Common Ground (7 page)

When Ted first ran for Jack’s old Senate seat in 1962, there were those who regarded him as grossly unqualified for the job and resented the Kennedys’ “arrogance” in forwarding his candidacy. But Alice and most other Townies had no such reservations. Indeed, so fierce was Charlestown’s loyalty to the President that it gave his brother a whopping 86.8 percent of its vote, the highest of any neighborhood in the city. Two years later—with JFK’s assassination fresh in most minds and Ted in the hospital after a near-fatal air crash—the Townies tendered him an incredible 94.8 percent.

But Alice’s enthusiasm waned as Ted took up the cudgels for minority rights. In June 1965—just months after the Selma march and Martin Luther King’s address on the Boston Common—Ted put himself squarely behind efforts in the Massachusetts legislature to withhold state funds from cities and towns with racially segregated schools. Receiving an honorary degree from Northeastern University, he told a throng at Boston Garden, “We in the Northeast say we have given opportunity to each wave of immigrants that has come to our shores, but if this is our tradition, why have we failed so far to offer similar opportunity to Negro citizens who have come from other states? It should be clear that a Negro child in Massachusetts has as much of a right to an integrated education as a Negro child in Mississippi or Alabama.”

Jerry Doherty, a Townie ally of Ted’s, warned that such positions would cost him heavily in Charlestown. And indeed they did, for Teddy had never been so much an object of Charlestown’s affections as the beneficiary of its special relationship with Jack. And if Jack’s advance to the White House had released the Boston Irish from their anxiety about being only half American, so it had made them secure enough to reject an Irishman as well. Ultimately, many blue-collar Irish unloaded on Ted the pent-up envy and resentment they’d never dared to direct at Jack.

By the spring of 1968, at age thirty-one, Alice McGoff was beginning to feel some of her father’s sense of grievance at the Kennedy clan. She was still a committed Democrat; she couldn’t imagine herself voting for a Republican. But she found herself wondering whether the Kennedys were genuine Democrats any longer, whether they really had the interests of the white working class at heart.

Hours after Martin Luther King’s death, Ted Kennedy delivered an impassioned eulogy to the fallen prophet. “He was a noble man, eloquent, patient, and brave,” the Senator told reporters. “He loved his fellow man, white and black. He died because he was willing to go throughout this country, as a leader and a symbol, in an effort to bring them together.”

Watching the Senator on television, Alice felt a rush of anger at his smug, preachy tone. As usual, Ted seemed to care more about blacks than he did about his own people. The Kennedys had never had it tough in their lives—who were they to sit down there at Hyannis Port and tell her what to do for the minorities? As fires stained the night sky over Roxbury, Alice turned off the set and went to bed.

A
stab of yellow light in the aisle, then a hand lightly jogging his elbow brought the Mayor of Boston back from the fields of Tara. “Mr. Mayor, there’s a message for you,” said the usher, thrusting a slip of paper into his hand. In the flashlight’s beam, Kevin White read: “Martin Luther King has been assassinated in Memphis.”

For a moment, he sat there wondering what he should do. Then he thought: There’s nothing I
can
do. The man is dead. So he slipped the note into his pocket and went back to
Gone With the Wind
.

A few moments later another figure loomed in the aisle beside him, the Gary Theater’s manager whispering, “Mr. Mayor, I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but the Police Commissioner is on the phone. He says he needs to speak with you.” The Mayor told his secretary, Mary McCarthy, he’d be right back, but when he picked up the phone in the manager’s office, Commissioner Edmund L. McNamara said, “Mayor, we got trouble,” and went on to explain that gangs of black youths were out in Roxbury smashing store windows and overturning automobiles. With that, Kevin White abandoned Scarlett, Rhett, and Mammy in mid-saga and briskly walked the four blocks to police headquarters, where he stayed for several hours, helping coordinate efforts to control the violence, before joining his staff at City Hall.

In a corner of the Mayor’s cavernous office, his chief aide, Barney Frank,
was scribbling a statement: “The assassination of Martin Luther King is a tragedy which diminishes us all. This brutal and senseless act has deprived America of one of our foremost leaders at a critical time. I hope the people will recognize anew the necessity of working together for the principle for which Dr. King lived and died: the equality of all men.”

From his outer office, the Mayor and Frank could hear the staccato bursts of a police radio tracking splatters of violence across Roxbury and the South End. Every few seconds a phone rang in the mayoral suite, bringing fresh alarms and cautions.

Just after 9:00 p.m., Police Superintendent Bill Bradley called to say that a bus carrying a dozen whites was trapped by blacks on Blue Hill Avenue. The crowd had done nothing violent yet. They were standing back, chanting and jeering at the terrified faces behind the glass, but at any moment they might rush the vehicle. “What should we do?” Bradley wanted to know. “Should we send our men in?”

The Mayor’s first instinct was to summon the police. But Barney, mindful of similar incidents during a riot the year before, warned that an armed response might only set off worse violence. At his urging, the Mayor agreed to let black ministers and community workers try persuasion first. Within an hour, Dan Richardson, Chuck Turner, and the Reverend Virgil Wood had quieted the crowd and rescued the white passengers.

That set the pattern for the rest of the night. Wherever possible, the Mayor held the police back, letting black leaders calm their own people. Meanwhile, two black plainclothesmen cruised the community in an unmarked car, relaying intelligence to police headquarters. When they reported that the worst incidents were caused by white curiosity seekers blundering into black crowds, the police sealed off Roxbury and the South End, diverting white pedestrians and motorists. By 2:00 a.m., the racket from the police radio began to ebb. The Mayor and Barney slumped on the office couch, trying to make sense of what was happening out there.

Kevin White had been Mayor of Boston for barely ninety-five days. With scarcely time to fill out his cabinet and learn his secretaries’ first names, he didn’t know whether his untried machinery could handle a crisis of this dimension. The only previous test had been an arctic cold snap in mid-January when below-zero temperatures burst water pipes, ruptured gas mains, and left hundreds of families throughout the city shivering and hungry. White had stayed in his office all one night, and for the next ninety hours city officials manned a round-the-clock operation at City Hall, which took 1,500 emergency calls and found temporary housing for seventy-four families. Partly as a result of that crisis, the Mayor decreed that City Hall would henceforth remain open twenty-four hours a day, with two staffers on duty at all times to handle emergencies—reflecting the Mayor’s broader effort to open up “new lines of communication” with an electorate widely believed to be alienated from government.

White’s creative response to the winter crisis had piqued Colin Diver’s interest in him. Here was an energetic young mayor who was eager to confront challenges, not run away from them. White seemed to be cut in the John Lindsay mold: bold, imaginative, innovative, and decisive, he talked about refocusing national attention on the cities, bringing new resources to bear on pressing human needs. He had good ideas and the ability to attract first-rate people. After the cold snap, Colin watched the Mayor with new curiosity, eager to see what he would do next.

In fact, nothing in Kevin White’s experience had remotely prepared him for the racial explosion he faced in April. True, he had won election the previous November over Louise Day Hicks in a contest heavily shadowed by racial confrontation. A member of Boston’s School Committee, Mrs. Hicks was regarded as the leading spokesperson for the “white backlash” then believed to be sweeping Boston and other Northern cities. Her bland refrain, “You know where I stand,” was generally interpreted—in light of her fierce opposition to school desegregation—as a not so veiled declaration of bigotry. National commentators and news magazines had quickly identified the Hicks-White race as a critical test of the racial climate in America’s cities, and Kevin White’s victory, though narrow, was seen as a triumph for racial enlightenment.

Since then, the Mayor had done his best to live up to that image, naming several blacks to important posts, pledging more low-income housing for the heavily black South End, announcing plans to hire twenty-five black police cadets. When the Kerner Report was issued on March 1, White promptly declared war on white racism, calling for a “profound and massive change” in public attitudes.

But during his first three months in office the Mayor had been preoccupied less with black alienation than with white disaffection. For Kevin White was even then pointing toward the 1970 governor’s race, and he remembered the 1966 race, in which the Mayor of Boston, John Collins, bidding for the U.S. Senate, lost twenty-one of the twenty-two wards in his own city. With that statistic in mind, White had drawn quite a different conclusion than most people from his victory over Mrs. Hicks the previous November. To him, the margin of only 12,429 out of 192,673 votes seemed less a triumph for racial enlightenment than an ominous sign of continued estrangement in the city’s white working-class neighborhoods, where Collins had been most soundly rejected and from which Mrs. Hicks drew her greatest support. It was those white neighborhoods which held the key to his political future and it was in them that his greatest energies had been expended. So—despite his bold pronouncements—White had given little thought to the plight of Boston’s blacks, had spent little time in the black community, and knew few blacks well. He was ill prepared to deal with a major racial confrontation—which, at 3:00 a.m. on April 5, is what Boston appeared to be facing.

The Mayor felt utterly powerless, but he didn’t think he should leave the
office. At 6:00 a.m. he stumbled to the same couch on which he had spent the subzero night of January 11, pulled a blanket over his head, and, to the wail of police sirens, fell into a troubled sleep.

He woke at nine to eerie silence. The sirens which had sounded in the night were stilled; someone had shut off the police radio; the phones had stopped ringing. Where the hell was everybody?

Then, shortly after nine, the first call of the morning came—from the black Councilman, Tom Atkins. “Kevin,” said an agitated Atkins, who had been up most of the night patrolling Roxbury’s streets, “something terrible is about to happen.”

Atkins had just received a call from a black disk jockey named James Byrd, known to his fans as “The Early Byrd.” In addition to his duties on WILD, Boston’s soul-music station, Byrd was the New England representative for rhythm-and-blues star James Brown, who was scheduled to hold a concert that very night at the Boston Garden. But Byrd told Atkins that the Garden, concerned about more violence, was canceling the concert. It didn’t take long for Atkins to realize what would happen, and now he sketched it in graphic terms for the Mayor.

“It’s too late to cancel it; the word won’t get around in time. There’ll be thousands of black teenagers down at the Garden this evening, and when they find those gates are locked they’re going to be pretty pissed off. King’s death and Brown’s cop-out will get all mixed up together and we’ll have an even bigger riot than last night’s—only this time it’ll be in the heart of downtown.” They should not only reinstate the concert, Atkins said, they should get a television station to carry it live, then appeal for kids to stay home and watch it on TV.

Neither the Mayor nor Barney Frank had ever heard of James Brown—Barney thought he was a football player, the Mayor kept referring to him as “James Washington”—but they immediately agreed that Boston needed him that night. So began a frantic seven hours of negotiation.

The urbane David Ives, president of WGBH, Boston’s public television station, agreed to televise the concert, but when Atkins called Byrd to tell him, the disk jockey exploded. “You can’t do that,” he said. “James is in New York to tape a show. They’re giving him a pile of money, but on the condition he doesn’t do any other television on the East Coast until after it airs. You put this thing on TV here and you’ll violate James’s contract. He isn’t going to like that.”

When Atkins persisted, Byrd suggested he call Greg Moses, Brown’s manager. Moses was dubious: “Look, even if we can work out the contract thing, we got another problem. It’s going to kill our gate. We’re going to take a bath on this thing. Who’s going to take care of James?”

Atkins called White and said, “We gotta tell these people we’ll guarantee the gate.” At first, the Mayor flatly refused; ultimately, under Atkins’ pleading, he agreed. “But for Christ’s sake,” he said, “don’t tell anybody. If word ever
gets out we underwrote a goddamn rock star with city money, we’ll both be dead politically.”

Atkins called Moses back and assured him the city would guarantee the difference between what Brown would have made from a full house and what he actually took in that night. Moses gave a tentative, very uneasy assent, for he had been unable to clear it with Brown, already on his way to Boston in his private Lear jet. Atkins promised to meet the singer at the airport and explain the whole thing.

In the Mayor’s limousine, led by a wedge of police motorcycles, Atkins rushed to the airport, picked up Brown, then sped back through the Callahan Tunnel while hurriedly outlining the situation to the outraged star.