by Diane Brady
Copyright © 2012 by Diane Brady
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Photograph on this page courtesy of Arthur Martin; photographs this page, this page, and this page courtesy of Theodore V. Wells. All other photographs in this book are courtesy of the College of the Holy Cross Archives.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brady, Diane.
Fraternity / Diane Brady.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-52962-4
1. Brooks, John E. 2. Educators—United States. 3. College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, Mass.)—Alumni and alumnae. 4. African American men—Education (Higher) 5. African American male college students. 6. College integration—United States. 7. Successful people—United States. I. Title.
LA2317.B578A3 2012
378’.07209251—dc23 2011023764
www.spiegelandgrau.com
Jacket design: Kevin Brainard
Front-jacket photography: College of the Holy Cross Archives
Back-jacket photograph: Dan Vallaincourt
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
ONE All of King’s Men
TWO Against the Clock
THREE First Impressions
FOUR Come Together
FIVE Winds of Change
SIX Love, Liberty, and Learning
SEVEN Black Power and a Lost Season
EIGHT Freedom and War
NINE The Walkout
TEN What Do You Fight For?
ELEVEN Eyes on the Prize
TWELVE Moving On
Epilogue
Where They Are Today
Notes
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I first heard of the Reverend John E. Brooks, S.J., in late 2005, when I was a senior writer at BusinessWeek. I was having lunch at a midtown Manhattan restaurant with a PR executive named Eric Starkman and his client Stan Grayson, a lawyer and former deputy mayor of New York who was then president of one of the country’s few minority-owned investment banks, M.R. Beal & Company. It was really just a courtesy meeting; I rarely covered Wall Street, but I trusted Eric’s judgment about people, and he said Grayson was a man I should take the time to meet. Over lunch, the three of us chatted about the economy, basketball, and how New York had changed since Grayson oversaw its finances during the 1980s. The conversation turned to Ted Wells, a lawyer who had been profiled in a New York Times article that week. Wells was representing Scooter Libby, the senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who’d been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly leaking the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media. It seemed natural that Libby would turn to Wells, who had a record of representing high-profile defendants, including junk bond king Michael Milken, former agriculture secretary Mike Espy, tobacco giant Philip Morris, and Exxon Mobil, and who would later go on to represent Eliot Spitzer. The Times article had painted Wells as a formidable trial lawyer—“one of the best” in the country—who had been raised by a single mother in Washington, D.C., and had attended college on a football scholarship.
It turned out that Wells and Grayson had attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, together. Grayson recalled that Wells had shared a dorm room with Eddie Jenkins, who became a running back with the Miami Dolphins during the team’s legendary 1972 perfect season and went on to establish his own law practice before becoming chairman of the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission. Down the hall from them, Grayson said, was the writer Edward P. Jones, who would later win a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Known World. Another hallmate was future Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.
They had all arrived on campus in the fall of 1968, at a time when the civil rights of African Americans had taken on a new urgency amid the rise of the black power movement and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., earlier that year, in April. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later had fostered both hope and frustration: hope that black Americans would finally experience the same rights and opportunities as everyone else, and frustration that the progress was so slow. One of the most obvious signs of inequality was the higher education system. While public schools had started to desegregate in the 1950s, many of the nation’s top colleges remained bastions of white privilege well over a decade later. They had been slow to open their doors to black students, and even slower to reach out to them with scholarships and support. Racial integration may have been a topic of debate on college campuses by 1968, but evidence of it was still in short supply. To have such an accomplished group of African American men emerge from a small Irish Catholic college in central Massachusetts seemed both unusual and amazing.
“Was there something in the water?” I joked. Grayson shook his head and said, “It was Father Brooks.” He went on to describe a compassionate, if sometimes brusque, priest who mentored, defended, coached, and befriended the group of black students who were at Holy Cross in the late 1960s. He’d personally had a hand in recruiting them to the school and had pushed to get the money for full scholarships at a time when many of his peers were unsure about whether to seek out minority students. He’d then nurtured them through their often challenging years at Holy Cross. When all of the black students at the college had quit school in protest against alleged racism in 1969, Brooks had been the one to bring them back. When the students needed supplies, transportation, and a place where they could live together and create a community on the otherwise white campus, Brooks had come through with the money or authorization needed to make it happen. It was less the material support, though, than the knowledge that he believed in the young men and had their backs. Without Brooks, Grayson insisted, “none of us would have made it.”
I asked Grayson when he had last been in touch with the priest, expecting to hear another anecdote from the early 1970s. The answer, “a few weeks ago,” surprised me. Since the men had graduated, Brooks had remained involved in their lives—standing up for Thomas in his bid for the Supreme Court, calling members of the group to celebrate accomplishments, presiding over weddings and the occasional funeral. Decades after they had left the school, many of the men had continued to gather at Wells’s house for an annual barbecue. The college friends were godfathers to one another’s children.
Naturally, I was curious. In the months and years that followed, I met with Brooks and the men whose lives he had influenced. In addition to Wells, Thomas, Jones, Grayson, and Jenkins, other talented young black men mentored by Father Brooks had gone on to build successful careers in law, business, and other areas. One became a prominent physician who served on Air Force Two; another spent two seasons in the NFL. The story was not entirely a triumphant one: Of the twenty black men who arrived at Holy Cross in the fall of 1968—nineteen freshmen and Thomas, who had transferred to the school as a sophomore—only a dozen would make it to graduation. Some got distracted by drugs, politics, and the lure of life outside of the classroom. Some dropped out, or were kicked out. Still, a number of them thrived spectacularly, both at Holy Cross and in the world at large.
Though they came of age during an era that Reverend Jesse Jackson described to me as one marked by “warmth toward social justice from the top,” the men’s success was not merely a product of the times. Even Ted Wells, who ident
ifies strongly with the larger generational movement that pushed for everything from racial integration to ending the Vietnam War, marvels at the accomplishments of the small, tight-knit group. “Sometimes I think it could have been serendipity,” Wells told me. “I like to think it’s something more—some combination of us and Father Brooks and other people we met during this incredible time in history.”
To me there seemed to be a powerful story behind Wells’s breezy assessment. The black recruits’ experiences raised important questions about the role that one man could play in altering the lives of those around him, even as he struggled to meet competing demands. I was also intrigued by the influence that the men had on one another, and on the middle-aged Jesuit who knew little about the African American experience. I wanted to learn more about the individual experiences of these men during a formative period in their development, a period that’s often subject to revisionist history later in life. Memories of college can come to take on a golden aura or can be cast aside in disdain once they’re at odds with a person’s new life script. The moments of bitterness or joy can become exaggerated, while perceptions about the influences of particular events or people are apt to change.
To read the memoirs of Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, is to learn about a Holy Cross experience that’s abbreviated and seems somewhat diminished—a chapter in which an angry rebel ultimately comes to his senses and manages to distance himself from his radicalized peers. To talk to Thomas in person, though, is to listen to a man whose loud laugh and obvious fondness for his former classmates suggest a more nuanced experience during those years in Worcester. Some classmates recall a more studious or sullen side of Thomas; others remember the jokes, the debates, and the camaraderie. What Thomas doesn’t dispute is where he found help in getting through a tough period. To him, there’s no surprise in the successes of Ted Wells, Stan Grayson, and Ed Jones. It wasn’t serendipity that his peers went on to have such successful careers, he told me. “It was Father Brooks.”
What follows is the story of five of those men who met during a transformative period in U.S. history, men who were eager to embrace new opportunities being offered even as they voiced anger at what was still being denied. They were an unfamiliar force at an all-male college that, like many other schools in the late 1960s, was struggling to hold on to its traditions while trying to adapt to new realities. And they were influenced by a Boston-born Jesuit who, besides changing their lives, was himself forever changed by this first group of black recruits to come to Holy Cross.
ONE
All of King’s Men
On April 4, 1968, eight black students were enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross. One, an outgoing and opinionated sophomore named Arthur “Art” Martin, from Newark, New Jersey, was studying in his dorm’s common room when he heard a commotion in the hall. A white student ran in and announced to everyone present that “Martin Luther Coon” had been shot. He looked Art straight in the eye, as if daring him to acknowledge the slur. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room as the other students all turned to stare, curious to see how the black student was going to react to the news of the civil rights leader’s death. Art calmly got up and left the study area. He held his composure until he found his friend Orion Douglass, a black senior from Savannah, and only then did his tears start to flow.
About 1,400 miles away, at the Immaculate Conception Seminary, a young student was battling his rage. Conception, Missouri, was no place to mourn the death of a black man. Clarence Thomas knew he didn’t fit in. From the minute he had arrived from Georgia in the tiny rural community where he had come to study for the priesthood, he’d had misgivings that were increasingly hard to ignore. Thomas had promised his grandfather that he would become the first black priest in Savannah, and he knew that the consequences of letting down the man who had raised him would be dire. His grandfather had made it clear that if Thomas dropped out of school, he would not be welcome back home. Thomas hadn’t expected to have fun in Missouri—he wasn’t the type of teenager who put having a good time ahead of an education—but the isolation and loneliness he experienced was a shock. While Thomas may have come across as friendly and enthusiastic to his fellow seminarians—three of whom were black—he had privately come to loathe his life at the pastoral theology school. Though he liked quite a few of his peers, he felt he had little in common with them. They sometimes stared at his black skin and spoke disparagingly about men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. The biggest problem, though, wasn’t the other men but the demons he was battling within himself. Thomas had been mourning the death of a friend who had been killed in a fight in Savannah, and had been reading about the philosophies of a new generation of black leaders.
Clarence Thomas
That sorrow, combined with the racial tensions he felt at the seminary, had merely added to his doubts about why he was there. The Roman Catholic Church had once seemed like a sanctuary from racism to Thomas. The Franciscan sisters who had taught him at St. Benedict the Moor Grammar School had shown him a level of respect he had rarely encountered on the streets of Savannah. Even St. John Vianney Minor Seminary, a white boarding school near Savannah where he had finished up high school and endured occasional teasing, had been at least tolerable in his mind. But a lot had changed over the past year. Civil rights activists like Stokeley Carmichael and Bobby Seale had helped to make black power a rallying cry on campuses nationwide, instilling black students with both a sense of pride and anger about social injustice. There was a growing sense across the country that it was time to give African Americans the rights they had been denied for so long. But one institution that had yet to come to that conclusion, in Thomas’s view, was the Roman Catholic Church. Despite the bold and inclusive vision of Catholicism that emerged from the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, he saw hypocrisy in where the Church was spending its energies. Thomas found that the Church’s discussions about how to become more relevant were lacking any real focus on the evils of racism, or on the racial segregation within the Church hierarchy. Thomas had once believed that becoming a priest would put him on equal footing with his white peers; now he wasn’t so sure. With each passing day, he instead felt more diminished and full of doubt.
Even as he gave the appearance of fitting in, Thomas felt left out by the conversations that seemed to grow quieter when he entered a room, the choice of TV shows in common areas, and even the letters that other students received from parents who seemed to care about their sons in a way that his own mother and father never had. His father had left the family when Clarence was a toddler, while his mother had left her two boys with their grandfather when Thomas was barely seven.
The scripture Thomas studied felt out of sync with the realities of 1968. The men living in Conception seemed to him oblivious to a world that was exploding with images of war, protests, and injustice. Instead of acting as a catalyst in the push for racial equality, the Church seemed to have become an oasis from it. It was hard for him to keep his faith when, amid all the battles and debates and violence over civil rights, the Church said nothing. As he would say years later, the silence haunted him.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was a beacon of hope for Thomas; through his work, King had helped him to articulate the pain he felt at being black in a racist world, a pain that Thomas had worked hard to ignore most of his life. The only time he had really been unaware of it was in the small black community of Pin Point, Georgia, where he had lived until the age of six. After his younger brother, Myers, accidentally burned down the house where they lived, the boys had moved to the slums of Savannah with their mother while Thomas’s older sister stayed in Pin Point with another relative.
On the evening of April 4, Thomas was walking back to his dormitory when one of the men watching TV suddenly yelled that King had been shot. As Thomas stood there, trying to digest the news, he heard a white classmate say, “That’s good. I hope the son of a bitch dies.” The man who’d said he hoped King would die was a futur
e priest. In that moment, all of the white students seemed the same to Thomas. Just as King had given voice to Thomas’s hopes, one wisecracking student brought clarity to his anger. It was apparent to him that he didn’t belong with these men. There was no sanctuary in the Church, no equality in Catholicism for people like him. Thomas no longer felt a desire to swallow his rage and head off to the chapel to pray. He simply made a decision, then and there, to leave the seminary and never come back. Later in life, Thomas would refer back to King’s death as a turning point, as the moment when he abandoned both his faith and his vocation.
At seventeen, Eddie Jenkins had a confidence that many adults envied. He was handsome, in an approachable sort of way, and had a reputation for being charming and funny. His days were filled with commuting more than two hours to school and football practice in Brooklyn before returning to Queens and his after-school job at Alexander’s department store. On April 4, Jenkins was stocking shelves at Alexander’s when he looked up to see an older black man walking slowly toward him. What an Uncle Tom, the teen thought to himself. The low hang of the stranger’s head gave the man the kind of look that men his father’s age sometimes had, as if they had spent so much of their lives bowing to white people that they had forgotten how to stand tall. Jenkins turned away in disgust and went back to his work, absently wondering why the street outside wasn’t buzzing with its usual mix of music, laughter, and the chatter of commuters.
Eddie Jenkins
As the man approached him, Jenkins grudgingly asked if he needed help.
“The king is dead,” the man said.
Jenkins saw tears in the man’s eyes and suddenly understood why he looked so beaten down. Martin Luther King, Jr., was dead. The teen was overcome with shock. But his most overwhelming reaction was shame—shame that he had stereotyped a grieving man as a coward.
The man looked straight into Jenkins’s eyes. “You can go home now,” he said. The statement struck him as surprisingly bold, but Jenkins immediately went to the register and cashed out. When he turned around, the man was gone. Once outside, he realized again how quiet the streets were. In other parts of the city, people were already smashing store windows and setting fires, but on Queens Boulevard it seemed like the world had stopped. The few people who were still milling around were walking in silence, trying to absorb King’s death. When Jenkins got home to the Flushing section of Queens known as “Da’Ville,” his family was gathered in the living room.
