Common Ground (53 page)

Several patrol cars came screeching up Bunker Hill Street, as Captain William MacDonald, Charlestown’s police commander, hurried down the hill to
take charge of the situation. At once he ordered the crowd to disperse, but by then the burning effigy and police sirens had drawn still more youths out of the housing project. Sensing a confrontation, they refused to move.

MacDonald seized a bullhorn and shouted, “This intersection must be cleared immediately. You have five minutes to comply with this order or the police will move you.” But that brought only a chorus of jeers: “We ain’t going nowhere!” “This is our town, you get out!” Abruptly, down the street in Hayes Square, appeared a squad of the dreaded Tactical Patrol Force, visors in place, ready to move. “Sit down!” a man shouted, and most of the teenagers obeyed, squatting in the street around the blackened object on the pavement. On a signal from MacDonald, the TPF began jogging up the street, and from around the corner came six motorcycles of the Mobile Operations Patrol, driving straight for the kids, scattering them right and left.

Until then, Danny McGoff had been merely a spectator. He kept telling himself: “I’m not going to get arrested today. I’m going to school in a week and I don’t want to come down here to court. I’d better stay out of this.” But now as the battle was joined, as friends all around him began pelting the police with beer bottles, rocks, and pieces of wood, Danny heaved a Narragansett bottle at the police cars in the intersection and watched it shatter against a fender. Aroused, he charged into the fray, heaving whatever came to hand.

All around him, others—even grown men—were losing control. Vinnie Donovan, a beefy neighbor of the McGoffs, charged Captain MacDonald and kicked him in the groin. As the captain doubled up in pain, two policemen seized Vinnie by the arm, but his friends grabbed him by the other arm and for a few seconds a bizarre tug-of-war ensued, each side hauling at him until the weight of the crowd prevailed and they pulled him back into their midst. By now, the TPF were angry too, flailing about them with their nightsticks, drawing blood. The motorcyclists roared onto the sidewalks, chasing some of the crowd into the project.

Danny, Tommy, and Kevin McGoff scrambled down Carney Court and into O’Reilly Way, a narrow road behind the first row of project buildings. There they were relatively safe, for they knew all the project’s alleys and courtyards, all the doors and passageways which led ever deeper into its protective maze.

So the battle became a game which Danny and Tommy joined with gusto while Kevin maintained his usual role of detached observer. The kids would sneak down an alley, jump onto Bunker Hill Street, and heave a barrage of rocks and bottles at the police, but once the cops gave chase, they would dart back into the project and disappear into a building, only to reappear a few minutes later two blocks away. For most of the morning and into the afternoon, the McGoffs and their friends played cat and mouse with the police.

But eventually they tired of that. In midafternoon, about three hundred Townies, most of them teenagers, staged a march up Breed’s Hill, chanting the high school football cheer, “Here we go, Charlestown, here we go!” Along the way, they overturned five small cars and set fire to a sixth. On the other side of the hill, demonstrators forced their way into the lobby of the Bunker
Hill Community College and assaulted a nineteen-year-old black student, knocking him to the ground and injuring his arm. Then, their anger spent, the crowd drifted back up the hill, heading home through the gathering dusk.

Still immobilized by her aching neck, Alice hadn’t moved from her apartment, where she followed the day’s events on radio and television. Several local stations had preempted their normal programming for coverage of the crisis. Prone in bed, her neck cradled by four pillows, she viewed with growing horror the massive array of forces around Monument Square, the frightening scene outside the high school, the battle of Bunker Hill Street, the march to the community college. As she watched the images flickering across the screen, and listened to the newsmen summing it all up in their Harvard accents, she thought: The scene they’re showing is barely three hundred yards up the hill, but for all these guys know, it might as well be on the other side of the moon. They just don’t understand. By the time her children straggled home, Alice was deeply agitated and she pleaded with them to stay in that evening, to keep off the streets. But soon most of the boys had rushed out again, unable to resist the skirmishes still sputtering along Bunker Hill Street. At about ten o’clock, somebody threw two firebombs into the Warren Prescott School, and when firemen arrived they were stoned by a hostile crowd. Another group set up a barricade of blazing trash barrels, which brought the TPF racing back to clear it. Until well past midnight, police cars streamed through the project.

As she lay in bed, watching headlights race across her bedroom ceiling, Alice could feel her neck growing suffer by the minute. It seemed to her as though all the pain of that terrible day had collected in one knot and lodged at the base of her neck.

The pain had been a long time gathering. Alice had paid little attention to the early phases of Boston’s desegregation struggle—preoccupied with raising her seven children, she told herself that the legal battle was unlikely to affect Charlestown for years to come. But by 1973, as both state and federal courts prepared to grapple with the central issue, it suddenly seemed less remote.

In the early seventies, Alice had four of her children at the Harvard-Kent, a new elementary school directly across the street from the Bunker Hill project. Like most of her neighbors, she was delighted to have the new school—the first in Charlestown in more than thirty years—but she was determined to keep a close eye on her children’s education. Having paid her one dollar to join the Harvard-Kent Home and School Association—Boston’s equivalent of the Parent-Teacher Association—she regularly attended its monthly meetings in the school’s spacious auditorium. In March 1973, after the state’s Supreme Judicial Court set an accelerated timetable for “racial balancing” of the city’s schools, Charlestown’s Home and School Association called a mass protest rally. Alice was among five hundred parents who gathered to listen to anti-busing leaders from around the city. The evening’s most rousing address came from Mrs. Olive Costello, a Dorchester mother, who warned that indiscriminate
mixing of blacks and whites would be a disaster. “The three R’s will be turned to Riot, Rape, and Robbery,” she said. “Wake up Charlestown, before it’s too late!”

To Alice, the idea of sending her children to a school halfway across the city when they had a perfectly good school right across the street was utterly ridiculous. Moreover, what she knew of conditions in Roxbury strengthened her resolve not to put any of her children on a bus. Riot, Rape, and Robbery might be a little strong, but she knew it wasn’t safe over there, and when the chairman asked for recruits to help form a Charlestown chapter of a new statewide organization—Massachusetts Citizens Against Forced Busing—Alice raised her hand.

Charlestown’s nascent anti-busing movement was led by a small circle of women: Gloria Conway, editor of the Charlestown
Patriot
, the town’s weekly newspaper; Peg Pigott and Ann Doherty, both active in the Home and School Association; and Judy Brennan, a telephone operator. All were mothers from stable “lace curtain” families, public-spirited, moderate, even circumspect. They fitted well into Massachusetts Citizens, a cautious organization which concentrated on public education, lobbying in the state legislature, and orderly demonstrations to capture media attention.

Though Alice lived in the project among a different breed of Townie, she’d been born and raised on Monument Avenue among women much like these. Now she threw herself into Massachusetts Citizens—signing up new members, handing out leaflets, attending demonstrations. Often she took her older children along—Lisa in particular became a regular in the protests outside City Hall and the State House. On Aprils, 1974, when five hundred Townies marched in the huge procession to Beacon Hill, Alice, Danny, Lisa, and Kevin walked arm in arm in the second row of the Charlestown contingent. And later that afternoon, as the sun set, they were among the 3,000 diehards who remained on the Common singing, to the tune of the World War I song, “Over there, over there, our kids aren’t going over there.”

When Arthur Garrity issued his long-awaited ruling two months later, making it clear that some kids would indeed be going over there, a new desperation crept into Boston’s anti-busing movement. With the federal court order overriding state laws, lobbying was now useless. A new brand of protest was needed to show the judge that Boston’s white neighborhoods would never bow to his dictates. That June, Louise Day Hicks and her advisers pulled together a coalition of anti-busing activists in a new organization. To express the group’s militance, they called it ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). The first demonstration under the new label was scheduled for September 9, 1974, the Monday before the limited first phase of busing was to begin.

With the federal court taking jurisdiction of the case, the September protest focused on Massachusetts’ two U.S. senators—Ted Kennedy and Ed Brooke—who had recently voted against a narrowly defeated anti-busing rider to the federal aid to education bill. The rider wouldn’t have bound a federal court, but ROAR wanted to voice its outrage at the senators’ stand.

Neither man actually advocated busing. In April 1965, Ed Brooke—then the first black to serve as Massachusetts Attorney General—said, “I don’t believe any parent, black or white, wants to have his children bused from a superior school to an inferior school. It’s just not natural. The sane and sensible approach is the destruction of the ghetto.” Ted Kennedy was equally skeptical. On
Meet the Press
in March 1964, he told a reporter, “If your question is asking me whether I oppose ‘busing’ students, I do.” But as support for busing became a touchstone of commitment to racial equality, both senators gradually altered their positions, and when Arthur Garrity handed down his decision, Kennedy and Brooke rallied round the embattled judge.

Ted Kennedy was especially close to Garrity—closer than his brother Jack had ever been. The two men saw each other with some frequency over the years, and not surprisingly there were those in Boston who regarded Garrity as Ted Kennedy’s front man. At anti-busing rallies, it was not uncommon to see signs linking the two, as in “Impeach Kennedy—and Impeach Kennedy’s Puppet, Judge Garrity.”

Late in August of 1974, ROAR’s leaders asked both senators to meet with them in their Boston offices in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building before the September 9 rally. Brooke said he would not be in Boston that day, but he designated two assistants to meet the delegation and receive their demands: “That you restore our alienated rights. That you use your influence to obtain an immediate moratorium of the court-ordered busing plan decreed by Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, a Kennedy political appointee. That you, failing this, do each day what you force us to do—put your children on a bus and send them into a high crime area. That you support us now or we will not support you.”

Ted Kennedy had never responded to ROAR’s request for a meeting. But he was in the city that morning, having flown up from Hyannis Port at 9:00 a.m., ostensibly to visit four high schools which were to be desegregated that week. When the delegation appeared at his office, an aide invited them to sit down. For nearly an hour, the six mothers waited impatiently. Suddenly a man appeared in the doorway, calling, “Kennedy’s here! He’s on the bandstand.”

Why the Senator had changed his plans and headed directly for the platform is not clear. Perhaps it was a column in the previous day’s Boston
Globe
, written by Mike Barnicle, a young columnist who was a friend of the Senator’s. Born in Fitchburg of Irish-American parentage, Barnicle saw himself as a spokesman for the city’s misunderstood white working class. The column, entitled “Open Letter to Senator Kennedy,” sought to express the feelings of those Irish-Americans who would march in that day’s demonstrations. “Dear Senator Kennedy,” it began.

Perhaps Kennedy was responding to a telephone call Barnicle made to Hyannis Port that weekend, urging the Senator to go to the rally and confront the crowd. Perhaps it was Kennedy’s own sense of what was required of him. As he said later, “I felt I had a responsibility to do it. I felt it was important that they hear my views.” Or, perhaps, it was merely his instinctive response to a challenge. Although he had been invited to meet with the delegation upstairs, Kennedy apparently thought the group was daring him to address the rally. “They had thrown out a challenge, implied that I didn’t have the guts. So I felt it was important not to back down from that, to go ahead and confront them.”

For whatever reasons, after brief appearances at South Boston and Dorchester high schools, instead of visiting the other two schools on his itinerary he told his driver to head for Government Center. There he halted the car at the plaza’s edge and walked to the temporary platform set up in front of City Hall, where 8,000 people were listening to the speeches.