Common Ground (26 page)

President Kennedy made it the occasion for his most important proclamation on civil rights. At eight that evening, over national television, he announced that he would introduce legislation to speed school desegregation and guarantee blacks access to all public facilities. Often criticized for being too cool and intellectual on such matters, it was an impassioned President who spoke to the nation that night on “a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” It was not a sectional issue, he said, but “a problem which faces us all—in every city of the North as well as the South…. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”

At that very moment in Boston, a crowd of 300, unable to gain entrance to School Committee headquarters, stood in the rain singing “We Shall Overcome.” Inside the committee’s grim third-floor meeting room a biracial delegation of 125 massed behind Mrs. Ruth Batson, chairman of the NAACP’s
education committee, as she demanded action. “I know that the word ‘demand’ is a word that is disliked by many public officials,” she said, “but I am afraid that it is too late for pleading, begging, requesting, or even reasoning. We are here because the clamor from the community is too anxious to be ignored, the dissatisfaction and complaints too genuine, and the injustices present in our school system hurt our pride, rob us of our dignity, and produce results which are injurious not only to our future but to that of our city, our commonwealth, and our nation.

“We then make this charge. There is segregation in fact in our Boston public school system. To be sure, the 1954 Supreme Court decision dealt with deliberate segregation, but there can be no misinterpretation of the language used in that decision which stated that ‘the separation of children solely on the basis of race generates a feeling of inferiority that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’ The NAACP’s position on Northern school segregation is clear. We must work to reduce and eliminate school segregation wherever it exists. We do not accept residential segregation as an excuse for countenancing this situation. We feel that it is the responsibility of school officials to take an affirmative stand on the side of the best possible education for all children. This ‘best possible education’ is not possible where segregation exists. Inadequate educational standards, unequal facilities, and discriminatory educational practices exist wherever there is school segregation.”

When Mrs. Batson had finished, Mrs. Hicks thanked her politely. For the moment, the chairwoman made no comment of her own. Instead, she turned the floor over to School Superintendent Frederick J. Gillis, who indignantly denied the NAACP’s charges. “At no time during my service has any child been deprived of the right of attending any Boston public school because of his or her race, religion, or national background,” said the sixty-four-year-old superintendent. “The Boston public school districts are determined by school population in relation to building capacities, distances between homes and schools, and unusual traffic patterns. They aren’t bound by ethnic or religious factors.”

The issue was joined. The next day—even as civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi—angry, frustrated blacks announced plans for a symbolic one-day boycott of Boston’s junior and senior high schools. The NAACP balked at first, but militants in the Massachusetts Freedom Movement insisted such tactics were necessary to wake the city’s blacks from their lethargy. Ultimately, the NAACP agreed to support the walkout if the issues couldn’t be resolved through negotiation.

On Saturday, June 15, the School Committee and four black representatives sought to break the impasse in a seven-hour session. The blacks presented fourteen specific demands, among them new training, counseling, and guidance programs; reduction in class size; new biracial textbooks; and fairer methods of intelligence testing. The committee finally accepted or agreed to
study twelve of the demands. It tabled No. 10—“The elimination of discrimination in hiring and assignment of teachers”—which it could hardly be expected to accept since it had never admitted that such discrimination existed. And it flatly rejected No. 1—“An immediate public acknowledgment of the existence of
de facto
segregation in the Boston Public School system”—the single demand which the blacks regarded as essential to an agreement.

In part, the dispute was a semantic one. There was no disagreement on the facts: thirteen of the city’s schools were at least 90 percent black. To many, that was
de facto
segregation—a term which had come into use to distinguish the Northern brand of racial separation from the legally mandated dual school systems of the South. But not to the School Committee. It conceded that “because of concentration of Negroes in certain sections of the city, we have Negroes predominantly in some of our schools,” but it wouldn’t admit that this was
de facto
segregation. The NAACP’s position was characteristically moderate: it didn’t accuse either the committee or its predecessors of deliberately segregating the system, asking only that it accept a generalized responsibility for the situation. The committee refused. “It’s like a picture on the wall,” one committee member explained. “Once you admit it’s tipped, you have to put it straight. We’re not admitting anything.” Superintendent Gillis, about to retire after eight years in office, was particularly intractable on this point, fearing that any such admission would be a repudiation of his administration. Of the five School Committee members, only Arthur Gartland, a liberal Back Bay insurance executive, was willing to accept demand No. 1. When the dead-locked parties gave up shortly after midnight, Mrs. Hicks emerged grim-faced and obdurate. “All views have been expressed during the past seven hours,” she told newsmen. “There is nothing more to say.”

But Mrs. Hicks was less adamant than she sounded. The next day she met secretly with three blacks—Paul Parks of the NAACP and Otto and Muriel Snowden of Freedom House. The meetings produced a statement designed to head off the boycott. “This will do it,” the Snowdens assured her. In light of Mrs. Hicks’s later reputation as a confirmed bigot, it was a remarkably conciliatory position.

Louise herself described this as “a strong, honest statement of policy and intent designed to show the Negro people I fully understand their position, their grievances, and their problems.” Although it did not include the magic words “
de facto
segregation,” it went a long way toward meeting the black community’s demands in this area, and might have provided the basis for a compromise.

But late Sunday evening, Mrs. Hicks angrily withdrew the statement. The reason for her abrupt reversal remains in dispute to this day. According to Mrs. Hicks, a reporter called her that night with a statement released in her name by black leaders. Mrs. Hicks says it resembled the one she had drafted that afternoon, but had been subtly altered—opening, “We regret,” and omitting the phrase “beyond our control”—to suggest greater committee responsibility for segregated schools. Black leaders deny they tampered with her statement. They suggest that she withdrew it when she failed to find majority support on the committee, leaving her uncomfortably isolated as a racial moderate.

In any case, at a news conference the next day, she utterly disowned any version of the statement. “Let me assure you,” she told reporters, “the School Committee members regret nothing, except that children are being encouraged to remain out of school. If some black leaders would rather ‘play with words,’ then I am indeed disillusioned.”

On Monday night, Governor Endicott Peabody made an eleventh-hour effort to avert the boycott. He managed to extract relatively conciliatory statements from three members of the committee—Joe Lee, Thomas Eisenstadt, and Gartland—and presented them to black representatives at a midnight meeting in his Beacon Hill apartment. None of the statements mentioned “
de facto
segregation,” though Arthur Gartland assured the blacks that the statements constituted “a moral commitment that cannot be repudiated.” But the blacks stood firm, perhaps influenced by Chairwoman Hicks’s sudden intransigence (“I repeat what I have said time and again,” her new statement read. “We do not have segregation in the Boston schools”).

So the boycott began as scheduled on Tuesday morning—8,260 of Boston’s junior and senior high school students remaining at home or attending “freedom schools.” No longer even faintly conciliatory, Mrs. Hicks lashed out. “Our schools and our public officials preach obedience to the law, yet here we have our Negro children being encouraged to flaunt the law.” At a teachers’ meeting, she exclaimed with tears in her eyes, “God help them, they know not what they do!”

By late June, the two sides had reached an impasse over two small Latin words. To some, the dispute seemed ridiculous. Boston’s Cardinal Cushing
urged the School Committee to “at least acknowledge the problem.” The Boston
Herald
warned that “recognition of the existence of
de facto
segregation … is the necessary forerunner of appropriate correction action.”

The strongest pressure came from Washington, where Boston’s conflict was proving acutely embarrassing to John Kennedy. For just as the NAACP’s June 11 challenge had brought Boston’s racial antagonism into the open, so the President’s June 11 address was a watershed in his administration’s stance on racial issues, the start of a concerted drive to get a civil rights bill through Congress. Not surprisingly, Southern Democrats seized on the troubles in Kennedy’s native city to brand him a hypocrite. Starting in midsummer, Mrs. Hicks began getting telephone calls from Presidential Appointments Secretary Kenneth O’Donnell, from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and, ultimately, from the President himself. All delivered the same message: the President would greatly appreciate it if Mrs. Hicks could reach some sort of compromise with the NAACP. Louise, by then a staunch Kennedy supporter, was flattered by the attention; but, even after one presidential aide dangled a judgeship before her, she declined to bend.

Indeed, the more others pushed, the more the committee, led by its chairwoman, dug in its heels. On August 15, when NAACP members raised the issue again, Mrs. Hicks snapped, “The committee has decided not to discuss the question of
de facto
segregation. Kindly proceed to educational matters.” The NAACP delegation walked out.

As Mrs. Hicks campaigned for reelection that fall, she was the target of demonstrations and denunciations by blacks who accused her of “the most vicious type of racism.” Louise denied such charges, labeling them “a distortion of the truth,” “an absolute lie,” and “a complete falsehood.” She even suggested that race wasn’t a relevant category in American life, that it was only the liberals who were insisting on it. “I never think of people as Negro or white,” she once said. “Boycotts and other actions have drawn a color line in our schools that never existed before.” And when civil rights activists sought the hiring of more Negro policemen, she said, “God forbid the day we have to think of our policemen by color as we do of our schoolchildren.” It was a convenient way to avoid dealing with the problem.

When George Wallace made overtures to her, she rebuffed him. “He’s a segregationist,” she told a reporter. “I don’t want to be connected with him. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t exist.” Later, in a particularly revealing interview, she conceded, “A large part of my vote probably does come from bigoted people. But, after all, I can hardly go around telling them, ‘Don’t vote for me if you’re bigoted.’ The important thing is that I know I’m not bigoted. To me that word means all the dreadful Southern, segregationist, Jim Crow business that’s always shocked and revolted me.” Repeatedly she challenged her opponents “to find any statement or any action of mine tainted with racism.” She said this so often and so vehemently, she may well have believed it.

Among others who believed it were the members of her old law school study group. Perri Reeder, Isabel Gates, James Purdy, and Reuben Dawkins
had never seen the slightest trace of racial antagonism in Louise. “I spent too much time with her day in and day out to regard her as a racist,” says Isabel. Perri couldn’t believe it either, but confronting Louise one day, she warned her that she was beginning to “sound like a racist.” To which Louise, with a wounded look, replied, “After all we’ve been through together, you should know better than that.” When Isabel asked Perri that fall of 1963, “What in the world has happened to Louise?” they decided that their old friend was being “politically expedient.”