Common Ground (63 page)

On October 14, some 175 white students walked out of school to protest Power’s meeting with Minority Council representatives. That afternoon, a list of complaints—drawn up by members of The Last White Class—circulated in the school. “The blacks aired their grievances,” it said, “now we would like to air ours.” Among them:

“All the vulgarity by the blacks in the classroom and nothing done about it.

“Obscene gestures and acts against the white girls from black boys. Shoving of white girls in the corridors.

“Metal detectors do not work. The blacks get in with picks concealed in their hair.

“Black aides entering classrooms to talk to black kids.

“Persecuting the whites before the blacks.”

The protest continued the next day as a hundred white students occupied the stairway between the second and third floors, refusing to move until granted an audience with the headmaster. When Power appeared, they complained vehemently about his “favoritism” toward blacks and demanded that he meet immediately with the white students in the school auditorium. Power expressed sympathy for their frustrations, but such a meeting, he said, was out of the question; Judge Garrity had expressly forbidden segregated school assemblies.

That brought a hail of abuse down on the headmaster’s head.

“Who runs this school, you or Garrity?”

“How come you met with the blacks, then?”

“Power, you suck!”

Frank Power glared up the narrow stairwell. He wasn’t going to take this from the kids. Yet every time he tried to speak, a new volley of catcalls drowned him out.

Lisa McGoff sat halfway up the stairs, wedged between Trudy and Doris. Looking down at the headmaster as he paced uneasily in the dim hallway, she felt sorry for the man. She’d always liked Frank Power—even though he didn’t live in Charlestown, he acted like any of the Townies you met on Bunker Hill Street. But since busing began, something had happened to him: he was definitely favoring the blacks over the whites. So despite her lingering sympathy for the headmaster, Lisa joined in the jeers that were now cascading down the stairway.

Never before in his fifteen years at the school had Frank Power been treated this way. Teachers standing nearby were horrified by the effect it had on him. Once he realized he’d utterly lost control of the situation, his shoulders sagged, the color drained from his face, his hands began to tremble.

Eventually, to get the students back to class, he agreed to meet with a small delegation, and that afternoon Power sat down with twenty members of The Last White Class in the school library. When they accused him again of favoring the blacks, he insisted that he was being evenhanded. Wasn’t he meeting with them, just as he had with the Minority Council? They had to understand, though, that the school couldn’t run without certain rules. They should come in and talk things over with him and they’d work everything out as they always had. That was enough to mollify some of the seniors, among them Billy McGoff. But others wouldn’t be placated. When they renewed their accusations, the headmaster grew testy. “Look,” he said, “I’ve done the best I can. Maybe somebody else should take a crack at it.”

Frank realized that he could no longer hold the school together with personal magnetism alone. Feeling deserted by the moderates who might have helped him isolate the extremists, he would have to fall back on coercion, the
naked clout of the federal court, and that wasn’t his style. He had no quarrel with Garrity, but he wasn’t comfortable with judicial authority: it was too abstract, too rigid, too remote. It was one thing to sit up there in black robes passing decrees, quite another to sit here in your shirt sleeves pressing human flesh. Frank had been in Charlestown too long, he was too close to the Townies to be the cool, dispassionate agent of the federal court.

Moreover, he wasn’t well. His doctor had warned him that he was suffering from serious hypertension. “One of these days you’re going to run up those stairs and they’re going to carry you down,” he said. Frank’s wife, Marie, had pleaded with him to quit. On October 17, the headmaster told Superintendent Marion Fahey he was ready to leave.

Once the decision was made, he wanted to turn his back on the old school forever, but he had to stick around another week to break in his successor, Bob Murphy. Finally, during the lunch hour on October 23, he asked to say a few words over the public address system.

“As you know by now,” he said, “this is my last day at Charlestown High. I’m going on sick leave starting Monday. This has been a painful decision for me. I love this school. I love this town. I will always love them. But the federal court has ordered some far-reaching changes. However we may feel personally about those changes, we have no alternative but to obey the law of the land. My position this fall—with which some of you have disagreed—has been that Charlestown High would stay open whether there were five hundred students, fifty teachers, and five police … or five students, fifty teachers, and five hundred police. Goodbye and God bless you all.”

Then he picked up his briefcase, tucked some manila folders under his arm, and walked out the side door.

The Townies were ready for their new headmaster, having moved beyond resentment of black demands to assertion of their own rights. Through mid-October, Lisa, Trudy, and Doris were among twenty white activists who met each evening at the Knights of Columbus Hall to frame a declaration. With Powder Keg’s ample assistance, the “White Caucus” drew up a list of fifteen demands that bore a striking resemblance to a list submitted two weeks before by the whites of South Boston High. They fell into five broad categories: decorum, patriotism, education, security, and community rights.

In the interests of decorum, the Townies wanted “the obscene gestures, abusive language and racial slurs stopped immediately.”

To promote patriotism, they demanded “to be allowed to pledge allegiance to the American flag in the morning, and to sing the National Anthem.”

To improve education, they asked “accelerated education programs for those students who are above the average grade levels” and demanded that “quality education be returned to Charlestown High.”

For improved security, they wanted more “modern and sophisticated metal detectors.” They wanted any student found with an “Afro pick” or knife to be arrested. And they demanded that “when white students wish to leave the
school because they feel their safety is in jeopardy they be allowed to do so, instead of being locked in like convicts.”

To secure the rights of the Charlestown community, they demanded that “community representatives”—Powder Keg and its allies—be permitted “access to the school,” be allowed to “act as spokesmen for the white student body,” and be permitted to “negotiate white student grievances.”

The demands were ready for submission to Bob Murphy on October 24, his first day as headmaster. At eight that morning, 125 white students occupied the main stairway, compelling the blacks to stay on their buses for half an hour. (Eventually, the blacks were sent home for the day while Murphy tried to end the sit-in.) The new headmaster offered to discuss the fifteen demands with a small delegation of white leaders, but the demonstrators booed, stomped their feet, and chanted anti-busing slogans until he finally consented to meet them all in the third-floor auditorium.

It was a daunting prospect for Murphy on his first day, and for support he summoned Charlie McGonagle, one of the school’s five Townie teachers and among its most popular figures. McGonagle’s engaging essays and light verse appeared regularly in the Charlestown
Patriot
. The fall before, his piece called “The Neighborhood Tavern” had become an instant favorite in the Town, where it could be found tacked up above beer-stained counters or taped to barbershop mirrors.

His scorn for Garrity’s order thus established, Charlie enjoyed the trust of the school’s white activists. Knowing this, Bob Murphy asked him to go to the auditorium and try to keep the demonstrators in check while the headmaster and others considered the fifteen demands. As Charlie mounted the stage,
there were a few catcalls from the Townies, but he bantered good-naturedly with the kids, assuring them that their demands were being studied.

Down in his office, Murphy huddled with District Superintendent John McGourty and representatives of the Faculty Senate, going over the white students’ grievances. With the sit-in paralyzing the school, they were eager to make concessions which might mollify the demonstrators; but, after reviewing the demands one by one, they found few to which they could accede.

Security was already tight. Airport metal detectors were in place and hand detectors had been ordered. Obscene gestures and racial slurs were already prohibited. Students couldn’t be permitted to walk out anytime they felt themselves in danger. A daily pledge of allegiance seemed excessive, but once a week might make sense. Murphy saw no justification for dealing with Powder Keg, but he agreed to meet with representatives of the Home and School Association or the Charlestown Education Committee anytime they wished. As for “quality education,” as the day’s events amply demonstrated, it was hard enough in the current climate to guarantee any education at all.

When Murphy and McGourty entered the auditorium, they were greeted with thunderous boos. Virtually every white in the school was there and now they surged to their feet, chanting rhythmically, “Here we go, Townies, here we go!” As the din crashed about her, Lisa felt tears welling in her eyes. God, she was proud to be a Townie! Townies stuck together. They weren’t going to let a judge or a bunch of black kids take their school away from them!

Finally the clamor subsided and Murphy outlined the steps agreed on in the office. As for the remaining demands, he hoped further discussions could take place with student representatives, but he would not stand for this kind of disorder. Nobody was going to drive the blacks out, so they’d better get used to them. At that, more than a hundred of the students—Lisa among them—rose and filed out. In the doorway, one student turned and shouted, “Mr. Power wouldn’t have treated us this way!”

Bob Murphy knew it would be futile to compete with Frank Power’s legend. He wasn’t even going to try. Although he’d been at Charlestown High before—as a science teacher and guidance counselor from 1964 to 1970—he realized that the Townies regarded him as an outsider. But that might prove more an advantage than a handicap, he thought; without encumbering friendships and loyalties, he could play a role foreclosed to Power: the stern, uncompromising disciplinarian.

The new headmaster set out to show the activist students and their adult supporters that he meant to enforce the court order at all cost. His hard line quickly surfaced as he dealt with an epidemic of bomb threats that fall. When the first ones occurred, all students had been promptly evacuated, left to mill about on the Monument grounds until the police could search the school. Since no bombs were found, Murphy soon concluded that such threats were mere harassment, designed to keep the school in constant turmoil; moreover, once black students left the school they were particularly vulnerable to attack. So
he revised his strategy. At first warning, police were summoned, but no evacuation was ordered unless they actually found a bomb—which they never did.

The new policy led to an angry confrontation with Tom Johnson. One day in October, after yet another threat was received, Johnson rushed into the headmaster’s office, demanding that the alarm bells be rung immediately. “You’re playing with these children’s lives!” he said. “Get them out of here now!”

Murphy refused, citing his new policy.

At that, Johnson put a finger against the headmaster’s chest and growled, “If there
is
a bomb in here, and if one child gets hurt, you bastard, I’ll be the first in line to punch you out, and there’ll be twenty thousand people behind me waiting their turn.”

Relations between the two men went from bad to worse. Johnson saw Murphy as a “carpetbagger,” an itinerant bureaucrat ready to sacrifice Charlestown’s interests to advance his career. Murphy regarded Johnson as a troublemaker, an unscrupulous roughneck fomenting unrest. Eventually, the headmaster banned him from the building. When Johnson insisted that his position in the Home and School Association guaranteed him access, Murphy shook his head. “We’re on different teams, Tom,” he said.

“You’re damn right we are,” Johnson shot back. “Is your NAACP card paid up yet?”

The battle lines were clearly drawn now. For the first time white activists found themselves pitted not only against the black students but against a school administrator determined to give them no quarter.

Skirmishing continued through early November. When whites again occupied the front stairs on November 21, the headmaster lost his patience. Turning to Captain MacDonald, he said, “We’ve lost control of this situation, Bill. I think it’s time for the police.” MacDonald addressed the students, warning them to go to class, leave the building, or face arrest. The demonstrators’ only response was a chorus of “God Bless America.” What happened next surprised even the headmaster. The front door burst open and in charged a platoon of the Tactical Patrol Force in their leather jackets, boots, and Plexiglas visors. Wading into the students, they heaved them down the staircase. Girls screamed. Boys who resisted got a billy club on the arm or shoulder. Sitting halfway up the stairs, Lisa McGoff was spared the initial charge, but soon cringing with fear, she permitted herself to be herded out the front door. The students huddled in small groups on the sidewalk, still dazed from the TPF assault and shaking with indignation. What right did the police have to violate their sanctuary? It was their school, wasn’t it? Didn’t they have a right to sit on their own steps?