Common Ground (20 page)

By her senior year in high school, Joan had another reason for feeling special. When Massachusetts’ own John Kennedy was elected President that autumn, she was elated. He was so handsome, so intelligent, so idealistic! He was one of their own, a spokesman for spare, principled New England and for an energetic new generation which was ready to take over from those drab, Eisenhower Republicans.

George Makechnie was also an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter, in part because he endorsed the Senator’s brand of liberal politics, in part because he had known him slightly through the years. When Boston University awarded Kennedy an honorary degree in 1955, George had been chosen to escort the Senator to the stage; after he became President, Kennedy sent him an autographed picture, which hung on George’s wall. Moreover, the college’s receptionist was Rose Kennedy’s sister-in-law, “Bunny” Fitzgerald, who kept the Makechnies well briefed on the Kennedys’ doings. Through Bunny, George received two precious tickets to the inauguration. Anne Makechnie was ill, so George took Joan instead. With hotel rooms impossible to come by, George called a former student, who found them rooms in the dormitories at Howard University. So far as Joan could tell, she and her father were the only whites on campus. The girls in her dorm seemed bemused by her presence and a couple of them made sly references to “Mrs. White.” Other than that, they treated her with elaborate courtesy.

For three days Joan and her father made the endless round of festivities. The night before the inauguration, they were dancing at the Shoreham when Kennedy stopped by to acknowledge the revelers’ cheers and Joan caught a glimpse of her hero bathed in a spotlight. The next morning, through streets white with new-fallen snow, they found their way to the Capitol Plaza and stood in the sunlight as Robert Frost summoned “the glory of a new Augustan age,” and the young President intoned those stirring phrases which would stay with Joan for years to come: “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”

Back in Lexington, she couldn’t get the image of that bright winter morning out of her mind. But something else lingered too: those days at Howard when she’d been the only white girl in a black dormitory. “Now I realize what it must be like to be a minority,” she told her father. “Now I see how a Negro must feel.”

The next fall, Joan went on to Wheaton College, where she soon displayed the public spirit that John Kennedy was urging on her generation. Vice-president of her class, editor of the yearbook, she majored in political science and dreamed of government service. But what pleased her father most was Joan’s defense of her roommate’s franchise. Candy Yaghjian was a white girl from South Carolina, which had no provision for absentee ballots. When Joan organized a campaign to send Candy home on election day, George Makechnie sent his daughter a poem by the abolitionist James Russell Lowell:

Joan basked in her father’s approval, but by then there was another man in her life. Neighbors and classmates, she and Colin had known each other all through high school, but only after Joan went to Wheaton and Colin to Amherst had they become romantically attached. The relationship bloomed in the summer after their freshman year and by the following fall Joan was spending every other weekend at Amherst.

Most people who knew the Divers assumed they were Yankees, associating the name with Dick Diver in Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night
. In fact, it was a corruption of Dwyer, Dyer, and Dever, for the Divers were originally Irish Protestants. Colin’s grandfather, Ben Diver, was born at Killybegs in County Donegal, but as a young man he emigrated to London, where he enthusiastically adopted the English way of life. In succeeding years, Ben consistently took the English side in the bloody rebellions tormenting his native land.

He found a job at Ward’s, a tobacconist’s shop in the Burlington Arcade, which catered to wealthy Londoners who could afford to have their tobacco mixed to order. The orders invariably arrived on stationery with the family crest, which Ben brought home for his son, Ben Jr., to paste in a scrapbook. Ben’s wife, Sarah, was cook to General Sir Redvers Henry Buller, who, after violating military etiquette, had been forced to surrender his command and retire permanently to his country home, Downes, in Devonshire. Sarah shuttled between Downes and Sir Redvers’ town house in London’s Russell Square, often taking her young son with her. The general and his wife were entertainers in the grand style, and Ben Jr. grew up in a “real upstairs-downstairs world.” Ben was fascinated by the electrical box on the wall which flashed the floor on which service was required. Every afternoon at four his mother would trundle upstairs with tea and scones, while Ben tagged happily at her heels.

When he was fourteen, Ben was apprenticed to the antiques department at Liberty’s in Regent Street, where he was set to work polishing the suits of armor with Rangoon Oil and powdered pumice. When war broke out in August 1914, he signed on with Queen Victoria’s Rifles and fought for two years on the Western Front until he was temporarily paralyzed by an exploding shell. Back home, he had difficulty finding work and emigrated to Canada, where he became a society photographer. Still he couldn’t stay put. In 1924, he emigrated again, this time to Massachusetts, where he took a room in the South
End, Boston’s shabby rooming-house district. Around the corner lived Ethleen Heuser, a young woman of German-Swedish ancestry who was a law student at Northeastern University. Eight years later—when Ben was forty-two and Ethleen thirty-two—they were married, and Ben got a job in the photo labs at MIT, where he worked for the rest of his life. The Divers found a tiny Cape Cod cottage in Lexington, where their only child, Colin, was born in 1943.

A precocious boy, Colin sailed through Lexington’s public schools at the top of his class. But by his third year in high school he had begun to slack off a bit, regarding his academic superiority as a social liability. At that point his parents sent him for a year to Deerfield, a private school in western Massachusetts that would guarantee he was well prepared for an Ivy League college. But they were after something else too: a touch of social panache. To Ben Diver, schools like Deerfield and Choate were the closest America came to the English public school, an experience he had been denied by his family’s modest circumstances but which he was determined that Colin should have.

The neighborhood in which the Divers lived throughout Colin’s youth was still largely rural, and Ben Diver put in countless hours creating an English country garden in their backyard. And in the basement, where their neighbors installed pine-paneled recreation rooms, Ben built an odd medieval chamber, adorned with gargoyles and murals of feudal knights in armor.

For many who lived in them, suburbs like Lexington were refuges from urban calamity, havens from the dirt, noise, crime, and disorder which seemed to lurk around every city corner. They were sanctuaries as well from the dark-skinned races, those unsettling newcomers who had begun to take over the rotting cores of American metropolises. The young veterans of Anzio and Guadalcanal, fleeing to the countryside, were exchanging the ethnic hodgepodge of their parents’ world for a more homogeneous environment in which the white middle class could taste the pleasures hitherto reserved for the Yankee elite.

Lexington had long been overwhelmingly white. Civil rights activists liked to recall that one of John Parker’s ragged band of minutemen on that fateful day in 1775 was Prince Estabrook, a slave belonging to Benjamin Estabrook. After the Revolution, Prince was rewarded with his freedom, becoming a progenitor of the town’s small free black community, which persisted well into the twentieth century. Yet by 1960, there were only thirteen black families among Lexington’s 32,000 inhabitants.

That very year—to help send Joan through college—Anne Makechnie joined a real estate firm in adjacent Bedford. Before long she discovered why blacks found it nearly impossible to rent or buy a house in most of Boston’s suburbs. Real estate agents feared a community boycott if they dared show a house to a black family. The agents were particularly concerned about the tests being conducted by “fair housing” groups. First, a black would try to buy a suburban house. When he was rejected, a white would immediately seek to
buy the same house. If the white succeeded, that was prima facie evidence of discrimination, and the agent might lose his license. Anne’s employer gave her strict instructions that if she saw a black enter the office she should make a dash for the back door. “If they can’t find you,” he said, “they can’t test you.”

She never had to make that dash because no blacks showed up in Bedford, but the firm’s policy made her uncomfortable and she was receptive when Leonard Colwell, a Lexington real estate man, asked her to join his new agency. Colwell agreed with Anne that they should sell or rent to anyone who had the money. A year later, Colwell was the only one of Lexington’s twenty-five real estate agents to sign a “good neighbor pledge,” sponsored by a newly formed Lexington Fair Housing Committee (“I will accept families and individuals into my neighborhood without discrimination because of religion, color, or national origin”). Colwell signed the pledge with some trepidation; his livelihood depended on listings and he feared retaliation.

But the reprisals never developed. The Colwell agency sold or rented a couple of houses every year to blacks, often referred by the Fair Housing Committee. One of the sales, negotiated by Anne Makechnie herself, was to Howard Thurman’s daughter and her white husband. By 1963, there were thirty-six black families in Lexington.

Late that summer, another black family came to town looking for a house. James Parker, a forty-one-year-old foreign service officer, had served in Liberia, Nigeria, and Spain before taking a year’s leave for work at Boston University’s African Studies Program. Now he and his wife, Odessa, were focusing their housing search on the western suburbs so that their three children could attend one of the area’s outstanding schools. But the hunt wasn’t going well. They would follow up ads only to be told that a property was already rented or that the landlord didn’t take children.

When they answered an ad for a cottage at 11 Saddle Club Road, the owner, Mark Moore, Jr., agreed to show it to them on the evening of August 27, but Moore was clearly taken aback when he saw them. He was so unenthusiastic that Parker finally asked, “Do you have any objection to renting your house to Negroes?”

“Oh, no, no,” Moore said.

“Well, we’d be interested.”

“I should tell you, there are some people from MIT who have first refusal.”

“Okay, but if they don’t take it, we’d like it.”

Moore said he’d let them know. But the Parkers had gone through all this before. Disheartened, they boarded a plane for Washington.

That night, a friend reported the incident to Barbara Petschek of the Fair Housing Committee, now a subcommittee of the Lexington Civil Rights Committee. Barbara and her husband had been active in the fair housing movement, and the Moore situation struck them as a perfect test case. Barbara began calling other subcommittee members, but none of them was home. Only
then did they remember what was happening that evening. Thousands of civil rights activists were descending on the nation’s capital for the next day’s March on Washington, scheduled to culminate with a mammoth civil rights rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Just as Barbara Petschek began her calls, the Lexington contingent was assembling at St. Brigid’s Church, so her husband sped to the church, where he found dozens of committee members milling around the parking lot. Explaining the Moore case, he asked permission to launch a test immediately, but with their minds already focused on the next day’s events, the travelers could work up little enthusiasm for Harry’s plan. “Don’t do anything yet,” said Charles Weiser, one of the committee’s leaders. “Wait until I get back.”

But the Petscheks were impatient. Scanning a list of committee members for a lawyer, Barbara found the name of Julian Soshnick, an assistant state attorney general. When she called him, Soshnick not only agreed that a test should take place immediately, he insisted that he be part of it. At 4:45 p.m. the next day—as the vast throng at the Lincoln Memorial was listening to Mahalia Jackson sing “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned”—a vice-president of Boston University called Mark Moore on Parker’s behalf and was told the house had been rented to the people from MIT. Fifteen minutes later, Barbara Petschek called Moore, identifying herself as a Mrs. Julian Gardner, and asked if the house was still available. Moore said it was and agreed to show it to her at 7:30.

At the appointed hour, “Mrs. Gardner” and her husband—Julian Soshnick—arrived at 11 Saddle Club Road. After viewing the cottage, they asked when they could move in. “September 1,” Moore said. Whipping out his credentials, Soshnick questioned Moore about his refusal to rent to the Parkers. Moore said he had “nothing against them,” but he had $400,000 invested in a prospective subdivision on the property and if he rented to a Negro he might lose it.

The next day, Soshnick filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, a state body empowered to resolve the situation through conciliation or to bring suit in court. Meanwhile, the Boston Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) announced that it would stage a demonstration Saturday on the Battle Green to protest housing discrimination in Lexington.

When Lexington’s delegation to the March on Washington returned late Thursday, still talking of Martin Lurther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, they were astonished to discover what had happened in their absence. On Friday, the executive committee of the Lexington Civil Rights Committee angrily confronted the Petscheks and Soshnick, accusing them of “rabble-rousing.” Mark Moore, they said, was one of the town’s most prominent citizens, a pillar of the Baptist Church; this wasn’t the way to deal with a man like that. Moreover, Saturday was the start of the Labor Day weekend, the town would be filled with tourists come to view the historic sites, and the
demonstration could only damage the town’s reputation. The committee urged CORE to cancel the demonstration.