Common Ground (93 page)

Alice loved the idea. She’d voted for Kevin White, but she found his stand on busing distressingly wishy-washy. ROAR had held two other demonstrations against the Mayor—one at an East Boston speech, another a “sleep-in” at his hotel suite while he hosted the United States Conference of Mayors. He had shrugged off both episodes. But seizing City Hall was a stunt even Kevin White couldn’t ignore.

On Saturday, December 13, Alice packed a blanket and pillow in a large shopping bag and set off downtown. From across the snowy plaza, City Hall glowed with warmth and light. Christmas trees strung with colored lights were
scattered across the lobby. A lavish buffet lined one wall. Beer and mixed drinks flowed at two cash bars. An organist played carols over the sound system. Alice loved a good party and she knew she’d enjoy this one all the more in anticipation of what was to come.

Shortly before midnight, as five hundred revelers milled about the cavernous lobby, word circulated that the sit-in was off. Those who wanted to demonstrate should assemble for a motorcade to South Boston, where they would hold a vigil on the high school steps. Alice was stunned. Who had canceled the sit-in, and why? The vigil was ridiculous. Alice swallowed her anger and joined nearly four hundred other demonstrators in South Boston, but after an hour or so, she went home. Lying in bed, she began to understand what had happened. Only one person could possibly have called off the sit-in—ROAR was still Louise’s organization. And only one person could have got her to do that—it was Kevin’s City Hall. How long had this sort of footsie-wootsie been going on? How many cozy little games had been played out over their heads?

Mrs. Hicks’s problems were soon complicated by skirmishing for the March 2 presidential primary. Pixie had thrown her support to Alabama’s Governor George Wallace, whose racial animus appealed to many of Boston’s embattled whites. Louise lined up with Senator Henry Jackson, a more moderate critic of busing. To ROAR’s militants, that was a scandalous retreat. When Louise brought Jackson to an “Irish Rally” at Charlestown’s Knights of Columbus Hall, Pixie’s supporters set up such an outcry the Senator was unable to utter two successive sentences. After a frustrating half hour, he stalked out behind a phalanx of Secret Servicemen.

The disaffection grew after Louise endorsed Jackson’s bill which would have brought Boston additional federal funds to pay certain indirect costs of busing. As the new City Council President, she insisted she had no choice but to seek relief for a city fast approaching a fiscal crisis. But that didn’t mollify her critics. Indeed, so negative was the reaction among anti-busers that Pixie decided the time had come to challenge Louise’s control of ROAR. Through February 1976, Pixie’s supporters launched a bitter assault on Louise for betraying her own movement.

Sensing that her position was rapidly crumbling, Louise retaliated. On Sunday, February 29, the eighteen-member executive board was hastily convened in secret session at City Hall. (By then, Alice McGoff had assumed one of Charlestown’s two seats on the board.) Rita Graul, Louise’s chief lieutenant, presented them with a fifteen-point program, clearly designed to reassert Mrs. Hicks’s waning control. Pixie would be removed from the board, ostensibly because she held an elected position on the School Committee. Three of her most vigorous supporters—Carol Stazinski of Dedham, Kay Fynn and Jean Fottler of Roslindale—would be banished from ROAR for “disruptive actions.”

Alice had grown rather fond of the hot-blooded but warmhearted Pixie; she admired the outspoken Carol Stazinski; and, particularly after the abortive
City Hall sit-in, she harbored her own doubts about Louise. But bigger things were at stake: nothing less than the future of Boston’s anti-busing movement. Alice sensed that Pixie was more of a hater than Louise, more likely to condone actions which would bring the movement into disrepute. Moreover, she didn’t much care for some of Pixie’s new allies, notably City Councilman John Kerrigan, a bigot if ever there was one. More practical considerations weighed against Pixie too. Tom Johnson had Louise—and the Mayor—to thank for his CETA position in the Public Works Department. Powder Keg had long been solidly in the Hicks camp and, somewhat reluctantly, Alice decided to stick with Louise.

In a stormy meeting at the Harvard-Kent School on March 8, Powder Keg ratified most of the fifteen points, approving Pixie’s expulsion by a vote of 85–25. But by then Pixie’s most determined supporters had already broken away, forming a rival Charlestown organization called the Defense Fund after its original purpose, the legal support of young Townies arrested for anti-busing activities. A few weeks later, the Defense Fund affiliated with United ROAR, a new citywide group representing the Palladino-Kerrigan-O’Neil faction, while Powder Keg retained its allegiance to Louise’s ROAR.

The range of permissible dissent in Charlestown was limited. Powder Keg and the Defense Fund might differ as to means, but those who differed openly with the town’s anti-busing orthodoxy—whether by speaking out in public, or by joining one of Garrity’s parents’ councils, or by actually putting their children on a bus to Roxbury—quickly discovered that the Town would not tolerate such heresy. Their windows were broken, their cars vandalized, excrement was smeared on doorknobs and knockers. One woman whose daughter was bused received a box in the mail one day. Inside was a large brown cat with its throat slit.

But so long as one held fast to central tenets of the faith, different styles of protest were acceptable. Powder Keg generally adopted Louise’s more temperate tactics, while the Defense Fund took on Pixie’s aggressiveness, attracting those whose appetite for protest could no longer be satisfied by prayer marches, living rosaries, and silent vigils. While Powder Keg remained essentially a women’s organization, the Defense Fund was dominated by men. Like Powder Keg, the Fund sponsored a host of activities at its Bunker Hill Street headquarters—Easter egg hunts, raffles, and Friday-night dances—but its principal focus was on the streets, where many of its youthful adherents fought running battles with the police.

The growing schism coincided with some of the worst violence in modern Charlestown history. On Monday evening, February 16, a hundred youths assembled outside the Bunker Hill project, erecting barricades, pelting police cars with rocks, which shattered their windshields, sending six officers to the hospital. Similar clashes continued all week. On Tuesday night, a Molotov cocktail exploded on Polk Street. On Wednesday, a rock smashed a picture window at the Charlestown Library. On Thursday, a gang broke windows at
the Meat Outlet, a butcher’s shop on Bunker Hill Street, hauling away sides of beef. Somebody tampered with utility poles along Bunker Hill Street, causing the lights to spit fiery sparks in the night sky.

The week’s events helped define the diverging viewpoints of Charlestown’s two anti-busing organizations. In the next issue of the
Patriot
, Powder Keg clarified its position:

“We do not, nor have we ever, condoned the use of violence in anti-busing matters. We are appalled to see our community destroyed by our children who are being encouraged by certain unidentified adults who lack the maturity and guts to come forth and act for themselves…. We cannot submit to farfetched, hell-raising doctrines of a handful of restless hoodlums who preach immediate, senseless, destructive action, as opposed to our way of meaningful, affirmative, carefully planned strategy.”

The same issue carried a matching piece by Elaine Cormier, a moving force in the new Defense Fund.

“… violence may have a different meaning to different people. Violence to me is the police that I saw attack a young man on the corner of Polk Street…. The police that told me to get the f—– off the street…. This is still my town. My children are fourth generation in this town and maybe the people that are dumping trash and causing commotion feel that this is the only way we can be heard. We lost in the courts and we lost at the polls. What is left? Put our kids on a bus??? Obey a law that to us is completely wrong? How do we change the law? How do we bring attention to ourselves? We’re tired of marching, praying, demonstrating.”

Within both groups there was intense disagreement on the efficacy of violence. In Powder Keg, for example, Tom Johnson cultivated a florid bellicosity. “I’m not scared to throw a punch at someone who’s throwing a punch at me,” he would say. “I’m the bull of Powder Keg. I don’t like marching with a permit. I’m for civil disobedience. All right, you take a rap on the head. Big deal. I’ve been arrested five times since we started. I’m the most violent member of Powder Keg.” (All this was a trifle misleading. Owing his Public Works job to the Mayor, Johnson was amenable to suggestions from officials trying to keep Charlestown cool. One mayoral assistant noted: “You could say, ‘Hey, Tom, up ahead at the corner there, it would be dangerous to take a right. Do yourself a favor and take a left.’ He’d take a left. Pixie would reconstruct the street on you.”)

But even Tom’s rhetoric made Alice uncomfortable; it smacked too much of a personal animosity toward blacks that she didn’t share. Adamantly opposed to forced integration, she never regarded herself as personally prejudiced against blacks—after all, she’d lived side by side with them in the housing project for years. And now, as an information operator at the telephone company, she worked with many of them, and gradually she had become friendly with an outgoing young black woman named Betty Strickland. Betty was very worried about a brother who was being bused into Hyde Park High, one of Boston’s most racially polarized schools. Alice told her how
concerned she was about Lisa at Charlestown High. Somehow, through that terrible year, the two women maintained a tenuous rapport built in part on their mutual anxieties.

There were other blacks at the company, though, whom Alice couldn’t stand. One in particular did nothing but complain about how “poor,” “disadvantaged,” and “misused” she was. Alice noticed that many of the blacks who talked this way were relatively recent migrants from the South, apparently drawn to Massachusetts by its liberal welfare policies. Such Southern blacks were simply different from the Boston-born Negroes she’d grown up with; they acted “as if they were still down on the plantation.”

But though she had reservations about some of the city’s blacks, she never felt comfortable with Tom Johnson’s brand of belligerence. It condoned violence if not actually encouraging it, and it sent confused signals to the Town. On more than one occasion, she and Tom tangled openly at Powder Keg meetings. Once as he launched a harangue about “beating some heads out there,” she told him he was talking dangerous nonsense. Tom called her a coward.

She was no Goody Two-shoes. She believed in aggressively asserting her rights, as she had in the September mothers’ march when she pressed through police lines at the Bunker Hill Monument. But insisting on your rights was one thing, setting out to bust heads was another. In her opinion, violence only distracted people from the merits of the anti-busing case. They should take a leaf from Martin Luther King’s book, making pests of themselves with sit-ins, boycotts, and marches but avoiding the hooliganism which had later tarred the black and radical causes.

Yet she realized how difficult it was to enforce such a policy. Powder Keg could condemn violence all it wanted, but lofty pronouncements did little to dampen the combustible atmosphere of the streets. As evening fell over Breed’s Hill, a struggle was joined that had little to do with abstract issues or organizational strategies.

Alice knew the lure of that engagement. Fearing that one of her kids would be hurt or arrested, she implored them to stay off the streets at night. But her admonitions proved largely irrelevant, as each child followed his natural bent. Levelheaded and easygoing, Billy and Bobby had no taste for such skirmishing. Unable to resist the spectacle, Lisa, Robin, and Kevin were invariably drawn into the streets, though generally as non-combatants. A battle-scarred veteran of such contests, Danny, on weekends home from school, hung out with his old buddies and frequently got caught up in the fray. And his younger brother Tommy, a fresh recruit to the Green Store Gang, did frequent battle with the police.

If only because of their vantage point at Monument and Bunker Hill streets, the Green Store Gang was destined to be in the thick of things. For years they’d prided themselves on being the toughest “corner” in town, frequently the champs at football and halfball, not to mention rough-and-tumble street brawls. They could boast other achievements too: over the years, at least a dozen of the older boys had served time at Walpole or Concord Prison, while
others awaited trials for assault or bank robbery. The Green Store Gang had a reputation to uphold.

The battles along Bunker Hill Street that first fall and winter were unfailing rituals, ceremonies as preordained as a Requiem Mass. As bleak afternoon faded to chilly dusk, the housing project disgorged its youthful battalions. Mustering by the Green Store, they pulled old two-by-fours, coils of chicken wire, corrugated boxes, and bunches of garbage into clumsy barricades. Fires blazed in drums of trash, casting an orange glow on the brick façades. Soon the first sirens whined over the hill; blue lights pulsed against the granite obelisk on the heights. As squad cars sped down the slope, screeching to a halt in the intersection, they were welcomed by a hail of rocks from youths waiting in ambush on the rooftops or clustered in the alleys. The missiles, some as large as grapefruit, shattered a windshield or two, showering the policemen inside with flying glass. Molotov cocktails exploded on the roadway, spewing jets of flaming gasoline. Here and there, a reckless youth dashed into the street, hurling a brick and a taunt. But when the police rallied for a charge, their assailants melted into the project, taking refuge in hidden courtyards, clammy basements, darkened apartments.

Tommy McGoff and his friends were particularly adept at the rooftop ambuscade. During daylight hours, the Green Store Gang heaped up mounds of rocks, bricks, bottles—even billiard balls—on the roofs. When the police advanced up the street, they looked like those chubby blue-and-white ducks at the shooting galleries down on Washington Street—easy targets for a well-aimed stone. Afer a while, the police began carrying plastic shields, posing a new challenge to the boys on the roof. One night, a friend of Tommy’s dropped a bottle straight down, just missing an upraised shield, leaving an ugly gash on a cop’s forehead.