Common Ground (4 page)

Rachel’s Specialty Shop, a women’s ready-to-wear clothing store, stood at the corner of Washington Street and Warren Avenue, in the heart of the area roiled that night by roving gangs of black youths. The rock thrown through one of Rachel Twymon’s display windows had set off a burglar alarm, which rang at the police station. When the police tried to call her at home the line was busy, so they sent a patrol car to alert her. But by then all the buses in the area were halted, as were the Orange Line trains which normally clattered along the elevated trestle over Washington Street, so the police offered to drop her at the store.

Though they skirted the riot area, Rachel could see fires burning and cars with their windshields shattered on several side streets. Once a group of about fifteen youths with sticks in their hands loped across an empty lot. Rachel knew her children had to be mixed up in this somehow; she only hoped they wouldn’t get hurt. When the police car pulled up in front of the store, she found to her relief that the grate she’d installed inside the plate glass was still intact and the racks of blouses and hot pants were untouched. But she noticed that the windows at Blair’s Foodland down the street had been smashed and that items from a nearby variety store were strewn across the sidewalk. So she decided to spend the night on the cot in the back room. For hours she lay awake staring at the ceiling, listening to the sirens wailing in the night.

The next morning, Washington Street and Blue Hill Avenue—the black community’s two principal thoroughfares—were pocked with smashed windows and burned-out stores. Police cars prowled the rubble and only a few pedestrians scuffed along the sidewalks examining the damage. By 1:00 p.m., things were heating up again. Several hundred youths began marching down the major shopping streets telling store owners to close up. On the door or window of each shop they pasted a flyer proclaiming, “This store is closed until further notice in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, the fallen martyr of the black revolution.”

Rachel saw the marchers coming down Washington Street and at first she determined to defy them. The stores on either side of her had long since closed up: Carroll’s Cut-Rate Drugs, where her brother Arnold worked as a clerk,
and Kim’s Kaps, which sold hats, Afro wigs, and costume jewelry. But they were both run by Jews, old-style ghetto merchants who weren’t very popular. Rachel’s was one of only two black-owned stores in the neighborhood. She felt sure the kids wouldn’t molest a “soul sister.” If they gave her an argument, she’d explain that she’d been on welfare until she opened the store a few months before, that she had six kids to feed and simply couldn’t afford to close up. But then the marchers were on her shouting, “Lock up the doors, sister, this is no time to be doin’ business!” Quickly she realized it was no use, so she placed some cardboard over the hole in her window, locked the door, and went home.

Rachel didn’t notice that Richard, George, and two of her younger sons—ten-year-old Freddie and nine-year-old Wayne—were tagging along behind the marchers, who then numbered nearly a thousand. When they reached the Jeremiah Burke High School they burned a flag flying at half-staff outside, then forced their way into the school and burned another flag. From there they marched to a Stop & Shop supermarket on Columbia Road which was still open. The white manager took one look at the vast throng building up outside his plate-glass windows, then called it a day. By 4:30, the crowd had broken up into roving gangs which began heaving rocks through store windows and car windshields. Back in the Orchard Park project, a light-skinned Negro was riding his motorcycle through one of the courts when a gang of young blacks knocked him off and beat him, stopping only when Bill Wimberly, director of the Roxbury YMCA, persuaded them the man was black. “It isn’t safe to be a white man in Roxbury today,” Wimberly told reporters.

The mood in Roxbury that afternoon would not have pleased the apostle of non-violence whose memory the demonstrators sought to honor. A leaflet distributed by the Black United Front said flatly, “Non-violence Is Dead. The Black Community Faces Disaster.” Another, issued by two black community groups, warned, “When the riot starts, you can expect martial law which will confine you to your home for as long as a month or more. Start your survival plans now. We must unite for the attacks upon our communities from the police, armed forces, and the white communities. Have a gun and plenty of ammunition. Nothing wrong with a bow and arrow …”

Others counseled caution. The Roxbury Youth Patrol passed out leaflets that afternoon saying, “Cool it. The riot squad has M-16 rifles—Mace—a machine so high-pitched it will make you deaf. They’re not playing. Keep off the streets. Defend your home and family. Don’t start anything.” Youth patrol members circulated in the crowds shouting the same message through bullhorns.

They urged young people to stay home that night and watch rhythm-and-blues star James Brown on television. “Don’t go downtown, brothers,” the patrol said. “Stay home. Put on the TV and watch cool James do his thing.” Snake and Sly wouldn’t miss James Brown, so they stayed home, huddled around the tube, pounding their feet as James wailed “Please, Please, Please.”

On Sunday morning, Rachel and several of her children walked through
muted streets to Union Methodist Church, where the Reverend Gilbert Caldwell admonished the congregation, “Don’t give way to anger. Don’t destroy your own community.” Rachel picked up the same theme, telling her children at home that night, “Who do you think you’re hurting with all this stuff? Your friends and neighbors, that’s who. You can’t burn yourself up.”

Partly as a result of such efforts, Boston began to cool off that weekend. By early the next week peace had been restored at relatively little cost—21 injured, 30 arrested, barely $50,000 in damage. This was mild in comparison with what happened in many of the 197 other towns and cities where riots broke out in the aftermath of King’s assassination: in Washington, for example, where 11 were killed, 1,113 were injured, and $24 million worth of property was destroyed; or Chicago, with 9 killed, 500 injured, and $11 million in damage.

On Tuesday afternoon, as King was buried in Atlanta, black Boston paused to watch the televised services from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the sweltering three-and-a-half-hour march through Atlanta’s streets, and, finally, the interment under a marble monument inscribed: “Free At Last, Free At Last, Thank God Almighty I’m Free At Last.” Coretta King’s haunted eyes, Daddy King’s bowed gray head, Ralph Abernathy’s cracked voice brought tears to Rachel’s eyes. And once stirred up, those feelings wouldn’t die, bringing with them memories of soft Sunday evenings years before when, after the Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings at Union Methodist, she and her girlfriends would stroll up Shawmut Avenue to the Twelfth Baptist Church.

They weren’t all that religious. What drove them up the avenue was gospel—those throbbing hymns which blended a heavy dose of spirituality with more than a pinch of sensuality. They couldn’t get gospel at Union Methodist, an outpost of staid respectability, so they sought it instead at the more soulful Baptist church.

Usually they had to sit through a boring anthem or two by Coretta Scott, an earnest soprano from the New England Conservatory of Music, who was often on the program because she was the fiancée of the young student minister who preached at Twelfth Baptist through most of 1952 and 1953. When Martin King had come to Boston University’s School of Theology in September 1951, his father told him to look up his old friend and Baptist colleague Dr. William Hester, and soon Martin was preaching most of the Sunday-evening sermons at Dr. Hester’s church.

Even then, Martin was a commanding figure in the pulpit. The Reverend Mike Haynes, Dr. Hester’s assistant, would normally have delivered those Sunday-evening sermons. For a time he was miffed at the preference given King, but soon he recognized that “Martin was completely out of my league.”

Rachel too was a bit awed by the young student minister. She didn’t talk to him much—he was twenty-three in 1952 and she was only fifteen—but she found his preaching “spellbinding,” his cool assurance “impressive.” She and her friends agreed he was a real “Bougie,” a middle-class boy destined for
great things. When those great things came to pass, she identified even further with King. Every time he came back to Boston, she went to hear him. Several times he appeared at Union Methodist seeking funds for his activities and on each occasion Rachel gave more than she could really afford, partly out of nostalgia for those evenings on Shawmut Avenue, partly out of pride in her association with this great man. She followed his career closely in the papers and on TV, and told her friends he was the greatest black man of his generation (just as Jack Kennedy was the greatest white man). After his death, she kept his memory alive in her apartment.

Rachel’s walls were covered with inspirational messages: “There are no limits on God’s ability to make things right in my life,” “Grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins,” “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” interspersed with less reverent slogans, such as “God bless this lousy apartment.” But now King became a principal theme in this display. On one wall was a bronze plaque of the dead prophet, on another a four-color portrait of him, and on her coffee table a memorial candle bearing on its circular shade an excerpt from his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Not everyone in the family shared Rachel’s admiration for King. One of the skeptics was her younger brother Arnold Walker, who shared many of the reservations then common among Northern blacks. The Black Panthers had denounced King as a “bootlicker,” Adam Clayton Powell called him Martin “Loser” King, and young ghetto dwellers dismissed him, with heavy irony, as “De Lawd.” It was the migration from South to North which, more than anything else, had eroded his constituency. In the settled black communities of Georgia and Alabama, his special amalgam of evangelical rhetoric and middle-class respectability provided the right chemistry for explosive change. But in the bleak ghettos of Chicago and Detroit, these same qualities—and particularly his relentless emphasis on non-violence and integration—proved less effective. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, an angry black voice cried out, “Fuck that dream, Martin! Now, goddamnit, now!”

Arnold Walker had formed his own judgment of “De Lawd” up close. He owed that opportunity to Mike Haynes, the former assistant minister at Twelfth Baptist, who over the years had remained close to King. King had once asked Haynes to be his assistant in Montgomery, but the young minister had stayed on in Boston and eventually succeeded Dr. Hester at Twelfth Baptist. Whenever King came to Boston, Mike Haynes handled the logistics—meeting him at the airport, driving him around town, scheduling his time.

Arnold had known Haynes for years, and when Haynes was elected to the state legislature, Arnold—six years his junior—became a member of his entourage. So he wasn’t surprised one morning in April 1965 when Haynes wandered into Carroll’s Cut-Rate and asked whether he would like to be a driver for King during his visit to Boston later that month.

It was an extraordinary moment in the civil rights struggle—both for
America in general and for Boston in particular. Only six weeks before, the nation had witnessed King’s double confrontation in Selma, Alabama—the first on March 9, when state troopers doused the marchers with tear gas, then waded into their ranks swinging clubs and cattle prods; the second on March 11, when a much larger group of marchers—including five hundred from Greater Boston—finally succeeded in crossing the Pettus Bridge. Later that evening, one of the white Bostonians, a Unitarian minister named Jim Reeb, was badly beaten as he emerged from a black restaurant. Two days later, he died of a fractured skull, and for nearly a week the story of Reeb’s death ran side by side with the Selma story on the front pages of Boston’s newspapers, giving Bostonians an acute sense of their stake in those events.

The movement for racial equality in Boston was gaining velocity at precisely the same moment. On April 14, a committee of distinguished Massachusetts citizens released a long-awaited report on racial imbalance in the state’s public schools. Defining imbalanced schools as those with more than 50 percent black enrollment, the committee found fifty-five such schools in the state, forty-five of them in Boston. It concluded that “racial imbalance is educationally harmful to all children, white and non-white, because separation from others leads to ignorance of others and ignorance breeds fear and prejudice.” Among the remedies which the committee recommended was busing—the first time such a step had been proposed by any public body in Massachusetts. The report stirred predictable protest, with Louise Day Hicks, chairwoman of Boston’s School Committee, calling the busing proposal “undemocratic” and “un-American.” But on April 20, the Boston branch of the NAACP—which had engaged in a steadily escalating confrontation with the School Committee—filed suit in Federal District Court seeking desegregation of Boston’s schools.

Boston blacks had been in touch with King all that winter, seeking his aid in their hour of need. King felt a large debt to the birthplace of abolitionism, which had supported his Southern campaigns with hundreds of volunteers and thousands of dollars. Besides, he had long wanted to carry his campaign into the North, where racial discrimination, he felt, was as deeply rooted as it was in the South. In that spring of 1965, Boston seemed the logical target for his first Northern venture.

When King arrived at Logan Airport on the morning of April 22, he wasted no time in reminding Bostonians of the bonds which united him and their city. “I was educated here and it is one of the cities which I call home,” he told reporters at the airport. Then they were off, with Arnold Walker driving the borrowed Lincoln Continental, on a day-long tour of the city, including a call on Governor John Volpe, an address to a joint session of the state legislature, an inspection of slum housing and overcrowded schools in black Roxbury, a news conference, a fund-raising reception at a downtown hotel, and finally, a Passover service at Temple Israel.