Common Ground (66 page)

In the library, Bob Murphy conferred with Deputy Superintendent John Kelly, District Superintendent John McGourty, and Captain MacDonald. Murphy and MacDonald wanted to call in the TPF, but, worried about community reaction, John Kelly warned that police overreaction could only make matters worse. As they debated what to do, a car pulled up out front and Pixie Palladino rushed through the front door. Informed that some officials wanted to eject the students, the School Committeewoman flew into a rage. “You can’t do that,” she shouted. “These are my kids. They’re just expressing their First Amendment rights. I don’t want anyone to touch them.”

In a system where the School Committee had the last word, Pixie had just delivered it. The students stayed where they were. Hour after hour, they camped on the stairway, running through their usual repertoire of patriotic songs and random chants of “Bushboogies, back to Africa!” and “Niggers suck!”

Lisa McGoff was aware that the black kids, locked into classrooms on the third and fourth floors, could hear the chanting, and in a way she felt sorry for them. They probably didn’t want to be in Charlestown any more than the Townies wanted them there. But the battle was bigger than all of them—it was a fight over principle, over who controlled this school. Nobody was listening to them; the judge, the Superintendent, the newspapers and TV were all taking the black kids’ side. The Townies had to do something to make people wake up, so Lisa joined in the songs and chants which echoed up the stairwell.

Shortly after noon, she noticed police taking up positions around the lobby. Suddenly, there was a cry from outside: “They’re getting away!” Lisa and a few others raced around the corner, only to see the buses filled with black kids disappearing down the hill. The boys heaved rocks after them, but Lisa turned and walked away, feeling outmaneuvered once again.

The next day, fifty white students met at the Harvard-Kent School to consider their next move. They wanted revenge, but the old tactics didn’t seem to
be working; they needed something new. Finally somebody came up with an idea: if they couldn’t block the stairway, surely they could sit in their own classrooms. If the police came, they should insist on being arrested.

As often happened, though, someone warned Bob Murphy of what they were up to. Over the weekend, the headmaster prepared carefully for the demonstration. On Monday morning, as the students arrived at school, each was handed a directive warning that “all students must attend their regularly scheduled classes or leave the building on request of the school administration.” Students who failed to comply were “subject to police action.” The warning was largely ignored. When the bell rang for the first period, most of the white students sat still, refusing to leave their homerooms. But Murphy was ready for that. Accompanied by John McGourty, Captain MacDonald, and several aides, he went from classroom to classroom, asking each student either to go to class or to leave the building.

At first the students were full of bravado, daring Murphy to bring on the police. But as the lengthy process dragged on, their resolve wore down and most of them agreed to leave the building. Only six insisted on arrest.

As one of the demonstration’s organizers, Lisa was determined to go to jail. When Murphy and his team reached her homeroom, she stared stonily ahead of her, and when the headmaster began asking questions, she answered in monosyllables.

“Is this your homeroom, Lisa?” Murphy asked.

“Yes.”

“Will you go to your first-period class?”

“No.”

“Well then, will you leave the building with one of these aides?”

“No.”

Captain MacDonald took over. “Lisa,” he said, “you are trespassing in a public school. That is a crime for which you can be arrested. Do you still refuse to leave quietly?”

“Yes.”

MacDonald nodded and left the room. Lisa’s face burned. Her hands trembled. She’d done it—she was actually going to be arrested.

But when the door opened again, it wasn’t the uniformed policemen she expected, but juvenile detective Nick Minichiello, an old family friend, who came over to her and said, “Lisa, honey, do you know what you’re doing? If you go through with this, you’re going to have a police record for the rest of your life. That’s a serious matter. Your mother will never forgive me if I let you get a record. Now come on, you’ve made your point. Let me walk you out of here.”

Nick’s familiar voice brought her back to reality. For a moment, she hesitated; she’d sworn to hold out to the end. Moreover, her own resolve had persuaded friends to join the demonstration, perhaps to get arrested too. But Nick was right: this was a futile gesture which would follow her as long as she
lived. As apprehension overcame chagrin, she allowed the detective to lead her from the school.

Outside, an icy drizzle fell over Breed’s Hill. Lisa stood in the lee of the school, brooding over the collapse of their plan. She was furious at herself for caving in, still angrier at the authorities for refusing to let them make their case. By then, more than a hundred whites were milling about in the rain, muttering with rage and frustration. When the six arrested kids were brought out to a paddy wagon, the crowd cheered lustily; and when the wagon headed downtown, the demonstrators set off after it, a bedraggled column scuffling through the muck. At the District 1 station house in Government Center, however, police wouldn’t let them assemble, citing the danger of heavy icicles falling from the Kennedy Federal Building across the street.

“Let’s go see the Mayor,” someone shouted. It was one thing they hadn’t tried, so off they marched to City Hall, where Louise Day Hicks ushered them into the City Council chamber, served them hot chocolate, and soon returned with Kevin White.

It was a heady moment for Lisa as she rose to tell the Mayor of Boston what was happening at Charlestown High. Once more she ran through the familiar litany of demands and grievances, adding several new ones for the occasion: the School Department’s “refusal to permit our peaceful demonstration this morning,” “the unjustified arrest of six students,” and “several acts of police brutality last week.” She concluded: “Mr. Mayor, your wife is from Charlestown. She knows what it’s like to be a Townie and have everything stacked against you. Ask her whether she would put up with what we’ve had to go through. Please, Mr. Mayor, help us!”

When she finished, the Mayor said, “Thank you, Miss McGoff. My wife understands—and I understand—how you feel. Believe me, I will do everything I can to help you. But you have to understand the limits of my authority. The School Department doesn’t report to me. I have no responsibility whatsoever for busing, which has been ordered, as you know, by a federal district judge. Nor do I control the police in such matters. Only school officials can call police into their buildings. Certainly I will look into your charges of police brutality. If I find the police are guilty, I can assure you they will be disciplined. But I have no way of dealing with most of your grievances.”

Rebuffed yet again, the white students had run out of options. Not until April 5 did they try again, this time with the notion of appealing to the ultimate authority—Judge W. Arthur Garrity himself.

Lisa, Kevin, and Tommy McGoff were among 120 whites who left Charlestown at nine that morning. Carrying American flags, Bicentennial banners, and anti-busing placards, they marched across the bridge to City Hall Plaza, where they joined 150 whites from South Boston High. After a brief meeting with Mrs. Hicks in the City Council chambers, they left for the Federal Courthouse, where they hoped to present their grievances to the judge.

At that moment, Ted Landsmark was hurrying across the plaza, late for a
meeting at City Hall. The route which had taken him to that place was an unlikely one for a black man reared in a Harlem tenement. Born Theodore August Burrell, the son of a New York subway conductor, he showed early academic promise and, after graduating from Stuyvesant High in 1963, applied to Yale. The college turned him down, but it was sufficiently impressed to arrange a “transitional year” at St. Paul’s, the New Hampshire prep school, where he learned to play hockey and read J. D. Salinger. Admitted to Yale in 1964—one of 16 blacks in a class of 1,090—he found the ratio unsettling and took two years off before earning his B.A., followed by a joint law and architecture degree from Yale Law School. By then, prestigious law firms throughout the country were looking for young blacks with his credentials. While at Yale, he had married the daughter of a white Massachusetts surgeon, so he accepted an offer from the distinguished Boston firm of Hill & Barlow.

But something was eating at Theodore Burrell. His adoption by the white establishment left him well connected but disinherited. Welcome in New Haven courtyards, Boston clubs, and New York boardrooms, he was no longer at home in the streets of black America. Seeking some part of his heritage with which to identify, he found it in his maternal grandfather, a West Indian Garveyite named Landsmark. As he left for Boston in 1973, he changed his name to Theodore Landsmark.

That was only the beginning of rapid disenchantment with his brave new world. A social chasm divided him from his prosperous white in-laws. His marriage ended in divorce. Hill & Barlow seemed too stiff, too white, too elitist. All this culminated in a visit to his ancestral homeland, the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, where he lunched with the black governor and met dozens of black doctors, lawyers, and bankers, plainly in control of their lives. Returning to Boston, he hailed a cab at Logan Airport. When the white driver asked where he was going, he gave an address on predominantly black Chester Square. The driver nodded, but when Landsmark turned to get his bags, the cab sped off.

In March 1974, he quit Hill & Barlow, becoming executive director of the Contractors’ Association of Boston, a black trade association which sought a greater share of construction contracts for minority builders. At 10:00 a.m. on April 5, 1976, he was scheduled to chair a community liaison meeting at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. When he couldn’t find a parking space and had to leave his car a quarter mile away, he knew he was going to be late, so he steamed along, heading for a side entrance to City Hall. Passing the New England Merchants Bank and entering the plaza, he saw a group of young whites rounding the corner of City Hall, moving toward the Federal Courthouse, brandishing banners and placards. Before he could reach the City Hall steps, someone yelled, “There’s a nigger! Get him!”

The first student hit him from the rear, knocking his glasses off. He tried to right himself, but a second blow from the front brought him to the ground. Other students moved in, kicking him in the ribs, the shoulders, the head. He
struggled to his feet, but someone grabbed him around the neck and pulled him down again. Once more he got up. Then he saw a student carrying an American flag on a long staff. Advancing across the plaza, the kid leveled the staff like a spear, as if to impale him. It struck him a glancing blow on the face.

Finally, Landsmark broke free, managing to reach the City Hall steps, where a policeman came to his aid. A moment later they were joined by Deputy Mayor Jeep Jones, who, along with Kevin White, had watched the attack from an upstairs window.

Lisa, Kevin, and Tommy McGoff had been among the stragglers rounding the corner of City Hall. Lisa had looked up in astonishment to see the black man in his three-piece suit walking toward them, and she had watched in horror as some of her Townie friends beat and kicked him. Instinctively fleeing the violence, she ran across the side plaza, hiding behind a wall which skirted the bank and adjacent travel agency. As she huddled there, face in hands, she felt like weeping—from pure shock, from fear, from dismay at the terrible thing happening in front of her. And she understood immediately that whatever was going on out there could only damage the cause she believed in.

She hoped the black man wasn’t hurt seriously, but she didn’t feel much sympathy for him; in fact, her first thought was: This has to be a trick, because no black guy in his right mind would walk smack into the middle of an anti-busing demonstration. He must have done it on purpose, bopping along like that, almost as if he were saying, Hey, come and get me, beat the shit out of me, so you’ll look like a bunch of white racist pigs. If that was his plan, she thought, they’d fallen right into it.

Charlestown took much of the blame for the attack. When the police arrested four youths, two of them proved to be Townies: a fifteen-year-old juvenile whose name has never been released and Eddie Irvin, seventeen, vice-president of Charlestown High’s junior class.

Lisa knew Eddie Irvin well. Although enrolled in the electrical course, he was active throughout the school. A funny guy who clowned around a lot, Eddie liked to boast of how tough he was, but she’d never detected a mean streak in him, never seen him commit a violent act before. That morning on City Hall Plaza he must have felt his bluff being called. Kicking a guy while he was down was no way to prove one’s manhood, Lisa conceded, but Eddie was essentially a good guy who was going to get strung up for one stupid act. Moreover, he was a Townie, a kid from her class. So Lisa attended all the court proceedings in his trial for assault, and when he was convicted—and given a one-year suspended sentence—she felt bad for him.

Ted Landsmark hadn’t anticipated what would happen to him on City Hall Plaza that morning, but once it happened, he was determined that Boston extract the full lesson. Not unwilling to become the city’s black martyr—a twentieth-century Crispus Attucks—he appeared at press conferences and interviews with broad white bandages covering his broken nose and face lacerations
(it had taken eight stitches to close his cuts). Relentlessly, he drove home his message: if a Yale-educated lawyer in a three-piece suit could be attacked on his way into City Hall, then what black was safe in Boston?

The incident’s impact was magnified by a remarkable picture taken that morning by a
Herald American
photographer. It showed the white student advancing across the plaza, the Star-Spangled Banner billowing in a breeze, the flagstaff leveled at Landsmark’s chest. The picture appeared on front pages across the country and went on to win that year’s Pulitzer Prize for news photography. In America’s Bicentennial year, its symbolism required no commentary.