by Diane Brady
Now that he had a particular recruit in mind, though, DeShay could finally do some good. Hell, yeah, DeShay thought to himself, he could help Thomas get to Holy Cross. He got on the phone and convinced his old friend that if anyone was going to get an exception for a late application, it would be a former priest-in-training. And he was sure the money would be there.
Thomas grudgingly agreed to put his name forward. Transferring to another Catholic college might not have been his first choice, but he knew that Holy Cross had a strong academic record. He knew he could handle the workload, and he could put up with being in another white school if it opened doors to something else. He didn’t have many other options. He was stuck in a tiny apartment with his mother, working at a company where every day he had to stare at the words nigger and KKK scrawled across the bathroom stall.
On the morning of June 5, as Thomas was getting ready to go to work, he turned on the radio to hear that Bobby Kennedy had been shot. As Thomas later wrote in his autobiography, he fell to his knees and cried. Another great man had been struck down in hatred, and Thomas knew that someone somewhere was rejoicing at the news. This time his grief turned to anger and fueled a determination to do something more with his life. As Thomas later put it, he didn’t want to let the bile and despair build up; that would only make his life worse. When DeShay called again, Thomas listened intently.
Holy Cross accepted Thomas’s last-minute application and offered him a full package of financial aid. At Brooks’s request, Coach Tom Boisture called up Thomas’s grandfather to help smooth things over. Brooks thought that Boisture, who knew the South and had attended Mississippi State in the 1950s, might be able to put Myers Anderson’s mind at ease. Though it wasn’t Boisture’s style, he found it was hard to say no to Brooks, and he made the call. When Anderson came to the phone, he sounded impatient, but once he understood the nature of the call, he began to listen. Boisture talked about how tough the Holy Cross curriculum could be, and how good the school would be for Thomas. Anderson didn’t ask many questions and Boisture didn’t know if their conversation had made any difference. Boisture didn’t know the depth of acrimony between Thomas and his family. He never learned if Thomas had asked for his grandfather’s consent, or if the older man gave it. Boisture hung up with the distinct feeling that Anderson had no intention of letting his grandson know that the Holy Cross football coach had called.
The very fact that Holy Cross wanted him gave Thomas hope at a time when his future seemed to be closing in on him. Thomas didn’t need anyone’s consent or any second opinion to know what to do with the opportunity that had suddenly been handed to him. He wasn’t going to waste it, and this time he wouldn’t care about fitting in.
FOUR
Come Together
In the summer of 1968, John Brooks was named vice president for academic affairs and dean at Holy Cross. The power he had unofficially assumed while head of the theology department was now officially his. The Crusader kicked off the school year with a profile of their new dean. On paper there seemed to be little difference between Brooks’s views and those held by people half his age. He talked about the failure of universities to get involved in social issues and spoke out against the Vietnam War, declaring the draft unfair because it put the biggest burden on the “poor and the oppressed members of society.” He called for an “offensive against the racism” on campus, and he talked about the need for “healthy dissent” against the Catholic stance on subjects like birth control. His views were aggressive, if not radical, for someone in a key role at one of the leading Catholic universities in the country. While Brooks was always quick to temper his bluntness with an easygoing smile and wit, his colleagues would later recall a man who openly shared his students’ discomfort with the status quo. Unlike those students, though, he also understood the fears of an older generation and appreciated the need to at least try to bring people on board. He didn’t want Holy Cross to descend into the kind of acrimony and combativeness that was turning campuses elsewhere into educational battlefields. A college couldn’t survive if it treated its students as the enemy, but neither could it thrive if everyone else was left on the other side of the fence.
Father Brooks at a protest in 1971 against the Air Force ROTC program
Still, Brooks was part of the establishment and knew that no amount of sympathetic rhetoric would make his first year as dean an easy one. The incoming generation of students was a restless one, full of varying degrees of indignation about everything from rising troop levels in Vietnam to the treatment on the home front of women, blacks, gays, Native Americans, the poor, and anyone under the age of twenty-five. Some were angry for the sake of being angry; others felt a genuine pain at the inequality in society. And as part of the largest generation the country had ever seen, born amid the boom times following World War II, they had numbers on their side. The incoming class of 1972 may have chosen Holy Cross for the same reasons as their fathers and grandfathers before them, but Brooks could see that their ambitions extended far beyond finding a job with a decent salary upon graduation. Right now, at least, they wanted to tear down old structures and build a new society, and they didn’t necessarily care if the rest of the world went along with them. Having already dealt with the occasional protest the year before, Brooks knew that outlook wasn’t going to create a peaceful atmosphere. The best he could hope for was that he and like-minded colleagues could convince the rest of the administration to give the students some space and treat the inevitable protests as demonstrations of free speech instead of a threat to the college.
Because of Brooks’s efforts, in the fall of 1968 black students now had a somewhat visible presence among the 2,200 students on campus. The new arrivals included nineteen freshmen and Thomas, a sophomore. There were the nine men from Philadelphia and the four athletes—Eddie Jenkins, Ted Wells, Stan Grayson, and a Washington football player named Jaffe Dickerson. The rest were an eclectic mix: Ed Jones; Alfred Bruce Coleman of Georgia; Worcester native Leonard Cooper; William Bryant of Hollis, Queens, New York; Jeff Graham of Schenectady, New York; and Robert Louis Robards of Fair Haven, New Jersey. Brooks had personally written up files on most of these students, highlighting what set them apart from other young men. For some it was a challenging family background that they had already shown signs of overcoming. For others Brooks noted a willingness to push beyond expectations and give back to their communities in big and small ways. Not all of them were obvious candidates. He had to push for Ed Jones to be admitted. The Washington native’s marks were far from spectacular, but Brooks liked his quiet intensity. The young man’s high school teachers had been impressed with his reasoning and discipline, especially given the hardship of his background. And Brooks had noticed that there was always a book in Jones’s hands. To him, that said something.
Brooks knew the least about the four students arriving on athletic scholarships. What he did know—and Wells, Jenkins, and Dickerson did not—was that the football players were arriving at a time when the Holy Cross football program was under mounting pressure to perform. Although the college competed against big sports schools like Syracuse University and Penn State, it was barely able to keep up. And while other colleges were ramping up their sports programs, Holy Cross was cutting back on athletic scholarships, part of an overall cost-cutting drive. But many in the administration had also argued that it didn’t make sense to keep competing against teams that had more money, more fanfare, and more victories. By the fall of 1968 there was talk of dropping football altogether. Even the student newspaper, The Crusader, was in favor of curtailing the football program, running an editorial calling on Holy Cross to “scale its athletic program to the size and the academic goals of the college.” While the specter of cuts no doubt weighed on Holy Cross’s coaching staff that year, they certainly hadn’t mentioned it as part of their pitch to the new recruits, black or otherwise. But they had sold all of them on the idea that Holy Cross would offer them more than just football. However, the new re
cruits might also have been disturbed to learn that their reputation had taken a hit before they even showed up. A study commissioned in 1966 had found the average SAT scores of athletes on the Holy Cross campus to be about 10 percent lower than the scores of other students. For those who opposed the college giving out scholarships to recruit “dumb jocks,” it was another fact to add to the argument.
After a large and raucous farewell party in New York, a bleary-eyed Jenkins had a friend drive him up to Worcester the next morning. The two of them got lost in the towns of central Massachusetts; in every neighborhood they drove through, the streets were so quiet that it was hard to even find people to get directions from. By the time they reached Holy Cross, Jenkins didn’t feel the excitement he had hoped for. Even the second-largest city in the state felt like a ghost town compared to New York City. Back home in Queens, the streets would have been humming with music and laughter and the sounds of parents yelling from their windows to children hanging out on the sidewalks below, but Worcester seemed to lack energy. It didn’t help that Jenkins was one of the first students to arrive on campus, since the football players had to show up earlier than other students for practice. Jenkins flashed back to his visit the previous winter, when clusters of pale young men trudged across campus in heavy coats. He’d thought his impression of the college would improve with the warmer weather, but now he had further doubts. He and his friend found their way to his residence hall, which was still empty except for his fellow football players. Jenkins walked into a bare double room and threw his bags on one side; his future roommate hadn’t arrived yet. After covering one wall with album covers from jazz singer Nancy Wilson and a photo of a girlfriend in New York, he felt more at home.
When Jenkins got to practice, Wells was already on the field where the freshman recruits were gathering. Wells had spent the summer in Washington moving furniture to earn some cash and was still feeling good about his decision to enroll. The Holy Cross campus felt as foreign to him as it did to Jenkins, but Wells hadn’t set his expectations high for the social side of college life. Holy Cross would be his ticket to an Ivy League degree of some sort later on, maybe a law degree or a Ph.D., or both. His job was to study hard in class and play hard on the field. He’d do what he had to do, then move on. The thing that nagged at him most was that he missed his girlfriend, Nina Mitchell. They had decided to end their relationship that summer because of geography. She was heading off to spend the next four years in Cincinnati while he would be studying in Worcester at a college he’d chosen, in part, to impress her father. High school romances were supposed to end when you headed to college. Besides, everywhere he turned, someone was preaching the merits of free love. But he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
At practice Wells found himself warming instantly to Dennis Golden. Golden was a tough coach, but he seemed honest and straightforward in his approach. With his dark hair, prominent features, and massive hands, the young man reminded players of the butler, Lurch, from the TV series The Addams Family. His style of football was simple: Whoever could block the hardest, tackle the hardest, run the hardest, and make the fewest mistakes would win the game. He wasn’t interested in any debates about X’s and O’s and formations. Wells, on the other hand, had enjoyed the mental challenges of football from his days of playing center in high school. He was used to having a say in how the game was played. From the first day of practice he felt comfortable enough with Golden to question him about different plays. Wells also enjoyed entertaining the other freshmen players with impromptu quips such as “stay on my hip, and don’t give me no lip.” It was his way to break the ice and keep the mood light. Not a practice would pass without Wells sprinkling in some witty rhymes and raps, to which Golden would jokingly respond by suggesting he shut up and play.
Jaffe Dickerson, the other Washington, D.C., athlete, was only about five-foot-eight but he was fast, having broken track records at his old school. He came from a middle-class Catholic family and spoke with a careful enunciation. When he was looking at colleges, Dickerson had fielded calls from Virginia, Maryland, and even California before his father had said yes to Holy Cross without even telling him. His father had decided it was the best place for his son to get an education. Dickerson hadn’t found out until it was too late to go anywhere else. He, too, wasn’t excited to have landed in Worcester, yet he understood the merits of getting a free education at a well-regarded college. Dickerson had no illusions about carving out a long-term career in football.
There was a fourth black football recruit, a gifted Boston player named Joe Wilson who didn’t make it to Holy Cross that year. With his bruising physique and incredible speed, Wilson had the makings of a future star, but he lacked the academic standing to gain admission to Holy Cross. Brooks had encouraged Wilson to spend a year at a nearby Catholic school, Assumption Prep, to bolster his academic foundation so that he could make an easier transition to Holy Cross the following year. The new dean argued to his colleagues that what Wilson really lacked was not intellectual ability but a setting in which people encouraged him to study. The young man had been so good at football, Brooks suspected, that he had simply let his schoolwork slide. The coaches clearly wanted Wilson, but Brooks cared about more than recruiting the best players. The last thing he wanted was for a black student to make such a risky, high-profile move, only to flunk out of Holy Cross.
Those first summer practices were more brutal than anything Jenkins had experienced in high school. He thought the coach was crazy for making them run so many laps in the heat, but he stayed quiet about it: He wasn’t going to let anyone hear him complain about being worked too hard. Secretly he couldn’t wait until classes started, when there would be some relief from days devoted to football.
Meals, at least, were something to look forward to. For many of the students, whatever their background, the quality of food at Holy Cross was a pleasant surprise. Kimball Dining Hall had a reputation for serving up some of the best college meals in the Northeast. The menu regularly featured such items as swordfish, fresh salads, and freshly baked rolls. The desserts were all homemade. And the building itself was physically impressive, with long mahogany tables, high ceilings, and large windows. Instead of lining up at a buffet, the men would be served their meals family-style by student waiters. To Jenkins it felt more like a restaurant than a college cafeteria. And he discovered that the football team had special privileges. Not only did the players get their own table in the dining hall, but they were regularly treated to luxuries like steak that were rarely available to other students. Someone somewhere must have decided that they needed the extra protein, he assumed, but it felt more like a badge of honor than a necessary part of training.
One evening after practice, Jenkins struck up a conversation with a black student waiter. Clarence Thomas had also arrived early on campus, as part of a work-study program, earning $1.10 an hour as a waiter. Brooks had helped to set up the job, remembering his own days as a dishwasher at Kimball, earning 33 cents a meal. Thomas didn’t like the job, less because of the hard work than the mild indignity of serving other students, but he’d certainly experienced worse. When Jenkins introduced himself, Thomas seemed surprised and pleased to see another black student. He admired athletes and considered himself to be an accomplished one. He and Jenkins immediately hit it off, trading jokes as he worked. Thomas came across to Jenkins as jovial and good-natured, not short on opinions but easily moved to a booming laugh.
The two of them began to hang out together on a small hill near the dining hall, drinking cheap wine and talking about their routes to Holy Cross. Jenkins quickly learned of Thomas’s anger about the racism and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, and found it odd that someone so disillusioned with the Church should have picked a Catholic college. But the anger didn’t seem to overwhelm the sophomore, or overshadow the benefits of being at Holy Cross. Jenkins suspected that Thomas, like him, had found it impossible to turn down the offer of a free education. And there were other things to
talk about, from black activists to their shared love of sports. Growing up in Savannah, Thomas’s basketball skills had earned him the nickname “Cousy,” after Bob Cousy, a famed Boston Celtics star and Holy Cross graduate. But he thought his talents on the football field were pretty good, too, having played on his high school team. When Thomas jokingly boasted that he could probably run circles around the football team, Jenkins challenged him to prove it and the sophomore immediately agreed.
When the two of them met on the field for a casual scrimmage, Jenkins was immediately struck by how different Thomas looked out of his waiter uniform. His hair was uncombed. He wore combat boots and army fatigues. Thomas also proved to be quite talented at football. He could throw a ball at least sixty-five yards and run fast. Jenkins just wasn’t so sure the man could take a hit, mentally or physically. You needed a certain kind of stamina to keep going when you got hurt. After a vigorous back-and-forth, Jenkins walked away feeling that Thomas was more like the guys he’d played with in his old neighborhood than someone he’d encounter on the Holy Cross team. Looking back, Thomas laughs and agrees with Jenkins’s assessment, saying, “I could probably do everything but take a hit.” At the time, though, Jenkins recalls the sophomore looking slightly miffed.
Still, having heard about Thomas’s ability, Tom Boisture invited the sophomore to try out for the team as a walk-on. While Thomas says he declined, Boisture recalled the young man coming out for a practice. The first thing Boisture noticed when Thomas walked onto the field was that the sophomore had likely borrowed someone’s shoes, since they seemed much too big for his feet. And while Thomas may have acted boisterous around fellow students like Jenkins, he showed a different side of himself to the head football coach. Thomas was more introverted than Boisture had expected, and he looked a little sad. He clearly had physical talent and the kind of drive Boisture often worked years to nurture in his players. Whether Thomas saw his one outing as a tryout or simply a scrimmage, he didn’t make the team. When Boisture looked around to talk to him, the young athlete was gone. Like Jenkins, Boisture suspected that Thomas wasn’t one to take failure easily.
