Common Ground (9 page)

Shelly Appel had been overwhelmed by King’s assassination, and was feeling, as he later put it, “the guilt of centuries.” Putting down the paper, he exclaimed to his wife, “Somebody ought to help these guys. Here their leader has been gunned down and they spend all their energies trying to save white people. My God, I’ve got to do something! This is something I can do.”

During the next few days, Appel called friends and acquaintances asking them to help raise money for the gym. Someone suggested he try Ralph Hoagland, president of Consumer Value Stores, a Massachusetts chain of cut-rate drugstores.

Hoagland was something of a phenomenon in Boston business circles—a Princeton and Harvard Business School graduate who, while still in his twenties, had built CVS into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. But he approached his social responsibilities with equal intensity. In 1961, while still at the business school, he asked one of his professors how he could help Negroes. “Why don’t you teach them what you learned last year?” the professor suggested. So that fall, Hoagland began teaching business at a Roxbury social service agency, to a mixed group of clothes pressers, junk men, and house painters. He was convinced that if he could pass along what he knew to these black men, they could make it in the business world. But it rarely worked, usually because his students lacked the necessary capital. Once he founded CVS, he dropped the course, but he retained a burning conviction that such men could make it if only they could put expertise and capital together. Staggered by King’s death, he was more than receptive when he got a call from Shelly Appel.

Nine people gathered in the Hoaglands’ living room on Saturday, April 13. Quickly, they abandoned the gym idea. As Ralph Hoagland put it, “Blacks don’t need more basketball courts. They do very well as it is bouncing the ball off a stoop. We have to shoot for something bigger than that.” But they couldn’t agree on what that should be. One by one, the guests began drifting away, leaving Appel and Hoagland staring at each other over the coffee cups. “Well,” Shelly Appel said, “I guess it’s up to us.” They agreed to meet again at Appel’s home on April 22.

In the meantime, Hoagland spoke with his black friends, among them Bryant Rollins, a young writer and social activist, who told him, “You want to help us, then give us the money and let us decide what we’re going to do with it. The time is over for white people to be telling blacks what to do. We’re going to control our own destiny now.” In part, Rollins reflected the stance of the Black United Front, a new umbrella organization embracing
nearly all of Boston’s major black groups—from the Urban League to the Black Panthers—formed that January following a visit by Stokely Carmichael. After King’s assassination, the Front demanded a large dose of self-determination—or, in the lingo of the times, “community control”—for Boston’s black neighborhoods. On April 8, five thousand blacks gathered in a Roxbury sports stadium. With whites excluded, they approved twenty-one demands, among them:

“As of Monday, April 8, all white-owned and white-controlled businesses will be closed until further notice, while the transfer of the ownership of these businesses to the black community is being negotiated through the United Front.

“Every school in the black community shall have all-black staff, principals, teachers, and custodians.

“All schools within the black community are to be renamed after black heroes. Names will be selected through the United Front.

“The black community must have control of all public, private, and municipal agencies that affect the lives of the people in this community.

“The Mayor’s office is to mobilize the Urban Coalition, the National Business Alliance, and the white community at large to immediately make $100,000,000 available to the black community.”

The United Front’s demands drew an angry response from Kevin White, who could hardly be expected to welcome steps which would weaken his political control over the city. “I understand and feel the anguish which spawned it,” he said. “I will not by one word or one act add to the delusion that it is rational, workable, or dignified either for black or white. Racism is obscene by whomever proposed, black or white, and social reform rarely benefits from expropriation.” The Mayor coupled his flat rejection of the Front’s demands with praise for simultaneous proposals by the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had broken with the Front. White called the NAACP’s proposals—which included stricter housing code enforcement and the hiring of more black policemen—“a worthy basis for serious implementation.”

Ralph Hoagland did not share the Mayor’s reservations. Indeed, he was excited by the boldness of the United Front’s vision (ultimately, the Front saw the black community separating politically from Boston and forming a new city). When he, Appel, and half a dozen others met on April 22, Hoagland persuaded the group to accept an extraordinary proposition: that they set out to raise the $100 million included in the demands and give it to the Front “no strings attached.” To screen out those not truly dedicated, they would ask for a minimum of $1,000 per person and one day a week to be devoted to a “skills bank” which would help blacks develop expertise in business and finance. Moreover, they agreed that the real problem was not in Roxbury but in Newton and other suburbs like it where “white racism” prevailed. While striving to help the black community, they must also educate the white community on their “moral responsibility” to erase racial inequality. They resolved to begin
with a series of recruiting breakfasts held in their homes at seven o’clock on weekday mornings. The hour was Appel’s idea. “People are always telling you they’re tied up for lunch or dinner,” he explained. “But nobody can tell you they’re busy at seven a.m. The only reason for refusing a seven a.m. invitation is that they’re too lazy or not committed enough. We don’t want those people anyway.”

The founding members of what came to be known as FUND—Fund for United Negro Development—could scarcely be accused of either laziness or lack of commitment. Ralph Hoagland, in particular, largely abandoned his drugstore chain for months on end as he worked sixteen hours a day raising money for FUND and serving as the principal go-between with the black community.

Hoagland, Appel, and the others brought the same almost religious zeal to their recruiting for FUND—one FUND officer told another, “Now I think I know what it must have been like in the early days of Christianity”—and at first it paid off. Over the next months, they held hundreds of seven o’clock breakfasts throughout Boston’s ring of white suburbs and brought in an impressive roster of members at $1,000 apiece. At the start, the recruits came principally from among their friends in the liberal Jewish communities of Newton and Brookline. But gradually during the weeks following King’s assassination it became fashionable to ante up for the black community. Senator Edward Kennedy was an early donor. So were Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, wife of the Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Ambassador’s son, George. FUND’s membership list was a tightly held secret, but most of those who joined the organization were substantial citizens of the Yankee suburbs: among them, Robert Saltonstall of Ralph Lowell’s trust company; Philip Weld, publisher of the Beverly
Times;
Standish Bradford of the law firm of Hale & Dorr, and Francis Hatch, a state representative from the North Shore. One wealthy suburbanite even gave FUND his Porsche.

There were failures too. Hoagland took a long walk up the Ipswich beach with novelist John Updike, but came away empty-handed. And Joan Diver went to a FUND meeting at the home of friends on Beacon Hill, but gave nothing, partly because the Divers didn’t have that kind of money, partly because they harbored doubts about FUND’s approach.

The early money raising went so well that on May 23, FUND presented the United Front with its first installment—a check for $75,000. But that was a long way from $100 million. Soon FUND’s leaders realized that if they were going to reach that goal they needed to get it in larger chunks. One day Hoagland and Harvard theologian Harvey Cox lunched with Robert Slater, president of the John Hancock Insurance Company and chairman of Boston’s branch of the Urban Coalition, a year-old organization which sought to enlist big business in the war on urban poverty. In a private dining room at the Somerset Club, they asked Slater to funnel some of his vast resources into FUND.

“No, I won’t,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why. The people you’re dealing with are Mafia and Communists.”

Indeed, much of Boston’s establishment—black as well as white—regarded the United Front’s leaders as either crooks who would take the money and run to Brazil or revolutionaries who would buy guns and bombs. Among those who harbored such suspicions was Kevin White. When FUND’S leaders went to see him at City Hall, he castigated them for “picking the wrong black cats” and warned, “If they go out and buy machine guns, I’m holding you people personally responsible for the bloodbath that ensues.”

Six months later one of the Front’s leaders—an ex-con named Guido St. Laurent, who headed the New England Grass Roots Organization (NEGRO)—was in fact gunned down with two of his aides in what police called a “gangland-style murder.” But most United Front members were well-intentioned if clumsy social activists. The $1 million which FUND presented to the Front between 1968 and 1972 went principally into loans for small black enterprises, most of which eventually went out of business.

Quixotic and ill conceived as it was, the FUND-United Front alliance outraged City Hall and State Street principally because it skirted the traditional channels of private philanthropy and good works; because it involved—both as donors and as recipients—volatile new forces in the community who wouldn’t play by the old rules; and because it threatened established institutional relationships. If substantial money could flow from progressive Jewish businessmen and their guilt-ridden Yankee allies to a bunch of militant, aggressive blacks determined to control their own community, it could at least temporarily discomfit the old money represented in the Vault, established interests among the black middle class, and, of course, the Mayor, whose political ambitions depended on mobilization of existing power bases.

Not surprisingly, in the weeks following FUND’S affiliation with the Front, these traditional interests began to coalesce. Robert Slater besieged the Mayor’s office, seeking “socially responsible channels” through which the Urban Coalition and the Hancock could deal with Boston’s urban crisis. So impatient did Slater become that one mayoral aide dubbed him “the quivering mass of money.” The Mayor was characteristically skeptical about this abrupt shift in the business community’s stance. “All of a sudden,” he said, “everybody wants to enlist in the battle to save the black man and the city.”

White was particularly bemused by Bob Slater, a flamboyant wheeler-dealer, who took big chances with the Hancock’s money and talked of running for governor. Early in 1968, Slater announced plans for a spectacular new company headquarters, sixty stories of reflecting glass towering over the Back Bay. There were some who believed that his passionate attention to minority needs was somehow related to the new building’s precarious site on the rim of the black community; its five thousand windows would make tempting targets in any disturbance. Skeptics suggested that the company was taking out “riot insurance.”

For the time being, though, Robert Slater’s interests coincided with Kevin White’s. On May 13, 1968, in a full-dress City Hall news conference, White proclaimed that Boston’s banks and insurance companies would provide $50
million for low-income housing—through new construction, rehabilitation, and liberalized mortgages on existing homes. In addition, he announced formation of a Boston Urban Foundation to invest $6 million in minority business ventures, and a “skills bank” to assist such businesses.

Much of the program—notably the foundation and the skills bank—bore striking similarity to the FUND-Front program. The Front’s response was predictable, labeling the Mayor’s scheme “a sham, an insult to the black community, a hypocritical and superficial political move.” Indeed, little came of it—except for some increased mortgage financing and a few ambitious, though ultimately abortive, projects sponsored by the Hancock. Years later, Kevin White conceded that the whole thing was a “floral piece.” The ubiquitous Ephron Catlin, who cropped up again as one of its promoters, privately called it a “wind puppy,” an old Yankee term for a dog who looks pregnant but is actually bloated by gas.

Not all of Kevin White’s activities in this period were so flatulent. An intensely political man, White responded to political imperatives—and, after King’s assassination, the black community claimed his attention. Wasting no time, he loosed a volley of statements and gestures that soon led working-class whites to label him “Mayor Black.”

On April 9, the day King was buried in Atlanta, White issued a statement describing himself as “Dr. King’s disciple.” By then the mood in Roxbury had cooled sufficiently for the Mayor to walk the streets. Accompanied by Jeep Jones, he strolled up Blue Hill Avenue that afternoon, played basketball with a group of teenagers, dropped in on several “civil rights” organizations, and shook every hand in sight. Three days later, White swallowed his pride and met with fifteen representatives of the United Front, saying, “I have no desire to stifle the dialogue that is so necessary to make progress in this critical area.” And on April 20, he spent all day at a conference on black employment, sponsored jointly by his office and Roxbury churches. Closing the conference that Saturday afternoon, he concluded that “the overriding need in the ghetto is not employment per se, but rather the development of black entrepreneurship.”

Three hours later, Kevin White kept a long-standing commitment to address the eighty-first annual banquet of the
Harvard Law Review
, which was held in the central hall of the Harvard Club, a vast, four-story chamber with a floor of Tennessee marble, walls of Flemish oak, and six arched windows rising to a beamed ceiling hung with Italian chandeliers. Assembled in this baronial splendor were the current editors and their predecessors from years gone by—members of Congress, federal and state judges, professors from the leading law schools, distinguished practitioners from Wall Street, State Street, and Broad Street, all turned out in white starched shirts, black ties, and dinner jackets. After an ample dinner, the speeches began.