that. When practice began in the last week of August, the holdovers from last year’s squad would assemble every afternoon in the choking dust of the J. J. Ryan Playground for two hours of calisthenics and light contact drills. It was murderously hot in the line, where Billy alternated between center and left tackle, but he loved the sweat and stink of the trenches, the surge as the linemen got off the mark together, the thud of shoulder pads as the two lines collided.

The holdovers were all white, but when the first full practice was held on September 15, four blacks showed up. Nobody had expected that. Blacks had played football for Charlestown before, but the team had been all white for three consecutive years and in the new climate of hostility engendered by busing, nobody had imagined blacks would try to crack the Townie monopoly.

That first afternoon, the four blacks practiced separately at one end of the field, most white coaches and players barely acknowledging their presence. Mike Sheeran, beginning his ninth year as the Townie coach, was an opponent of busing, impatient with the complications it required him to deal with. Many of his players were more vociferous. “Only a Townie can make this team,” said defensive back Mark Burns. “The rest of the school is falling apart. They’ve taken everything else away from us. This is the only freedom we have left.”

When Charlestown played its first game against South Boston on September 20, only eighty-four spectators showed up at White Stadium in Roxbury’s Franklin Park. Fourteen white cheerleaders—selected the previous spring to preempt the racial issue—tried to rouse the meager Charlestown rooting section with chants of “Here we go, Townies, here we go!” But South Boston drubbed the Townies, 36–6. At left tackle, Billy McGoff spent a long, frustrating afternoon butting heads with a bruiser from Southie. It must have been a frustrating afternoon for Mike Sheeran too. Disgusted with his team’s performance, unable or unwilling to resolve its racial problems, he approached his principal assistant, John Green, and said, “You’ve always wanted a crack at this job, John. Well, it’s yours. I quit.”

Even John Green, a more relaxed and patient man, couldn’t defuse the racial issue. Confronted with active or passive hostility from most of the white players, the four blacks dropped off the team within a week. And yet Frank
Power’s strategy paid off. The Townies suffered through a dismal season—no wins, six losses, and a tie—but all that fall Billy and most of his teammates stayed in school, shunning walkouts and demonstrations.

Billy’s aloofness irritated his sister Lisa as she found herself being drawn more deeply into the anti-busing struggle. Since her father’s death, she had felt particularly close to her mother, and as Alice plunged into the movement, so did Lisa, accompanying her to Powder Keg meetings, ROAR rallies, and innumerable marches to City Hall and the State House.

Lisa had grown up with no intense feelings—one way or the other—about black people. In a town so overwhelmingly white and so insulated from the rest of the city, race wasn’t much of an issue; through most of her childhood, the handful of blacks in the housing project were more curiosities than anything else. But the approaching storm of school desegregation had changed all that. As it swept across South Boston, Hyde Park, and Dorchester, its repercussions were received in Charlestown with profound alarm, and as the adults of Powder Keg girded for battle, they passed their anxieties on to their children.

Ten days before the first buses rolled into Charlestown, rumors had raced through the Bunker Hill project that “the blacks are coming,” that they were going to ride up and down Bunker Hill Street shooting anything that moved. A few kids went down to the bridges to serve as lookouts, and for nearly a week many project families, including the McGoffs, slept with baseball bats by their beds. No carloads of blacks ever showed up, but Lisa never quite forgot that terrible week. Like most of her contemporaries, she believed that when the buses came, the black kids would step off armed to the teeth and ready to rumble. She believed that most black boys were out to molest and rape white girls, that black girls would attack white girls in the ladies’ room, and that blacks of both sexes carried knives, razors, scissors, stickpins, and other weapons with which to assault whites.

But Lisa had been raised not to betray her fears and doubts; she prided herself on being a tough Townie chick who gave as good as she got. Moreover, she was a born leader, blessed with a strength of will that made others follow her. Though only a junior, she was accepted on equal terms by the circle of energetic girls who had taken control of that year’s senior class. She felt particularly close to two of them: Trudy, an honor student, basketball and softball player, and leader of Project ’76; and Doris, the class secretary, a cheerleader and three-sport athlete. Trudy, Doris, and Lisa all lived in the Bunker Hill project, and all three had parents active in Powder Keg. Soon they emerged as the acknowledged leaders of the school’s anti-busing activity. Certain teachers labeled them “the unholy trinity.”

But the girls rarely acted on their own. From the start, Powder Keg had called the shots at the high school. The year before—as Charlestown demonstrated its support of embattled Southie and geared up for its own ordeal—Pat Russell had relayed orders to the students through her daughter Patricia. Every morning at 9:40, between the second and third periods, Pat assumed her position
on the slope beneath the Monument, while Patricia went to a window facing the Monument grounds. From her mother’s hand signals she could tell whether students loyal to Powder Keg should walk out or stay in school that day. But the “Bunker Hill semaphore,” as it became known, was too crude for the more difficult decisions which had to be reached the following fall, and the Town’s anti-busing forces found more efficient means of getting the word into the high school.

In June 1974—exercising his traditional right to designate the head of the high school’s Home and School Association—Frank Power had selected a maverick. Virginia Winters, a mother of eleven from the Bunker Hill project, didn’t openly favor busing, but she supported peaceful implementation of the court order. That made her useful to the embattled headmaster, but earned her only enmity from most Charlestown parents. The association’s other officers—among them, Alice McGoff as secretary—regarded her as a traitor to their cause. When the time came to elect new officers in June 1975, Alice was returned to office, along with the vice-president and treasurer, but the association defied Frank Power by refusing to reelect Ginny Winters. Instead, it chose Tom Johnson.

It was a crucial choice, for the association president had ready access to the high school and Tom Johnson took full advantage of that privilege. In his blue ROAR jacket, he became a familiar figure in the school lobby, where he served as the white students’ adviser and advocate, and through him, Powder Keg maintained direct contact with student leaders like Lisa, Trudy, and Doris. Frequently, the students attended Powder Keg meetings to plan tactics for the school.

Through September, most of Charlestown’s protests took place on the streets. In the mornings, the now familiar procession of mothers filed up the hill, “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys” sounding in the still autumn air; and at night, the kids in the Bunker Hill project played cat and mouse with the police. For the moment, Charlestown High was a sideshow, its students content with an occasional boycott to demonstrate support for the featured players in these daily dramas.

All that changed abruptly in early October as the Minority Council began making its presence felt. The notion of a black pressure group presenting demands and forcing concessions was offensive to white parents and students alike. For years, they had watched black student organizations in action at Boston’s inner-city schools. It seemed as if they always got their way, that all blacks had to do was grow bushy Afros, brandish their fists, and chant, “Burn, baby, burn,” for white administrators to start caving in. Now this terrifying scenario seemed to be playing itself out right up the hill at Charlestown High.

And who was it making concessions to the blacks but the Town’s old stalwart, Frank Power! The Townies simply couldn’t understand why Frank had deserted them. It had begun back in July when the School Department mailed out the fall’s assignments. In the days that followed, Power had been besieged
by Charlestown parents, imploring him to use his influence downtown to get their kids transferred back to Charlestown. Invariably, they invoked a special relationship with the headmaster: they had scored two touchdowns for him in the Eastie game back in 1957, their sister had gotten a B in his advanced geometry class. Frank would greet them warmly, embrace the mothers, wrap a big arm around the fathers. There was nothing he’d rather do than help, he’d say, but what could he do—it was a federal court order. “Come on, Frank,” the parents would say. “You know us. You’ve pulled strings for us before.” Again he would explain: the judge controlled the whole thing. As they left, he could see the wounded look in their eyes.

But that was nothing compared to their sense of betrayal when he began negotiating with the Minority Council. It was one thing for Power to accept the court order, quite another for him to deal with the interlopers themselves, giving away, piece by piece, the time-honored prerogatives of Charlestown High. And none of Power’s dealings with the caucus stayed confidential very long. When he accepted most of their demands in principle, the Townies could not contain their anger. That afternoon, coming into a vacant classroom, he saw scribbled in big block letters on the blackboard: “Mr. Power is a backstabber. He sold us out.” And a few days later, during a white student boycott, a girl he’d known for years spat in his face.

At first, he tried to shrug it all off; the haters might be in control now, he told himself, but eventually the moderates would rally around him as they always had, and Charlestown High would be Frank Power’s school once again. But as Indian summer turned to raw New England autumn, he could feel the resentment congealing into hard rage. He received death threats, half-legible warnings scribbled on postcards, slurred voices on the phone telling his wife he was going to get “a bullet in the head.” The daily confrontations took their toll: dizzy spells and other symptoms which his doctor told him reflected dangerously high blood pressure. Seeking solace, he turned to the priests at St. Mary’s. In the murky light of dawn, after opening the school, he would walk across Monument Square to the rectory. Sitting at the big dining-room table under steel engravings of the saints, he would sip a mug of black coffee and tell the Irish priests about the forces pulling him apart. How, he asked, could he reconcile his deep love of Charlestown, and his personal relationship with hundreds of Townie families, with his commitment to racial justice? “It’s tearing me in two, Father,” he told Pastor Bob Boyle one morning in early October. “I don’t know how much longer I can take it.”