The neighborhood in which the Divers lived throughout Colin’s youth was still largely rural, and Ben Diver put in countless hours creating an English country garden in their backyard. And in the basement, where their neighbors installed pine-paneled recreation rooms, Ben built an odd medieval chamber, adorned with gargoyles and murals of feudal knights in armor.
For many who lived in them, suburbs like Lexington were refuges from urban calamity, havens from the dirt, noise, crime, and disorder which seemed to lurk around every city corner. They were sanctuaries as well from the dark-skinned races, those unsettling newcomers who had begun to take over the rotting cores of American metropolises. The young veterans of Anzio and Guadalcanal, fleeing to the countryside, were exchanging the ethnic hodgepodge of their parents’ world for a more homogeneous environment in which the white middle class could taste the pleasures hitherto reserved for the Yankee elite.
Lexington had long been overwhelmingly white. Civil rights activists liked to recall that one of John Parker’s ragged band of minutemen on that fateful day in 1775 was Prince Estabrook, a slave belonging to Benjamin Estabrook. After the Revolution, Prince was rewarded with his freedom, becoming a progenitor of the town’s small free black community, which persisted well into the twentieth century. Yet by 1960, there were only thirteen black families among Lexington’s 32,000 inhabitants.
That very year—to help send Joan through college—Anne Makechnie joined a real estate firm in adjacent Bedford. Before long she discovered why blacks found it nearly impossible to rent or buy a house in most of Boston’s suburbs. Real estate agents feared a community boycott if they dared show a house to a black family. The agents were particularly concerned about the tests being conducted by “fair housing” groups. First, a black would try to buy a suburban house. When he was rejected, a white would immediately seek to buy the same house. If the white succeeded, that was prima facie evidence of discrimination, and the agent might lose his license. Anne’s employer gave her strict instructions that if she saw a black enter the office she should make a dash for the back door. “If they can’t find you,” he said, “they can’t test you.”
She never had to make that dash because no blacks showed up in Bedford, but the firm’s policy made her uncomfortable and she was receptive when Leonard Colwell, a Lexington real estate man, asked her to join his new agency. Colwell agreed with Anne that they should sell or rent to anyone who had the money. A year later, Colwell was the only one of Lexington’s twenty-five real estate agents to sign a “good neighbor pledge,” sponsored by a newly formed Lexington Fair Housing Committee (“I will accept families and individuals into my neighborhood without discrimination because of religion, color, or national origin”). Colwell signed the pledge with some trepidation; his livelihood depended on listings and he feared retaliation.
But the reprisals never developed. The Colwell agency sold or rented a couple of houses every year to blacks, often referred by the Fair Housing Committee. One of the sales, negotiated by Anne Makechnie herself, was to Howard Thurman’s daughter and her white husband. By 1963, there were thirty-six black families in Lexington.
Late that summer, another black family came to town looking for a house. James Parker, a forty-one-year-old foreign service officer, had served in Liberia, Nigeria, and Spain before taking a year’s leave for work at Boston University’s African Studies Program. Now he and his wife, Odessa, were focusing their housing search on the western suburbs so that their three children could attend one of the area’s outstanding schools. But the hunt wasn’t going well. They would follow up ads only to be told that a property was already rented or that the landlord didn’t take children.
When they answered an ad for a cottage at 11 Saddle Club Road, the owner, Mark Moore, Jr., agreed to show it to them on the evening of August 27, but Moore was clearly taken aback when he saw them. He was so unenthusiastic that Parker finally asked, “Do you have any objection to renting your house to Negroes?”
“Oh, no, no,” Moore said.
“Well, we’d be interested.”
“I should tell you, there are some people from MIT who have first refusal.”
“Okay, but if they don’t take it, we’d like it.”
Moore said he’d let them know. But the Parkers had gone through all this before. Disheartened, they boarded a plane for Washington.
That night, a friend reported the incident to Barbara Petschek of the Fair Housing Committee, now a subcommittee of the Lexington Civil Rights Committee. Barbara and her husband had been active in the fair housing movement, and the Moore situation struck them as a perfect test case. Barbara began calling other subcommittee members, but none of them was home. Only then did they remember what was happening that evening. Thousands of civil rights activists were descending on the nation’s capital for the next day’s March on Washington, scheduled to culminate with a mammoth civil rights rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Just as Barbara Petschek began her calls, the Lexington contingent was assembling at St. Brigid’s Church, so her husband sped to the church, where he found dozens of committee members milling around the parking lot. Explaining the Moore case, he asked permission to launch a test immediately, but with their minds already focused on the next day’s events, the travelers could work up little enthusiasm for Harry’s plan. “Don’t do anything yet,” said Charles Weiser, one of the committee’s leaders. “Wait until I get back.”
But the Petscheks were impatient. Scanning a list of committee members for a lawyer, Barbara found the name of Julian Soshnick, an assistant state attorney general. When she called him, Soshnick not only agreed that a test should take place immediately, he insisted that he be part of it. At 4:45 p.m. the next day—as the vast throng at the Lincoln Memorial was listening to Mahalia Jackson sing “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned”—a vice-president of Boston University called Mark Moore on Parker’s behalf and was told the house had been rented to the people from MIT. Fifteen minutes later, Barbara Petschek called Moore, identifying herself as a Mrs. Julian Gardner, and asked if the house was still available. Moore said it was and agreed to show it to her at 7:30.
At the appointed hour, “Mrs. Gardner” and her husband—Julian Soshnick—arrived at 11 Saddle Club Road. After viewing the cottage, they asked when they could move in. “September 1,” Moore said. Whipping out his credentials, Soshnick questioned Moore about his refusal to rent to the Parkers. Moore said he had “nothing against them,” but he had $400,000 invested in a prospective subdivision on the property and if he rented to a Negro he might lose it.
The next day, Soshnick filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, a state body empowered to resolve the situation through conciliation or to bring suit in court. Meanwhile, the Boston Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) announced that it would stage a demonstration Saturday on the Battle Green to protest housing discrimination in Lexington.
When Lexington’s delegation to the March on Washington returned late Thursday, still talking of Martin Lurther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, they were astonished to discover what had happened in their absence. On Friday, the executive committee of the Lexington Civil Rights Committee angrily confronted the Petscheks and Soshnick, accusing them of “rabble-rousing.” Mark Moore, they said, was one of the town’s most prominent citizens, a pillar of the Baptist Church; this wasn’t the way to deal with a man like that. Moreover, Saturday was the start of the Labor Day weekend, the town would be filled with tourists come to view the historic sites, and the demonstration could only damage the town’s reputation. The committee urged CORE to cancel the demonstration.
CORE refused. At 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, some thirty demonstrators—most of them from Boston CORE and the NAACP, but a few, like the Petscheks, from the Lexington Civil Rights Committee—set up a picket line on the Battle Green. For two hours they paraded around the green carrying signs that read: “Birthplace of American Liberty???” and “Freedom: Let It Begin Here.” The d
emonstrators didn’t fail to note that Jim Parker bore the most renowned name in Lexington history. As they passed the statue of Captain John Parker, one protester brandished a sign which read, “If John Parker could live here, why can’t Jim Parker?”
On the sidewalk across the street, townspeople gaped in astonishment at the first political demonstration they had ever witnessed on that hallowed ground. Among the onlookers was Colin Diver, then about to enter his junior year at Amherst. He found the demonstration strange. He had followed the high drama unfolding in the South, where civil rights activists were confronting local authorities armed with whips, cattle prods, and fire hoses. Now here in his own New England village, on the gentle green where he had played as a boy, these demonstrators were suggesting that Massachusetts wasn’t so different from Georgia or Alabama. Somehow the march seemed out of place. A demonstrator handed Colin a leaflet headlined: “There is discrimination in the North! It exists in Lexington too!” He stuffed it in his pocket and went downtown.
Among leaders of Lexington’s Civil Rights Committee, the reaction was more intense. In statements to the press, they angrily denounced CORE for exploiting their historic battlefield to score cheap points. Dr. Warren Guild, the committee chairman, said that his group had placed eighteen Negro families in Lexington. “Our work has been quiet, dignified, unsensational, and, most important, effective. I sincerely hope our future usefulness in combating discrimination will not be impaired by unfavorable public reaction to today’s picketing.” Father Thomas E. MacLeod, Jr.—who seven months later was to be arrested during a sit-in at a North Carolina restaurant—said, “I am in complete sympathy with sit-ins in the South where they demonstrate against the laws which are both immoral and unconstitutional, but I deplore the action of CORE in this instance.”
CORE was undeterred. “We go wherever there is discrimination,” a spokesman said. The following Wednesday, they were back on the green for two more hours of picketing.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Jim Parker was equally adamant. He told the State Department that he would abandon his year in Boston unless the government found him appropriate housing. He flatly refused to live in Roxbury, where, he said, the schools were segregated and second-class. The Department was sympathetic. It was preparing a stiff letter of protest from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to Massachusetts’ governor, Endicott Peabody, when word came that Mark Moore had capitulated. On September 7, just in time for the start of school, the Parkers moved into their pine-shaded cottage.
To Joan Makechnie and Colin Diver, now back at college, the bitter squabble in their hometown was only a passing distraction. The great national struggle over racial segregation was centered in places like Selma and Little Rock. Even the first murmurings of discontent in Boston’s black community didn’t convince Colin and Joan that the race issue had much relevance in their own backyard.
8
Twymon
In my school, I see dirty boards and I see papers on the floor,” wrote a fourth-grader at the Christopher Gibson School in the spring of 1965. “I see an old broken window with a sign on it saying, Do not unlock this window are browken. And I see cracks in the walls and I see old books with ink poured all over them and I see old painting hanging on the walls. I see old alfurbet letter hanging on one nail on the wall. I see a dirty fire exit I see a old closet with supplys for the class. I see pigons flying all over the school. I see old freght trains throgh the fence of the school yard. I see pictures of contryies hanging on the wall and I see desks with wrighting all over the top of the desks and insited of the desk.”
The Gibson was a crumbling, seventy-two-year-old brick schoolhouse on Ronald Street in the North Dorchester section of Boston. It was only three blocks from Fenelon Street, where the Twymons lived, so five of Mrs. Twymon’s six children went to the Gibson that year: Richard and George in the fifth grade, Frederick in the first grade, Wayne and Cassandra in kindergarten.
They brought home stories which alarmed Rachel Twymon: tales of children being beaten with the “rattan,” a thin bamboo whip still used then in the Boston schools to discipline recalcitrant children; of overcrowding so severe that classes met in the damp basement, which stank of urine and coal dust, or in corners of the auditorium, where glee club rehearsals drowned out most of what their teachers were saying; of shattered windows, broken desks, three-legged chairs; of chronic shortages of pencils, chalk, and erasers; of outdated textbooks, often with covers ripped off, pages missing or obliterated by ink stains; of racial slurs directed by indifferent white teachers at the black pupils who made up 60 percent of the school; and even reports of one teacher whose classroom was segregated, whites seated in front and blacks in the rear.
But when twenty black parents and a few concerned teachers called a meeting at St. Mark’s Church that April to discuss conditions at the Gibson, Rachel Twymon wasn’t sure she would go. It had been barely a year since she and Magnolia Williams had heatedly debated racial discrimination in Boston, and Rachel was still loath to admit that “Southern” practices and attitudes had invaded her city. She did not see life in racial terms; temperamentally, she wasn’t much of a protester; and the growing activity by the Boston branch of the NAACP made her nervous. Yet the tales her children brought home from school profoundly disturbed her. So she went along to St. Mark’s that night, and gradually, almost against her will, Rachel was drawn into the mounting protest. In May, she joined a small delegation which called on Dorothea Callahan, the Gibson’s principal. Miss Callahan smiled a great deal and shook hands with each of them. She conceded that the school was in disrepair and said she was trying to get funds from the school department for some badly needed improvements. But when the delegation mentioned the racial slurs, Miss Callahan grew aloof, saying that she didn’t believe “any of that.” Rachel left the school that afternoon feeling that changes would be slow in coming.
Then, on June 10, she learned that one of the white teachers who had been present at St. Mark’s—indeed, the teacher most sympathetic with the parents’ concerns—had been abruptly fired by Miss Callahan. His name was Jonathan Kozol, and he stood out among the other teachers at the Gibson, most of them middle-aged Irish women, veterans of some years in the system, strict disciplinarians who seemed resentful at spending their days teaching ill-prepared black children. Kozol was different. Only twenty-eight, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, a Rhodes Scholar and published novelist, he was in his first year of teaching, brimming with enthusiasm for the job and concern for his students. At St. Mark’s, he had spoken passionately about how black children were being “short-changed” by the Boston school system, and Rachel Twymon had liked him immediately.
Kozol had taught a fourth-grade class just down the hallway from Richard and George’s fifth-grade classroom. Indeed, they still remember the commotion that afternoon when the school learned what had happened. The popular young teacher, they were told, had been fired for reading to his class a poem not included in the official “course of study.” The poem was unlike most of the reading assigned at the Gibson—stories about characters like Miss Molly, Fluffy Tail, and Miss Valentine of Maple Grove School. It was a poem about the lives of black people in a big city like Boston and some of the black children in Kozol’s class liked it so much they took it home and memorized it. Once Kozol’s firing became known, mimeographed copies of the poem became prized items at the school, and even Richard and George could recite portions of Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of the Landlord.”
Landlord, landlord
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don’t you ’member I told you about it
Way last week?
Landlord, landlord
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It’s a wonder you don’t fall down.
Ten bucks you say I owe you?
Ten bucks you say is due?
Well, that’s ten bucks more’n I’ll pay you
Till you fix this house up n
ew.
What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty
Talk on—til you get through.
You ain’t gonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.
Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He’s trying to ruin the government
and overturn the land!
Copper’s whistle
Patrol bell!
Arrest
Precinct station
Iron cell
Headlines in press:
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD NO BAIL
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.
Later, a school official told Kozol that Negro poetry was unsuitable for schoolchildren if it described suffering; the only poems acceptable for classroom use were those which “accentuate the positive,” “describe nature,” or “tell of something hopeful.”
The Gibson parents had run out of hope—and patience. After workers from the Congress of Racial Equality knocked on doors in the neighborhood, telling parents what had happened, two hundred of them, including Rachel Twymon, showed up for an angry rally at St. Mark’s. The next Monday, a dozen parents staged a three-hour sit-in at the school to protest Kozol’s firing and conditions in the building. Their children all stayed home that day while the parents took their places at the battered wooden desks in Kozol’s classroom. Police officers warned that they were violating the law, but the mothers and fathers stolidly refused to budge.
Common Ground Page 16
