Common Ground (5 page)

The next morning, when King arrived at Roxbury’s Carter Playground, the crowds were so thick that it took the marshals nearly an hour and a half to
herd them into a procession headed toward the Boston Common. It began eight abreast, but soon thousands of spectators joined in, swelling the lines to twenty-five and thirty across. Arnold marched with Mike Haynes in the second rank, just behind King and Ralph Abernathy, and when he turned in Copley Square he saw an awesome stream of determined faces, mixed in nearly equal parts of black and white, some shouldering placards which read: “We Need Better Schools” or “All Men Are Created Equal” or simply “Love,” and one group from the Catholic Interracial Council making a particularly dramatic demonstration of their faith in integration, with the black women carrying white babies and the white women carrying black babies.

On the flanks of Boston Common, fresh with new grass, the 22,000 marchers converged on the Parkman Bandstand. Gil Caldwell of Union Methodist got the Freedom Rally started with a mass sing-along, black welfare mothers and suburban stockholders, teenage dropouts and Wellesley college girls raising their voices together in the anthem which made each of them feel a bit stronger and more virtuous:

Then, after a spate of warm-up speeches, the man whom some that day had called “the Black Moses” advanced to the microphone. It had begun to rain, so Arnold unfurled a large black umbrella which he held over King’s head as the preacher exhorted his flock:

“I come here not to condemn but to encourage. I would be dishonest to say Boston is Birmingham or that Massachusetts is Mississippi. But it would be irresponsible for me to deny the crippling poverty and the injustice that exist in some sections of this community. The vision of the New Boston must extend into the heart of Roxbury. Boston must become a testing ground for the ideals of freedom…. We must not become a nation of onlookers. This fight is not for the sake of the Negro alone, but rather for the aspirations of America itself. All Americans must take a stand against evil.”

Standing there next to the prophet, holding the umbrella until his arm ached, Arnold looked out over the crowd, noting in particular the suburban white men in their alligator polo shirts and chino pants, their wives in Lily Pulitzer shifts and silk scarves. As King’s voice soared to a crescendo, the whites looked up at him with rapt faces. Sure, Arnold thought, they just love old Black Moses, just love all us
Neeegroes
because he’s our leader and he’s so non-violent and peaceful and all. But just let us push to get something of
theirs
, and you’ll see how they’ll act. Then there’ll be a different look on those well-fed faces. And these are the people King tells us we should treat like brothers and sisters.

After his thirty-six hours with King, Arnold was more ambivalent than ever about the great man. He made mayors and governors listen when he spoke; he
made people on the street straighten up and look as he whipped by in his long black limousine. Arnold was impressed by all that. And he had to admit the man was a powerful speaker; he knew how to grab these people, how to get them fired up.

But Arnold didn’t care for
what
the man was saying. He’d never been that hot for non-violence. A few months before, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been recruiting people to go down South for the sit-ins. Arnold had gone for an interview, but he’d been rejected because they didn’t think he was non-violent enough. And they were right. Arnold would prefer to be the person doing the crackin’ rather than the one taking the crackin’. He wouldn’t let people beat him with a hose, and prod him with sticks, and hit him over the head with a Georgia toothpick while he just sat there singing “We Shall Overcome.”

But then King was a Christian preacher man, and Arnold had always had his doubts about them. His mother was a real Christian lady, a pillar of Union Methodist Church who went to church every chance she got, and so did his sister, Rachel. But Arnold’s father had regarded preachers as Father Divines who robbed their own people blind. Growing up in rural Georgia, he’d seen poor sharecroppers giving preachers the choice morsels off their tables while their own kids went hungry. When he married his pious Methodist wife in Boston, he’d laid down the law: He didn’t want no ministers with their feet under his table. And he wasn’t sticking his feet in any minister’s pew.

Arnold respected his mother as he respected many Christians who used the church to get ahead in the white man’s world. But he saw how two-faced some of those Christians were—preaching piously about “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” then looking out for themselves at the expense of everybody else. The Christians had never done much for him. Gradually, he began slacking off in attendance at Union Methodist—hittin’ and missin’, as he put it, but doing more missin’ than hittin’.

Instead, he began drifting over to Muhammad’s Temple #11 on Intervale Street for the Sunday-afternoon services. Although he could never quite bring himself to become a Muslim, he was getting a lot more out of temple in the afternoon than he got out of his mother’s church in the morning.

After all, he knew the minister over there as well as he knew Mike Haynes. Louis X, or Louis Farrakhan as he was later known, was actually Gene Walcott, who had grown up on Sterling Street, right around the corner from the Walkers’. As early as Arnold could remember, Gene had been a star. People said he was prettier than Cassius Clay, a better singer than Harry Belafonte, a better actor than Sidney Poitier, a better talker than Martin Luther King.

But then Gene went to Winston-Salem State Teachers College in North Carolina and two things happened. First, this slick, self-confident son of West Indian parents encountered Southern Jim Crow, which was unlike anything he’d experienced in Boston. He started fighting it, using the “white” toilets in Wool worth’s and drinking from the “white” fountains at the bus station, challenging any white man to say him nay. But all that might not have mattered so
much had he not been turned down for Belafonte’s spot at a New York nightclub. When white folks rejected him for the New York gig, he quit Winston-Salem and joined the Black Muslims. Putting his talents to the service of his new faith, he composed its most popular song, “White Man’s Heaven Is Black Man’s Hell.”

Soon he became a disciple of Malcolm X, who had also grown up on Boston’s streets. Malcolm “Red” Little had worked for a time as a rest-room attendant at the Roseland State Ballroom and a busboy at the Parker House before operating a burglary ring out of Harvard Square. Sentenced to the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown, he paced his cell for hours denouncing God so vehemently that he became known to fellow inmates as “Satan.” Then he met a veteran con who converted him to Islam. Staring out his barred window at “the white world” of Charlestown, which rose in bleak three-deckers up Bunker Hill, Red Little became Malcolm X.

By 1958 Malcolm was Islam’s minister in New York and it was Gene Walcott—now Louis X—who founded the temple on Boston’s Intervale Street. When Arnold Walker heard what his old friend was up to, he came by the temple out of sheer curiosity; when he heard Gene preach, he was electrified. He took special pleasure in Gene’s gibes at Christianity as “the white man’s religion,” and at Christian preachers, symbolized by “the Right Reverend Bishop T. Chickenwing.” Through Gene, Arnold was drawn to Malcolm, regularly going to hear him whenever he was in Boston. He was at the Boston Arena on August 18, 1963, when Malcolm derided King’s forthcoming “March on Washington,” calling it “the Farce on Washington.” He applauded as Malcolm condemned “white liberals who denounce what the white man has done to us in the South while they do the same thing in the North—the Northern Fox is more vicious than the Southern Wolf because he poses as your friend.” He cheered three months later when Malcolm told the Ford Hall Forum, “We want no part of integration with the wicked race which enslaved us.” And when Malcolm was gunned down by three black assassins in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, Arnold remained convinced that whites had somehow contrived the death of the prophet of black pride and self-reliance.

So when Martin Luther King was assassinated three years later, Arnold Walker and his sister Rachel Twymon saw the event from different perspectives. To Arnold, King was a great man, but also a great temporizer, a timid reformer who had long kept his finger in the dike, restraining the torrent of black rage. His death, Arnold hoped, would free blacks to make a clean break with whites and achieve a substantial degree of autonomy. To Rachel, such hopes were misguided. Boston was a primarily white city, America a primarily white nation. Whether they liked it or not, blacks had to learn to live with whites. If King’s death served any useful purpose, she thought, perhaps it would persuade a guilt-ridden white America to grant a genuine measure of integration.

I
t was the moment she liked best, the vegetables spread out before her in voluptuous profusion: squeaky stalks of celery, damp lettuce, succulent tomatoes, chilled radishes. From the sink rose the earthy smells of wet roots and peels, and from all about her the clamor and fracas of a busy kitchen, gearing up for dinner only minutes away.

Three nights a week, Alice McGoff served as salad chef at the Officers Club of the Charlestown Navy Yard, a break from her usual job as the club’s hatcheck girl. Taking coats and hats was more rewarding—tips could run nearly $200 a week—but Alice liked the sounds and smells and breezy camaraderie of the kitchen. That April night she was cheerfully tossing her greens when she noticed a commotion across the room. A black busboy was in tears. Eventually someone told her that Martin Luther King had been killed in a Southern city.

Through her mind flashed a memory five years old, a solemn television announcer reporting the President’s assassination in another Southern city. She’d mourned that night as never before, an anguish so acute it might have been for her husband or brother.

She didn’t feel that way about Martin Luther King. You had to admit he’d done one hell of a job for his people; if she were black, she would have been the first one in line behind him. And you had to support his crusade down South. No right-minded person wanted blacks to sit in the back of the bus, eat at separate lunch counters, or use different toilets. That sort of thing was just plain wrong. But when King turned northward, Alice had grown skeptical. When King held his big rally on the Boston Common, Alice had asked, “What the hell is he doing up here?” As far as she could see, Boston wasn’t prejudiced against blacks—nobody rode the back of the bus, nobody was kept out of restaurants; Boston wasn’t Birmingham or Selma. King was getting a bit
above himself. So while his assassination was a terrible thing, she couldn’t bring herself to grieve for him.

When dinner at the Officers Club was over and the kitchen had been scoured clean, Alice walked up Decatur Street to her apartment in the Bunker Hill housing project. Her husband, Danny, was still tending bar at the Point Tavern, but their seven children were home, huddled around the television set, watching the riots that had broken out in dozens of American cities. For more than an hour, Alice and her kids watched young blacks racing through the nation’s streets—burning, looting, battling the police. Her daughters, Lisa and Robin, seemed terrified by the violent images flickering across the screen, but her sons, Danny Jr., Billy, Kevin, Tommy, and Bobby, sat openmouthed, absorbing the action as avidly as they did their weekly police dramas. Well past midnight, Billy took her outside and pointed toward the horizon, where the fires of Blue Hill Avenue cast a dull red glow.

What did the blacks think they were doing? Alice wondered. They acted as though they were the only people who’d ever had it tough in this world. Poor was poor, hungry was hungry. The housing project where the McGoffs lived wasn’t any better than those across town in the ghetto. The widow upstairs who had to get by on social security and food stamps didn’t have any more than those black welfare mothers the newspapers were always writing about. The discrimination which blacks had confronted over the years was no worse than the arrogance and indifference which the Irish had faced when they came to this country.

The difference between the blacks and the Irish, she thought, was that the blacks had tried to advance through the civil rights movement—sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, ultimately riots—while the Irish had used politics. Alice believed in politics—it was the American way of getting ahead. And for a long while it had paid off. No district in the country had produced a more potent roster of pols than the storied “Old Eleventh,” of which Charlestown was part.

As early as 1894, in a race marked by bogus “mattress” voters, street brawls, and bully-boy raids on polling places, a tough little mick named John Francis Fitzgerald had won election to Congress from the Eleventh. “Honey Fitz” promptly repaid Charlestown’s support by getting the Navy Yard reopened, bringing hundreds of jobs back to town. But his stock in trade was an appeal to Irish rage against the “blue-nosed Yankee bigots.” In 1905, he rode that anger into the Mayor’s office.

Eventually, Fitzgerald’s old congressional seat passed to an even more aggressive young Irishman, James Michael Curley, who also exploited Irish resentments against the Yankee nabobs. The very term “codfish aristocracy,” he once said, was “an insult to the fish.” His style was flamboyant, even demagogic, but both as congressman and later as Boston’s mayor he appealed less to narrow Irish ethnocentrism than to the poor of all races. Nowhere was he more popular than in Charlestown and no neighborhood received more of his
largesse. One of the most consistently Democratic wards in the nation—Democrats routinely defeated Republicans there by margins of five or six to one—Charlestown did well under the New Deal, receiving one of the country’s first public housing projects (the very one where the McGoffs now lived), relief assistance for 1,200 of its 30,000 residents, and a staggering 400 federal jobs.