Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
The Kings’ indictment of the Bancroft went far beyond matters of curriculum. The white middle-class settlers, they charged, were trying to make the South End—and the Bancroft—over in their own image; in effect, they had turned the Bancroft into a private school, serving their own needs and priorities. They might talk a lot about racial integration, about how much they wanted blacks and other minorities at the school, but they weren’t about to
give blacks any real power (the Kings dismissed the two black parents on the school’s Managing Committee as “window dressing”). Moreover, the white middle-class parents could go off anytime they wanted and pay for a genuinely private education. Blacks and the poor didn’t have that option; they
needed
the public schools, which shouldn’t be turned into chic, elite institutions like the Bancroft.
Joan Diver knew that many blacks in the Bancroft community shared at least some of the Kings’ reservations. She had sensed mute resentment from minority parents who clearly felt excluded from the inner circle which ran the school, and she could appreciate what they experienced, for even she felt shut out at times by the tight little group of founders. In the winter of 1974, she had tried to remedy the situation by setting up a meeting with black parents. When her first overture was rebuffed, she and Lois Varney concluded that it would be better if a black parent made the gesture, so they asked Dusenia Smith, a tenant at Methunion Manor, to invite black and white parents to her home. On the appointed day, Mrs. Smith was the only black to show up at her own party. For an awkward hour, Dusenia, Lois, Joan, Colin, and a few other white parents sat around with coffee cups on their knees, trying to make conversation.
The resentments ran in both directions. Joan had heard white parents complaining that teachers were giving too much attention to minority students, that their own kids were being short-changed because they could do things on their own, while black and Puerto Rican children needed constant guidance. These complaints irritated Joan, for they came from some of the very parents who had insisted that the school be integrated. How could you have integration—by race
and
class—without some discrepancies in educational background? One went with the other. Moreover, if they were serious about integration—and she was—the benefits of diversity ought to outweigh any temporary imbalance in the teachers’ attention.
But if racial tension had long been simmering at the Bancroft, it was Arthur Garrity’s order that summer of 1975 which brought it to a boil. For the first time, black and white parents were pitted directly against each other. Most of the white families had selected the Bancroft, supported open education, and were determined to preserve it. Most blacks that year had been assigned to the school against their will, had no vested interest in open education, and increasingly saw it as unsuited to their needs.
Even the judge’s provision for a Racial-Ethnic Parents’ Council exacerbated the situation. In years past, blacks and whites had served together on the school’s Managing Committee with little open discord, but now Garrity required that blacks and whites meet in separate caucuses to elect members to the REPC. At first, Bancroft parents balked, arguing that such methods were appropriate only to schools being desegregated for the first time; at the Bancroft, with its long tradition of integration, caucuses could only be divisive. But the judge refused to exempt the school from his order and the parents complied. Joan Diver was one of five white parents elected to the council, and
played an active role throughout the year on various administrative issues. Black parents elected a slate, but its members took little part in the council’s functions, declining to take on assignments. It was as if the formation of white and black caucuses had institutionalized the school’s racial impasse.
And there were those who foresaw yet another divisive consequence to Garrity’s order. As gentrification swept across the South End, the new white families concentrated in a narrow strip between Columbus Avenue and Tremont Street. To the north, the area between Columbus and the railroad tracks—one of the earliest sites of Negro settlement—remained overwhelmingly black. Three of Methunion Manor’s brick fortresses reared along the north edge of the avenue in grim contrast to the parks and town houses of the white enclave. The old Bancroft district had embraced both sections, blacks from Methunion Manor mixing at the school with children of white gentry. Now Garrity’s aides had drawn the district’s northern border down the middle of the avenue, reinforcing the significance of that boundary. In a letter that summer, the school’s Managing Committee warned the judge: “The Bancroft school has been an integrating force, bringing children from both sides of Columbus Avenue together. Now that they are not allowed to attend the same school, they will not easily meet each other. This has the potential of causing future racial strife and making Columbus Avenue a barrier across which hostility may develop.”
By late 1975, the Bancroft’s predicament was rich with irony. Founded by parents determined to fulfill their civic obligations, the school had become an institution determined to preserve its own prerogatives. Dedicated to the proposition that children of all races and classes should be educated together, it was torn by racial and class struggles rooted in divergent concepts of what an urban education ought to be. Designed as the cornerstone of the New South End, it had become an object of contention splitting the community down the middle. Parents like the Divers were tugged first by self-interest, then by their vision of a model urban school, their motives so mixed they couldn’t disentangle them.
There were times when Joan Diver wearied of the delicate balancing of private want and public weal that life in the South End demanded; at such moments, she was grateful for a career which required dispassionate judgments, with nothing personal at stake, about what was good for the community at large.
As long as she could remember, Joan had wanted to work for the poor and disadvantaged. She supposed it was something she had inherited from her father, who had nurtured it in her with a subtle blend of praise and prodding. Her first jobs, in the Radcliffe and Emerson College development offices, had done nothing to satisfy that need—raising money from “fat cat” alumnae for capital improvement wasn’t her idea of humanitarian endeavor, particularly since neither college was greatly involved in the community. Joan wanted work that would have a direct impact on the lives of ordinary people.
In late 1969, nearly a year before the Divers moved to the South End, a
friend suggested that she explore the foundation world, and she talked with Bert Waters, director of the Associated Foundation of Greater Boston, a recently formed league of the city’s private philanthropies. No position was available, but Waters kept her name on file, and a year later he called to say that a job had opened up—part-time secretary at the Hyams Trust, Boston’s second-largest foundation. In November 1970, Joan saw Bill Swift, a partner at the old Yankee law firm of Hutchins & Wheeler, who was Hyams’ managing trustee. At the start it wouldn’t be much of a challenge for a bright college graduate, Swift said apologetically—answering the phone, opening mail, and drawing up the agenda for board meetings, which were held every six weeks between September and June. But the board was thinking of expanding the job to include research on potential grantees.
The job seemed exactly right to Joan. With Ned barely a year old and Brad only three, she couldn’t accept full-time work, but as the boys grew older, she’d be able to take on more, and she felt confident that she could handle anything the board assigned her. Moreover, she was intrigued by philanthropy on this scale—Hyams supported a broad range of community programs that confronted most of the social ills besetting Boston. She particularly liked the notion of tackling the same urban issues which Colin was addressing a few blocks away at City Hall. So, early in December 1970, Joan became the foundation’s administrative assistant.
In the starchy world of Boston philanthropy, the Hyams Trust was something of an anomaly, rooted not in old Yankee money but in a relatively new Jewish fortune. The Hyamses were Polish Jews who had emigrated to Ireland in the seventeenth century and thence to Boston’s South End. When Godfrey Hyams graduated from Harvard in 1881, the university gave him a position teaching mineralogy, but he was in great demand with mining interests and soon signed on with Henry Rogers’ Amalgamated Copper. One of the era’s most ruthless businessmen, Rogers built an empire in oil, steel, banking, and railroads, but his boldest stroke was his attempt to corner the world’s copper market. Hyams was a loyal lieutenant in these wars and Rogers cut him in on the lucrative Virginian Railway. By 1910 Hyams was a multimillionaire, but perhaps because of his role in some of the period’s least savory business practices, he had become virtually a recluse. For years, he maintained a small office in Room 301 of the Sears Building, with no name on the door. If visitors got past a protective secretary, they found a slight man in gold-rimmed spectacles, reticent in the extreme about his activities.
Hyams had one secret he kept hidden from even his closest confidants. He was married to a gentile, most unusual then for a Jew in his position, and he went to extraordinary lengths to conceal this aberration. He lived in a large house in Dorchester with his two unmarried sisters, Sarah and Isabel, and even they were unaware that their brother kept a wife—Mary Irene Wilson—in a rented apartment nearby.
Hyams’ marriage reflected his yearning for identification with the Yankee community. His family had emigrated to Ireland so far back that he thought of
himself as British, and like many Jews of similar extraction, he was eager to distinguish himself from the later waves of Russian Jews who flooded into Boston around the turn of the century.
But his sister Isabel had another life, which kept her in close touch with the less advantaged class of Boston immigrants. Among the first women to attend MIT, she conceived a passion for the new science of “public health.” In 1895, she founded a settlement program in the South End to teach home economics and social hygiene to young girls, calling it the Louisa May Alcott Club, in part because the author of
Little Women
had lived for a time in the South End, where she followed a family tradition of “good works” for the poor.
But even as she taught young South Enders to cook and clean house, Isabel Hyams dreamed of a wider scope for her philanthropies, and not surprisingly, her thoughts turned to the fortune her brother was accumulating in copper and railroads. Over dinner in Dorchester she may have reminded Godfrey that the Boston Yankees they both admired generally left part of their wealth to assist less fortunate members of the community. What could better complete the Hyanises’ transformation into Yankees than a family trust to benefit deserving Bostonians down through the centuries?
Godfrey liked the idea. He turned for advice to a Yankee lawyer, H. LeBaron Sampson of Hutchins & Wheeler, who drew up a document conveying Hyams’ substantial holdings in several corporations to a charitable trust. Sarah and Isabel were named as trustees, but so long as he lived, Godfrey managed the trust himself, contributing anonymously to Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and other venerable institutions. On his death in 1927, the bulk of his remaining estate went into the trust, bringing it over $7 million—at that time the largest philanthropic gift ever made in Massachusetts.
The trustees soon concentrated their philanthropy on social welfare activities favored by Isabel—hospitals, clinics, settlement houses, neighborhood centers, camps, and other agencies assisting the poor and disadvantaged. Through two smaller trusts, they supported good works in East Boston and several unincorporated charities.
Like many Boston foundations, Hyams operated from the law firm which had drawn up the original trust—in this case, Hutchins & Wheeler. Between board meetings, decisions were made by Sampson, who, once Isabel and Sarah were dead, knew the benefactor’s mind better than anyone. Sampson remained the foundation’s managing trustee for forty-one years, relying heavily on the advice of a part-time consultant, an official of Boston’s United Fund named John Moore. His only other staff were two aging women—Janet Graves, the part-time secretary, and Thetis Questrom, Godfrey Hyams’ personal bookkeeper, who stayed on with the trust for more than four decades. Only when Bill Swift succeeded Sampson in 1970 and Joan Diver replaced Janet Graves later that year were the solemn rhythms of the trust at last interrupted.
Joan began slowly, spending twenty hours a week in the little office tucked away in a corner of the law firm. At first, she worked from nine to one o’clock,
leaving Ned with a babysitter, then hurrying back to the South End after work to pick Brad up at the John Winthrop Nursery School. When the Winthrop added a day-care service, she put in several full days a week at the office, staying home with her children on the others. Joan knew too many women who, in the name of “doing good” for society, neglected their own families, and she wasn’t going to let that happen to her.
But gradually the trust absorbed more of her energies. She brought work home from the office, poring over reports as her two rambunctious boys tore around the house. She grew preoccupied with the “philanthropic dilemma”: how to use the limited charitable dollars to the maximum benefit of society? Thumbing through the trust’s files, she realized how perfunctory its research had been. John Moore was a well-meaning man, but he generally suggested that Hyams put its money into the stodgy, traditional charities favored by the United Fund. How much did the trustees really know about the way their money was being used? Joan asked Bill Swift if she could take a closer look at several first-time applicants: among them, the Bromley Heath Teen Cave and the Protestant Guild for the Blind. When Swift agreed, she visited each agency, observing their operations, talking with staff and clients. The board accepted her recommendations and, impressed with her initiative, expanded her duties. In January 1971—after only two months on the job—she was promoted to Assistant to the Secretary of the Trustees. At the same time, the board authorized her to hire an assistant of her own to take over the stenographic and custodial work, freeing her to concentrate on Hyams’ grant-making procedures.