Common Ground (8 page)

“No way,” Brown shouted. “They’ll sue me in New York.”

“James, James,” pleaded Atkins. “We’ll work this out! But right now you have an opportunity to help save this city.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Brown grumbled.

When they screeched up to the Garden, Brown was met by Eddie Powers, the Garden’s manager, who reported that people had been coming in all day getting refunds.

“This concert has been killed!” Brown roared.

At that moment the Mayor pulled up and he, Brown, and Atkins huddled in the manager’s office. By then, Brown had figured out what the whole thing was going to cost him and demanded a city guarantee of $60,000.

“Sixty thousand!” the Mayor exclaimed. Martin Luther King had just been killed and here were two black guys putting the squeeze on him for $60,000. One of them, he’d been told, was the highest-paid black performer in America who made $2 million a year, had a Victorian mansion, a Rolls-Royce, two Cadillacs, two radio stations, a record company, a production staff of forty-two. Now he was worrying about the gate from one measly concert!

But White was running out of options. “Okay, Mr. Brown,” he said. “You’ve got your commitment. Now get up on that stage!”

Barely 2,000 young people, most of them black, were scattered around the 14,000-seat arena when Tom Atkins advanced to center stage.

“I’m not going to sing, but I do want to say this,” he began. “James Brown has donated his money and his time to help people. He donated one of his biggest-selling records to the young people of our country. And tonight he’s making a twenty-five-hundred-dollar contribution to the Martin Luther King Trust Fund. For those of you who are not with us here tonight, but are watching, I think it would be sort of great if you were to make out a check to the Martin Luther King Trust Fund and send it to City Hall care of Mayor Kevin White. Anyway, this country owes James Brown a great debt and we’re lucky to have him here tonight with us. Give a great round of applause to James Brown.”

The audience thundered its approval.

Then Atkins went on. “I’d like to bring now to the microphone the man
who is making the program tonight possible, the man whose foresight and leadership has given the city of Boston and the whole metropolitan area a new lease on life. He’s a man who’s young, he’s a man who cares, and he’s going to make this a great city. The Honorable Mayor …”

Dapper in a dark blue suit, button-down shirt, and rep tie, Kevin White ducked into the spotlight. The crowd’s response was—at best—subdued. It was the first time since King’s assassination that the Mayor had confronted a large group of blacks. Sensing the ghetto’s new rage at whites, Atkins and other black advisers had urged him to stay off the streets. Gazing now into the vast arena, squinting against the klieg lights, White feared that someone up there in the balconies might try to avenge the prophet’s death.

Sensing the Mayor’s anxiety and the crowd’s hostility, Brown took the microphone. “Just let me say,” he assured his constituency, “I had the pleasure of meetin’ him and I said, ‘Honorable Mayor,’ and he said, ‘Look man, just call me Kevin.’ And look, this is a swingin’ cat. Okay, yeh, give him a big round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. He’s a swingin’ cat.”

With the crowd more receptive now, the Mayor said, “All of us are here tonight to listen to a great talent, James Brown. But we’re also here to pay tribute to one of the greatest Americans, Dr. Martin Luther King. Twenty-four hours ago, Dr. King died for all of us, black and white, that we may live together in harmony. Now I’m here tonight to ask you to make Dr. King’s dream a reality in Boston. This is our city and its future is in our hands. So all I ask you tonight is this: Let us look at each other, here in the Garden and back at home, and pledge that no matter what any other community might do, we in Boston will honor Dr. King in peace. Thank you.”

As White finished, Brown cried, “The man is together!” Then he launched into the distinctive routine which had earned him the sobriquet “Mr. Dynamite.” Flanked by two moaning saxophones, lit by pulsing strobes, he batted the microphone between his palms, bringing it close, pushing it away, gyrating, twisting, and sliding. His skin slick with sweat, he stripped the jacket from his three-piece suit, tossed it into the wings, then began a frenetic rendition of “Has Everybody Got the Feeling?”

At that, his young fans in the front rows could no longer contain their enthusiasm. Jumping on the stage, they grabbed at their idol’s hands and hair. Police pushed them back, while Brown pleaded, “Let me finish the show! We’re all black. Let’s respect ourselves. Are we together or are we ain’t?”

“We are,” the crowd chorused back. And they were. Scattered violence erupted in Roxbury that night, but the downtown riot never materialized. As expected, thousands of young blacks stayed home to watch the concert.

But three days later, the city’s delicate deal with Brown came close to collapse. On Monday morning, Greg Moses called Atkins to say the city was backing off. Atkins quickly dialed the Corporation Counsel, Herb Gleason.

“We never really gave the guarantee,” Gleason said. “We were only discussing it.”

“Herbie,” Atkins said. “It was a firm agreement.”

“Well, I don’t know where we’re going to get the money.”

“Write a damn check on the city treasury.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you back off,” Atkins said, warning that if he hadn’t heard from Gleason by noon, he was going to introduce a resolution in the City Council laying out the whole story and calling on the Mayor to fulfill his commitment.

At 11:50, Gleason called to say, “Brown will get his money.”

But the Mayor didn’t have the money. Everyone agreed it couldn’t come out of the city treasury. Tom Atkins’ televised appeal for a “Martin Luther King Trust Fund” had elicited barely $5,000, most of it from liberal white suburbanites. A few large private donors were tapped, with little success. So the Mayor turned to the one source which could come up with such money on short notice—the Vault.

In the late 1950s, shabby and decrepit Boston had drifted toward a financial crisis, a forerunner of the credit squeeze which would plague many municipalities two decades later. When Boston tried to raise desperately needed capital with a bond issue, Moody’s Investor Service rated its bonds lower than those of any other large American city. The Athens of America, once the financial capital of the colonies, the home of generations of parsimonious Yankees, was now ranked below Cincinnati or Denver. To the Brahmin bankers, this was simply unacceptable.

Convinced that Boston was headed for municipal bankruptcy, the sachems of State Street resolved to control that process. If the city had to go into receivership, then the banks and major corporations were determined to have a mechanism in place to administer the wreckage. This effort was spearheaded by Charles A. Coolidge, senior partner in Ropes & Gray; Lloyd Brace, president of the First National Bank of Boston; Carl Gilbert, president of the Gillette Company; and Ralph Lowell, board chairman of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. Widely known as “Mr. Boston,” for his astonishing range of civic enterprises, Lowell became chairman of the new group, which met in his company’s boardroom. Lloyd Brace brought his bank’s senior vice-president, Ephron Catlin, along as treasurer.

The consortium convened in utmost secrecy, but a few scraps of information inexplicably reached the press. One newspaper dubbed the new group “the Vault,” and the name stuck.

By 1959, State Senate President Johnny Powers seemed all but certain to become Boston’s new mayor. Distrusting Powers, whom they saw as the prototype of the big-spending Irish pol, the bankers considered several ways of forcing the city into bankruptcy and giving them control of municipal finances. Nevertheless, regarding Powers’ election as a foregone conclusion, they reluctantly supported him. Only at the last moment did several Vault principals quietly open channels to Powers’ opponent, Register of Probate John Collins. When Collins scored an astonishing upset, he shrewdly forged an alliance with
Charlie Coolidge and his colleagues. Every other Thursday at 4:00 p.m., Collins met with the Vault in the boardroom of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. Against all precedent, the Irish mayor and the Yankee bankers collaborated intimately on the “New Boston,” then rising on the twin cornerstones of “fiscal responsibility” and a “revived downtown.” Time and again, the Vault produced substantial sums for the Mayor’s cherished projects, while raising money for him to hire experts at salaries well above budgeted levels.

When Collins decided not to run for reelection in 1967, he mobilized his financial backers behind a handpicked successor, Redevelopment Director Ed Logue. If Kevin White instinctively distrusted the Yankee establishment, he particularly resented its determined support for his opponent. Once in office, he pointedly kept his distance from the business community, only reluctantly attending a couple of Vault meetings. Yet now, as he sought the money for James Brown, his thoughts naturally turned to the Vault. Why shouldn’t he tap their ample resources? Indeed, with all the money represented around that table, why stop at $60,000? The “long, hot summer” was nearly upon them. Even in the best of years, funds would be needed to put young blacks to work and expand inner-city recreation.

One day in mid-April, White made his pitch to the Vault. Around the mahogany table that afternoon was the core of the original membership—Lowell, Coolidge, Brace, Gilbert, Catlin. And there were some new members too, for the Vault had gradually expanded to embrace most of Boston’s principal business and financial leaders, among them Frank Farwell of the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, Eli Goldston of Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates, Richard Chapman of the New England Merchants Bank, Richard Gummere of Filene’s Department Store, and Edward Mitton of Jordan Marsh. Had a Marxist revolutionary sought to wipe out the city’s ruling class in one stroke, he could scarcely have done better than plant a bomb in the boardroom of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company that day.

Seated at the head of the long, polished table, the Mayor delivered his appeal. He explained “the James Brown problem,” then went on to talk of the “tinderbox” in Roxbury, the need for emergency palliatives to “cool things off” until longer-range projects could be brought to bear.

“How much, Mr. Mayor?” asked the blunt Eli Goldston.

“Well,” White ventured nervously. “It’s hard to put a dollar figure on it. But I should think, well, it cost me a million to run for mayor, so maybe in the neighborhood of a million dollars.”

After a short pause, Ralph Lowell spoke up: “Mr. Mayor, in all the years we dealt with your predecessor, we never came up with anything remotely like that. I’m afraid the figure you mention is out of our league.”

Oh, come off it, the Mayor thought, looking around the room at all those pinstripes. But what he said was, “Well, gentlemen, the city is at stake here, so whatever you think you can do.” Then he got up and walked back to City Hall.

When he entered his office, barely half an hour later, his secretary said, “You have a call from Charles Coolidge.”

The Mayor picked up the telephone and Coolidge snapped, “Mayor, you have a hundred thousand dollars on account. Have one of your people talk to Eph Catlin.”

Catlin later explained what had happened in the boardroom during the Mayor’s walk. “Well, we had some pretty fierce arguments about that James Brown thing—some of our fellows just didn’t go for that at all. But the Mayor had persuaded us that if we didn’t come up with the money, the blacks were going to burn the city down. So we thought we better do something.”

Over the next year, the money in what came to be known as the Mayor’s Special Fund was doled out to a long list of projects, controlled by Barney Frank. Off the top, of course, came $15,000 for James Brown (reduced from the original $60,000, largely because the city put pressure on the Garden to waive its share of the receipts). Some of the money went to the city’s new Human Relations Task Force, set up after the assassination to help “cool” things in the black community (the task force and its successor, the Office of Human Rights, were principally financed from the regular city budget, but the Special Fund secretly paid a small cadre of black informants and operatives who, had they been on the official payroll, might have been accused of “selling out” to the establishment). Most of the money went to more prosaic projects in the black community: the Roxbury Beautification Program and a similar “cleanup” drive, both designed to keep black youngsters busy during the summer; equipment for a teenage football team; a contribution to the Roxbury YMCA; tickets for two hundred black kids to see the “Ice Capades” at the Garden.

The Orchard Park housing project, where Rachel Twymon and her six children lived, received a disproportionate share of the money, perhaps because it had been the site of some of the worst violence following King’s assassination. Some $1,500 went to finance a summer festival there called “The Orchard Park Thing,” a week-long bash of rock concerts, games, and food, hugely enjoyed by the Twymon kids. Another $600 helped equip an Orchard Park Security Patrol, made up of men in the project fed up with crime and vandalism. And $100 went to the nearby Robert Gould Shaw House, the settlement house which Mrs. Twymon, her brothers and sisters, and now her children attended.

Such expenditures were merely stopgaps—firebreaks to hold back the holocaust. More grandiose plans were being contemplated.

The Sunday after King’s assassination, Sheldon Appel, a Boston paper box manufacturer, was at breakfast in suburban Newton when he noticed an article on page one of the
Herald
headlined “City’s Negroes Cool Their Own.” It told how Bill Wimberly, director of the Roxbury YMCA, and his sidekick, Marvin Butler, had rescued a white man badly beaten in Roxbury that week, and how they had otherwise sought to control violence in the black community following
King’s death. The
Herald
had selected Wimberly and Butler to represent the hundreds of black community leaders, ministers, and social workers who had been out in the street trying to cool things during the riots. The reporter closed his piece: “Bill Wimberly sat in his office with the green curtains drawn back and the April sun shining in on him, thinking about the summer. ‘We need a gym here real badly. It will cost $250,000…. We can’t raise it in the black community. We need help.’ ”