Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
The Divers’ most difficult discussion was with eight-year-old Brad, who had come to love the Bancroft, where he had many close friends. When his parents told him they were moving, he threw a terrible tantrum, weeping, stomping through the hallways, calling them names, insisting that he wouldn’t live anywhere else. Colin said to him, “Brad, you know that we love you very much and wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you. You’ve liked all the decisions we’ve made for you until now—like deciding to send you to the Bancroft—and you’re just going to have to trust us that we’re making the right decision for you now.”
At first, six-year-old Ned didn’t know what to make of the move. Then, barely a week after the Divers signed an agreement on the Newton house, Ned had an experience which resolved his ambivalence. The boys had a set of keys with which to let themselves in when they got home from school. One afternoon Brad quickly went out again, leaving the door ajar. Seizing the opportunity, a black teenager entered, telling Ned he wanted a glass of water. Instead, he raced through the house grabbing change off bureau tops and tables. Returning from work, Joan heard Ned yell, “Mommy, a robber’s stealing all Daddy’s money.” The youth fled, with Joan in vain pursuit. When she got back, she found Ned at the top of the stairs weeping hysterically. He took days to regain his equanimity.
Barely $1.50 was taken that day, but it was one of the few times that the sanctity of the Divers’ house had been violated, and it only heightened their anxiety.
That same week in early April, high school students from Charlestown and South Boston kicked and beat black lawyer Ted Landsmark as he hurried to his meeting at City Hall. Barely two weeks later a gang of black teenagers dragged a white auto mechanic named Richard Poleet from his car in Roxbury and beat him senseless. With tensions reaching an intolerable pitch, Boston seemed poised on the brink of a race war.
When Kevin White, at the
Globe
’s prompting, summoned Bostonians to a Procession Against Violence on April 23, Joan had to be there. That Friday morning she left the Hyams Trust, joining the huge throng which swept from the business district across the Boston Common to the assembly point at Charles and Beacon streets. At 11:40, the marchers headed ten abreast up the broad flank of Beacon Hill, past the gleaming State House dome, past the
sooty Saint-Gaudens monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his black soldiers who had died together in 1863. Led by the Mayor, Senators Ted Kennedy and Ed Brooke, Governor Mike Dukakis, and other notables, they walked in silence, without banners and placards save for one small sign which hung from the neck of a black man: “Bless the Peacemakers.” Once the marchers had assembled on the red brick of City Hall Plaza, police estimated them at 50,000, the largest such gathering in Boston since the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium. As Joan gazed about her at the salesclerks and bankers, waitresses and housewives, barbers and professors standing solemnly in the April sunshine, she was deeply moved. The procession seemed an expression of all that was brave and beautiful in the city she loved.
But it wasn’t enough. Within forty-eight hours, the violence resumed, a spattering of racial incidents across the anguished neighborhoods. As the spring wore on, the city’s agony seemed a magnified echo of Joan’s own desperation. She felt an acute sense of loss, as if she were in mourning for someone near and dear. Her grief was relentless, embracing the South End community which had nurtured her these past six years as well as Boston itself, the city to which she and Colin had dedicated their young lives. Joan had never lost a close relative, but she supposed it would feel much like this hollow ache in her chest. By May the ache had grown into a sharp pain, aggravated by a rasping cough. Joan’s doctor told her, “You must be very nervous about something. You’re swallowing a lot of air. That’s what’s giving you the pain.”
On May 11, she flew to Atlanta for the annual meeting of the Council on Foundations, a league of 793 philanthropies from across the nation. The four-day conference was marked by a heated debate on the position that foundations should take in the racial arena. A study by the Human Resources Corporation concluded that a “woefully inadequate” share of foundation funds went to minority groups. In response, Council directors had framed a resolution on “Foundations and Social Justice,” which read in part: “Whereas, the signers of the Declaration of Independence found to be self-evident these truths: that all men are created equal and that each of us has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness … Be it resolved that organized philanthropy should recognize the urgent obligation to help bring about constructive social change …”
The Hyams Trust had only one vote on the resolution, to be cast by its secretary, Bill Swift, so Joan wasn’t called upon to take a formal position. But the resolution left her ambivalent. Its principles were impeccable—the very notions which had drawn her to philanthropy in the first place. Inside Hyams and elsewhere in Boston’s charitable community she had urged foundations to become agents for constructive change. Yet the violent crime and social disintegration of the South End had shaken her faith in traditional liberal nostrums. Though she remained committed to equal opportunity and social justice, she was no longer sure that New Frontier—Great Society programs such as public housing, model cities, affirmative action, and court-ordered busing
were well-conceived means to those ends. All during the conference, she felt like standing up and shouting, “Isn’t anybody going to say that things aren’t working very well?”
She was sure of only one thing: that nobody had all the answers. That week, she spent as much time as she could riding around the city, observing how Atlanta had confronted its racial and social problems. Here was a predominantly black city with a black mayor, yet somehow it seemed less tense than Boston, blacks and whites mingling in its stores and public transportation with little apparent friction. She knew there was a large black middle class, boasting its own insurance company and bank, giving blacks the clout to deal with the white power structure. And deal they had—in the famous 1973 school settlement, which created a pattern sharply different from Boston’s. Confronted with a school system already overwhelmingly black, Atlanta’s NAACP had chosen not to press for massive cross-city busing, which in any case would have produced relatively little integration. Instead, it had hammered out a settlement—roundly condemned by national NAACP leaders—which sacrificed integration for black control of the city’s schools (by 1976 there was a black superintendent, a black majority on the school board, and a black board president).
Atlanta’s trade-off had stirred the old debate between integration and community control. Joan could recognize assets and debits on both sides, but at least here was another approach, free from the conventional liberal pieties. Was black power and self-confidence sufficient compensation for the lost goal of integration? All that week she debated such questions with two friends, a white Atlantan named Linda Copeland, whom she had met years before as a student at Wheaton, and a black woman named Anna Jones, assistant director of Boston’s Permanent Charity Fund, with whom Joan shared a hotel room. Linda, who lived in a handsome white neighborhood not far from downtown, thought the settlement had paved the way for relatively peaceful coexistence between Atlanta’s whites and blacks. Anna—the daughter of Mordecai Johnson, the late president of Howard University—feared that Atlanta was headed for a “separate but equal” solution.
On the final day of the conference, Joan and Anna took a guided bus tour through the city. Late in the afternoon, they rode past Southview Cemetery, where Martin Luther King had been laid to rest after his assassination. As the bus glided beneath a canopy of giant oaks, Joan made out the eternal flame by King’s headstone. Suddenly her throat throbbed with the loss of so many dreams buried there in the red Georgia clay.
All through that spring and early summer, Colin felt some of the same remorse. Walking to and from his office at the Boston University Law School, he passed Marsh Chapel, where he and Joan had been married, where their friend Howard Thurman had presided as chaplain, where Martin Luther King had worshipped as a divinity student. In front of the chapel the university had erected a monument to King, a cluster of cast-iron shapes, turned reddish brown by rust, which resembled a flight of birds soaring skyward. On three
sides were chiseled passages from his writings. It was a provocative reminder of the man and the event which had brought Colin into Boston nearly a decade before. Passing the monument twice a day, he recalled that time when moral imperatives had seemed so clear and compelling and he caught himself yearning for that old certitude, for that sense of high purpose which had swept him through the late sixties and early seventies.
All that spring and early summer, the South End house stayed on the market, with no buyer willing to pay the asking price. But the Divers decided to move into the Newton house on August 1 so that the boys could get acclimated before school began and Colin and Joan would have a midsummer respite in which to recover from the emotional cyclone of the spring, a time in which to consider where they had come from and where they were going.
Since the baseball bat incident, some of his critics in the South End had dismissed Colin as a hypocrite whose liberal convictions had melted away as soon as they confronted his self-interest. They were fond of quoting such dicta as “A conservative is a liberal who just got mugged” or “A conservative is a liberal whose kid just got bused.” Colin conceded that, of late, he was paying less attention to the needs of society and more to his own, his wife’s, and his children’s. Not long ago he would have apologized for that; now he saw no reason to. What was wrong with wanting to live in a community where he could walk the streets without fear, where he could leave his family at home without worrying about their safety, where he could send his children to public school with confidence that they were getting a sound education? What was wrong with demanding effective police protection, efficient courts, clean streets, well-maintained parks, good lighting, adequate garbage collection?
Yet he liked to think that the changes in his social and political outlook were grounded in something more than narrow self-interest—namely, in his years of government service and his life in a troubled urban neighborhood. For if the central tenet of liberal faith was the efficacy of governmental intervention, Colin’s experience had made him something of an apostate. Eight years before, as he entered Kevin White’s administration, he had thought the city was very much like a poor person who suffered from dirt, disease, poverty, hunger, and crime. The first priority was to devise programs addressed to those human needs. One should hire a staff of bright, committed young people, turn them loose on such problems, and come up with fresh solutions. What happened to those ideas, how they were put into practice, hadn’t concerned Colin very deeply.
Four years with Kevin White and two with Frank Sargent had taught him that ideas alone were virtually useless, that government couldn’t define people’s needs for them, that “solutions” worked only if they were perceived as such by a substantial constituency and implemented by skilled managers. Moreover, unless such programs were shrewdly calculated, they were often ineffective, even counterproductive, producing consequences quite opposite from those the reformers had intended.
By late 1976, Colin was dividing his time equally between Boston University’s
Law School and its School of Public Management. The study of law dealt with rights, management with procedures; law with what should be, management with what worked. These two approaches to the world were naturally in tension. Shuttling between them, Colin increasingly saw himself as an intermediary, giving managers a better appreciation of constitutional rights, showing lawyers how to implement such norms.
He was particularly concerned with the growing role of judges in managing public institutions. For governmental intervention was especially hazardous when it came not from politicians, who were responsible to a popular constituency, but from judges guided only by their reading of the United States Constitution, centuries of common law, and judicial precedent. Eight years before, just completing his stint as the
Harvard Law Review’s
Supreme Court Note Editor, Colin had been especially sensitive to constitutional imperatives, looking to the judiciary for affirmation of rights flouted by callous legislators and arrogant executives. Not surprisingly then, he had welcomed Arthur Garrity’s decision in the Boston schools case. But gradually he came to wonder whether Garrity’s remedy—massive cross-city busing—was appropriate to the violation he had found, and whether this example of judicial activism hadn’t finally set back the very cause it was designed to advance.
Unlike legislators directly accountable to the electorate, and executives with substantial resources at their disposal, judges depended heavily on society’s respect for their adjudicatory role. They could prevail only with the cooperation of other governmental bodies and, ultimately, with assent from the people themselves. But Garrity’s sweeping remedy so affronted the conventions of white Boston that he never got that cooperation. Instead, thousands of whites found an effective means of subverting his order.
In September 1972, the year Garrity first heard testimony on the NAACP suit, some 90,000 students were enrolled in Boston’s public schools, roughly 54,000—or 60 percent—white. By 1974, when the judge issued his long-anticipated order, the system’s total enrollment had slipped to 82,000, about 55 percent white. By 1976, only 71,000 students were left in the system, barely 44 percent of them white. In just four years Boston’s schools had lost nearly 20,000 white students—to parochial schools, private academies, the streets, or because their families had left the city altogether.
This precipitous decline had set off a vigorous debate in legal and academic circles. Some critics saw it as indisputable evidence that massive numbers of white families had pulled their children out of the public schools to protest Garrity’s order. Others were less certain. They noted that white enrollment had been eroding for more than a decade before Garrity even received the case, in part because of the declining white birth rate, in part as a result of the long-term migration of middle-income families from city to suburb. Even those, like the Divers, who left the city during the initial busing years were often reacting to many conditions simultaneously—as much to crime, dirt, noise, and the unresponsive bureaucracy as to the disruptive effects of the busing order.