Common Ground (104 page)

The boycott, the gunshots, the hijackings and threats were alarming evidence that the Globe was terribly out of touch with part of its community. That fall Bob Phelps submitted a memo to Davis Taylor analyzing the newspaper’s dilemma. “The
Globe
does not know the people and the neighborhoods of Boston the way it should,” he wrote. “We are part of the establishment that has lost close touch with the people that we used to have. There are others in Boston who have also lost that close touch—the business and professional community. It’s time for all of us to learn more about our neighbors.”

Soon readers got their first intimation of the debate splitting the
Globe
’s executive ranks. On October 12, Crocker Snow expressed in a column some of the doubts he had voiced in memos to Winship and Davis Taylor. Opening with a lyrical description of ducks silhouetted against a scarlet sunset near his North Shore home, he noted that “twenty miles south as a duck flies, the same setting sun glints off the hoods of burning cars at Mission Hill and the blue plastic riot helmets of the TPF…. It is all in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy, like a horrible quicksand drawing the city down.” His portrait of a city straining in the yoke of an unworkable court order was hardly calculated to ingratiate him with Tom Winship. Placed in the front office as an advocate for the editorial outlook, Crocker seemed now to be lining up with the business side. That evening Winship wrote him a note: “I thought the first thing you learned in journalism school was to substantiate your charges. The kind of patent generality included here is worse than nothing.”

One line in Crocker’s column which particularly irritated Winship was a suggestion that opponents of busing were appealing to a “higher moral calling, a personal one, like the war resisters and draft evaders [whom the liberals] cheered all the way to Sweden.” That was a persistent theme in the
Globe
’s painful reappraisal that fall: how—some in-house critics asked—could a newspaper which so enthusiastically supported civil disobedience against Southern segregation and the Vietnam War condemn Boston’s mothers for using similar techniques against a court order they considered unjust? As the staff debated, Bob Phelps had a reporter put the question to sixties activists, who proved similarly divided. “God, it’s terribly hard to judge these women,” replied Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, who had spent two nights in a St. Augustine jail in 1964. “I still think that what Martin Luther King said was right—that you could disobey the laws of the land if you had to, if you did so openly, and were prepared to take the punishment.” But Jonathan Kozol, who had gained national attention in 1967 with his indictment of Boston’s schools, said,
“We’re seeing today not civil disobedience in its classic sense—moral action taken by choice, driven by love, devoid of fear—but mob terror and decades of miseducation, stirred by demagogues, preplanned by those who feed on hate.”

This, in turn, raised the troubling issue of class. Some critics contended that in passionately supporting middle-class draft resisters, the
Globe
had failed to note that it was working-class youths who fought—and died—in Vietnam. Now those same observers argued that, in vehemently backing Garrity’s busing order, the paper was once more putting the burden on those least prepared to bear it.

One
Globe
man who rarely overlooked class was Mike Barnicle. Cultivating a Breslinesque rhetoric (“He was of politics, this Patrick J. McDonough. He was Irish. He was Catholic. He was Democrat. He was human”) and his own brand of pugnacity, Barnicle loved to attack the establishment, particularly such symbols of Yankee privilege as Harvard, the First National Bank, orange Volvos, Earth Shoes, and wine lists. There was a certain irony in all this, for Barnicle himself was anything but proletarian—for years he lived in the suburbs, drove foreign cars, hobnobbed with Cambridge literati. But one of his suburban friends was Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and author, who had been pondering the class dimensions of busing. In mid-October, Barnicle did a lengthy interview with Coles, who boldly defied liberal orthodoxy. “The busing is a scandal,” Coles said. “I do not think that busing should be imposed like this on working-class people exclusively. It should cross these lines and people in the suburbs should share it…. The ultimate reality is the reality of class. And to talk about [busing] only in terms of racism is to miss the point…. [Working-class whites and blacks] are both competing for a very limited piece of the pie, the limits of which are being set by the larger limits of class which allow them damn little, if anything.”

Tom Winship—who agonized over his paper’s suburban orientation and supported the notion of metropolitan busing—devoted the entire op-ed page to Coles’s interview, stirring up a storm of protest in liberal circles. Yet, regarding the city through thick panes of bulletproof glass,
Globe
editors saw little choice but to seek an understanding with the white working class. In mid-October, a curious item began appearing regularly: “The Boston
Globe
wants to receive suggestions and ideas as well as information about events and incidents related to the city’s wide-ranging school busing program…. All letters will be read by a
Globe
editor. The information will be considered in the paper’s coverage of this complex and controversial subject.” Bob Phelps and assistant executive editor Jack Driscoll visited South Boston, Charlestown, and Dorchester for “coffee klatches” with parents, while Tom Winship invited ROAR’s Virginia Sheehy to lunch, then published two of her feisty pronouncements on the op-ed page.

In the following months, the
Globe
intervened still more directly, using its power in a determined effort to ease the city’s agony. Bob Phelps and Tom Winship held off-the-record sessions with Judge Garrity. Healy and Winship
called on Cardinal Medeiros, urging him to mobilize the “moderate Catholic middle.” Winship lunched with attorneys for the black plaintiffs, suggesting that they accept the Masters’ Plan. And at one critical juncture, Winship telephoned Kevin White to propose a city-sponsored Procession Against Violence. When the Mayor accepted the suggestion, the
Globe
—without disclosing its own role in the matter—urged Bostonians to turn out for what “could be the most important show of faith and unity this city has ever witnessed.” Two days later, the Mayor appointed Davis Taylor to a thirteen-member Committee on Violence “to delve into the causes of racial violence and find ways to reduce the hostility.”

Despite the
Globe
’s best efforts, the violence only intensified, drawing the paper further into the contradictions of its “balance” policy. Once, when a white man was dragged from his car and severely beaten by a gang of black youths, the
Globe
buried its three-paragraph account on an inside page. Almost immediately, the switchboard lit up with outraged calls, many of them noting that, two weeks before, the
Globe
had given banner headlines to a similar attack by white youths on a black man. The
Globe
responded with severity, demoting the responsible editor, publishing an abject
mea culpa
on page one: “The
Globe
’s policy is to report the news as fully and fairly as possible, without manipulating or slanting of any kind. But there can be many a slip between policy and practice. And this is what happened here. Poor judgment prevailed … and it cannot be excused.” Yet this merely drew a salvo from the other camp, which charged the
Globe
with “exaggerating black violence.”

In its frantic efforts to offend no one, the
Globe
somehow managed to offend everyone. Gradually the clamor from all sides took its toll. Skittish and defensive, the paper retreated to a mechanical evenhandedness, keeping a running count of column inches devoted to “pro-black” and “pro-white” stories, trying to keep them approximately equal. Afraid that its news judgment wouldn’t be trusted, it no longer sought to reach a consensus on each day’s events, relying instead on a thorough recapitulation of the police blotter. Diligent in its collection of data, meticulous about covering all angles, it trusted that somehow the truth would emerge from the welter of fact.

On May 5, 1975, the
Globe
was rewarded with the most prestigious of all journalism awards, the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Meritorious Public Service, given for “massive and balanced coverage of the Boston school desegregation conflict in a bitterly emotional climate.” The jurors concluded that the
Globe
had “withstood pressures from both pro- and anti-busing forces to put the issue into perspective and inform the public impartially.” To Tom Winship and Bob Phelps, the prize came as splendid vindication, an exquisite compensation for months of anguish. But there was no celebration in the newsroom that afternoon. Editors and reporters alike agreed that the
Globe
must not seem to be profiting from the city’s ordeal. As Davis Taylor issued a sober statement acknowledging Boston’s travail, the newspaper did everything but apologize for its award.

That evening, several of the
Globe
’s unreconstructed Irishmen, victims of the youth movement and utterly cynical about the Winship regime, adjourned to their favorite watering hole, a noisy Italian restaurant called the Venetian Gardens. After numerous drinks and irreverent toasts, one of the newsmen, gazing deep into his shot glass, pronounced a private epitaph on the day’s events. “That’s not a Pulitzer Prize,” he concluded, “it’s a goddamn Purple Heart.”

W
hen Alva Walker was nine years old, a brother took her Raggedy Ann and stuffed it in a pot of greens simmering on the stove. By supper-time, the doll was a shriveled crone.

Growing up in a family of eight children, Alva had to watch her playthings carefully. She begged her parents for a dollhouse in which to keep her treasured possessions, and her father, who could do almost anything with his hands, hinted that he might build her one. Her mother said she’d try to get one from the Cooper Community Center. But Christmases and birthdays passed without a dollhouse.

When she was fifteen and had outgrown such childish things, Alva went off to spend a year with her uncle Moses Baker in New Haven. A meticulous man who maintained a spick-and-span establishment near the Yale campus, Moses insisted on having his plates warmed before each meal, his pictures hanging just so on the walls. From him, Alva learned to appreciate the good life.

Gradually her childhood yearning for a dollhouse gave way to an adult obsession with a house of her own. In her dreams, it was a white clapboard cottage with green shutters, a big elm tree on the front lawn, and a white picket fence; in such a house, she would be secure from the vicissitudes of city life. But Alva realized that she would have to labor for such rewards. When she was sixteen, she quit high school to work at Schrafft’s candy factory in Charlestown, remaining there for eighteen months until she married Vernon Kinch and went off with him to Waterbury, Connecticut. But the marriage didn’t last; in 1959, while Alva was pregnant with her second child, Vernon left her.

Back in Boston, she went to work at the Goddess Bra Company, where her mother and sister had also been employed. But Alva had no intention of getting trapped in a subsistence-level job. Determined to break into “high tech,”
where the real money was, she began wiring computers at an RCA plant in suburban Needham while studying computer programming and getting her high school diploma at night. Meanwhile, she had begun seeing an amiable North Carolinian named Otis Debnam. In 1962, Alva and Otis set up housekeeping in a five-room apartment on Calder Street. In 1965, they had a child, Otis Jr., and when Alva’s divorce became final in 1973, they were married.

Relentless in their pursuit of better things, the Debnams worked around the clock, each holding two jobs. Otis worked as a bank courier during the day and for a rubber company in Newton at night. In 1974, Alva became a computer operator at Gillette, while doing data processing at night for the Boston School Department.

For Alva, in particular, it was an arduous schedule. Gillette was headquartered in South Boston, hostile territory for blacks, requiring vigilance as she came and went. She was the first black as well as the first woman ever to work in the company’s computer room. The white men who sat all around her were predictably resentful, most of them refusing to show her the ropes, even to speak with her. But it was a good job, with a decent salary. Alva had plans for that money.

Her co-workers weren’t the only ones who resented Alva’s ambition. Her sister Rachel Twymon took each of Alva’s advances as a personal affront. Ever since they were children, the Walker girls had sniffed at each other’s pretensions. To Rachel, Alva was “Miss Astor,” living well above her means; to Alva, Rachel was “Miss Rich Bitch,” going to theaters and fancy restaurants while living off her welfare check. Alva kept noting that Rachel made her daughters’ clothes, until Cassandra and Little Rachel were ashamed of their “mammy-made” dresses. Rachel asked Alva’s daughters how their mother could afford to buy so many new clothes from Lerner’s and Filene’s; what man was she getting the money from now? Any affinity that remained between the two women was snuffed out by the bitter wrangle over Little Rachel’s baby. By the mid-seventies, Big Rachel was barely speaking to her “highfalutin sister.”

That didn’t faze Alva, who was ready to make her next move. The Calder Street apartment had grown cramped for two adults and three school-age children. With Alva and Otis each bringing in two salaries and paying a hefty share to Uncle Sam, they needed tax deductions. Everything pointed toward the house Alva had always wanted. In July 1975, they began their search, concentrating on that part of Southeast Boston from Dorchester through Mattapan into which the black ghetto had been expanding for more than a decade.

Alva did the looking, most of it through a realtor named Charlie Butts, who had extensive listings in the area. Several mornings a week, someone from the Butts agency took her around to examine houses. She began in Mattapan, the nicest of the neighborhoods now opening up to blacks, but most properties there were single-family homes, well out of the Debnams’ price range. They needed a two-family house, so that income from the second unit could help pay their mortgage.