Common Ground (27 page)

Indeed, in retrospect, Louise seems to have acted less like a bigot than a politician on the make. She hadn’t gone looking for the fight. In 1961, she’d campaigned in the black community and done reasonably well there (30.5 percent in one black district). During her first year and a half in office, she had shown some understanding of black aspirations. And her initial reaction to the NAACP’s challenge was relatively sympathetic. Her retreat to a more conventional position apparently stemmed from personal pique at black leaders who, she felt, weren’t sufficiently grateful to her; political caution, which drove her to seek shelter in the committee’s majority; instinctive support for Superintendent Gillis, who doled out the committee’s patronage; and deference to the view of her friends and neighbors in South Boston (her “non-political” stance and lack of organizational muscle made her particularly vulnerable to constituent pressure). Then, as chairwoman, she discovered that, while her intransigence brought denunciations from blacks and liberals, it gained still greater support in white working-class neighborhoods. She had found her issue or, more accurately, it had found her. If she had any doubts about its potency, they evaporated that November when she not only topped the School Committee ticket but recorded a staggering 74 percent of all votes cast, a record for a Boston municipal election and 20,000 votes more than John Collins received in his reelection as mayor. “My, my,” she exclaimed.

Only rarely in years to come would she permit her old feelings about blacks to surface. One occasion was a 1969 “encounter group” run by a Boston radio station, during which Louise, several other white officials, and four blacks were locked in a tiny studio for twenty-two hours. Toward the end, worn down by fatigue and enforced intimacy, Louise and a young black woman exchanged tearful vows of mutual admiration. But most of the time she kept such impulses bottled up. Some friends believe the chronic hives which often blotched her arms and legs were the external signs of an inner war between emotions she long suppressed and political stands she felt required to take.

To most blacks it mattered little whether her position was motivated by bigotry or opportunism. In either case they held her largely responsible for what followed. Ruth Batson once cornered her in a classroom and, shaking a finger at her, shouted, “You had an opportunity to change history. Instead, history is going to record you as the woman who impeded history. A whole generation of children has been lost because of Louise Hicks.” When Martin Luther King spoke on the Boston Common, the crowd sang, “Will you follow
Louise Day Hicks or Martin Luther King?” Which, as many people saw it, was the choice Boston—and America—had to make.

During the mid-sixties, she built a following much as School Committee members before her had done—through the extensive application of patronage. She became a particularly ardent supporter of the system’s 500 custodians, consistently seeking pay raises and other emoluments for them. And she looked after her own family. Her brother Paul became manager of the Adult Education Center in Charlestown, earning $25 for each of fifty evening sessions. Her son Bill served as her administrative assistant at $178 a week, supplementing that with a $13-a-night job at the Adult Education Center in Dorchester.

In April 1965, the segregation battle resumed when the Advisory Committee on Racial Imbalance and Education, appointed by the State Education Commissioner, issued the most detailed analysis yet of racial division in the Boston schools (the phrase “racial imbalance” was used throughout to avoid the term “
de facto
segregation”). The committee found that half of the city’s black students—some 10,400—attended twenty-eight schools which were at least 80 percent black. Sixteen schools in the heart of the black community were over 96 percent black. “Racial imbalance,” the committee concluded, “represents a serious conflict with the American creed of equal opportunity. It does serious educational damage to Negro children, impairing their confidence, distorting their self-image and lowering their motivation. It does moral damage by encouraging prejudice within children regardless of their color…. Separation from others breeds ignorance of others, and ignorance breeds fear and prejudice.” It recommended legislation to compel school systems to eliminate such imbalance. Boston’s situation, the committee said, could be corrected by revisions in the open enrollment program, the closing of some existing schools, location of new schools so as to promote integration, and, perhaps, “the exchange of students between other school buildings”—a very carefully couched suggestion for limited busing to achieve racial balance.

Within hours of the lengthy report’s release, the School Committee voted to reject it out of hand. Mrs. Hicks’s reaction was particularly harsh, branding it “the pompous proclamations of the uninformed” and its busing proposal “undemocratic, un-American, absurdly expensive and diametrically opposed to the wishes of the parents of this city.” Of the committee itself—which included Cardinal Cushing and four college presidents—she said, “We have in our midst today a small band of racial agitators, non-native to Boston, and a few college radicals who have joined in the conspiracy to tell the people of Boston how to run their schools, their city and their lives.”

The constituency for change was larger than that. In June, Governor John Volpe introduced a bill empowering the State Board of Education to withhold state funds from any local school system that had not adopted an acceptable plan for eliminating imbalance. Although Boston’s representatives howled with rage, the suburban and rural majority found the bill unobjectionable. (Its principal backers were Father Robert Drinan, a Newton resident, then dean of
the Boston College Law School; Beryl Cohen, a Brookline legislator; and the Yankee lieutenant governor, Elliot Richardson.) For by defining imbalance as more than 50 percent black, the state committee had taken the onus off all but three of Massachusetts’ largest cities—Boston, Springfield, and Cambridge. There were simply no other communities with enough blacks to qualify. The committee conveniently ignored the question of whether 100 percent white schools in Brookline, Newton, Wellesley, and other suburbs within a short bus ride of the Roxbury ghetto were also imbalanced.

This, of course, was the formula for any successful civil rights legislation. The national Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1965 had all been imposed by Northern and Western majorities on Southern communities. Veteran lobbyists had long since deduced the applicable maxim: the probability of support for such legislation is inversely related to the proximity of its potential application.

Nor, for that matter, did the Massachusetts bill address the more complex question of whether quality education might not be possible in a predominantly black school. The moral fervor of the time—a few months after the outrages of Selma, a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s impassioned address on the Boston Common—did not leave time for such quibbles. Few paused to wonder whether the moral imperatives of the Southern civil rights struggle could be applied mechanically to a Northern city where segregation had developed differently. With passage of the Racial Imbalance Act on August 16, 1965, the Massachusetts state legislature became the first in the Union to outlaw
de facto
segregation in the public schools.

But the bill’s passage only intensified the School Committee’s determination to resist. Mrs. Hicks and William O’Connor, acting through a friendly legislator, introduced a bill to repeal the act. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hicks, serving her second term as committee chairwoman, left no doubt that she would rather lose all state funds than accept busing or other forms of balancing: “My father never yielded to pressure in his years on the bench and I never will.” Once more her intransigence paid handsome political dividends. At the November elections, she again finished first. Though her percentage of the votes slipped to 64 percent, she finished 22,000 votes ahead of her nearest rival, and 40,000 ahead of Arthur Gartland, the lone dissenter on racial balance issues, who lost his place on the committee.

Talking to reporters after the election, Mrs. Hicks said she wanted to relax and “let peace settle in”; to which her colleague and political rival Tom Eisenstadt remarked, “She wants peace the way I want a heart attack.” Indeed, there was to be no peace. Even before the election, Mrs. Hicks had obtained a gun permit, telling reporters she had acted after a man called her in the middle of the night to say, “I’m going to kill you. You’re a pigeon and I’m going to get you.” Following another threat, two policemen were assigned to her day and night as bodyguards. Later, she acquired—apparently from sympathizers on the police canine squad—a fierce German shepherd guard dog named Prinz. But some critics questioned whether Mrs. Hicks really wanted to avoid confrontations.
They cited her appearance at the Campbell School graduation in 1966, despite advance warnings of demonstrations at the overwhelmingly black school, and a later incident in which she and an aide crept to the edge of a Black Power rally in Franklin Park until they were chased away by black youths. The critics suggested that she sought out such incidents to gain sympathy—and publicity—for herself.

To some who dealt with her during that period, Louise appeared remarkably clumsy and inept. Mayor John Collins called her “ineffective, confused, maudlin, a big gooey mass of uncooked dough.” But the novelist Edwin O’Connor may have been more prescient in his portrait of Margaret Lucille Elderberry, a character in his novel
All in the Family
clearly patterned after Louise. Another O’Connor character, loosely modeled on Jack Kennedy, says of Margaret: “She’s clumsy, but she’s not stupid. You remember that the biggest compliment people used to pay a politician around here was to say that he was ‘cute.’ Well, that’s what she is, she can shoot around corners. Pure poison … I think that given the right circumstances, Margaret Lucille might just come full-blown out of the woodwork.”

All through the mid-sixties, Louise helped create the “right circumstances.” Partly at her instigation, the School Committee used every means at its disposal to resist implementation of the Racial Imbalance Act. It tried ridicule, submitting “A Plan to End the Monopoly of Un-light Colored Pupils in Many Boston Schools,” which included a proposal to “notify at least 11,958 Chinese and Negro pupils not to come back to Boston schools.” It tried diversion, suggesting extension of compensatory education programs for black students in their own schools, which Mrs. Hicks called the “golden key” to the problem. And it tried delay, resubmitting a plan the State Board had already rejected.

Some School Committee members made little secret of their attitude toward the Negro pupils in their charge. “We have no inferior education in our schools,” Bill O’Connor said in 1964. “What we have is an inferior type of student.” The most outspoken member was old Joe Lee, an amiable Yankee eccentric, former naval architect, newspaper reporter, and unsuccessful candidate for mayor and governor, who liked to puff on a homemade hookah constructed out of a ten-cent test tube, a briar bowl, some surgical tubing, and a few rubber bands. “Now, the Negro people are the most likable people in the world,” he once said. “And yet what have we done? By forcing this pace of imagined need for jet-set education, every student is almost a nervous wreck and all the qualities that I mentioned of pleasantness, obligingness, and so forth are kind of knocked out of them in their race to understanding the latest wrinkle in mathematics….”

The State Board ultimately withheld $52 million in state funds from Boston. Meanwhile, the number of “imbalanced” schools in the city rose from 45 in 1965 to 62 in 1971. By the later year, 62 percent of the city’s black students attended schools that were at least 70 percent black and 84 percent of white students attended schools that were at least 80 percent white.

The School Committee continued to insist that such racial separation was due entirely to residential segregation, combined with the tradition of “the neighborhood school.” In fact, Boston had long since abandoned the neighborhood as an organizing principle for attendance at the middle and high school levels. Students shuttled around the city, following elaborate “feeder patterns.” Even at the elementary level, where children generally attended schools close to home, they frequently had a choice of two or more schools and often didn’t attend the nearest. As the School Committee fought the Racial Imbalance Act, it manipulated this Byzantine system in such a way as to keep blacks and whites separate. The few new schools or annexes built during this period were clearly located so as to be either heavily white or heavily black. Graduates of predominantly white lower schools were given preference at white high schools; students from heavily black schools were guaranteed seats at heavily black high schools. Even the “open enrollment” program, under which students could transfer to schools with vacant seats, aggravated segregation by permitting whites to escape predominantly black schools.

And yet the School Committee could hardly be blamed for the concentration of Boston blacks in an inner-city ghetto where they had little access to decent homes, good jobs, or wholesome recreation, much less adequate schools. Louise proved particularly irritating to the Massachusetts establishment because she had a way of spicing her predictable opinions with some facts most suburban liberals did not care to address. “If the Negro lacks mobility in finding housing, the School Committee cannot be held responsible,” she said. “This is a problem for the entire community.” And “Boston schools are a scapegoat for those who have failed to solve the housing, economic, and social problems of the black citizen.” And still more pointedly: “If the suburbs are honestly interested in solving the problems of the Negro, why don’t they build subsidized housing for them?”

Meanwhile, Louise herself had moved into a larger arena. In the great tradition of School Committee politics, her landslide victory in 1963 had aroused a taste for higher office. The following year, she tested the political waters with an unsuccessful but promising campaign for State Treasurer. In 1965, she toyed with a run for the City Council. She chose the School Committee again, she told reporters, after receiving a visitor to her home, a mother of four small children, who broke into tears when told Louise was not going to run again. “It would be a disservice if I didn’t listen to that mother. I belong on the School Committee until the problems are solved.” But that resolution proved short-lived. When she headed the ticket again that November, she detected “a hue and cry in the city that I run for mayor.”