Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  As the band rolled out of town on the tour bus, they couldn’t believe what just happened. The musicians had assumed that the show would end in a “ball of fire.” That night, major rioting hit more than one hundred American cities, with places like Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and D.C. bearing the brunt. Dozens died, twenty thousand arrests were made, and damage estimates reached $45 million. In Boston, by contrast, the disturbances were surprisingly minor, especially for a city with so much racial tension. Marva Whitney would later say that Brown’s performance that night did not come without a cost. “I know [James] went through something mentally. He knew whether it went down wrong, bad, or indifferent, whatever, he knew that he would get blamed for it. To tell you the truth, I was glad when we got out of there.”

  On Monday morning, recovering from a 103-degree fever, Tom Atkins heard that the city might be wriggling out of its promised payout to Brown. The councilman threatened to publicize the news if Mayor White didn’t make good on his word. But White wasn’t exaggerating; the city didn’t have the funds to write out a simple treasury check. The mayor approached the so-called Vault—a group of powerful, old-Boston moneymen who, behind the scenes, had been fixing potential catastrophes since the late 1950s, when the city was on the verge of bankruptcy. They balked upon hearing White’s unusual request for a payout to Brown.

  “Well, the city is at stake here,” he told them flatly, “so whatever you think you can do.”

  By the time he walked back to City Hall, a sum of money had been extended to deal with the issue. Some reports say far less than sixty grand was earmarked for the singer; according to J. Anthony Lukas, the city had pressured the Garden to waive its share of the receipts that night, which reduced the city’s bill to Brown to $15,000. A close Brown associate, Charles Bobbit, claims they were never paid more than $10,000. In Bobbit’s telling, when he told Brown about the missing money, the singer shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, we’re doing a good thing.” Mayor White, in a 2008 documentary, repeats the old figure: “It was worth the 60K.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT SPRING AND SUMMER, people came together en masse: in a stadium in Roxbury, on the Common, by Arlington Street Church and Marsh Chapel. Faced with the rising body count in Vietnam and assassinations at home, the public assembled to grieve, meditate, connect. On the evening of April 4, Robert F. Kennedy had memorialized King to an Indianapolis crowd while on the campaign trail; two months later, he too was gone. As political scientist Ross Baker later noted, “the two killings seemed to make a compelling argument to many that the peaceful path was a dead end and that the resort to violence was now acceptable.” Eerie headlines (“DID KING EARLIER HAVE PREMONITION OF DEATH?”) pumped up the terror. On The Tonight Show, Truman Capote told Johnny Carson that the turmoil was part of an occult plan to overthrow the American government.

  For over a year, students had regularly gathered in Boston Common to protest the war and support the civil rights movement, but that summer something strange happened: A large contingent of young people simply started living there. “In Hippievilles around the country,” the Globe reported in June, “the word is out: ‘See You in Boss-Town This Summer.’” The article predicted that dropouts would be migrating from all over the country to grab a piece of public lawn—an accurate forecast.* “As the hot weather sets in, they frolic in the Frog Pond or listen to rock concerts by such groups as the Ultimate Spinach,” Time reported. In June the hippies declared they wanted to clean up the Common and its surroundings, so the Parks Department issued rakes, shovels, and a nearby lot where they could grow vegetables. They grew marijuana instead.

  For Mayor White and his trusted aide Barney Frank, the hippies on the Common were fairly low on their list of priorities, but soon, phone calls from freaked-out parents captured their attention. The flip side of the story developing on the Common was a rash of young runaways from the suburbs. In the summer of 1968, if a teenager ran away in the Boston area, they were likely to end up at the Common or up on Fort Hill. “There was a cult issue [up on Fort Hill], with children disappearing,” Frank says, but he was wise enough to recognize that direct police intervention there would only galvanize a group like that (it certainly worked out that way in regard to the Avatar obscenity trials). Instead, Frank addressed that trouble spot by having a private meeting with Fort Hill Community member Lewis Crampton, encouraging him to consider turning young runaways away from the Family.*

  As the Common’s full-time residents grew, the mayor instituted a midnight curfew, which took effect on June 28. “The hippies,” White said, “are no longer a novelty.” Barney Frank hired a kind of “hippie whisperer,” Dr. Stanley Klein, to be a full-time presence on the Common, both to try to understand the community’s way of life and to offer help to those who needed it. After a June 29 protest of the curfew erupted into violence, Judge Elijah Adlow—fresh off sparring over the artistic merits of the Avatar newspaper—began sentencing squatters, explaining that he would not allow the Common to become a flophouse. “You’ve made a disaster area out of what used to be the most beautiful part of Boston,” he told a courtroom full of longhairs. These kids were merely “looking for something,” the defense insisted; Adlow told them they weren’t going to find it at the corner of Charles and Beacon.

  The media latched on to the Summer of the Hippie as a lighter alternative to the coverage of the other major youth story unfolding at that time: protesting the Vietnam War. Since 1964, the draft had come to resemble a lottery of death, plucking young men out of their communities, dropping them into danger a world away. More than eleven thousand U.S. servicemen had died in 1967, a tally that ’68 was set to top. The brutal imagery of the Tet Offensive, piped into American homes early that year, gave even the staunchest hawks pause. Belief in the illegality and immorality of the war moved from the fringes toward the mainstream. “For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” CBS anchor Walter Cronkite told his viewers. “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.”

  Those under twenty-six hoping to dodge the draft could do it legally, by hiring lawyers to find loopholes, or illegally, by faking an undesirable condition or simply not showing up. Fort Hill’s Michael Kindman put together a strategy based on stories of community members who had done it before. “I woke up and took a small dose of LSD to make sure I would be a little disorientated and uninhibited,” he wrote. “I volunteered that I was both gay and a communist, and was unresponsive to the psychological interviewer. He made it clear I was not the kind of person they were looking for.” For musician Ted Myers, of the band Chamaeleon Church, staying awake on speed for a solid week before his Selective Service physical did the trick. He told the examiner he wanted a gun to kill some people. “They called me weirdo and faggot,” he says. “The docs didn’t even make me drop my pants.”

  Boston became an epicenter for Vietnam War resistance, perhaps because of its role as the birthplace of the American Revolution, or its proximity to Concord, where Henry David Thoreau had written on civil disobedience a century earlier. “You could just feel it,” one activist remarked. “There was something in the bricks.” At a protest on the Common, an older attendee declared what marketers at MGM Records, DJs on WBCN, and the prognosticators on Fort Hill had been claiming all year: “Boston and New England will once again be the beginning point and inspiration for a second and badly needed American Revolution.”

  Among the most passionate antiwar activists were area professors, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn at Boston University. “I don’t believe we owe loyalty to a government that lies to us,” Zinn, a World War II veteran, told a crowd at the Common. “I do believe we owe loyalty to our fellow Americans who are in danger of being killed by the incompetence of this government.”

  Ray Mungo was one of many BU student
s under the sway of Zinn. “While other teachers might sign a petition, Howard would join the sit-in,” Mungo says. “He put his body on the line.” Zinn was a close mentor to the group of BU resisters, who often had breakfast at his house. Short and bespectacled, Mungo seemed wise beyond his years, and made vivid, moving appearances on What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? He deluged Avatar with letters until they finally put the dynamic demonstrator on the cover.* His editorial direction at BU News was so inflammatory that the university threatened to withdraw its financial support for the troublemaking paper—“the nation’s only college paper with its own reportorial staff in Vietnam,” Mungo noted. With his friend Marshall Bloom, he founded the Liberation News Service in 1967—a kind of antiwar AP wire service, one that could “reach millions of readers without having any power and very little money,” Mungo says. “We made everyone a media.”

  By the summer of 1968, the Liberation News Service became enough of a federal annoyance to warrant an infiltration by members of the FBI. The undercover agents divided and conquered the organization by writing and distributing a finger-pointing manifesto full of insider information entited “And Who Got the Cookie Jar?” In fact, many underground and student newspapers in Boston received visits from the FBI in the late sixties, including Avatar. When feds visited the office at 37 Rutland Street, Avatar editor Wayne Hansen let them search the location freely and they left soon afterward. Outside, Hansen found the agents trying to get into their own car with a coat hanger, their keys locked inside. He walked over to the scene with his camera, but the agents begged him not to take pictures, which he obliged. By the time the FBI arrived at BU News, word had gotten out. Alex Jack, an editor at the paper, had prepared some materials in preparation for their visit. “Thank you for coming. I just have a few questions,” Jack told the agents, and handed them a three-page questionnaire. As they left in a huff, other students followed them to their car, pretending to take notes on their every move and muttering, “Ah, yes, very interesting.”

  It was a brutal summer for the resistance. In May, four of the Boston Five—local men who had been charged with aiding draft resisters—were found guilty of conspiracy, in a trial that the prosecuting attorney described as “more exciting than sky-diving”; now it appeared that the most trusted adviser of early parenthood, Dr. Benjamin Spock, was headed to prison. In early June, a “weird and dirty-looking” young couple walked into Boston’s Selective Service office and poured black paint into file cabinets, making portions of the database unreadable. They were charged and found guilty in October. In July, the stabbing of two servicemen on the Common went down late one Tuesday night, marking a turning point in what was previously considered a fairly lighthearted phenomenon. When chanting hippies disrupted Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s downtown presidential rally in late September, Mayor White’s patience finally ran out. The media claimed he ordered a “police war” on the protesters; arrests piled up, and the Common’s grass was conveniently scheduled to be torn up for “routine maintenance.” The Summer of the Hippie was coming to an end. By the time the Common curfew was found to be illegal in Suffolk Superior Court in December 1968, the cold weather had made the issue moot.

  James Brown’s Boston Garden show certainly prevented an immediate wave of violence from sweeping over the city, but it was not as if racial tension simply evaporated. Mayor White’s sigh of relief lasted approximately a day. On Sunday, April 7, the United Front, a coalition of nearly every black organization in the city, was organized and ratified. On Monday, five thousand people convened at White Stadium in Roxbury—no whites allowed. United Front representatives read aloud twenty-one demands—most strikingly, a call for immediate black ownership and black leadership at all businesses and schools in their communities, as well as renaming schools and other institutions after heroes of the movement.

  The language was startling: “As of 12:00 A.M. Monday April 8 1968 all white owned and white controlled businesses will be closed until further notice, while the transfer of the ownership of these businesses to the Black community is being negotiated through the United Front.” Lastly, the UF stated that the mayor needed to make $100 million available to the black community.

  The demands incensed Mayor White. He voiced his support for the NAACP’s recommendations for Boston, which had been crafted and delivered after the NAACP and UF separated their efforts in the wake of King’s death. Councilman Tom Atkins was upset by Mayor White’s swift rejection of the United Front, adding, “Neither this mayor nor any other mayor can decide what part of the black community he is going to deal with, and for the mayor to say that he will receive suggestions from one group and not from another is the epitome of stupidity.” Less than a week ago they had been applauding each other onstage at the Boston Garden; now they were trading barbs in the press. The Globe, reporting on why the UF felt justified in their gigantic ask, noted that “some black intellectuals compare Roxbury to a colony, where the economy is controlled from without by a colonial government.”

  Over in Franklin Park, whose greenery covered parts of Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and Roxbury, “the American flag was lowered and the Black Nationalist flag was raised,” Skip Ascheim reported in Avatar. “Keep your eyes open,” Avatar announced. “The first phase in the liberation of Roxbury has begun.”

  * * *

  • • •

  UP ON THE HILL, the Mel Lyman Family braced for what might happen in Roxbury after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Even as Avatar ran stories blasting institutionalized racism, there was friction between the Fort Hill Community and residents of the predominantly black neighborhood, where Lyman had put down stakes in 1966. For over a year before King’s death, the Family posted armed guards to send a message that they weren’t going anywhere. “The Hill was locked down that April,” a neighbor, Alison Burke, recalls. “The police basically left our part of Roxbury to vigilante control.”

  In the early summer of 1968, the group of black men who patrolled parts of Roxbury, often running into Lyman’s Fort Hill patrol, suddenly had an official name: the Black Panthers. Founded two years earlier in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party focused on monitoring and challenging police brutality. Soon FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover would call Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale’s volunteer army of young black men in leather jackets and berets “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The party’s fifth chapter opened in Boston.

  Delano Farrar, a Northeastern University student, opened two Panther headquarters in Roxbury. The group plastered the South End and Roxbury with posters, gave Avatar street hawkers a run for their money with its own newspaper, started a breakfast program for kids, and opened a free health clinic. “The Panthers call their breakfast program ‘socialism,’” the Globe wrote. “Others consider it charity. Still others consider it indoctrination.” “We are twenty-four-hour revolutionaries dedicated to the needs of black people,” Farrar declared in response. Their health clinic—a trailer stationed on Tremont Street in the South End—was soon riddled with bullets—shot by local cops, the Panthers claimed.

  At some point Boston’s Black Panthers became interested in all the white people living on Fort Ave. Terrace, acting like Highland Park was their private property. From the Panther perspective, these folk-music-loving weirdos ought to move to a different part of the city and return the neighborhood to the black community. Jessie Benton recalled the community receiving a message that the Panthers were planning to set fire to their houses to clear them out of Fort Hill. Benton would sit inside and “make sure they could see the glint off the rifle on the window.”* Lyman sent out word that he’d rather negotiate, but on the appointed day he sent his wife in his place. “It was a political move, of course, that Mel sent a woman and didn’t come himself,” Jessie Benton recalls. “There were several of the men with me who were all packing.” Nevertheless, a truce was forged, and tensions between the two groups subsided.

  * * *


  • • •

  AS A KIND OF INDIRECT RESPONSE to the United Front’s twenty-one demands, Mayor White earmarked $56 million to aid Boston’s black community in May 1968. The UF promptly blasted the measure as an insult to the black community, planned with zero input from the people it meant to help. The full effects of White’s May ’68 decisions would take years to play out, but each remaining month of that turbulent year would contain its own set of racial confrontations, many of them unexpected victories for the civil rights movement. In late April, black students at Boston University seized an administration building to call attention to the fourteen urgent demands they had for the school. After a twelve-hour standoff, the administration conceded to all of them—most based around the promise of more black students and scholarships at BU—except for the request to rename a building after Martin Luther King.

  And in the wake of airing the James Brown concert, WGBH replaced What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? with Say Brother. “Included will be news from the ghetto, interviews with black people,” the WGBH press release read, “and a forum for all shades of Negro opinion.” The tone-deaf description belied the show’s outspoken content, such as the roundtable in which a local artist said, “There is great talent in the black community—we know this because white people are constantly stealing everything we have and packaging it and calling it whiteness.”

  Say Brother was hosted by James Spruill, a Brandeis graduate and actor who had lived with Mel Lyman, Charles Giuliano, and John Kostick in Waltham in the early sixties. Spruill would also found a theater company for black artists in the fall of that year. “There must be a black theater for the black community, our own voices in our own playwrights, and the more black rage the better,” he told an interviewer. “Black people refuse to go around not being recognized anymore.”