by Diane Brady
Ed Jones was becoming more concerned about issues of social justice during his sophomore year and had started to express his views through a column that he had suggested writing for The Crusader. He had bought a typewriter and could be heard clacking away on it at all hours, writing pieces about the hypocrisy of people like black tennis star Arthur Ashe who “have mental miscarriages when they can’t play with the doomed whites of South Africa” or golfers like South Africa’s Gary Player deigning to “descend their ladders to make money for an American black college fund.”
Jones also channeled his discontent into protests; his willingness to go almost anywhere in support of a cause had helped him to strengthen his bonds with hallmates like Gordon Davis and Al Coleman. Every weekend there was a protest of some kind, from small gatherings over labor issues in Worcester to large antiwar marches in other cities. Jones felt invigorated and part of a community, if only for the duration of each march. When other men weren’t available to go, Jones began to head off to Clark University alone, where there always seemed to be a bus going to some demonstration. That fall he met a young woman from a neighboring college on a trip to Washington. He took her to his mother’s apartment one evening, hoping to surprise his mom with a visit. When they got there, his mother was still at work and his companion suggested that Jones leave a note. “She can’t read,” Jones had replied. The young woman was struck by how sad he looked as they walked out, leaving his mother with no sign that they’d ever been there.
Jones’s forays into the counterculture only went so far. The drug culture held little allure for him. His most direct exposure to marijuana was after a protest in Boston, when he, Coleman, and another student decided to walk the more than forty miles home. As the sun was coming up, a man stopped to offer them a ride and some pot. Jones got into the backseat, watching as the man lit a joint and passed it around. The smell alone had made him a bit nauseated. Drugs would never be his thing. The free love movement didn’t affect him, either, and Jones tended to avoid parties. On the few occasions he was dragged to one, he would stand alone, drinking soda or perhaps a beer while watching the others chat up women.
Jones met his first real girlfriend on one of his D.C. bus trips, a quiet white girl who was a commuter student at Anna Maria. Jones liked the fact that she shared his passion for ending the war and promoting civil rights, and he found her very attractive. She wasn’t the usual type he saw at demonstrations; she was conservative, in keeping with the mores of her Catholic girls’ college. Although she seemed to enjoy his company, their courtship was a tentative one. He never told the men that he was dating someone, never mind a white woman. Moreover, as the year progressed, it felt more like a friendship than a romance.
Stan Grayson had been working hard to raise his game as the basketball season began that fall. He had a wider social circle than most of the men on the corridor, and was spending as much time with white students as with black students; he didn’t always sit at the de facto “black table” at Kimball. Grayson wasn’t immune to racial tensions; he simply tried to ignore them. But his coach, Jack Donohue, sometimes got to him. An article had recently appeared in Sports Illustrated in which Lew Alcindor recalled Donohue, then his high school coach, accusing him of acting “just like a nigger!” The piece had been circulating all over campus.
Donohue had built a reputation for himself as a father figure to inner-city boys. The Sports Illustrated piece tarnished that image. It also diminished the pride Holy Cross felt at having hired the coach who had shepherded Alcindor to greatness. But the article hadn’t surprised Grayson. Even during his first year on the team, when he figured he was just getting used to a new coach, he saw signs of bias in Donohue.
Donohue had a wonderful wit and was never short on stories for every occasion. But he also seemed to associate certain traits—being late, not putting in the effort—with being black; he referred to the late starting time of games or practices as “Negro time.” Grayson found the slang especially insulting because he prided himself on never being late.
Donohue pulled Grayson aside before a game in October to address the accusations in the magazine piece. Despite Donohue’s brazen attitude, he was sheepish when he told Grayson that important elements of the article were inaccurate. Donohue was clearly embarrassed when explaining that he had called Alcindor a “nigger” once because the young player was being lazy. “You know what I meant,” he said. Grayson wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Sure, coach,” said Grayson. “I know what you meant.” They never spoke of the matter again.
Stan Grayson during a Crusaders game
The team was finding it hard to thrive under the larger-than-life Donohue, and it hadn’t performed as well as expected. Grayson certainly didn’t think he was playing at the top of his game. At six-foot-four, he was a relatively small man for many positions, but Donohue kept trying to play him as if he were another version of the seven-foot-two Alcindor. Some of the players balked when the coach reacted to their missteps with ridicule, and many got used to hearing Donohue yell, “Who the hell told you this was a democracy?” if challenged on decisions. While Donohue’s sharp wit and brusque style kept things lively, some players felt it did little to build their own confidence or the team’s morale.
Grayson had been dating a woman from Detroit who was attending the University of Michigan, but the distance was too great and they had split up. On a trip to Washington with Ted Wells, he met Vicki Mitchell, the younger sister of Ted’s girlfriend, Nina. Grayson really liked her and discovered to his delight that Vicki was attending Anna Maria College, just outside Worcester. It wasn’t often that he met women who lived close to Holy Cross; the options around Worcester were limited, in large part by the men themselves. There was an unspoken rule that black men should date within the black community. When Clarence Thomas once saw a black girl walking with a white man on campus, a hallmate recalled he did an exaggerated double take and joked that the revolution might be going too far. The BSU even staged a mock trial for a black man dating a white woman. When the man was judged guilty, they broke his Afro comb as punishment. It was all meant in jest, but the message to the members was clear. When some BSU members later decided to draft a missive on “the black man’s philosophy,” dating black women was placed at the top of the list. Rule #1 stated that “the Black man must respect the Black woman. The Black man’s woman is the most beautiful of all women.” After some other rules that spoke to the black man’s superiority and his need for separation, the members went back to the subject of dating with Rule #9: “The Black man does not want or need the white woman. The Black man’s history shows that the white woman is the cause of his failure to be the true Black man.”
What unified the BSU in 1969, though, was war, not women. While Jaffe Dickerson was recuperating from hepatitis that fall, he learned that his older brother’s jaw had been blown off in Vietnam. Eddie Jenkins’s brother had called him on a handset from the Khe Sanh combat base and told him that every time he put up radar, it got shot down. Muhammad Ali, who had been convicted of draft evasion, stripped of his heavyweight title, and banned from boxing in 1967 for his refusal to serve in Vietnam, had become a hero after famously stating that “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” Free on bail as he appealed his conviction, Ali had been touring colleges around the country to speak out against the war.
At BSU meetings, the impending draft lottery on December 1 was an increasingly emotional issue. President Nixon had promised to end the war in Vietnam and review the Selective Service System in the hope of moving to an all-volunteer army. In the meantime, though, Nixon had signed an amendment to have conscription determined by random selection. It was the first draft lottery since 1942. To address complaints that too many poor black men were sent to serve, there would be no college deferral. Everyone born between 1944 and 1950 would be eligible, with the date of birth used to determine the order that people would be called for induction.
The event, held at the S
elective Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., was broadcast via radio and TV. On the corridor everyone gathered to listen to the results. Only one of the black students from the class of ’72, Stephen Collins, was too young to make the cut. The others couldn’t afford to go to Canada to dodge the draft, nor did they have the contacts to get them into the National Guard. If they were chosen, they would be put on a plane and sent to fight.
Each day of the year was written down on a piece of paper and rolled into plain plastic capsules that were then placed in a large glass container. There were a total of 366 capsules—an extra one for men who had a leap-year birthday. Someone in the corridor put on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On as the men gathered together to watch as Congressman Alexander Pirnie of New York reached in to pull out the first capsule. All the men had put five dollars into a pot. Whoever had their birth date called first would win the jackpot.
The first capsule chosen contained the date September 14. The men were relieved to find that it wasn’t anyone’s birthday. Nine more capsules were opened and everyone in the corridor cheered as the dates passed by. With each date they could hear whoops and yells from other parts of the building.
Then the voice over the radio read out “August 31,” and the room fell silent. That was Eddie Jenkins’s birthday. Jenkins had won the jackpot. He tried to laugh but he felt tears welling up in his eyes. He didn’t want to die in a jungle somewhere, but with his No. 11 standing, it looked certain that he would have to go.
The cheerful mood was fading fast. Ed Jones was No. 24. He thought of the forced marching he had endured for years in the Washington High School Cadet Corps. Like Ted Wells and other young men from the capitol, Ed Jones went to high school at 7:45 A.M. twice a week to perform one-hour drills in all the military movements—about-face, column left, column right, port arms, right shoulder, left shoulder, parade rest. He knew the military alphabet—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie—and the fact that the M-1 rifle weighed nine and a half pounds. Maybe that would help him in Vietnam.
Clarence Thomas’s birthday came up as No. 109, while Stan Grayson was No. 158. Only Ted Wells looked like a long shot at 272.
Anyone whose birthday came up in the first two hundred capsules stood a strong chance of being called to report for duty and would likely find himself assigned to the ground army, where much of the fighting and most of the fatalities took place. Jenkins began to have nightmares, wondering when his letter would arrive.
Brooks understood the students’ fears: Although he had volunteered for service, he knew the difference between wanting to fight and being forced to fight. When some of the men with low numbers had come to see Brooks after the lottery, he had felt at a loss as to how to comfort them. There was nothing that he or anyone else at Holy Cross could really do. As long as the United States continued to play a role in the Vietnam conflict, the country would need a steady supply of young men to keep up the fight. All across the campus, a large portion of the student body now had a much more personal reason to protest the war.
NINE
The Walkout
By late 1969, antiwar protests had become an unavoidable part of campus life. While some students took an active role in the ROTC and supported American efforts to defeat North Vietnam’s communist forces, a growing number were angry and desperate for the United States to pull out. Opposition to the war was fueled by the rising body count of American dead and reports of the mass murders of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese women, children, and elderly villagers by U.S. troops in what became known as the My Lai Massacre. Soldiers came home and spoke of abuses; journalists went with their cameras and documented the horrors of the war on film. Nationwide, students were looking for any opportunity to make themselves heard on the war or on any matter of social injustice.
Holy Cross was ripe terrain for anyone looking to protest the war. The college had a long-standing ROTC presence and was a popular recruiting spot for the military as well as companies with military contracts. The steady stream of recruitment visits gave antiwar protesters easy targets for demonstrations. In the fall of 1969, the Holy Cross chapter of Students for a Democratic Society staged a “talkathon” when Marine recruiters came to campus. They chanted so loudly that the officers were unable to interview potential recruits. While tensions were high, most of the demonstrations passed without incident. During a march to protest an insurer’s involvement in a controversial urban renewal project, police met the protesters at the company’s headquarters in full riot gear with dogs and reinforcements. The police ordered the students back to campus, and they left without any real arguments. None of them wanted to go to jail or get into real trouble.
Brooks firmly believed in the students’ right to protest. Occasionally he even joined them. At one October event, a large group of students gathered on the library steps to call for a moratorium on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Brooks gave a speech in support of the students, and then he and Swords held an impromptu mass for everyone who showed up.
Minor campus confrontations continued throughout the fall of 1969. The SDS morphed into the Revolutionary Students Union (RSU), and the new group devoted much of its effort to going after the ROTC. They argued that the volunteer organization was an especially toxic force in the military machine because it helped to train officers who would then give orders to men who’d been drafted into battle against their will.
On December 1, the faculty senate took a vote to state that, among other things, “advocates of no cause will be permitted to deny freedom to anyone with whom they may disagree.” Moreover, when it came to career recruiting, the campus “must remain open to the representatives of business firms and agencies of government which enjoy a legitimate place in American society.”
The RSU vowed to continue with its protests in spite of the vote, especially after learning that its threat of a protest had prompted the cancellation of a December 3 visit by the Central Intelligence Agency. Next up was a General Electric Company recruitment visit on December 10. Protesters saw that as an opportunity to log yet another victory. The RSU announced that it planned to interrupt the GE visit in support of an ongoing strike by GE workers and to protest the company’s role as a major defense contractor that manufactured products like the Minigun, a helicopter-mounted weapon that could fire up to four thousand rounds per minute.
The RSU organizers approached Ted Wells and Art Martin to see if the Black Student Union wanted to join the protest, since GE had been accused of discriminating against African Americans. Wells was skeptical; he argued that the BSU should save its energy for battles that were more directly related to black issues, but he agreed to take the matter to a vote. The black students met on December 9 and, after some debate, agreed that the union should stay neutral. Anyone who wanted to join the protest would have to go on his own.
The next morning, two GE recruiters arrived on campus. Holy Cross officials met them in the parking lot and took them straight to Room 320 of Hogan Hall. Within half an hour, a few dozen students had gathered to interrupt the job interviews. When the first senior tried to enter the room for an interview, he was turned away by a chain of interlocked arms. The same thing happened for two other students, who left amid a chorus of voices chanting “Workers, yes! GE, no!” Don McClain, the dean of students, was livid. He stood before the crowd and vowed to take the matter to the College Judicial Board for further action if the protesters didn’t disband. When the students ignored him, McClain, frustrated, asked the recruiters to leave.
Within an hour, John Shay, the vice president for student affairs, read a statement on behalf of the college, noting that “the students who participated in [the] obstruction of the General Electric Company’s career counseling appointment did so with the full knowledge that such obstruction was in direct defiance of an explicitly stated college policy on demonstrations.” He added that anyone charged would have their cases heard before the College Judicial Board, which would have the authority to suspend or expel them. Later that day, members of McCla
in’s staff made what they later called a “visual identification” of sixteen students out of the fifty-four who had been at the demonstration. They put the names of the identified protesters on a list of students to be charged with violating college rules. Most of the students on the list were activist organizers who had made a name for themselves at Holy Cross. Four of the sixteen identified students were black. They weren’t regular protesters; they were merely, as McClain put it, “highly identifiable.” There had been five black students in total at the demonstration.
