Experiment in Black and White Common Ground: a Turbulent Decade

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

History is made by the famous, but it is endured by the anonymous--ordinary men and women who see themselves as victims of malign forces. That is the guiding principle of much populist scholarship, and it defines the approach taken by J. Anthony Lukas, a Pulitzer-prizewinning former New York Times correspondent, in his story of Boston's public school desegregation by court order in 1974.

That social goal was achieved at the cost of great disruption: the inner-city whites, many of Irish or Italian descent, resented what they viewed as upper- class suburban values imposed on them. Black children were unprepared for the surge in hostility, and the schools were turned into fortresses. As Lukas dramatically illustrates, small pieces of neighborhood turf became battlefields, while children's chances for self-improvement slipped away. The travail of Boston's leaders was amply reported at the time, but Lukas' account focuses on the impoverished participants in the social experiment, black and white.

For a time it seems the city has gone crazy: mobs of mothers flail at policemen, neighbors battle neighbors, young vandals hurl epithets and rocks and sometimes fire bombs. Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, who issues the order to integrate, is harassed by death threats. Mayor Kevin White watches his political standing disintegrate on the eve of his intended run for the presidency. Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship sees his employees threatened, even shot at, as the paper goes after the story. Louise Day Hicks, the city council member who became the earth mother of the antibusing forces, stands by helplessly as her movement turns savage. Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, Archbishop of Boston, perceived as an outsider because of his Portuguese background, inherits the role of the late beloved Richard Cardinal Cushing, who had a gift for defusing conflict. Uncomfortably, Medeiros defends desegregation, aware that his stand is alienating many conservative Roman Catholics.

The author shrewdly uses the dilemmas of leadership as counterpoint to three narratives of Bostonians who suffered through the school battles. The Twymons are a fatherless, churchgoing black family of seven, dependent on public assistance. Alice McGoff is an Irish Catholic widow of a blue-collar worker; she and her seven children live in public housing in the ethnically isolated Charlestown section. Colin and Joan Diver are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, motivated by liberal compassion. They see themselves and their two sons as "urban pioneers" in the integrated South End, the husband working in city and state government, the wife directing a community-minded foundation.

The women interest the author most: Alice McGoff, with a fierce sense of pride and devotion; Rachel Twymon, afflicted with lupus, passionately determined to work her way up from welfare; Joan Diver, devoted to self-denial and sacrifice. Each has reason to believe that her children are being victimized by busing. Cassandra Twymon, 14, shipped into white Charlestown, cannot abide the abuse and loneliness, and her bright academic future dims. In the city's atmosphere of strife, her brother Frederick backslides into crime. Billy and Lisa McGoff become disruptive students at Charlestown High because they believe the institution will cease to exist once "TLWC"--The Last White Class--enters its senior year. Brad Diver loses his opportunity to ^ attend an unstructured, experimental elementary school when busing transforms its student body and curriculum.

These stories are more than ten years old, but in Lukas' hands they still have the power to move. No reader, no matter what his political or social views, can fail to be affected by the Irish Catholic family, declining into an acrimony that leaves all of its members diminished; by the black family, breaking up in despair; or by the white liberals, who in the end give up on the South End, retreating to a Victorian house in the suburbs.

Manifestly, Lukas means these stories to be paradigms. Are they the only possible paradigms, the inevitable, universal results of busing? The author's careful choice of characters seems to imply that they are. The book ends in the late '70s, and thus omits both the continuing signs of racism and the counterbalancing elevation of Boston politics, notably the 1983 mayoral race in which both candidates denounced racial hostility.

Still, if this oversize volume cannot be considered the last word in Boston's struggle with the law, it can be appraised as a model of thoroughness and balance. Lukas well knows Emerson's dictum that there is properly no history, only biography. When Colin Diver chases a mugger who battered a black woman outside his front door, when Alice McGoff debates with herself whether she can respect a Catholic priest who is a "pro-buser," when Rachel Twymon's sister hears rocks smash through her windows night after night, the story is larger than three families, and larger than Boston. As a narrative of people's repeated losses of faith, above all the faith that they can shape and control their lives, Common Ground explains what once seemed incomprehensible, and persuades the reader that to understand is indeed to forgive.