Common Ground (25 page)

The study group usually met at Elaine Reeder’s apartment on Peterborough Street. Elaine was known as “Perri,” after Perry Mason, a nickname gained in childhood because of her passion for defending the underdog. She had been an early civil rights activist, setting out to become a lawyer because she was “enamored of the Constitution of the United States.” She once told Jim Purdy that she wanted to become a judge so she could “right wrongs quickly.”

Isabel Gates, too, spent much of her time in Roxbury, often attending the Twelfth Baptist Church, where she knew Dr. Hester, Mike Haynes, and, of course, Martin Luther King, then a student at the university’s Divinity School. There were so few blacks at the university then that they all hung out together. Isabel was a frequent visitor at King’s apartment on Columbus Avenue in the South End, and it was King who introduced her to her husband, Donald Webster. In later years, Isabel and Donald Webster were to become prominent leaders of the civil rights movement in Atlanta, but in those law school years, Isabel, Perri, and Louise rarely discussed such lofty matters. They talked about classes, about boyfriends, about clothes. Louise, ten years older than the others, often took them to the shrine of her patron saint, St. Anthony, where the three girls, Jewish, black, and Irish, knelt side by side in prayer. Or she brought them home to the house on Columbia Road, where they would sit around the kitchen table playing Scrabble. On St. Patrick’s Day, South Boston’s special holiday, they would don green hats and join the family’s friends and neighbors for a party which lasted long into the night.

Louise had something of a head start on the others in the study group. Not only had she been to law school before, but she had a decade of experience in her father’s office. “We shared the law,” Louise says. “I learned more about the law from my father than from any book I ever read.” She was particularly well versed in property law. Following her father’s lead, she had invested heavily in real estate, purchasing several substantial apartment houses in the Back Bay. “My father collected diamonds,” she told friends. “I collect buildings.”

“Louise was a very pragmatic lady,” says Perri Reeder. “She understood corned beef and cabbage; from
pâté de foie gras
she could have cared less. She had enormous respect for property and money. For her, the law was a means of making your way in the world; she didn’t give a damn about constitutional law.” During their second year at law school, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in
Brown
v.
Board of Education
. Perri and Isabel were stirred by the landmark school desegregation ruling, but they can’t remember Louise reacting to it. “It probably rolled right off her back,” says Perri. “That wasn’t where her act was.”

When she passed the bar examination in March 1956, Louise wrote Perri she felt “born again.” She promptly went into partnership with her younger brother John. Operating out of their father’s old office in Barristers’ Hall, the new firm of Hicks & Day didn’t make much of a splash in Boston legal circles. It was a crimped, hidebound practice, like hundreds of others across the city, dealing primarily in real estate transfers, trusts, and wills—the musty, fly-blown instrumentalities of the law. But soon Louise broadened her activities. She examined titles for the Suffolk County Land Court. She served as an unpaid counsel for indigent defendants in Boston’s Juvenile Court, carrying on her father’s concern for errant youths. And she started building a base of community support as a founding member of the Catholic Lawyers’ Guild, treasurer of the Massachusetts Association of Women Lawyers (where she worked closely with Ethleen Diver), and regional chairman of the 1961 Cancer
Crusade. Then, in the spring of 1961, she announced her candidacy for the Boston School Committee.

Both of her brothers were against it. “If you’ve got to run for something,” said Paul, “why don’t you pick a job that pays?” “Why do you need it?” John argued. “What will it get you?” That was undoubtedly the position their father would have taken. “The Judge would never have approved Louise going into politics,” said his ex-clerk, John Flaherty. “It wasn’t dignified.” But for a politically ambitious woman, a seat on the School Committee was the obvious office to seek. Here was the one body in the city to which women had traditionally been elected, presumably because children and their schooling were considered to be the mother’s province.

Boston’s School Committee had an honorable pedigree, running back as far as America’s notion of the common school. In 1784, a town meeting declared that Boston’s schools should serve “the Benefit of the Poor and the Rich; that the Children of all, partaking of equal Advantages and being placed upon an equal Footing, no Distinction might be made among them in the Schools on account of the different Circumstances of their Parents, but that the Capacity & natural Genius of each might be cultivated & improved for the future benefit of the whole Community.” This high ideal was implemented five years later when Massachusetts passed the nation’s first comprehensive school law, requiring every town to support an elementary school. A few months later, Boston established a twenty-one-member School Committee.

The committee changed shape over the years, responding to political exigencies. As long as Boston remained a relatively homogeneous Yankee town, the schools operated much as they had in colonial times, under relaxed local control, and the School Committee reflected local interests, ballooning to 116 ward representatives. Its members were doctors, merchants, and ministers—men of like backgrounds and rearing who, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “carry the Common in our heads as the unit of space, the State House as the standard of architecture, and measure off men in Edward Everetts as the yardstick.”

But by the mid-nineteenth century, following the flood tide of Irish immigration, such men became obsessed with the threat to the social order posed by “the ravenous dregs of anarchy and crime, the tainted swarms of pauperism and vice Europe shakes on our shores from her diseased robes.” Education was quickly enlisted in the struggle for social discipline. “Unless [the children of immigrants] are made inmates of our schools,” School Committeeman George Emerson warned in 1846, “they will become inmates of our prisons.” The common school, once a reflection of natural community, became a means of wrenching community out of diversity, of assimilating foreign elements to American civic and moral standards. “The whole character of the instruction given,” said the Boston School Report of 1853, “must be such, and only such, as will tend to make the pupils thereof American citizens, and ardent supporters of American institutions.” These were the concerns which motivated Horace
Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and often called the father of the American public school. If they were to compel immigrants to become “morally acclimated to our institutions,” Mann argued, the schools themselves had to be centralized and professionalized. In 1851, after a long battle, the committee finally named a superintendent to run the system.

Meanwhile, the Irish themselves—the very newcomers who threatened to rend the social fabric—were gaining seats on the ward-based committee. Long before the interlopers were much of a factor in mayoral elections, the School Committee was the arena in which they and the Yankees did battle. By early in this century, they gained an iron hold on the School Committee which they maintained into the 1970s, doing unto the Yankees, the Italians, and the blacks as they had once been done to. Between 1905 and 1976, there were 48 Irish Catholic members, 8 Yankees, 5 Jews, and 2 Italians; after 1942, all but four members were Irish. And the committee took care of its own. Since 1920, all school superintendents have been Catholic and all but one have been Irish. During most of this period, the system’s administrators and teachers have been overwhelmingly Irish. In the mid-1960s, one investigator counted 68 Sullivans, 61 Murphys, 40 McCarthys, 30 O’Briens, 25 Walshes, 22 Dohertys, 21 McLaughlins, 21 Lynches, 18 Kelleys, and 14 Kellys in the system.

It is perhaps noteworthy that the comparable body in New York is the Board of Education while Boston’s remains the School Committee, for the committee seems less interested in education than in employment. Once Boston’s schools had justly claimed to be among the country’s best. But in the thirties—as Puritan rigor was abetted by Irish civil service rigidity—the system began to atrophy. (“We do not need to teach the current economic theories, nor the ever-changing concepts in government, nor the science of tomorrow,” Superintendent Patrick Campbell said in 1935. “Let us remember that man must always learn from the experience of the past.”) The proud boasts of another time (“Our common schools are a system of unsurpassable grandeur and efficacy,” Horace Mann had said) became ritualistic obeisance to “our wonderful system” and “our dedicated teachers.” By 1944, the Boston Finance Commission, a state watchdog agency, concluded: “ ‘Politics’ has dealt a paralyzing blow to progress in Boston schools. ‘Politics’ is given as the cause of relatively incompetent persons holding responsible positions, of decisions being made that are contrary to [educators’] best judgment…. The result is deadly to honest thinking, professional initiative, courageous leadership, and progress in all portions of the school system.”

A quarter century later, in 1970, the situation was, if anything, worse. Only 14 percent of School Committee votes concerned educational policy and curriculum, while 74 percent dealt with hiring, firing, promotion, and assignment of individual school employees. Appropriately grateful to the member who put them or kept them in office, such employees could be counted on to work on the member’s future campaigns; indeed, elections were often decided by how many jobs a member controlled (the average member appointed 30–40
custodians, aides, or night school teachers during his term on the committee; the chairman up to 200).

Although members were unpaid, they raised thousands of dollars each year through $25-a-plate “testimonial dinners” to which administrators, teachers, and businessmen seeking contracts with the system were “invited.” (“Dear Friend,” read a typical invitation, “Friends of Boston School Committeeman John J. Kerrigan are planning to honor him with a reception and cocktail party at the New England Aquarium on Thursday evening, October 19, 1972, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The purpose of this party is twofold. The first is to honor John, an outstanding dedicated public official, who is an unpaid member of the Boston School Committee. The second is to honor John on the occasion of his fourteenth Wedding Anniversary…. Enclosed for your convenience you will find both a reservation card and a postage-paid envelope: Gentlemen: please reserve _____tables at $250 each. Please reserve _____tables at $500 each.”) Failure to attend such dinners often resulted in the employee’s demotion or dismissal or the loss of a contract. The funds raised went straight into the member’s pocket for purely personal use or toward the escalating cost of incessant campaigns. For ever since Maurice Tobin had graduated from the School Committee to mayor, governor, and Secretary of Labor in Harry Truman’s Cabinet, members had seen the committee as the ideal launching pad to higher office.

But in 1961 Louise Hicks gave no sign of such aspirations. She ran as a reformer, pledged to “take politics out of the School Committee.” Indeed, the Judge’s daughter seemed then the very prototype of the “lace curtain” Irish who had long collaborated on school reform with Yankee “Goo-Goos.” She won endorsements from the Boston Teachers’ Alliance and the League for Better Schools. She appealed particularly to women with her campaign slogan: “The only mother on the ballot” (not bothering to mention that her two sons went to parochial school). But her chief political asset was her late father. From the start, she always used her full name, Louise Day Hicks. People would call her campaign headquarters to ask, “Is she really the Judge’s daughter?” The little people the Judge had helped and the big people with whom he had hobnobbed rallied round his little girl. Her campaign organization was rudimentary, built on her family. Her brother John reluctantly served as campaign manager. Her husband ran a sound truck. A neighbor, Marie Whelan, helped organize women’s groups which met in kitchens and parlors across the city. Louise called on two friends from the law school study group—Perri Reeder, who canvassed the Jewish community, and Reuben Dawkins, who worked the black neighborhoods (Louise herself met with black parents at Freedom House, the black community’s principal settlement house, and pledged her support for their objectives). Reform was in the air that fall and four new members were swept onto the five-member committee, among them Louise, who finished third in the balloting.

During her first year on the committee she was quiet and uncontroversial. At the start of her second year, in January 1963, her colleagues elected her
chairwoman and for the first five months her direction of the committee was so unimpeachable that Citizens for Boston Public Schools, the principal reform lobby, contemplated endorsing her for reelection that fall. Then, on May 22, the Citizens released a report charging that thirteen of the city’s schools were over 90 percent black; that eleven of these were at least fifty years old and the newest twenty-six years old; and that all were chronically short-changed on funding (the average cost allocated to pupils in all-white elementary schools was $350 per year, while in predominantly black schools it ranged as low as $228.98). Paul Parks, the group’s black vice-president, who had met Mrs. Hicks during her first campaign, invited her to a meeting at Freedom House that night at which he outlined the report’s finding. Afterwards, Parks drove Louise home to South Boston. In the car, she assured him that she “understood and sympathized” with the black parents’ grievances and would do what she could to alleviate them.

Three weeks later, on June 11, the NAACP went before the School Committee to call for correction of these conditions. By coincidence, they had chosen a critical moment in the national civil rights struggle. That very morning, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Governor George Wallace stood on the steps of the University of Alabama, symbolically blocking implementation of a court order for admission of two black students. But then, with 600 federal marshals and federalized National Guard units standing by to enforce the order, the Governor backed down, ending weeks of tense confrontation with the White House and Justice Department.