by Diane Brady
In April 1969, near the end of the recruits’ first year at Holy Cross, an article ran in The Crusader examining the situation of blacks on campus. The reporter, a white student, noted that “a degree of suspicion and mutual animosity exists and will probably continue to grow as more blacks enroll.” One black student was quoted as saying that “whereas whites are frankly bigoted in the South, whites here express tolerance, but on the condition that we behave ourselves.” A civil rights demonstration across town at Clark University had sparked a typical reaction, the student said: “We were accosted by our white friends and asked why we were making trouble.”
Despite such tensions, many of the black men felt they were starting to find a home on campus after the second semester drew to a close. Ted Wells greatly improved his academic performance after withdrawing from the football team, and he was relieved when Nina was accepted at Newton College. Ed Jones began to find solace and a new voice through writing. Maintaining a balance between academics and basketball had proved difficult for Stan Grayson, but his team had had a promising year, and many students thought the school might revive its standing in basketball.
Eddie Jenkins had carved out a reputation for himself on campus. He was likable in many ways, but he also had a dose of bold swagger that some people found hard to take. After contemplating a transfer to the University of Tulsa so he could play for the ousted Tom Boisture, he decided to commit himself to football at Holy Cross. It wasn’t so bad, he concluded, especially now that he could live with Wells, Grayson, and the other members of the BSU. He would also be joining the varsity team at a time when people thought the new squad would return Holy Cross to its days of football glory. The press was paying more attention to the team, and he was struck by the surprising number of beautiful black women at neighboring colleges. While he couldn’t wait to get back to New York, he knew he’d return to dreary Worcester in the fall, and that was okay.
Clarence Thomas didn’t want to go home for the summer. His grandfather had made it clear that he wouldn’t be welcome. Thomas tried to convince himself that it didn’t matter if his grandfather was supportive or not—he had pretty much written Myers Anderson off as “an ignorant illiterate incapable of understanding or facing the facts about racism.” Despite his continued anxieties and self-doubts, he was feeling much more enlightened about the world, especially in comparison to his poorly schooled grandfather. He had made the dean’s list and was, in his opinion, now better than the man who had raised him.
Brooks helped Thomas arrange to stay in Worcester for the summer. Through an alumnus, he got him a job at an electroplating company, but the fumes from the plant made him sick and he couldn’t keep the job. With nothing to do, Thomas decided to take a trip back home. It was a mistake. He and his grandfather seemed to fight the whole time. As the summer wore on, he vowed never to live at his grandfather’s house again.
Across the Northeast, the competition to recruit top black students was building. Although Holy Cross had been the best offer on the table for many of the recruits in the spring of 1968, that was no longer the case a year later. Brooks had handed out more scholarships for the incoming recruits, but he found that the candidates for the class of 1973 had other options and it took more to persuade them to enroll. He thought about what might have happened had the school been recruiting Wells, Thomas, or any of the other men this year. Gil Hardy, for one, had turned down Harvard to come to Holy Cross. Had Hardy waited a year, Brooks had no doubt that Harvard would have sweetened the deal for a smart, black, working-class teen, and Holy Cross would have been left in the dust.
SEVEN
Black Power and a Lost Season
The air was once again crackling with tension when students returned to the Holy Cross campus in the fall of 1969. Over the summer, NASA had put a man on the moon. Any dreams of another Kennedy presidency had been dashed when Mary Jo Kopechne’s body was discovered that July in a submerged and overturned car belonging to Ted Kennedy. A Worcester native, Abbie Hoffman, was among the “Chicago Eight” antiwar protesters on trial for disrupting the Democratic National Convention, and police were investigating the gruesome Hollywood murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate by members of the Charles Manson “family.” In August, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair had drawn four hundred thousand people to a dairy farm in upstate New York for a celebration of peace, love, and music. The world was again changing in profound and often uncomfortable ways.
Only a year had passed since the first group of black recruits had arrived and already the campus felt like a different place. A Worcester college consortium had hired an African American professor to teach black literature at Holy Cross and two other schools, and Father Brooks was looking to do much more. Incoming students had been assigned to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and, once again, Eldridge Cleaver’s provocative Soul on Ice over the summer to sensitize them to the issues and anger of the black community. More important, the total number of black students on campus had grown to sixty-eight, thanks to a concerted recruitment drive. Brooks and his colleagues had traveled to more cities, interviewed more high school students, and given out more money than the year before. While the eighteen freshmen who had arrived in 1968 had received a total of $26,610 a year in scholarships, the forty-one freshmen in 1969 received $105,650 in aid. In a memo to the trustees that August, Brooks argued that although their SAT scores “may not seem impressive in all cases,” each of the students had demonstrated leadership skills and had strong recommendations from their schools. He knew that some of the new recruits might not make it at Holy Cross, especially given the difficulties that some of the men had encountered the year before, but Brooks was confident in his ability to spot future leaders. He was looking for men with passion, whether it was a passion for history, writing, or faith in God. What mattered to Brooks was that each student cared deeply about something and had the discipline to pursue that passion. Holy Cross would never move beyond being an institution for the sons of the Catholic elite, Brooks had argued, if it cleaved to tradition at the expense of introducing new thinking.
With their broad range of backgrounds, the black freshmen certainly seemed likely to bring in some new thinking. Brooks and his colleagues had broadened their search beyond conservative Catholic high schools and promising athletes. Holy Cross was now able to attract students who ranged from city kids with Afros and T-shirts to buttoned-up followers of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. On the whole, the new group was more radical than the students who had arrived a year earlier, and less interested in whether they would end up in law school than in using college as a way to explore their black identities. Ted Wells and his friends were also becoming more political and less satisfied with the status quo.
There were some tensions among the returning students. Bob DeShay was now living off campus as a senior, trying to have as little to do with Brooks and the BSU as possible. He had already alienated the black athletes with his caustic diatribes about their inflated egos and devotion to sports. “So tell me how running around with that ball is going to save the world, brother,” he would say to people like Eddie Jenkins. DeShay now had the black corridor to hate, too. “Congratulations on your resegregation!” he told Ted Wells. Only Clarence Thomas seemed to have a close relationship with DeShay, stemming in part from their shared Georgia background and from the fact that they often agreed with each other on black politics. Notwithstanding Thomas’s love of combat gear, neither of them was all that interested in raging against “the Man.” DeShay would later recall that he had decided it was more rewarding to hang out with his white hippie friends and smoke pot than deal with the earnest lot now living in the black corridor. “If you’re so black and proud, let’s have a watermelon party on parents’ weekend,” he said at one BSU meeting. “We’ll celebrate our heritage by sitting on a porch and spitting the seeds out. What do you say? That’ll show them how proud black folk like to live.”
To outsiders, though, the BSU projected an image of soli
darity, and the members all agreed that the bigger the black community, the better. In fact the number of incoming students wasn’t as high as the BSU had lobbied for. The previous year, in a meeting with Raymond Swords, Art Martin had told the president that the union expected “no less than fifty” new black students in the incoming class. “If Holy Cross doesn’t get these students, the Ivy League will,” he stated in an article written by Clarence Thomas for The Crusader.
Father Brooks was doing his best to deal with the escalating demands of the BSU. The group had asked Brooks and Swords for a black admissions officer, a transitional-year program to “rectify any inferior secondary school preparation,” a black studies curriculum, subscriptions to several black publications in the library, and a special “black meeting and reading room.” Swords, incredulous, asked Brooks if he thought they were being serious. Brooks responded that they were. He didn’t dismiss the demands as wishful thinking, or as a sign that the young men were becoming too emboldened from getting their way. Brooks saw the list as a clear indication that the students weren’t being accommodated.
A demonstration at Clark University in fall 1969.
Left to right: Clarence Thomas, Gil Hardy, Ted Wells
(center, in sunglasses), Stan Grayson (second from right).
Holy Cross still had a long way to go if it wanted to become a welcoming place for black students.
Swords didn’t like the give-and-take atmosphere that Brooks had encouraged. He felt that the rules and authority of the college were being challenged on a daily basis. He marveled at the audacity of students demanding special concessions in order to feel comfortable. Swords had lived through a war that had affected the lives of a large number of his peers; the world had been changing fast then, too, and he knew that nothing ever moved fast enough for young men. He didn’t mind the sense of urgency among the BSU members or among many of the other students on campus. What he disliked was the growing sense of entitlement.
Brooks reminded Swords that most of the black students had never dreamed of attending Holy Cross, because the college had little to entice them. Brooks had convinced these men to come, and the least the college owed them was a few concessions to help them adapt. But Swords was worried about the impact the growing list of perks for a small minority might have on other students or the alumni. A few professors had come to ask Swords whether he thought the black students could handle the workload; they were concerned about letting in more recruits when some of those who had enrolled in 1968 didn’t appear to have had the adequate academic training, discipline, ability, or interest to succeed in their studies. Brooks had responded that many of the black recruits were among the top in their class, and that a significant number of white freshmen also struggled and dropped out. The transition to college was rarely easy for anyone. Singling out the difficulties of only black students was fruitless, he argued, and unfair.
The tensions around race had shifted somewhat over the previous year. The anger that had followed King’s death had led to some meaningful efforts to address inequalities, at least at the college level. But more black students also meant more demands for teachers who looked like them and courses that reflected their experience. And greater numbers meant less pressure to conform. Before the previous term ended, one senior administrator had written to Brooks and Swords to say that he, for one, was convinced that the college would experience significant problems with the black students within the next year or so. Meanwhile, one sociology professor gave a speech to faculty in which he tried to explain the “totally alien” backgrounds of black students in relation to Holy Cross. “They come from ghetto surroundings; they have gone to ghetto schools, and they have breeded for themselves a ghetto mentality.” But some also shared Brooks’s view that the onus was more on the faculty than the students to adapt to the times. “The fact is that most of us do not know how to relate to the black students,” one Holy Cross education professor argued at an American Association of University Professors meeting. “We have to know something about the heroes and the causes of the black people, just as we know about our own heroes and our own causes.”
The mind-set of the black college student was the subject of much discussion, not just at Holy Cross but across the entire country. As more colleges made a concerted effort to admit black students and dealt with the resulting unrest on campus, academics began to study the values and goals of the new black undergraduate population. Black leaders were calling for the creation of a new curriculum aimed at creating a common understanding of black culture. Nathan Hare had been hired to form the first black studies program at San Francisco State University in 1968. He insisted that being black meant you had to be revolutionary and nationalistic. As he wrote in Newsweek in 1969, any program “which is not revolutionary and nationalistic is, accordingly, quite irrelevant.” Hare lasted only a few months on the job before being fired. Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that segregation—whether in studies or in residences—would likely leave students with a substandard education experience “foisted on them by an administration ready to buy peace at any price.”
The debate was fierce on campuses nationwide. Was it fair to subject black students to a body of knowledge that had been forged by centuries of white men? Should race be a factor in admissions? Was any acknowledgment of skin color condescending and, therefore, racist? How much of the burden of racial integration should fall on students? How much should an institution adapt to accommodate black students?
Brooks was skeptical about the many assumptions that intellectuals were making in trying to establish the black students’ collective mind-set. As he told one newspaper reporter in Worcester, the “freshmen we brought in measure up in all ways. They are strong personalities and have not folded under some tremendous psychological and social pressures.” If some of them came in wanting to be white, he added, that was no longer the case. “They are happy and quite proud they are black and they know they can have a positive effect in a college community.”
He fought to get black studies courses into the curriculum that fall, and succeeded in helping to add “Black Literature,” “Perspectives on Racism” in the theology department, “Black America” in the history department, and a rather dubiously titled economics course, “The Problem of Blacks and Other Minority Groups.” But Brooks refused to draw sweeping conclusions about race—a game that the black students themselves liked to play. It bothered him that so many people seemed intent on trying to define who “they” were, as if the experience of being a black college student could be reduced to one sentence.
Brooks told the trustees that, of the eighteen freshmen who had come in 1968, sixteen had radically improved their grade point averages between the fall and spring of their freshman years. One student went from a near-death 0.8 to 2.5, another from 1.8 to 3.1. He added that another young man had significantly improved his grades once he received a much-needed pair of eyeglasses.
Brooks suggested that the school do more research on the urban communities in which many of the black students had grown up. He argued that the research could be enlightening to all students, reminding the administration that education was supposed to be more than a path to life in a tree-lined subdivision. The aspirations of each Holy Cross student were varied, and the curriculum had to become more varied to accommodate them. As Brooks later wrote in The Crusader, “Must we continue to impose on the black man an educational package that is sealed and designed for those who plan to join the suburbanites?” It wasn’t enough to let in black students, he concluded. The school needed to change. “Is Holy Cross willing to take the measures necessary to make up for the deprivations suffered by many black students at the time of their admission to college?” he wrote. “Unless a genuine and sincere effort is made to remedy these deprivations, there is no social advantage to be found in admitting scores of black students and then exposing them to insensitive and possibly resentful professors who demand an academi
c performance comparable to that demanded of the more privileged students.”
Brooks placed priority on bringing in black faculty. He reached out to several academics, including Ogretta McNeil, whom he had met a few years earlier while she was doing a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Clark University. Although McNeil was teaching at nearby Assumption College, she had done her best to make the black students at Holy Cross feel welcome in Worcester by inviting them over for dinner parties at her home. McNeil remembered how lonely it had been for her as a single black mother with two little boys moving to Worcester from New Jersey in 1964. She knew that it would be just as bad, if not worse, for the college students. She admired what Brooks was trying to do at Holy Cross, and had met with him to talk about recruitment. In 1969 they began talking about whether she would be willing to teach at the college, too. The following year she came to Holy Cross as a visiting professor, and she joined the faculty full-time in 1971.
