Common Ground (3 page)

He was prey as well to migraine headaches which incapacitated him for hours on end. Walking through Harvard Square or reading in Langdell Library, he would suffer a blurring of his eyesight, followed by a stabbing pain in his skull. Doctors ascribed these attacks to dilation of the blood vessels near the ocular nerve, but psychological pressures, particularly in highly controlled and self-disciplined people, were also a factor. Most of Colin’s acquaintances regarded him as unemotional, aloof, even cold. Only his closest friends knew what strong emotions ran just beneath the surface. The effort to keep such feelings under control may well have brought on the crippling headaches from which he suffered all that spring.

Now, on the afternoon of April 4, Colin decided that he’d brooded long
enough. Closing the corporate tax volume he’d been idly perusing, he stuffed some papers in his briefcase and hurried down the stairs. Walking across the lawn, he glanced as usual at the stone marker which proclaimed: “Here assembled on the night of June 16, 1775, 1200 Continental troops under the command of Colonel Prescott. After prayer by President Langdon they marched to Bunker Hill.” General William Prescott, who commanded the colonial troops at Bunker Hill and admonished them not to shoot until they saw the whites of their enemy’s eyes, was one of his wife’s ancestors.

His daily walk through Harvard Yard deepened Colin’s sense of connection to a significant past. Something about the way the sidewalks sliced the lush lawns into neat geometric shapes satisfied his sense of order. The sharp-edged New England purity—kiln-red bricks, black shutters, gleaming white trim—touched him deeply.

Then he was out again in the dash and hustle of Massachusetts Avenue, past the bicycle exchange, down Mount Auburn Street to the apartment on Flagg Street. Joan was there, feeding one-year-old Brad. Colin stretched out on the bed, picked up the morning
Globe
, and flicked on the clock radio. For half an hour, a Haydn string quartet mixed with the clatter of pans.

At 7:16 p.m., a somber voice interrupted the music: “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot outside a Memphis motel this afternoon. His condition was not immediately known.”

At 8:19, the voice broke in again: “Dr. Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader and Nobel laureate, was shot and killed late today as he stood alone on the balcony of his motel.”

Until well past midnight, Colin and Joan sat on their bed, listening to updates from Memphis and other cities—including Boston—which had begun to burn.

Nothing in Colin’s experience had quite prepared him for what he now felt. King hadn’t been one of his special heroes; he regarded him as a courageous man who had endured terrible hardships to achieve equality for his people, but he felt little for him personally. Colin had followed the Southern civil rights movement closely and sympathetically but, unlike some of his classmates, he hadn’t been impelled to participate in those events. He hadn’t joined Amherst Students for Racial Equality, which sent its members South to help integrate public beaches in Florida or register voters in North Carolina. Bizarre and exotic, those events had seemed remote from his own time and place.

Yet King’s assassination tapped some secret well of feeling. Perhaps that was because it evoked memories of John Kennedy’s death. It seemed to Colin as if every great man who tried to change this country through personal leadership was going to pay with his life.

Or perhaps it was because King’s killing echoed the Kerner Commission report, issued only two months before, which had warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” A paperback edition of the report by the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders was selling briskly at bookstores in Harvard Square. Colin and Joan had been shocked by the eruptions of the Newark and Detroit ghettos the summer before and, like many of their friends in Cambridge, were reading the Kerner Report to understand what had gone wrong. Their dog-eared copy was underlined in pencil where they had found telling conclusions. One heavily marked passage said, “In the riot cities we surveyed, we found that Negroes are severely disadvantaged, especially as compared with whites; that local government is often unresponsive to this fact; that federal programs have not yet reached a significantly large proportion of those in need; and that the result is a reservoir of unredressed grievances and frustrations in the ghetto.”

They had underlined the section that warned: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, white society condones it.”

And they had put a star in the margin by the section that went: “White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”

The Divers knew few Negroes—the notable exception being Howard Thurman, an eminent theologian and spellbinding preacher, long a friend of Joan’s family. Colin had come to know and revere Thurman. When he and Joan were married, they had chosen the black minister to perform the ceremony.

Thurman was a friend and confidant of Martin Luther King. After the assassination, he delivered a stirring eulogy for his lost colleague. “Tonight,” he said, “there is a vast temptation to strike out in pain, horror, and anger; riding just under the surface are all the pent-up furies, the accumulation of generations of cruelty and brutality. A way must be found to honor our feelings without dishonoring him whose sudden and meaningless end has called them forth. May we harness the energy of our bitterness and make it available to the unfinished work which Martin has left behind.”

Sitting cross-legged on their bedroom floor the next afternoon, Colin and Joan heard Thurman’s words on WILD, Boston’s “soul” station, to which they had tuned because they wanted to hear what blacks were saying about King’s death. The station had suspended its normal rhythm-and-blues format and was devoting hour after hour to news and commentary on the assassination and on the violence even then rippling through Boston’s streets. The night before along Blue Hill Avenue in the heart of the black community, angry crowds had pelted store windows and cars with rocks and bricks. Nine persons had been injured. The police were out in force. Black ministers and politicians were using WILD’s airwaves to “cool” things while, at the same time, expressing indignation at their leader’s murder.

Late that afternoon, the station broadcast an impromptu discussion among black spokesmen, chaired by City Councilman Tom Atkins, Boston’s only elected black official. Colin paid particular attention because he knew Atkins, who was then completing his second year at the Law School. Like other black
leaders, Atkins had been out in the streets most of the night trying to quiet the crowds. Now his voice was drained and weary as he fielded telephoned questions.

Much of his audience was still very angry. “You been tellin’ us to do this and do that,” cried one young man, “and it didn’t make any difference. They killed him anyway. Now what you got to say?”

“Not much,” Atkins said. “Not much, my man. Except stay cool for now and hang in there. We’ll get over somehow.”

The next caller was a woman from Lexington, the suburban community in which Colin and Joan had both grown up. Hers was a smooth, cultivated voice with that waft of extra breath characteristic of Yankee Massachusetts. But this afternoon it was an agonized voice as well. “Everyone out here feels terrible about this,” she said. “Please, tell us, Mr. Atkins, what can we do to help you? What can we do for the Negro community?”

For a moment there was silence. Then, his voice rumbling in the lower registers, choosing his words carefully, Atkins began: “Right now, there’s nothing you can do for us. Right now, it isn’t even safe for you to come in here. Right now, the best thing you can do is to leave us alone and let us try to get our act together. If I may say so, what you ought to do is to go back to your own community and try to get your people together. Try to get them to start caring, to start responding, to start looking at themselves, at their own motivations and attitudes on the matter of race. Before you can do anything for us, you have to look into your own souls.”

As Atkins spoke, Colin felt a terrible anguish for his country. Atkins was saying that America was already two societies—separate and unequal, and already so far apart they couldn’t reach out to each other in this terrible moment.

Colin contemplated these circumstances all through a weekend marked by further violence in Boston and other cities. On Monday, the Law School’s acting dean canceled classes for the next two days so that “each student may have a full opportunity for uninterrupted reflection on recent events and his position in regard to them.” Later, it was revealed that the dean had acted after threats from the Law School’s Association of African and Afro-American Students that they would picket the school unless it was closed. In any case, Colin took the dean literally: all Monday he remained at home, reconsidering his position.

At 1:00 p.m. Tuesday—as King’s funeral cortege wound through Atlanta’s streets toward Morehouse College—Colin joined 1,200 Harvard students and faculty in Memorial Church for the university’s own memorial service. High in the pulpit, John L. Burkholder, a professor of divinity, declared, “Dr. King’s death has challenged us to positive action. We must find new, radical approaches to justice and brotherhood.” But it was Charles P. Price, preacher to the university, who pointed out a simple reality that Colin had already noticed but nobody had dared to mention: virtually the entire throng in the church was white, for blacks were holding their own service on the steps outside. The
separate services were “a mark of the estrangement between white man and black man that exists today,” Price said. “We meet in sorrow and repentance for what we have done to create a situation and sustain such a gap that we cannot even mourn together.” Then he led the congregation in singing “We Shall Overcome,” and when they reached the words “black and white together,” Colin found himself wondering: will we ever be together?

As the strains of the hymn filtered through the tall windows, some of the eighty blacks gathered on the church steps jeered. Jeffrey P. Howard, president of the university’s Afro-American Society, told them, “Martin Luther King would have called these people in there hypocrites. If they come out of there with tears in their eyes we want it to be plain we don’t want tears. We want black people to have a place here at Harvard. On this campus there is as much racism as anywhere.”

After the service, black law students filed across the street to the Ames courtroom at the Law School for a panel on “The Black Man’s View” of the assassination. Colin, still brooding over the day’s divisions, tagged along and took a seat in the back of the courtroom with a few other whites. There he listened as Bishop Hollifield, president of the black law students’ association, told them, “If racism and repression don’t give way to justice and hope, America in a little while will be just a page in a history book. The next time the white man slaps us in the face, black people are going to kick the hell out of him. In the meantime, we here in the cloistered world of the university, we students of the law, must pay closer attention to the condition of the black masses, to the agonized voices of our brothers in the street.”

A
n hour after the transistor radios in the project blared the news of King’s death, Snake and Sly were out on Eustis Street slinging rocks at the police. Around the corner on Dearborn Street, someone had thrown a brick through a grocery window and every few minutes a kid would scamper across, grab a juicy grapefruit or a handful of plums, then dash to safety in the jiving black crowd.

But soon the frolic turned serious. The Orchard Park housing project, three square blocks of dingy barracks and barren courtyards, squatted on the edge of Roxbury, Boston’s black heartland, but several neighboring streets were still white. Shortly past eleven, John McLaughlin, a twenty-six-year-old white man, rounded the corner in his maroon convertible, with twenty-five-year-old Carolyn MacElroy at his side, their radio blaring a hit tune, oblivious to the turmoil around them. As the car screeched to a halt in the intersection, a brick smashed the windshield. “Get out!” ordered a black kid in overalls. Carolyn MacElroy opened her door and ran back onto Dudley Street, unmolested. But when McLaughlin tried to follow, several teenagers knocked him to the street, blood streaming from his forehead. Policemen quickly pulled him to safety, but soon the crowd had surrounded the convertible, and lifting it by the fenders, they heaved it onto its side. The fuel tank burst into a fierce blaze. At this, a long sibilant sigh issued from the crowd, as if the fire had released hours, perhaps years, of pent-up feeling.

George, whose street name was Sly, and his brother Richard, known as Snake, had been out on Prescott Street, playing stickball against the factory wall, when a little kid had come by with a transistor radio, chanting in a monotone, “Dr. King is dead, Dr. King is dead.” At first the brothers jeered, “Get out of here, you little bugger,” and lashed the ball harder and higher against the concrete. But when the kid stuck the radio in their faces they heard
it too. Although they were only twelve and fourteen, they knew enough about Martin Luther King to feel an acute sense of loss.

Their mother, Rachel Twymon, wept when she heard the news in her apartment on Prescott Street in Orchard Park. When her eight-year-old daughter, Cassandra, said, “Ma, he wasn’t a member of our family, so why are you crying?” she replied, “Because, Cassandra, what he got killed for makes him my big brother, because he wanted all of us to be equal.” She started to tell Cassandra that there were other reasons why she felt particularly close to King, reasons that went back fifteen years to the days she had known the young theological student they called Martin. But her recollections were interrupted by a knock on the door as two policemen from District 9 appeared to tell her, “They’re breaking into your store, Mrs. Twymon. You better get on down there.”