Common Ground

...Mr...

...Part of this is for personal reasons...

...This is the story of three families, each of which was subjected not only to Judge Garrity's desegregation order, but, more significantly, to the unheavenly environment that is Boston — and increasingly the racially, ethnically, and socially oppressed reality that characterizes too many of our cities...

...Hicks, for all her negative image in the liberal press as bigoted "Boston's Head Mother," worked quietly behind the scenes, and, in many more open ways, risked her political career to prevent the violence over busing in South Boston...

...Freddie Twymon's favorite victims become people like the Divers and their white, professional friends, who have moved into the South End to gentrify it...

...He had no choice, under the constitution, but to rule as he did and was prevented, by the Burger Court, from making the suburbs part of a metropolitan desegregation plan...

...Lukas says: "The three families at the center of my story were not selected as statistical averages or norms...

...But Lukas is critical of the judge as well, suggesting that he should not have thrown Roxbury and South Boston together in the first year of the busing, and that he could have been more flexible in keeping some schools intact where integration seemed to be working, although they did not fit exactly into his rigid desegregation formula...

...Insight can be a source for healing...

...The strands of the tapestry were so various and so mixed, events kept moving and moving (only in August 1985 did Judge W. Arthur Garrity get out of the case and return the system to a newly reconstituted Boston School Committee) and it simply seemed too close in time to make any measured historical judgment...

...What variables should one put into the multiple regression analysis, and would this really tell us what impacted upon what...

...Black Rachel Twymon, raising her six children alone in a church-sponsored housing project in Roxbury, sees the effects of busing on her daughter, Cassandra, a member of the first group of blacks sent, in the fall of 1975, into the tight Irish isle of Charlestown amidst a hail of bottles, epithets, and stones...

...At least they try, and are survivors...

...But the Divers, despite the best of intentions, are victimizers too, because their coming drives up the cost and rent of property and drives out the blacks who live there...

...Lukas finds common ground...

...At first, I thought I read clear moral imperatives in the geometry of their intersecting lives, but the more time I spent with them, the harder it became to assign easy labels of guilt or virtue...

...Moreover, nothing in the mountains that had been written on the situation in Boston even came close to accurately portraying what was going on...

...The Divers, at least, have options...

...That we were only partially successful, I deeply regret...

...Laced with telling anecdotes and done with historical overview, these sketches reveal that, despite their temporary eminence, these main actors in the Boston drama also share common ground with those subject to their edicts...

...Common Ground has already been the object of extraordinary critical acclaim...

...At the book's end, exhausted by the crime around them (Colin Diver sleeps with a thick lead pipe next to his pillow) and the incessant political nature of Mayor Kevin White's administration, they move out to the white picket fence suburbs, where Judge Garrity lives...

...Like the dyer's hand, J. Anthony Lukas has become that which he works in...

...Lukas's book is not only a work of consummate genius, but is instructive to anyone who would attempt an analysis of a complex, closein-time event...

...Among these seemingly disparate families, Mr...

...It was stupid...

...J. Anthony Lukas hopes, and I hope, that Common Ground will reach the wide audience it so eloquently deserves...

...Commonweal: 618...

...I wasn't thinking...

...Even the McGoffs did not come...

...A member of the Harvard Law Review, class of 1968, Colin Diver forgoes a job with a prominent Washington law firm in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination to answer Mayor Kevin White's call to white liberals to live in and work for the betterment of the city...

...Lukas's book...

...Lukas noted: "We were deadly serious at this conference to bring Bostonians together, not Harvard professors and governmental officials...

...But in its breadth, its nuance, and its quality as literature, though a piece of non-fiction, Common Ground is no less than Shakespearian...

...As they emerged from a restaurant, they were set upon by an angry mob, throwing rocks and shouting racial crudities...

...The McGoffs and the Twymons, victimized by urban poverty, violence, alcohol, and drugs, become, in turn, victimizers...

...The third family is that of Colin and Joan Diver and their children, Yankees...

...Cardinal Medeiros, a devout, quiet Portuguese, simply didn't have the political clout of his Irish predecessor nor the will to confront mobs hostile to busing in Charlestown...

...My parents had spent most of their professional lives in the Boston public school system and I had written a number of articles about the case and "the troubles" in Boston...

...On the contrary, I was drawn to them by a special intensity, an engagement with life, which made them stand out from their social context...

...Lukas literally lived with these families over the years of his book, tasting their sorrows, and sometimes joys...

...One need only go back a generation or two to discover that they once were immigrants all...

...I had been closely involved with many of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Boston School Desegregation case, the focal point of Mr...

...But the McGoffs, Twymons, and Divers have a grittiness of spirit about them which makes them very winsome...

...If there is any hero, it is probably he...

...Lukas's technique borrows from the participantobserver tradition of Oscar Lewis's La Vida, Anthony Lewis's Gideon's Trumpet, and Richard Kluger's Simple Justice (until now the best book written on school desegregation, demonstrating an equal amount of effort...

...Then, too, there was the old problem of academe — how could one evaluate anything...

...Lukas avoids the trap of trying to overwhelm us with statistics or to scientifically evaluate anything, so much the fashion in modern sociology...

...The realities of urban America . . . proved far more complicated than I had imagined...

...Nor does he get mired in the legal thicket so well known to me...

...All were a little grayer and, perhaps, a tad wiser...

...I had even attempted a book, but gave up...

...The wound on the face of the disk jockey, Jim Julian, required nineteen stitches...

...At Charlestown High, which resembles more an armed camp than an institution of lower learning, little green and white stickers soon appear on the lockers of the seniors — TLWC — nostalgically proclaiming The Last White Class...

...Interspersed amidst the ongoing saga of the three families are chapters which are probably the best short biographies ever written of Cardinals Cushing and Medeiros, Chairwoman Louise Day Hicks, Editor Tom Winship and The Boston Globe, Mayor White, and Judge Garrity...

...Equally trapped in her Charlestown housing project, Alice McGoff, a widow raising seven children, joins the mothers' marches and group Hail Marys sponsored by ROAR — Restore Our Alienated Rights — against the "invaders" on their "turf...

...Lukas describes all with humor and great empathy...

...In the first place, despite the far more than seven years of meticulously checked research that went into Common Ground, Mr...

...They, too, send their children to the public schools and become subject to Judge Garrity's order and the maelstrom of urban violence...

...That same night, in Charlestown, a popular Boston disk jockey made the mistake of bringing his son and a black friend in his van near Charlestown's Bunker Hill housing project, McGoffville, if you will...

...November 1985: 617 On September 28, 1985, it was the centerpiece of a gathering of over 500 participants in, and commentators on, the struggle over busing at the John F. Kennedy Library on Columbia Point in Dorchester...

...In his prefatory note describing how he tried to get a handle on the happenings in Boston over the last decade, Mr...

...Cardinal Cushing was from "Southie," Kevin White's wife grew up in Charlestown, as did Judge Garrity's forebears, in circumstances not far removed from the McGoffs...

...Yet one cannot help but wonder which groups in Boston will, in fact, read it, let alone this review...

...Yet despite strenuous efforts to draw^a broad spectrum of people together, few working-class Charlestown or South Boston whites showed up...

...There are few winners in Common Ground, at least on the mundane, factual level...

...Then, a little like Milton coming upon Chapman's Homer, I read and reread and reread J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, and walked away each time with an ever deeper amaze...

...The McGoffs, Twymons, and others trapped in the city rightly experienced this as very inequitable...

...He later said ruefully: "It didn't occur to me that I was taking a black man into Charlestown...

...The Divers move into Boston's South Commonweal: 616 End, not far from Rachel Twymon and her family...

...As Mr...