Common Ground (105 page)

One morning in August, Alva visited 185 Centre Street in the Codman Square section of Dorchester. A three-story frame house painted battleship gray with white trim around doors and windows, it had a sloping shingle roof, a small front porch, a patch of grass and shrubs surrounded by a neat picket fence. The owners, a white couple named Jim and Bertha McKenna, lived in seven rooms on the top two floors, renting the ground unit to an elderly white couple. They were asking $25,000.

Alva knew this was the one she wanted. When Otis saw the house a few days later, he agreed. They put $900 down, getting an FHA-insured loan for the rest. The Debnams moved into their new home on January 24, 1976.

On Sunday evening, February 1, Alva and Otis entertained their first guests—Mike Davis, a cousin of Alva’s first husband, and Charlie Lane, Mike’s brother-in-law. After supper the four sat down at the kitchen table for a bout of whist, a game long popular in the Walker family. Just as Mike and Otis ran an impressive streak of diamond trumps, there was an excited knock at the door. It was Frank Leonard, the downstairs tenant, shouting, “Mrs. Debnam, someone just tossed a rock through our window!”

As the men examined the debris on the Leonards’ floor, Alva summoned the police, but when two cops arrived a half hour later, they weren’t very impressed. “Kids,” they said. “Happens all the time around here.” The Debnams and their guests returned to the whist table.

The next evening, as Alva was fixing dinner, she heard a crash in the next room. A large beer bottle had hurtled through the window, dashing shards of glass across their bed. The whole family raced down two flights and into the backyard just in time to see three hazy figures behind a high mesh fence in the macadam playground of St. Mark’s School.

“Did you kids throw that bottle?” Alva demanded.

“Yeh, nigger,” said one of the figures. “Wanna make something of it?”

“No,” said Alva. “I just want you to stop it.”

“I’ll tell you what we want,” said another figure. “We want you niggers out of here.”

“You’ve got until Wednesday,” said the third figure. “Or else.”

Once again Alva called the police. Once again two cops showed up, took a report, and promised to investigate.

The next evening, just at dusk, Alva was fixing her daughter Charlene’s hair while Maria, her other daughter, and young Otis watched television. Suddenly one of the kitchen windows exploded as a huge rock clattered across the linoleum. From the school yard Alva heard a cheer and someone yelled, “Two more nights, nigger. Get out if you know what’s good for you.”

This time Alva summoned not only the police but much of the family: Mike Davis, Charlie Lane, her brother Jo-Jo, her sister Helen. Someone suggested it was time to bring in the press, so Charlie called Garry Armstong, a black reporter for Channel 7, who arrived to tape an interview with Alva in her glass-strewn kitchen.

Did they have any idea why they were being attacked? Armstrong asked.

No, said Alva. They hadn’t harmed anyone. All they’d done was to move into their new home.

Well, said Armstrong, the neighbors seemed to feel they’d moved into white territory, that they had crossed an invisible line.

Invisible line? asked Alva. What invisible line?

The boundary the Debnams had violated was a legacy of B-BURG, the effort by Boston savings banks following Martin Luther King’s assassination to provide mortgages for the city’s low-income blacks. Restricting such loans to a narrow corridor abandoned by retreating Jews, the banks had carefully skirted Irish neighborhoods, leaving a
de facto
racial border zigzagging across the city. Part of that “B-BURG line” followed Washington Street through Codman Square, slicing Dorchester in two, leaving everything to the west heavily black, everything to the east overwhelmingly white.

That many homes purchased with such mortgages were vastly overpriced and soon retaken by the banks only aggravated the social ravages of that policy. As the original “B-BURG families” moved out, their houses were often resold to other blacks less ready to assume the responsibilities of home ownership. Hundreds of Haitian refugees flooded the area, bringing with them the reggae beat, a Caribbean-French patois, and exotic new foods like coconut bread and barbecued goat. Between 1970 and 1975 the population turnover in the western sector, fueled by blockbusting and speculation, was so explosive that it ripped the community to shreds. Codman Square—once a graceful colonial crossroads marked by the spire of the Second Church in Dorchester—was transformed almost overnight into a black rendezvous where bands of boisterous youths flocked around funky new enterprises like Brother Lord’s Music Sounds. After two white men were killed in the square during 1975, it was shunned, especially at night, by all but the most adventurous whites.

By then the sharp boundary had begun to crumble. A few blacks ventured across Washington Street, cautiously staking their claims in the white domain which stretched from there toward Dorchester Bay. The first pioneers were so rare that they posed no threat to their neighbors and encountered little hostility. But the advent of city wide busing in 1975 aggravated the situation, as black children from the western sector were bused across Washington Street and whites were moved in the other direction, raising fears that no racial boundaries were secure. Meanwhile, the new black homeowners had begun to approach Dorchester Avenue, the main street of Irish Catholic Dorchester. “Dot Av,” as it was known to its denizens, was a breezy jumble of laundromats, luncheonettes, and variety stores, interspersed with taverns called the Emerald Isle, the Blarney Stone, and the Irish Rover, which still sold Guinness stout and McCardle’s ale on draft. As blacks edged closer to that Gaelic stronghold, many whites feared that the B-BURG barrier was giving way for good, that one day soon the deluge would come sweeping through their neighborhood, destroying property values, eradicating community life as they knew it.

Much of this anxiety focused on Centre Street, a pleasant, tree-shaded
thoroughfare which stretched a mile from Washington Street to Dorchester Avenue. By 1975 the black advance had reached about halfway between those two ethnic bastions. When the Debnams bought No. 185, they knew nothing of the nervous standoff. Neither the McKennas, who were eager to sell their house, nor Charlie Butts, well known for his aggressive brokerage in changing neighborhoods, had ever mentioned it. Nor were the Debnams aware of the rumors racing along Centre Street that week: that the NAACP had bought the house to “crack” the community; that a white man had served as an intermediary; that the McKennas’ own daughter had wanted to buy the house but was outbid by the blacks; that the Debnams were on welfare. Not until rocks and bottles began crashing through their windows did Alva and Otis realize they had jumped two blocks beyond the nearest black family, ratcheting the level of apprehension another notch.

Alva’s interview on the eleven o’clock news found a receptive audience around the corner. Eileen Bisson, twenty-seven, and Janet Connors, twenty-six, shared a Clementine Park three-decker. Both women also belonged to Racial Unity Now (RUN), a small group of Dorchester whites devoted to curbing racial violence and forging an alliance between whites and blacks.

RUN had grown from an unusual effort by Cambridge radicals to organize Dorchester’s white working class. The experiment shrewdly focused on Municipal Court Judge Jerome Troy, who had long dispensed his special brand of justice: acquittal for those with money or influence, jail or military service for those who lacked such resources. Accumulating 10,000 signatures on a petition for his removal, the insurgents later took their case to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which ultimately barred Troy from the bench. But even this famous victory couldn’t hold the alliance of middle-class radicals and working-class recruits together. As more young ideologues arrived to test their Marxist principles on a proletarian community, the Dorchester contingent kicked over the traces, expelling many of the outsiders. The organization gradually collapsed, leaving a residue of politically conscious young people eager for new forms of community action.

When a dark-skinned Colombian named Mario Munez was severely beaten by whites outside a Dorchester Avenue tavern in January 1975, a feminist collective, whose members had been active in the Troy campaign, organized a fund-raiser to pay his hospital costs. That, in turn, led to formation of Racial Unity Now—an amalgam of Dorchester’s working-class activists and remnants of the New Left belonging to the Communist Labor Party, the October League, and the Revolutionary Union. Over the next year, RUN helped defend several black families harassed by white youths. Soon they evolved sophisticated techniques, including a “phone chain,” which could put several dozen members on the streets within minutes, and a “house-sitting” procedure which provided round-the-clock protection for embattled blacks.

When they heard of the Debnams’ plight just before midnight on February 3, Eileen and Janet went directly to their assistance. Rushing down Clementine
Park, turning the corner onto Centre Street, they saw that all the lights at No. 185 were out, with no movement behind the curtains. Approaching cautiously along the far sidewalk, they noticed two black women seated in a car directly across the street from the Debnams’ house. Assuming the women had fled from the attack, Eileen and Janet rapped lightly on the car window.

After three assaults in three nights, the Debnams had responded as best they could: turning off the lights to wait for another attack, hoping to identify their assailants. Alva and Helen had stationed themselves across the street in the Debnams’ red Oldsmobile, where they were still sitting when the two white women knocked on the windows. Convinced that the newcomers were part of some fresh assault, they shrank back in terror. Only gradually, as the women smiled and gestured, did the sisters roll down their windows a few inches and eventually invite them into the back seat. For half an hour the women whispered to each other, Alva and Helen recounting what had happened at the house, Eileen and Janet explaining RUN’s objectives. Later they entered the darkened house together. Mike Davis appeared from the shadows, Janet summoned her husband, Larry Turner, and soon the gathering became a full-fledged council of war. Sleepless for nearly forty-eight hours, Alva and Otis were on the brink of nervous exhaustion, but once they realized that these white people really intended to help them, they babbled their gratitude. When they finally staggered off to bed, Eileen and Larry sat in the car until dawn, keeping watch on the house.

In succeeding days, RUN’s twenty-five members mapped strategy for the Debnams’ defense. In similar situations their role had been limited to guarding an embattled house, but now conditions were clearly deteriorating. Apparently provoked by the busing crisis and by rapid neighborhood change, racial harassment was spreading through Dorchester. The week the Debnams moved onto Centre Street, a black woman named Ruby Bradley and her seven children had fled their apartment on nearby Templeton Street after eight nights of attack by white youths—the fourth black family forced off that street in less than a year. Convinced that the situation could be brought under control only with wide neighborhood support, RUN called a community meeting.

For several evenings that week, members passed out leaflets. “EMERGENCY,” the flyers proclaimed. “Some of our neighborhood’s young people have been throwing rocks, bricks and bottles at some of our new neighbors on Centre Street every night since February 1. We don’t think this is right. After working hard for years to buy a home, they chose our neighborhood. We welcome them and want to put an end to these attacks. Come to the community meeting to welcome them and to discuss what to do. St. Mark’s School. February 13, 7–8:30 p.m.”

Some seventy people showed up at the school’s basement auditorium that night to hear the Debnams and RUN explain what had happened. One of Otis’ co-workers at the rubber company—a recent immigrant from Ireland—delivered a brief testimonial, calling Otis “a damned good man who ought to be
our ally, not our enemy.” Alva told of the attacks on her family, concluding: “Nobody’s going to tell me where I can live and where I can’t. Hard as I had to work to get this house, nobody’s going to take it away from me.” Her speech drew sympathetic applause and several expressions of outrage from white homeowners who recalled their own encounters with neighborhood vandals. A dozen people volunteered to defend the Debnams. Another thirty-five signed a petition urging District 11 to station a police car outside their house.

Responding to community pressure, Captain William V. McCormack gave orders for a blue-and-white cruiser to guard the Debnams during evening hours. As long as the car was there the youths kept their distance, but no sooner did it leave at midnight than they reappeared, pelting the house with renewed vigor. The police insisted there was nothing much they could do unless the Debnams provided them with names, addresses, or—at the very least—detailed descriptions of their assailants.

Meanwhile, the vandals stepped up their assaults. On February 20, a particularly determined attack shattered three rear windows. And later that week, youths attacked Jim and Bertha McKenna’s new home in Quincy, breaking four windows and cracking their car windshield, in apparent revenge for their sale of the Centre Street house to the Debnams.

On February 25, RUN distributed another flyer. “Vandalism has long been a problem in the neighborhood,” it said, “but attacks on the Debnam family are by far the worst we’ve seen. It’s up to us to deal with this—no one else will do it for us…. Neighbor after neighbor, young and old, say the attacks must end. We have to put all our heads together to figure out how. The last meeting ended with a call for another. It’s scheduled for St. Mark’s School, Sunday, February 29. 7–10.”

On the lawn of St. Mark’s Church, a giant statue of Christ stretched its arms toward a row of shabby three-deckers. Carved in its granite base was the legend “Come Follow Me.”

A monument to Catholic power in the O’Connell-Cushing era, St. Mark’s vast compound just off Centre Street embraced not only the red brick Gothic church, but a rectory with four priests; St. Mark’s School, with an enrollment of seven hundred; and a convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, housing twenty nuns. Francis Cardinal Spellman once called St. Mark’s “the finest parish in the country” and, indeed, some of Boston’s most eminent communicants once lived there. Among them was Honey Fitz, who brought his family to Welles Avenue in 1903. Elected Mayor of Boston three years later, Fitzgerald became a benefactor of St. Mark’s, where his daughter, the future Rose Kennedy, often attended Mass with the family. In those years, the parish frequently led the Archdiocese in per capita contributions. Through the twenties and thirties, the Irish middle class settling Codman Square were proud to say they came from St. Mark’s, and even when they moved to the suburbs, they often left instructions that they were to be buried back in the old ground.
Later, as the neighborhood’s tone declined, St. Mark’s lost much of its glamour, but the extravagant dimensions of church, school, and convent still recalled its most potent era.