Common Ground (107 page)

The strain on their nerves was even harder to bear. It was eerie, never feeling secure in their own house. They couldn’t walk past a window without casting an apprehensive glance at the school playground. They couldn’t concentrate on a book of card game for fear the room would explode with flying glass. A simple walk to the grocery was a perilous mission. The children had to be watched at all times. Sleep came hard, every sound a reminder that there were enemies out there in the dark who had threatened to burn the house down. Often, after they finally fell asleep, they were awakened by revelers
from the Irish Rover or Emerald Isle roaring past the house, honking their horns and shouting, “Niggers suck!”

The ordeal was even more onerous for Frank Leonard, the Debnams’ white downstairs tenant, who wore a pacemaker to control a serious heart ailment. Not realizing that No. 185 was a two-family house, the assailants tossed almost as many rocks through the Leonards’ windows as they did through the Debnams’. Doctors warned that the constant barrage was aggravating Mr. Leonard’s heart condition.

The Debnams quickly learned they couldn’t depend on the police for protection. Almost from the start, their relations with District 11 had been thorny. Patrol cars frequently took twenty minutes to respond to a call. When they showed up, the cops usually asked if the Debnams could identify their attackers. When they said they couldn’t, the police often shrugged their shoulders as though to say: If you don’t know who attacked you, what do you want us to do about it?

There was something to be said for the police position. If they stationed a patrol car out front, the kids stayed away—but the car couldn’t remain there all night. As soon as it left, the kids returned, heaving rocks and bottles out of the school yard, then retreating into the night. By the time the police responded to a call, the kids were probably sitting in their living rooms watching television. It wasn’t a situation the ordinary patrolman was equipped to handle, but when the Debnams asked for detectives, they were told the district’s eight plainclothesmen had their hands full with murders, rapes, aggravated assaults, and burglaries. Did they really expect detectives to be pulled off such life-and-death matters to track down a bunch of rock-throwing kids?

Yet the police attitude had other roots as well. Like most Boston police stations, District 11 was overwhelmingly white and largely Irish Catholic; many of the policemen sympathized with their co-religionists’ struggle to preserve a white community along Dorchester Avenue. The Debnams were by no means the only people to complain that Dorchester’s police were inattentive to racial harassment. George Lincoln, the white landlord of a Templeton Street building, had often considered inserting a warning in his rental ads: “People of minority races are advised not to apply as there is no adequate police protection in this hostile neighborhood where only whites are acceptable.”

Some cops regarded the Debnams as troublemakers, intruding where they weren’t welcome, then complaining loudly when they didn’t get the protection they thought they deserved. If anything, RUN was worse, a bunch of radicals who had driven old Judge Troy off the bench. The police particularly resented the Debnams’ appeals to the press. One detective warned Alva: “All this publicity is doing you more harm than good. If you’d just keep your mouths shut for a year, you’d be able to live here in peace.”

By April, relations with District 11 had deteriorated so far that Deborah Anker, a lawyer representing the Debnams, arranged a meeting with Boston’s Police Commissioner, Robert DiGrazia, Superintendent Joe Jordan, and
Deputy Superintendent Lawrence Quinlan. After the Debnams laid out their grievances against the police, the Commissioner and his aides explained their problems. They sympathized with the Debnams—this kind of racial attack was a nasty business, and District 11 was doing everything humanly possible to stop it. But the law was the law. The police couldn’t arrest people simply because they looked suspicious. To make an arrest, the police either had to see someone commit a crime or obtain positive identification of the culprit. The family should try to identify their attackers.

The Debnams had heard all that before. The meeting merely reinforced their conviction that they could expect little from the police. Alva quit her second job with the School Department so that she could stay home every night with the children. That put the bread winning burden on Otis, who continued to hold two jobs, which kept him away from the house between 6:00 a.m. and midnight. To fill that gap, Alva turned to her family—to her brothers John and Jo-Jo, to her sister Helen, to Charlie Lane, and particularly to Mike Davis, who spent virtually every night at the house for weeks on end. Later, as the attacks persisted, the Debnams appealed to virtually anyone in authority—to Ted Kennedy, Kevin White, Deputy Mayor Jeep Jones, Governor Michael Dukakis, State Attorney General Frank Bellotti, Cardinal Medeiros, the NAACP—with meager results.

For a brief time, both federal and state investigators became interested in the Debnam affair. The FBI’s Otis Cox assigned two agents to look into the matter. Robert Cook, a Justice Department official from Washington, also spent several weeks on the case (once, when the Debnams heard rumors that someone planned to firebomb their house, Cook went up and down Dorchester Avenue, warning service stations not to sell gasoline in containers). Officials briefly considered summoning federal and state grand juries, but later abandoned the notion.

In mid-spring, several Black Muslim and Black Nationalist groups from Roxbury approached the Debnams. If nobody else was going to defend the family, they would be happy to oblige. And one of them went further. What the Debnams needed, he said, was a little muscle; smash up a few of those white neighbors’ houses and the assault on the Debnams would stop.

No, thanks, said Alva and Otis. We don’t need any of that stuff.

So, as the stones came through their windows night after night, they depended more and more heavily on RUN. When the organization first volunteered to defend the Debnams, it hadn’t expected a protracted siege. As late as March 11, RUN was still reaching out to the community, hoping to mobilize white neighbors with a conciliatory leaflet. But as the assaults continued, RUN gradually developed a paramilitary battle plan. Dividing the night into three shifts—eight to midnight, midnight to three, three to six—it assigned four defenders to each period. Through trial and error, it devised four “battle stations”: two defenders on the top floor, one watching the front, one the rear;
someone on the second floor, keeping the troublesome school yard under constant observation; a fourth behind the front door, watching Centre Street.

The attackers proved remarkably resourceful, however. Noting when the defenders changed shifts, when they seemed to relax their guard, the youths varied their tactics to exploit these moments of vulnerability. RUN then shifted its strategy too, relying increasingly on advanced technology. By April, it had two small vans stationed in the neighborhood, one behind St. Mark’s Church, the other on nearby Nixon Street. From a citizens band “base unit” on the third floor of the Debnams’ house, a “radio coordinator” maintained contact through walkie-talkies with defenders in the vans. With the defense team in constant communication, the vans warned the house of any attacks forming in their sectors, while the base informed the vans when youths were retreating in their direction.

Just what RUN should do if it cornered one or more of the attackers was a matter of some dispute. From the start, the organization had been split by ideological differences, leading to the resignation of several members who favored a more determined campaign against the “forces of racism.” Similar disputes developed over the Debnam case. RUN’s defenders often carried baseball bats in their cars, potent weapons for self-defense that were easily explainable as innocent sports equipment. A few of the most zealous activists yearned to use their bats on the attackers. Others hoped to capture the youths and place them under citizen’s arrest. But lawyers associated with RUN sternly warned against such “vigilantism,” fearing it could lead to civil suits by aggrieved parties. RUN therefore concentrated on photographic identification of the attackers. Several defenders in the house and one in each van were equipped at all times with a camera and flash equipment. When an attacker got close enough, the defender would leap out and snap his picture. Any shots that came out were turned over to the police, in hopes that they would provide sufficient evidence for prosecution.

In practice, the picture taking only exacerbated tensions in the neighborhood. Since it was difficult to distinguish attacking youths from innocent passersby, RUN snapped pictures of everyone who went by the house, often provoking strenuous objections. One night, after they had photographed a green Chevrolet making its third pass at the house, six white youths jumped out of the car and angrily confronted the picture takers. From the house burst six defenders, led by a black man carrying a double-barreled shotgun. “Give me those car keys,” he told the driver. “This is the third time you guys have been past here. You aren’t getting these keys back tonight and you aren’t leaving until the Man comes.” When the police arrived, the black gave them the keys and said, “Get these guys out of here. I don’t want to see them again.”

On March 16, RUN’s strategy provided fresh ammunition to its critics. When a rock went through the Debnams’ living-room window, a RUN sentinel in the front hall spotted several youths scattering down Centre Street. He gave chase, accompanied by Alva’s brother Jo-Jo, while the base unit alerted other
defenders in cars and vans. A RUN member named Kathy Navin, cruising the streets in her Toyota sedan, saw a white youth in flight. Drawing alongside, she asked if something was wrong. The boy said two men were chasing him. Eventually he got in the car—whether at his suggestion or hers was a matter of some dispute—and they drove away. A minute later, Kathy picked up Jo-Jo Walker, who identified the boy as one of those he had seen in the street. Kathy then drove to the Debnams’, where RUN photographed the boy, then told him to go away and not come back. The next day, the police charged Kathy Navin with kidnapping Michael McKeon, a fourteen-year-old student at St. Mark’s School. Judge Dolan quickly dismissed the charge, but the incident damaged RUN’s reputation in the community, contributing to a widespread suspicion that something ominous was going on at 185 Centre Street.

In the wake of such incidents, RUN became increasingly alienated from the neighborhood. Its determined defense of the Debnams had turned 185 Centre Street into a fortress against the outside world. RUN’s most ideological members increasingly saw the white neighbors as unalloyed racists, a hostile force which could not be bargained with, only repelled. This proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some previously sympathetic adults were put off by the armed-camp atmosphere. Rumors that RUN was “a bunch of Communists” made rapprochement still more difficult.

A handful of white neighbors, sensing that things were getting out of hand, made one last effort to mobilize the community behind the Debnams. In late March, a college professor named David Stratman, who lived around the corner on Samoset Street, invited Alva and Otis—but not RUN—to meet with him and a few sympathetic neighbors. Stratman believed that both RUN and ROAR, for their own reasons, were seeking to make race the central issue in the city. Only by defusing the racial question, he believed, by embedding situations like the Debnams’ in a nexus of common concerns, could the community’s polarization be halted. That meant relying on the best instincts of the neighborhood—not on radical missionaries from Cambridge—to restore a sense of decency and perspective. At the meeting, several participants volunteered to help. One woman active at St. Mark’s said she would speak with the priests, urging them to get more involved. Paul Tafe and Marie Garrett, the youngest members of the group, volunteered to seek out the vandals themselves.

District 11 maintained a list of 147 locations—street corners, parks, school yards, and drugstores—where Dorchester’s youth gangs customarily hung out. Some 2,580 young people between the ages of ten and twenty-five were said to belong to such gangs, but police cautioned that the word “gang” should be construed loosely to mean any group of youths who hung together for any purpose—from street hockey to smoking dope to merely “messing around.” Few of them bore the colorful names, the bizarre regalia or lethal weapons popularized by
West Side Story
. Few were regularly involved in overt criminal
activity, though many engaged in random vandalism against public buildings or private homes.

But rapid change in Dorchester’s neighborhoods and the city’s tense racial climate had begun to alter that. The gangs, which generally carried the names of the street or corner on which they hung out, became more aware than ever of their turf. Their members often spoke of themselves as “protectors” of the neighborhood. Those who could remember the days when their parents lived west of Washington Street would say: We didn’t defend ourselves then, we let the colored push us out; now we’re going to fight for our territory. Some gang members no longer lived in Dorchester at all but returned from South Shore communities on weekends or evenings to help defend a turf that was no longer their own. It didn’t take much to move the gangs to action; the slightest alteration in territorial patterns—as simple as blacks hanging a basketball net on a new light pole, or taking their clothes to a new laundromat—could ignite fears of fresh incursions, triggering a racial explosion.

The Debnams’ house was boxed by four such groups—the Roseland Street gang, which took its name from the street just behind St. Mark’s Church; the Shawmut Station gang, which hung out at the subway station on Clementine Park; the Mather Street gang, which met on a corner just across Centre Street; and the Wainwright Park gang, named after a grassy rectangle two blocks from the Debnams’.

One night in late March, Paul Tafe and Marie Garrett strolled across the school yard to the stoop where the Roseland Street gang usually congregated after supper. Only a few years older than the gang members, who ranged from fifteen to twenty, Paul and Marie easily struck up a conversation. As a sociology student at the University of Massachusetts, Paul was interested in what motivated these youngsters, and as the leader of a rock group called Ashmont, he enjoyed a certain prestige in the neighborhood. He told them he’d been up at the Debnams’ recently, where he had seen the ruin caused by their stones. It must be a terrible thing to have rocks crashing through your windows night after night, he said. Why did they do it?