Common ground: a turbulent decade in the lives of three American families

National Review, Dec 13, 1985 by Thomas P. McDonnell

Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

'A MARVELOUS SAGA," and Newsweek, in perhaps the mildest of the acclamations that have greeted J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, an account of the Boston school-desegregation crisis, 1968 to 1978. William A. Henry, reviewing the book for Time magazine, tries not to let his biases show as a former employee of the Boston Globe. It was left to The New Republic, however, to hail this hefty volume as "an extraordinary chronicle," etc. The New Republic's reviewer is Fox Butterfield, chief of the Boston bureau of the New York Times, while Lukas himself is an ex-New York Times correspondent.

Common ground is largely anecdotal history; the author fails to provide a clarifying perspective, and most of the reviewers have not supplied one. The most astonishing aspect of the reaction to this book, in fact, is that almost no one has noticed that the public schools in Boston have now achieved reverse imbalance. Evidently some liberals still hold to the principle that public schools are segregated only when the white student population is in the majority.

Common Ground, as its subtitle indicates, deals with the experiences of three representative families during the decade of the school-desegregation crisis, and in fact the ground on which they walked is about all these families had in common outside their various forms of misery. The pity is that the misery had been so seldom shared, the bread of sorrow so seldom broken in common, and the plain fact recognized that the Twymons (the blacks) and the McGoffs (the Irish) are largely unfortunates set against one another by a meddling government and the irrational calculations of the social engineers.

Colin and Joan Diver (the WASPs) are not only the most pathetic element to be found in Common Ground, but prove to be fairly irrelevant as well: They are muddle-headed suburban progressives who get in the way of solving any problem at hand, like demonstrators who have literally to be dragged to one side before serious discussions can begin. The Divers moved from suburban Lexington to the multi-racial community of the South End in order to catch the pulse and tempo of it all. Soon enough, however, the harsh realities of their adoptive environment knock them out of their Nikes. Colin ends up chasing a Puerto Rican mugger down the street and even bashes him in the head with a baseball bat. Last we hear, the Divers have moved to suburban Newton.

But it is the Twymons and the McGoffs who are the heart of this book. Rachael Twymon, as the black mother of five, is a classic welfare case: a woman, abandoned by her husband, attempting to hold her family together, as her three sons, deprived of their father's presence, turn hostile and aggressive, and her 13-year-old daughter becomes pregnant. Alice McGoff struggles against similar odds, a woman attempting to raise seven children after the death of her bartender husband. She is basically a good woman beset by enormous problems of her own, which have been complicated further by the predictable hassle of busing black students into the Charlestown enclave. For these people the situation was nothing less than the grinding of one millstone against another.

This is the dirty little secret of the Boston busing crisis; and if it has been told hardly at all, that is because the moralizing part of the community has had the means to remain completely isolated from the problem. The Divers found this out soon enough and beat their hasty retreat back to the suburbs, where Colin may be a slightly sadder but a wiser man today, while Joan still can't rub the stardust from her eyes. The truth of the matter is that the social experiment indulged in by the courts was not suffered by the WASP community, nor by the Jewish community, nor even by the predominantly Italian North End: It was suffered by the two communities that were least able to deal with it on both economic and historical grounds.

Another part of the dirty little secret is that the school-desegregation crisis had nothing to do with education. One of the most asinine statements to arise from the busing crisis was Senator Edward M. Kennedy's remark that what mattered most is what one found at the end of the bus ride. While his own children and the children of most other Washington-based politicians were taking advantage of a very privileged education, he must have really thought that what the poor Irish in Boston objected to was the prospect of poor blacks getting an education too. In fact, what poor Irish mothers feared most was the social aspect of the crisis, as described in the harrowing 27th chapter of this book, even as poor black mothers feared the rock-throwing hostility they knew would be the immediate result of busing.

Between the recurring and thematic chapters on the Divers, the Twymons, and the McGoffs, Lukas fills out his report with material on the Chairwoman (Louise Day Hicks), the Judge (W. Arthur Garrity Jr.), the Editor (Thomas Winship), the Cardinal (Humberto Medeiros), and the Mayor (Kevin White). The chapters on Cardinal Medeiros and Thomas Winship, then editor of the Boston Globe, especially reveal the author's biases. Whereas Cardinal Medeiros is portrayed as withdrawn and even wimpy, Thomas Winship rides through these pages in the gleaming armor of a modern knight of the New Journalism: "Winship handled the protest calmly"; "Winship sought to deflect the demands with a coolly noncommittal reaction"; "Tom Winship . . . waged a relentless campaign"; "Tom was determined to inject some of this youthful iconoclasm into his own staff"; etc. In fairness, though, Lukas also takes note of Winship's peculiar talent for suppressing important news stories when the special interests of the Boston Globe itself were at stake.