Fraternity

by Diane Brady

  Brooks enjoyed a good debate, and he wanted to delve into the various points to explain what the school could and couldn’t do, but Swords didn’t like the idea of negotiating with students over perks. Brooks couldn’t blame him. He would never have dared to ask for special privileges from a college president when he was a student. A year or two earlier, it would have been unusual to see that kind of behavior in the student body. But much had changed in the past year, and the black students weren’t the only ones with demands and requests. Swords’s answer to Wells and Martin was the same as the one he gave to any other student organization: He would do his best to accommodate their needs. The reality was that Holy Cross didn’t have a lot of extra cash, with an operating budget that barely covered costs and an endowment that was hovering below $6 million.

  Swords made it clear that he preferred Brooks to handle the demands of the BSU. The president largely deferred to his colleague on matters relating to student life, and it was Brooks who had insisted the college aggressively recruit black students. It was Brooks who had skirted the rules to get some of them in. He would have to be the one to acclimatize his recruits to the school’s harsh realities. Swords also knew it was a role that Brooks was going to take on, whether he was asked to do it or not.

  Wells and Martin both believed that having Brooks as their main contact would work to the BSU’s advantage, and they were right. Although Brooks was acutely aware of the budget constraints, he tried to fulfill as many of the BSU’s requests as possible. He wasn’t motivated only by a desire to make the men feel more at ease, though that certainly played a role because a lot of his peers were looking at the black students as some sort of test case for Holy Cross. If the young men failed, it would fuel the argument that they should never have been invited. Brooks also believed that much of what the students wanted was reasonable. He, too, wanted the faculty and curriculum to reflect the experiences of the broader population. And he needed the experience to succeed. He had already started an ambitious recruitment drive across the Northeast in the hope of at least doubling the number of black freshmen in the fall of 1969.

  Brooks thoroughly enjoyed the dinner with Wells and Martin, and they agreed to make it a monthly meeting. As the two students talked about their experiences on and off campus, Brooks became aware of issues he hadn’t anticipated. The men were desperate to get off campus on weekends, both to meet black women at other colleges and to find other social outlets. Holy Cross’s movie nights and residence parties seemed to revolve around beer—a distinct second, in the minds of several black students, to wine—and music the black students didn’t like. Some of the men had taken to borrowing a car from one accommodating Jesuit professor until Jenkins drove a group to Boston one night and didn’t return the car until early the next morning. After that the priest suggested they get their own vehicle. Within weeks of their first dinner, Brooks authorized the purchase of a used burgundy Ford Fairlane station wagon.

  Wells and Martin also brought forward the BSU’s complaint about the racist lyrics in the school song. Brooks found that harder to address: Holy Cross students had been belting out “Mamie Reilly” for generations. He himself had been singing the song for years without much thought. The lyrics were self-consciously silly, the kind that appealed to mildly drunk sports fans and nostalgic alumni. But the BSU thought the reference to “Old Black Joe” sounded like a throwback to the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Grayson, in particular, winced every time he heard the lyrics: “Slide Kelly, Slide / Casey’s at the bat / Oh, Mamie Reilly, where’d you get that hat? / Down in Old Kentucky / From Old Black Joe.” Brooks insisted that it was a tradition, albeit from a different era; tampering with a beloved song struck him as a rash move, especially given the heightened sensitivities of alumni and faculty. However, he agreed to consider it. Now that the men had pointed out what the lyrics meant to them, he could see why the words were offensive.

  Art Martin and Ted Wells at a BSU meeting

  Amid the lively give-and-take of those initial discussions, Wells discovered his strengths again. He had just arrived at Holy Cross and already he was having dinner with the president of the college! While that was an ego boost in itself, Wells found himself drawn to Brooks, who was a force of life—vibrant, extroverted, and a straight shooter. The dean could talk passionately about religion, sports, and the latest films coming out of Europe. To Wells he seemed a Renaissance man. And Wells could tell that the dean was truly comfortable with them, whereas the president perhaps wasn’t. Meeting Brooks gave Wells a more nuanced view of the administration. Maybe it wasn’t so conservative and resistant to change. He looked forward to meeting with Brooks again.

  Brooks encouraged his colleagues to meet with the black students as often as possible. It was important to make sure that the BSU felt they were being listened to, and important for the people running the college to understand this group of young men. Several faculty members shared Brooks’s view that the college had a stake in the success of the students, but they interacted with the men differently than Brooks. While Brooks shared laughs and easy debates with Wells, other administrators found their interactions with the young man to be more somber.

  One administration official wrote a memo to the president after dining alone with Wells in February 1969, noting Wells’s complaint that the curriculum wasn’t relevant to black students. The administration official also noted that the young man was finding the social climate to be miserable, and went on to speculate that Wells was likely not alone in his sense of isolation. The administrator suggested to Swords that they keep their doors open to the black students and admit their ignorance when it came to understanding the black experience.

  Wells was certainly finding the transition to Holy Cross tougher than he had imagined it would be. Academically he was struggling for the first time in his life. Football was distracting him from his schoolwork. He had almost flunked his first round of tests, and he was scared. High school felt so easy in retrospect. Realizing he’d have to put in more effort than he ever had before, Wells began to work late into the night, still rising early each day for classes and practice. He ended the semester with a 3.0 grade point average—a solid showing for a freshman but terrifying to the former honors student. He was working around the clock, and he wasn’t sure he could keep the juggling act going for long.

  Even so, Wells’s biggest challenge was cultural. He had been a popular football player in an all-black school; at Holy Cross he felt noticed but largely ignored. He didn’t have the same number of easy friendships he’d had in Washington. The way of talking at Holy Cross was different, the jokes were different, even the style was different—a little less flashy and more button-down for the typical student. While Wells had nothing against the white students, he found himself more drawn to the brothers. Many of the blacks had come from cities, like him, while the whites had grown up in suburbs. There was some intersection of taste with musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Smokey Robinson, but for the most part the black and the white students seemed poles apart. For the first time in his life, Wells was feeling lonely.

  Many of the other black students were struggling, too. For some of them it was no worse than what the average white freshman was experiencing. Even Gil Hardy, who finished the first semester with a stellar grade point average of 3.9, appeared a little shell-shocked by the course load. In addition to having to get used to a rigorous academic schedule, several of the black students also complained to Brooks that they were under extra scrutiny, as if people were waiting to see them fail. Brooks didn’t try to convince them otherwise, in part because he suspected they were right. Even Hardy found he had to deal with students who openly assumed he’d gotten into Holy Cross because he was black. As unfair as that felt, the reality was that some of the recruits were unprepared and underperforming, academically, socially, or both. One recruit from Philadelphia was, as the dean jotted in a note to Swords, “running scared.” The teen appeared to be diligent but was clearly not effective, stayi
ng up late and sleeping in. He had complained of getting “crank calls” from other students and feeling isolated. He seemed to be feeling pressure on all fronts. Even the other black students were getting to him at times, with their ribbing and intensity, and he wasn’t eating as often at “the black table” in Kimball Hall. Brooks thought the Philadelphia native was a mess, though the dean made a point to write that he “still smiles—is buoyant—he will come back!!” Brooks noted that the young man had faced personal challenges at home, which the two of them talked about often. He vowed to help him get on a more disciplined schedule and to see him more often. He also suggested that Swords invite the freshman to dinner, which the president did.

  The black students may not have been fully prepared for Holy Cross but it was becoming increasingly clear that Holy Cross was woefully unprepared for them. Despite the supportive rhetoric he’d received and the president’s clear backing, Brooks felt he had to keep justifying his decision to recruit black students. No effort to help the students, no poor grade, seemed to escape notice. Some colleagues were quick to condemn anything that smacked of special treatment. One science professor responded in outright anger after listening to Brooks talk at one faculty meeting about the black students’ situation. In a note to Brooks, he pointed out that blacks were not the only minority groups in the country that were worthy of special consideration; there were numerous others that were every bit as badly off as the Negroes. Moreover, he added, Brooks was doing nothing to help what he described as the extremely poor pure-blood white Americans. In short, he argued, Brooks’s behavior was simply racism in another form.

  Brooks became used to dealing with that kind of hostility. He was willing to try to change the views that some colleagues had of black men, but only to a point. He didn’t care if they were wrong, and they were wrong, in his view: narrow-minded, superficial, just plain wrong. Black families in America weren’t just another minority group like people from Ireland or Indonesia, he argued at one faculty meeting. They had been systematically discriminated against and marginalized for the entire history of the country; they had been bought and sold as property, and the discrimination was continuing. Making sure black students had the same access to educational opportunities as everyone else wasn’t a plan that would solve every injustice, but Brooks argued it was the role Holy Cross could play.

  Brooks sensed that a number of the black students might need someone other than their friends to talk to if they were feeling that the pressure was too much. Some had forged close relationships with one or two professors, but others had not. He asked psychology professor Paul Rosenkrantz to act as a formal adviser to the BSU. Rosenkrantz was the man whose advice Brooks trusted most. He wasn’t a typical hire by any measure; he was a former communist, an electrical engineer and merchant seaman who’d proudly spent his youth as an activist. What he may have lacked in terms of a traditional career path, though, he made up for in excellent academic credentials and solid judgment.

  Brooks also told Martin and Wells to let the other BSU members know that they could come by and see him anytime. While he was chatty and engaged with the white students on campus, too, he didn’t extend an open invitation to most of them. He wanted the black students to know that they were a priority.

  One evening in the autumn of 1968, Thomas came knocking on Brooks’s door. He had just stopped by to discuss some classes, but Brooks invited him in and the conversation quickly turned from grades and professors to the Catholic Church. Thomas knew that, in addition to his administrative duties, Brooks ran the theology department. But Brooks seemed accessible and open, more curious about Thomas’s decision to leave the seminary than sitting in judgment of it. Brooks asked a few questions but mostly he listened as Thomas unburdened himself. Thomas couldn’t find refuge in the confessional booth, having resolved never to go back to church, and yet he felt comforted by this priest, who sat nodding as he spoke about the bitterness he was feeling.

  The truth was, despite his cheerful manner and loud opinions, Thomas recalls feeling alienated and disheartened as he went through his sophomore year. Some of his classes and assignments, such as translating French texts into English, were more challenging than he had anticipated. He feared that his marks, though solid, might not be high enough to get him into an Ivy League law school. In truth, he was still among the top in his class. Though Brooks nodded in sympathy, he didn’t offer the young man any easy solutions. The only way to succeed, both men intuitively understood, was to focus on the work and get it done. For all his sympathy about Thomas’s emotional state—and he could see the genuine pain the man was feeling—Brooks wanted to reinforce the idea that Thomas had to be responsible for his own success. Nobody could take the courses for him or master the schoolwork. If Thomas found something too difficult, together they could talk about his other options. But the decisions and the commitment had to come from him. Thomas appreciated Brooks’s high standards and the respect that he felt the priest was giving him. He found himself knocking on Brooks’s door quite often to talk about coursework, current affairs, and the comings and goings of campus life. In many ways both men were dissatisfied with the status quo. Brooks’s office became as close to an oasis as Thomas could hope to find at Holy Cross.

  Ed Jones, meanwhile, had issues of his own to work out. Math wasn’t turning out to be his calling. He couldn’t even recall why he had picked it as a major. He’d never been especially good at it, or interested in it, and he was close to failing.

  Because of his shyness, Jones preferred to sit at the back of the classroom, where he couldn’t easily read the blackboard. He assumed no one else could see it, either. It wasn’t until Thanksgiving, when he, Dickerson, and Wells were driving to Washington, that he became aware of a problem. He was in the front passenger seat, helping navigate. Dickerson drove through a side street in Connecticut and Jones struggled to make out the words on a street sign. A few feet short of the sign, he figured out the letters and yelled for Dickerson to stop. Dickerson slammed on the brakes. “Man, you need glasses!” That Wednesday, Jones went downtown and bought his first pair.

  By the end of the first semester, Jones had a 2.3 grade point average. He began to doubt he would last long enough to earn a degree.

  But while Jones may have been discouraged, Brooks continued to believe that the intense, quiet young man from Washington had potential and had been quietly talking to some of his professors. Shortly after Jones’s report card arrived, Brooks sent the freshman a note that praised his performance as “good” and encouraged him to keep up the hard work. Jones wondered if Brooks was kidding. He knew that a 2.3 average wouldn’t take him very far, and he was certain Brooks was aware of that fact, too. Still, Brooks’s note encouraged Jones. One of the most senior administrators at the college had taken the time to look up his report card and write him a letter. The following semester, Jones got a 3.2.

  Jones was increasingly drawn to writing. He liked his English professor, a Jesuit named Reverend Healy who wore his cassock to class and often paced around the raised platform where his desk sat. Although Jones rarely talked, he caught the professor’s attention. It certainly helped that he wrote all his assignments in longhand, because he didn’t own a typewriter, and he would sometimes write up his poetry assignments using different colored ink for each line. He received several A’s in the class and liked the fact that his professor cared more about his writing than whether or not he spoke up.

  One student who didn’t appear all that worried about his grades was Eddie Jenkins, who was neither excelling nor failing, but drifting somewhere in between. He had impressed the other students with his confidence and air of sophistication that seemed to come from growing up in New York City. Jenkins was actually just as nervous as the rest of them, but he had learned to put his mouth to good use; few people were better at bravado than Eddie. Still, Jenkins figured he had plenty of excuses if his grades weren’t exactly stellar, as college life was keeping him busy.

  Wells had convi
nced Jenkins to come along with him to join the Air Force ROTC on campus, in part because it got them out of Monday football practice. In addition to earning college credit, Wells reasoned, they would be able to get more studying in because they wouldn’t be so exhausted from practice. Moreover, if either of them was drafted to serve in Vietnam, it would be better to go as an officer. In Washington high schools, a year of cadet training was mandatory, which meant that Wells had arrived at Holy Cross knowing how to march and take apart a rifle.

  Jenkins didn’t care for the spit-and-shine part of the ROTC program, and the routines bored him, but he had great respect for anyone serving in the military, as some of his family had done, and felt proud when he put on the uniform. At Thanksgiving he put it on to hitch a ride home to New York. He knew he looked good—and trustworthy. When he arrived at his home in Queens, his parents were immediately taken aback. Jenkins’s older brother was at that point serving in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam, and here was another boy, home from college in a uniform, like he was acting in a play. His father looked distinctly unimpressed. Feeling ashamed, Jenkins took off the uniform. After the holiday, he returned to Worcester on the bus in civilian clothes.

  The ROTC was a controversial institution on campus, in any case, and neither Jenkins nor Wells wanted to think seriously about going to Vietnam. Many of their friends were already off fighting. Within months both men decided to drop out of the ROTC. When they turned in their uniforms and quit, the Air Force major asked why they were leaving the program so soon. They told him that they had decided to leave on principle. They said they didn’t support the war.