Common Ground (71 page)

On December 18, 1969, the United Fund held its annual Awards Luncheon at the Statler-Hilton Hotel. Nearly seven hundred guests were just finishing their coconut custard pie and coffee, and Charles Francis Adams, a lineal descendant of the Adams Presidents, board chairman of Raytheon, and leader of that year’s campaign, was preparing to make the awards, when thirty black members of the New Urban League filed into the vast ballroom. Taking up positions around the walls, they stood with arms folded, staring coldly at the diners. James Bishop, the League’s president, strode to the platform, where, flanked by two aides in black leather jackets, he denounced the United Fund as a “racist organization that collects funds from black people and friends of black people, but can’t allocate them in a way that will help black people.” As he spoke, his colleagues moved through the stunned audience gathering half-eaten French rolls and pieces of coconut pie, which they tossed into a large laundry bag marked “Our Unfair Share—Black Crumbs.” Then Mel King—his shaved head glistening in the ballroom spotlights—held the bag high over his head and dumped the leftovers in front of an astonished Charles Francis Adams. “We’ve been getting crumbs,” King said. “We’re no longer going to accept crumbs.”

When Adams had brushed the pie off his lap, he rose to say, “There’s a great deal of truth in what our black friends say. But it’s not as simple as that. Our friends tend to oversimplify. I hope negotiations with the Urban League will continue, but the real solution is to increase the total we raise, rather than taking from one deserving group to give to another.”

But that was precisely what the New Urban League was demanding: a shift of money from whites who needed it to blacks who needed it even more. Over the next several years, contributions to the “inner city”—a euphemism for the black community—did rise to $2.1 million, and the Fund did establish a Committee on the Inner City to consider ways of giving blacks a greater voice in their own allocations. But when negotiations reached an impasse, the Black United Front established its own United Black Appeal, seeking an annual $4 million for black institutions and agencies. The drive was launched in the middle of the United Fund’s fall campaign, a point which chairman Ben Scott emphasized when he said, “We have a message to the black and the white individual who cares about urban problems and the emergency needs of the
black community: Give to the Black Appeal, because the United Fund is inadequate to the growing needs of our community.”

This bold attempt by Boston blacks to augment—and control—the flow of private money into their own community was the talk of Boston’s philanthropic world when Joan Diver arrived at the Hyams Trust, and she felt a certain sympathy with the challenge; surely, if one considered the pressing needs of Boston’s black community, it had been short-changed over the years by the major Boston philanthropies, the United Fund in particular. Joan hoped that Hyams and other private foundations could fill that gap, but as she came to know the foundation world better, she recognized that Hyams couldn’t simply hand money over to the black community. The sad saga of FUND had demonstrated the dangers inherent in doing that. In the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, FUND’s white liberals had set out to raise $100 million and give it, no strings attached, to the Black United Front; in fact, it had raised barely $1 million, most of which was quickly dissipated in bad loans to small black businesses. And, within weeks of its inauguration, the United Black Appeal indicated its own unreliability when it took a $20,000 grant from Polaroid, intended for Boston’s blacks, and presented it to the civil rights activists in Cairo, Illinois, and South African “freedom fighters.” No, if Hyams wanted to step up its assistance to the city’s black community—as Joan surely did—it would have to identify specific black agencies doing valuable work there and then fund them.

But that wouldn’t be easy, Joan realized; excepting East Boston, where much of its early work had been concentrated, Hyams had little personal contact with any Boston neighborhood, much less the black community. For decades, it had remained aloof from the city it was pledged to assist. Reflecting Godfrey Hyams’ own reclusiveness, the foundation published no annual reports, prohibited newspaper publicity for its grants, and discouraged visits to its offices. Many potential applicants were utterly unaware of Hyams’ existence, and those who did apply had little contact with the trust. Their proposals were turned over to John Moore, whose recommendations to the board were based largely on his own experience at the United Fund. Most board members had little independent knowledge either of the communities they assisted or the agencies they funded. And there was little follow-up to determine how well the money had been used.

This time-honored procedure had worked reasonably well so long as the city’s social agencies remained limited in number and applicants to the trust were old friends. But, energized by the War on Poverty and the movement for community control, new agencies were popping up every month. Determined to make the foundation more responsive and accessible, Joan published an elaborate annual report, opened channels to the press, and began meeting regularly with agency representatives, seeking more information about their operations than could be gained from written proposals. These conferences frequently took place in the foundation boardroom beneath the House of Lords panels, and one afternoon during a meeting with two young black men she
noticed that they couldn’t stop staring at the panels, which clearly disconcerted them. After checking with Bill Swift, she replaced the panels with stark black-and-white photographs of communities the trust was assisting: two black kids in the South End, a construction worker with a cold cigar in his mouth, an Italian woman in a North End market, black teenagers buying rhythm-and-blues records, an Irishman with a beer belly fishing in the harbor.

Gradually the new decor was matched by a shift in the trust’s priorities. It has always devoted the bulk of its assistance to the city’s poor and disadvantaged. Now, without abandoning the white ethnic neighborhoods, it allocated more of its resources to blacks and minorities. Meanwhile, it slowly phased out its support for some of the most conventional institutions whose needs were being amply met by other Boston philanthropies. In 1971, for example, the board had voted a $10,000 grant to the 90th Anniversary Fund of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—perhaps the most popular of all Boston charities. Two years later, instead of supporting the adult orchestra, it gave $2,000 to the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra “to support inner-city youth participation,” as well as $10,000 to the Museum of Afro-American History for restoration of the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, and $2,500 to Radcliffe College to help publish the proceedings of a conference on “The Black Woman: Myth and Realities.” By the mid-seventies, about a quarter of Hyams’ grants were going to agencies serving black or minority populations, while another quarter served mixed populations.

Hyams’ greatest expenditure had always gone to settlement houses and other neighborhood centers—a direct legacy of Robert Woods’s pioneering work at South End House. Like Jane Addams in Chicago, Woods believed that the urban poor could best be helped by strengthening their neighborhood institutions, “securing the local identity and local loyalty out of which the feeling of social responsibility springs.” Appropriately enough for a philanthropy so influenced by Woods’s thinking, Hyams had long supported the United South End Settlements, a social agency which had grown out of South End House. It had also helped to fund settlements in East Boston, Dorchester, South Boston, and Roxbury, and in 1971, shortly after Joan went to work, it made a major new commitment—to the Lena Park Multi-Service Center, which served the burgeoning black populations of Dorchester and Mattapan. By the mid-seventies, it was giving Lena Park $45,000 a year.

Unlike the Permanent Charity Fund, Hyams had decided to continue its annual operating grants, which were the lifeblood of places like Lena Park and United South End Settlements. Joan and Hyams’ trustees debated long and hard on this issue. They could see powerful arguments for abandoning these grants to concentrate on more innovative projects, but Joan felt—and the board ultimately agreed—that because so few other foundations provided unrestricted funds, Hyams had an obligation to go on doing so. Moreover, she reasoned, such grants might in themselves become a spur to innovation. Many of the settlement houses, now called multi-service centers, were trying to develop new techniques to meet the pressing social problems of their communities,
but how could they experiment with new programs unless they knew where their annual operating expenses were coming from?

After John Moore died in 1972, the trustees promoted Joan to executive director and authorized her to hire an assistant director. This allowed her to concentrate still more of her time on evaluating applicants and assessing how Hyams’ money was spent. By then, she had become the linchpin of Hyams’ operations.

As she made a name for herself in Boston philanthropy, she was invited to join other undertakings. Responding to mounting criticism, the Massachusetts Bay United Fund had at last gone through a major overhaul, designed, in part, to make it more responsive to “inner-city needs.” In early 1973, the United Fund and United Community Services were merged into a single organization—the United Way of Massachusetts—which assembled a new set of review committees. Joan was named to the Committee on Social Services for Families, Individuals, and Children, which evaluated all applicants and recommended allocations in that area. It was a field in which she had considerable experience and quickly she became one of the committee’s most influential members. She played a major role, too, in the Associated Foundation of Greater Boston, the league of philanthropies which she had first approached for a job in 1969. Founded by Bill Bender to enhance the effectiveness—and social activism—of Boston’s foundations, Associated examined the city’s problems and tried to nudge its thirty-two members into a coordinated approach to a solution. As the league’s largest members, the Permanent Charity Fund and Hyams often set the pace, and Joan eventually was named a vice-president.

The early seventies were heady days for the Divers. Colin was rising within the Mayor’s office, assuming new responsibilities, rapidly becoming one of Kevin White’s principal aides. Joan was moving just as quickly at Hyams, advancing from secretary to executive director in barely three years, becoming a leading figure in Boston philanthropy. For a time they both found their work enormously rewarding, precisely the kind of service they had hoped to perform for their community. And somehow the fact that they were grappling with the same issues made it even more satisfying. At times they joked with each other about their overlapping responsibilities for the city’s condition: with Colin handling the public sector, and Joan the private, how could Boston go wrong?

But they had frustrations in common too: the sheer intractability of the problems they confronted, the relative paucity of their resources, certain unintended consequences of their actions, the difficulty they faced in assisting one group without seeming to injure another.

By 1974 the three Hyams trusts made grants totaling $1,917,530—a lot of money by most people’s standards, but very little indeed if one was trying to help stem the torrent of urban ills which cascaded across Joan’s desk every week: alcoholism, drug abuse, mental retardation, crippling diseases, congenital
handicaps, truancy, vandalism, juvenile delinquency, gang warfare, rape, overcrowded prisons, overburdened courts, deteriorated housing, ill-managed projects, broken families, wife beating, child abuse, unemployment, untrained workers, discrimination, and racial violence. Everybody had a program designed to meet one of these problems, but there simply wasn’t enough money to go around.

Once Joan had hoped that Hyams could meet the needs of disadvantaged homes and deteriorating neighborhoods across the city. But gradually she had scaled down those expectations. Philanthropy was not generally effective in two areas critical to a just society—public schools and jobs. In other fields, only the federal government had the requisite resources. At best, foundations like Hyams could supplement federal spending, fill in some of the gaps, point the way toward projects which deserved government funding, and take calculated risks on a few ideas which might bear fruit.

Joan was disheartened when some of the programs for which she had the highest hopes ultimately proved unworkable. And to her chagrin, more often than not, it was the black agencies and institutions which were unable to make a go of it—not because they were black, but because the individuals involved had little experience in running such programs. Among the casualties were the Roxbury Federation of Neighborhood Centers; the Ecumenical Center in Roxbury; Open Ear Associates, a program for black alcoholics; and the Black Heritage Camp. She learned to resist the emotional tug of such programs, to look coolly at their prospects for survival. It was all very well to help a worthy black effort get off the ground, but if it didn’t last out the year, the money could probably have been used more productively elsewhere.

Joan was particularly eager to find some effective instrument for easing the racial tensions which stemmed from Arthur Garrity’s desegregation order. Boston’s philanthropists—although generally sympathetic to the judge’s stand—had remained aloof from the problem. As the Associated Foundation described its members’ original position in an internal memo late in 1974: “Desegregation was perceived as a responsibility of the school system, the police, and City Hall. Because it was regarded as a racial problem, it was viewed as a problem between the Irish and black residents of Boston and one that the commuting white suburban population could not affect. For these reasons, the philanthropic community felt it could not play a significant role …”

Eventually Associated itself helped break the logjam. In a memorandum to the league’s members, Executive Director Janet Taylor warned: “The problem is not simply the responsibility of the public sector … It requires a re-direction of many of the services already funded by Associated’s members to focus on the school setting. A concerted effort, of which our members are a part, can have a real impact.”