1

Getting on the Bus

In the fall of 1960, a loaf of bread cost twenty cents. “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison was on all the AM radio stations. In twenty-six states it was illegal for men and women of different races to marry. Jim Crow segregation was the law in all Southern states. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were competing for the presidency. And, at age thirteen, I started high school in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Civil defense drills were common to every school across America. Periodically, we were told there would be a drill to practice what to do in the event of nuclear attack. The fire alarms would ring. Dutifully, we would troop down to the basement with its yellow and black “fallout shelter” signs, one of one million metal signs, visible from 200 feet, carefully designed by psychologists to direct us to safety.¹ Once in the basement, we would be ordered to “drop” and then assume the proper position, head down, “duck and cover.” The one thing we are not to do, we were repeatedly told, is to look up at the time of the blast, as it would blind us. Drop. Head down. Duck and cover.

We are huddled down in the basement, some boys trying to tease the girls. Some of us are just bored. Some are frightened. We have seen the newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cindered bodies, the devastation. I veer from thinking it is all a joke to being terrified. But of course, I and all the other boys do not want to show how we feel. We want to be James Dean or Marlon Brando. We practice curling our lip. We need to be cool, and we are so not cool.

One chart on the wall catches my attention. It depicts concentric circles centered on a blast site. Each expanding circle demarks a zone of destruction. Within the inner zone everything is turned to ash; further out there is a vast firestorm and all the oxygen is consumed instantaneously; in the next zone most buildings are flattened, and in the next there is massive radiation contamination. I am supposed to have my head down between my knees, but I cannot keep my eyes off those circles, the mile radius markings clear.

I raise my hand and ask the obvious question: since Brookline High is located less than ten miles from the South Boston army base and since the active army base will be the logical target in any nuclear attack, isn’t it completely clear that we would all be dead? I point to the chart. Why should we worry about not looking up? Why duck and cover when we will be either ash, or dead, because the firestorm has sucked all the oxygen out of the very air?

Questioning the teachers assigned to run civil defense drills is not well received. One teacher chirps, “Keep quiet, look down, do as your told.”

I have no sense of optimism. I believe there is some sort of equation for sanity in a crazed world. If everyone around you, especially those in authority, is irrational, then the only reasonable response is to behave in a manner that may seem crazy. I think the world could actually end. I think I am a stranger in a strange land. (I have read Robert A. Heinlein of course.)

Out of despair, I refuse to duck and cover. I simply will not cooperate with lunacy. I will not sit down. I will look up. I will stand up.

Detention after school.

The next civil defense drill I pass out a leaflet explaining how wacky this is.

Double detention.

I join with two young women, Rika Alper and Harriet Hornstein, to form a small team protesting nuclear weapons. We enlist a few other kids and pass out leaflets on Saturday mornings to pedestrians along the busiest shopping streets in Brookline calling on both the Soviets and the United States to take “unilateral steps toward nuclear disarmament.” I have no expectation that our gestures will have a real impact.

That first year of high school I was often on crutches, frequently in pain, frequently morose and resentful. I had spent much of the previous summer in Children’s Hospital in Boston, immobilized in casts that had done nothing to ease the searing pain of an undiagnosed joint disease. Upon being sent home, I had fled into books, found escape into an alternative reality allowing me to shuck off, at least for a night, my failing body and my drab existence. I would find an author who excited me and then read every one of their books. Increasingly I was drawn to American history. I devoured all the novels of Kenneth Roberts. I spent hours browsing in the American Heritage Book of the American Revolution or lost in a book of photographs from the Civil War. Our history came alive for me. Curled amid the disheveled blankets and sheets at two in the morning, I did not so much read books, I lived books. My reading confirmed that I was born in the wrong century. Everything had already been explored. All the important battles had already been fought. Born into the wrong body, the wrong time.

The first day of school, I had hobbled along on crutches awkwardly navigating unfamiliar halls, acutely aware of my pimples and flab, found my cubby, greeted some of the kids I knew, and generally wished I were anywhere else. The one thing I was looking forward to was the American history class. The teacher, a short, balding man with a round, bespectacled, froglike countenance, passed out the syllabuses and explained that our grades would be determined solely by how well we did on weekly tests. There would be no essays, only multiple-choice tests.

I was outraged.

After class, with the insolence of the eager young, I explained that multiple-choice history tests were the stupidest idea I had ever encountered. What—George Washington was A) our first president, B) our first general, or C) a liar?

He was not pleased. The tests were what the school used, he said, and I would have a hard time getting the answers right. Arrogant and morosely cocky, I replied that I would not open a textbook all fall and would still get an A. He became furious, sputtered that I was wrong, that I was outrageous, and that I would most certainly fail the class if I did not do the assigned reading. His frog face turned red.

I swung away on my crutches, disdainful, convinced that teachers were clueless. I did not open the textbook. My score ended up being a hundred for the semester. I stopped doing any homework. I detested my classes, refused to take them seriously.

With adolescent certainty, I was determined to not conform to a system that was intellectually bankrupt. I was driven by despair. Wrong century. Wrong school. Wrong life. Wrong body.

I had grown up in a strange family. As a child, of course, I did not think it strange. I was determinedly oblivious. I remembered my early years as idyllic, spent in the new Virginia suburbs of Washington surrounded with woods, creeks, and even a few remaining farms. But after we relocated to Massachusetts and I became a precocious adolescent, I noticed that my parents, unlike the parents of my friends, rarely went out, never had guests over for dinner. Our house was crammed with books. But we were always scrabbling for money. Each home of ours had my mother’s paintings on the walls but she had stopped painting before I was born. I was raised to think of myself as a Syrian Lebanese American. My father’s family had immigrated from what is now Lebanon. My mother’s brother and sisters were Jewish, but she maintained that her family was not Jewish, that they had converted because of their marriages. In fact, despite my mother’s vehement assertions to the contrary, her family had been part of the great wave of Russian Jewish immigration to the United States in the first years of the twentieth century.

I do not remember political discussions growing up. In my teenage years I would learn that both my parents had been active in left politics in the 1930s and that in 1947 my father had been fired from his job at the State Department as a security risk.

My father had trouble staying in a job for long. He went through a string of them, rarely lasting more than three years. In the end, despite a Harvard degree, he became a cab driver, hated it, and did poorly at it. Desperate for money, my mother started tutoring children in our kitchen. At twelve, I went to work at the Brookline Public Library shelving books.

While others thrilled to the generational summons of a young JFK, I thought we lived in an irrational world with crazy leaders, including the new president, who was testing nuclear weapons that put radioactivity in the milk I and millions drank every day. The whole world was crazy, bleak, and hopeless. I was in the iron grip of adolescent despair.

I walk, slightly limping, down Harvard Avenue into Coolidge Corner with its stores and restaurants. Walking past Woolworth’s, I see a small group of picketers circling, back and forth, carrying signs. After watching for a few minutes, I ask a tall young man what they are doing. He says they are supporting “Negro” students in North Carolina who were refused a cup of coffee at a Woolworth’s and so are sitting at the lunch counter until they get served. Segregation has to go, he says. America is the land of the free, he says. Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he says. “Negroes” are Americans too.

Sunlight filters on the sidewalk. I step into the slow-moving line, step into “the movement,” step out of adolescent despair and bleakness and into a new life.

I do not think about what I am doing. With impetuous certainty I know my place is in that line. Only much later will I consider why I took that first step into a life of activism. I will recall attending the only integrated school in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I will remember a sweat-stained, tear-stained walk home from a lost fight in the Virginia twilight after a Little League practice when the other kids taunted me for “going to that n----- school on the hill.” I will remember the burnished mahogany cheek of the gentle nurse who took care of me through polio, when at eight years old, I was confined to bed for months. I will feel ashamed that I do not remember her name.

Quickly I fall in love with “the movement.” I am in awe of those who sit in at the lunch counters, ride on the freedom buses, and register people to vote. Their quiet courage in the face of hatred and violence is stunning. They possess a ferocious dignity. The Freedom Riders, those sitting in at lunch counters, those lining up to register to vote, those young Black bodies willing to be beaten, those new heroes of mine, are standing up to decades of terror and legalized discrimination.

Southern white people had woven a tight net of laws segregating and subjugating Black people. In 1960, it was illegal for Black people to drink from white-only water fountains or to swim in white-only pools, to attend white-only schools, to eat or even sit at white-only lunch counters. Black voters were disenfranchised. Over roughly eighty years, the Jim Crow system was enforced by unyielding terror. Routinely Black Americans were beaten, shot, even murdered, lynched. Killed for trying to sell their crops at market rates. Killed for not stepping off the sidewalk fast enough to let white people pass easily. Killed for trying to vote. Killed for being “uppity.” Killed for looking the wrong way at a white woman.²

Then young Black students and slightly older African American ministers challenged that terror and the legal system of segregation. Sat in. Became Freedom Riders integrating buses. Marched. Registered people to vote. Challenged the decades old laws and violence. They were beaten. They were shot. They were jailed. Water hoses turned on them. Dogs unleashed on them. Bombs exploded on front porches and in Black churches. Some were murdered. And still, they would not stop. Despite the beatings, despite the arrests, despite the shootings, despite the deaths, they brought legal segregation to an end. They integrated the South. They won voting rights. They changed America.

How could I not fall in love with those young men and women only six, seven, and eight years older than I? How could I not dream of following in their footsteps? How could I resist the magnetic pull of such gigantic hope?

I could not. I dove into the movement. I plunged in, without any hesitation, and with fierce joy.

There was a constant buzz of civil rights activities in Boston. The Northern Student Movement organized high school and college students to tutor younger Black students, and I helped out. Activists from the South frequently came to Boston to raise awareness and support. I felt a particular connection with the young organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the organization that emerged from and carried forward the sit-ins at the lunch counters. Soon courageous young African American students left their colleges to become full-time activists. They possessed a passionate intensity. They talked about organizing as well as sit-ins, wade-ins, and marches. And I listened, eagerly. Their moral gravity drew me the way a magnet attracts filings. At my home, I had a sense of things broken, space filled with unspoken despair. My moments with the SNCC organizers as they came to Boston bathed me in courage and optimism. For the first time I began to believe that there were causes worth fighting for. Perhaps I was not born into the wrong century after all.

Late in the spring of 1961, I let my parents know that the next year I would not be attending Brookline High. I was done with multiple-choice education. I had heard about a new, small, private school called the Commonwealth School that had started up three years earlier in Boston’s Back Bay.

Walking into the two old townhouses that had been joined to create the school, I immediately felt at home. The entrance exam asked the applicant to choose three questions from a list and write a short essay about each one. I wrote one essay on why their questions were the wrong questions. Commonwealth loved it.

I was accepted with a huge scholarship and the newly created job of “assistant janitor” to pay the remainder of my tuition.

I loved Commonwealth and thrived there. The teachers wanted to teach. The classes were tiny—there were twenty-two students in my entire grade. The school was for my intellect as a rain forest is for orchids. I soaked in everything, blossoming in my own angsty adolescent way.

I made two close friends, Tim Dickinson and Ron Carver. Ronnie, in particular, was deeply antiauthoritarian—as budding activist teenagers should be. I was as well—ideologically. But I felt I needed to be responsible and care for my family. At school, I wanted to excel, to please teachers who I respected, even loved. I wanted to change the world but did not want to change a thing about Commonwealth.

My education extended beyond school. St. Mark’s Church and the affiliated Social Center in Grove Hall were the center of organizing for civil rights in Boston. Its youth marching band, instead of playing the music of John Phillip Souza, worked up freedom songs. Two dozen young Black kids high stepping to drums and singing “keep on walking, keep on talking, marching down to freedom land,” sent my adolescent soul soaring.

I was mentored by a remarkably generous array of Black activists. Sarah-Ann Shaw, a slight young woman with the beginning of an afro, a social worker for St. Mark’s, became one of the organizers in Boston for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Byron Rushing, slender and soft spoken, was the organizer for the Northern Student Movement in Boston. Mel King was the large, overalls-wearing social worker at the South End Settlement House. The reverend Jim Breeden was the poised and handsome Episcopal priest at St. James Episcopal Church. Julian Houston was a tall and precociously dignified undergraduate at Boston University. They all became my mentors. The two most important and most generous were Noel Day, the lead social worker at St. Mark’s who would spearhead the Boston Action Group and the Massachusetts Freedom Movement, and A. Robert Phillips, the organizer for both.

I do not know why they bothered, given how young, raw, and inexperienced I was, but they treated me with a respect that nourished. I was fourteen and fifteen and have no idea if they realized exactly how young I really was. I volunteered for any task: knocking on doors, producing flyers on mimeo machines, setting out chairs, whatever was needed. Miraculously they treated me as one of their own, invited me into their inner circle.

After a meeting, I could often be found sitting on the stoop of an old townhouse in the South End, a constant stream of activity on the street, mothers returning from shopping, drunks attempting to cadge enough money for yet another drink, kids biking. Everyone except me was Black.

Bob Phillips tilts back his head, his goatee militantly fashionable, looks me in the eye and takes me through what has happened and what is being planned.

“So how many doors have we knocked on so far?”

I have the list. “Seventy-three this weekend.”

“And where does that put us toward our goal?”

“We’ve knocked a total of one hundred fifty-five out of our goal of seven hundred fifty.”

“Well, I think we need to recruit more people to knock on doors this week and next weekend. Here is the list of people I will visit. If I get twelve new people for next weekend, I want you to be ready with the streets to assign, and make sure we have enough packets for them.”

“Okay. I am on it.”

“By the way, what did you think of Jean? I think she has a lot of potential. I think we can get her to play a bigger role. Perhaps we ask her to coordinate a team of the other women in her area. What do you think?”

He talks with me as if I am a fellow organizer—younger, in need of education and guidance but still in some way an equal. He stresses that the movement is the sea we swim in, but that organization is what matters; organizing will build power, sustain people.

Other times, I am sitting on a hard metal folding chair at St. Mark’s after a public meeting, included in the evaluation and planning with Bob, Sarah-Ann, Noel, and Reverend Breeden. Noel, his round, golden-brown face glistening with sweat, dissects the meeting and takes us through the plan for what comes next. Interlaced with all the detail and logistics is a constant questioning: are we effectively changing people, changing their understandings, their relationships? Are we getting people to see that problems they think of as individual, as their own, are shared problems rooted in systems of power? Noel leads us into taking leaps, launching a boycott of Wonder Bread, planning a walkout of students, planning a march without a permit. I am thrilled that young as I am, white, pimply, and wide-eyed, I am allowed to be a small part of that “we.”

From them, I gain optimism. I discard my despair. I shed my cynicism. I still hurt in most of my joints, but my body and its failures seem far less important.

I idolize Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who has emerged as a civil rights leader. She radiates courage. I am awed as she describes being a sharecropper who never finished high school. She is “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” She possesses moral weight and a deep well of determination. She is not fearless—she fears for herself, for her kids, for her people. She had no illusions about what awaited her when she stood up for the right to vote. She knew she would be reviled, beaten, and jailed. And still she not only stood up, but she is also organizing; she is a leader. She is the richest example to me of what happens when “ordinary people” step out of their day-to-day lives and join a movement for change: they can do extraordinary things. Out of darkness they kindle hope. It is happening even in the darkest regions of the Mississippi Delta.

Hamer and the organizers of SNCC impart to me a profound belief that history can be shaped, that history is in the hands of the children of Birmingham, in the hands of the organizers in small hamlets of the Mississippi Delta, in the hands of the swaying crowds in the churches. I know it is in our hands, and with love, passion, sacrifice, organizing, and courage it could, it would, be shaped toward justice. I do not just know it intellectually. I feel it.

As I sit in packed churches, African Americans of all ages around me, as I hear the stories of the South, as we sway, arm in arm singing, I fall in love with organizing, the idea that you could create social change by changing people, convincing them to come together to build organization. To change people, you first must talk with them, earn their trust, listen to them, get them to see that their individual problems were shared problems, social problems, and then get them to see the potential power that comes when people act together, have the courage to engage in direct action. Organizing is not as dramatic as the sit-ins, the bus rides, or the marches, but it is what makes direct action possible. Intrinsic to the concept of organizing is the belief that ordinary people matter, and that through working together in new democratic forms we can change society.

I know what I want to be in life: an organizer. I will toy with other paths from time to time—perhaps I will be an artist, perhaps I will be a journalist, for a few months, I even think I might be a college professor—but always, I will return to what I first saw in the young organizers of SNCC and the young African American organizers in Roxbury. I will be an organizer.

In 1962, when I am fifteen, Noel and Breeden test out the power of economic boycotts in Boston. Discrimination is not restricted to the South. All around us are companies that never hire Black workers or only hire them for the most menial of positions. Noel challenges us to mobilize the economic power of Boston’s Black community to force changes in corporate behavior. At that time, Black people were averaging 53 percent of white wages and one out of three Black people in Boston made under $2,000 a year.³

We start months of canvassing, research, listening, recruiting block captains. We are building a new organization, the Boston Action Group (BAG). Volunteers meet at St. Mark’s and go door to door talking about economic discrimination and asking families to fill out forms about what they buy. Particularly responsive people are asked to become block captains.

Normally we went door knocking in pairs. As time went on, I occasionally knocked on doors by myself, white and eager, and usually received a warm welcome.

Occasionally I met indifference. Certainly, I met people tired from their work and lives of worry and scarcity. But that did not stop them from inviting me in, taking time to talk with me.

A typical visit would start with my ringing doorbells of the brick townhouses on Mass Ave that once were elegant single-family homes for Boston’s richest and most fashionable families. Now converted into apartments, they house multiple families amid flaking paint and failing plumbing.

I had to find one doorbell that worked so I could get into the building. I knock on the first door and as it opens a crack, I say: “Hi, I am Michael from the Boston Action Group, working with Noel Day and Reverend Breeden. Can I come in and talk with you about how we are planning to get better jobs for our community?”

The door swings open. Beneath a high ceiling with chipped decorative moldings, a large woman in a tan house coat and slippers, answers. “Hi, I’m Mrs. Johnson, come on in.” She leads me to the kitchen table.

I explain, “We as a community can have power if we act together. One power we have is to decide together what we will buy and what we won’t buy. It’s not right that companies will take our money but not give us jobs. (I feel no incongruity in the use of that “we.” She knows I am speaking of the Black community.)

“And that is not right. We gotta use our economic power. If they won’t give us the jobs, they won’t get our dollars. We need those good jobs just like everyone else.”

“Yes indeed,” she murmurs. “For sure.”

I continue, “So BAG is going door to door. We want to find out what people are buying and ask if you will be willing to be part of a boycott. Just imagine what we can do if we all pool our buying power. May I go over this list of products to see what you buy?”

I show her a list of household products and food items organized by brand. We go over it and check off everything she buys. I ask her lots of questions not just about what she buys but how she feels about all that is happening. She is enthusiastic about a possible boycott. I explain how the boycott will work, that we will need every family to participate once we announce the target company at a large community meeting. I say that I am listing her as committed.

Mrs. Johnson is nodding her head. “You sure can.”

I explain that we are setting up a system of block captains and once one is selected for her block, I will connect them. I remind her that when we all work together, we can make change happen.

“Great,” says Mrs. Johnson, “time for some changes around here. Past time. You can count on me.”

Frequently, I would be offered a piece of pie or cake, and we would sit talking about the community, family, their church.

Often, I find myself late on a Saturday evening alone in Roxbury or the South End. Usually, I am the only white person. I never once feel the slightest fear—and with good reason. Despite all that they have suffered at the hands of white people—the slights, the insults, the jobs denied, the restrictions as to where they can live, even relatives lynched—family after family not only listens to what this young white boy has to say, but because I am part of the movement, because Noel and the others vouch for me, I am embraced. I not only don’t feel fear, I feel loved. I know it is the message more than the messenger, but still, I feel a very personal, warm generosity.

The first company targeted is Continental Baking Company, makers of Wonder Bread, the ubiquitous whitest of white breads. Twelve percent of Wonder Bread’s Boston sales are in the Black community.⁴ But of 250 workers in their plant located in the heart of that community, only eight are Black and all restricted to the lowest paid, most menial positions. BAG meets with Wonder Bread executives and demands that the company hire Black people for five driver salesmen jobs, one long-distance driver, four clerks, and two bakery production positions. The executives refuse, saying that they have no open jobs.

We initiate the boycott. Black ministers are all in. Throughout the South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester, churches preach boycott. The block captains reach out to the families on their blocks. We have a distribution system that can get a mimeographed leaflet into the hands of virtually every Black family within forty-eight hours. With each day Wonder Bread sales fall. In less than a month, the company decides it is better to give in than continue to lose revenue.

The strategy outlined by Noel and Reverend Breeden works. Wonder Bread hires African Americans into positions previously reserved for white people. Other groups, especially the Congress of Racial Equality, pick up the strategy and soon a growing list of Boston companies, including the major banks, pressured with the threat of sit-ins and boycotts, are negotiating hiring practices with community leaders.⁵ I see firsthand the power of collective action. I see firsthand the iron grasp of unreasoning racism being loosened and released.

In the summer of 1962, I volunteered for the campaign of Harvard professor H. Stuart Hughes, running as an independent candidate for the Senate seat vacated by President Kennedy. The Kennedys decided the seat should go to the younger brother, the totally inexperienced Ted Kennedy. Hughes ran on a remarkable platform of nuclear disarmament, civil rights, and economic justice.

The campaign needed to collect 72,000 signatures to get on the ballot. Those signatures had to come from every county across the state. Led by a graduate student, Chester Hartman, the campaign collected over 140,000 signatures in ten weeks. Along with dozens of others, I teamed up with Ron and we walked the streets, knocked on doors in Fitchburg, Leominster, Lowell, and Holyoke. Through the campaign, I met a group of older undergraduates and graduate students who became role models for me. They debated politics in a way I had never heard before. Lee Webb, a Boston University student, also from Brookline, impressed me immediately. He would go on to become national secretary of SDS. Another, a tall and soft-spoken Texan, John Maher, drove a sleek green Porsche and even let me drive it once. I was so much younger in so many ways than all of them but felt an immediate connection. Many were members of a small organization called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Because of them, I began to pay close attention to SDS, got on the mailing list, joined, and began to think of myself as part of a New Left. Through the Hughes campaign, I also met Jerry Grossman and Flora Donham, who would create an enduring political reform effort in Massachusetts and end up playing a significant role in both politics and the peace movement.

Just before the election, the Cuban Missile crisis brought the world close to the unthinkable. Hughes dared to call for a peaceful resolution, criticized President Kennedy, and suggested that the UN should play a role. Popular perception was that Kennedy “won” and that Nikita Khrushchev “blinked.” Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly elected Ted Kennedy. Hughes received fewer actual votes than he had names on his nominating petitions.⁶

In April of 1963, Birmingham was rocked by the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Along with millions, I watched on television as water hoses were turned on the protestors, dogs unleashed on the marching Black children. King was arrested and wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

In Boston that spring, Noel and Reverend Breeden, joined by SNCC’s Peggy Trotter Dammond (Noel’s wife) formed Citizens for Human Rights to organize a rapid response demonstration of 10,000 people on the Boston Common to support the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham.⁷ That day we raised enough money for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to pay for a voter registration bus.

Then they turned their organizing to the Boston public schools. The Boston NAACP tried to negotiate with the Boston School Committee to end de facto segregation. Those negotiations led nowhere.

June 11, 1963, George Wallace barred Black students from entering the University of Alabama.⁸ President Kennedy, reading the new political climate created by the wave of direct actions and the brutal response across the South, delivered a speech declaring civil rights a moral issue.⁹ In Mississippi, on June 12, Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary, was killed, gunned down in his driveway.¹⁰ And in Boston, the NAACP staged a sit-in at the Boston School Committee demanding action on fourteen demands to end de facto segregation in the Boston public schools. The next day Noel and Jim called for a Stay Out for Freedom Day in which high school students would not go to school. Instead, they would attend alternative “Freedom Schools,” where they would study African American history for the day.¹¹

On June 18, 1963, 100 percent of Boston’s Black high school students stayed out of school. One thousand of them jammed into Freedom Schools where they sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize,” studied the history of Black people in America (there was no African American History Month back then), and listened to the Celtics great Bill Russell. Russell also spoke at a rally for parents picketing the School Committee downtown.

When the call came for a long-expected march on Washington, I was tasked to be the assistant bus coordinator, working under a courtly, slightly portly, Harvard Divinity School graduate, Archie Epps, who was then teaching at Harvard. (Archie would become the first African American dean of students at Harvard and would be carried out of his office by protesting students occupying University Hall.)

We arranged to rent a few buses, then more and then still more. In the last two weeks we were frantically searching for additional buses, mapping routes and pickup spots. As the number of people determined to go to Washington kept increasing, we desperately worked to locate enough buses, and then rented whole trains to accommodate the growing river of those heeding the call.

Finally, Ron and I got on one of the very last buses out of Boston headed for Washington.

I remember approaching Washington, the front of the bus packed with Black hope, Black faces, and in the back among a handful of white students, there I was, exhausted, tearful in the dark, crying with a pilgrim’s devotion, returning to the shrine of the back yards of my childhood, back when lightning bugs blinked small beacons in the Virginia sunsets, a time before schools allowed Black and white people together, back when Black and white people could not marry, back before a couple unbelievably named Loving did marry and were arrested in their bedroom; back when my sisters vied to be Scarlett, the three of us playing runaway slave, and I was the slave, hurtling over barbed wire on the last farm left, racing through rows of new ranch houses, urged on to run long and hard, in the shadows sneaking home to hide, tears watering my imagination… . But that was before and now I am coming back in a bus pulling into the Ellipse lined with more buses than I ever dreamed could pour into one city, a mighty, righteous river of buses.

On that day in DC, I marched out into unexpected brilliance: black, brown, copper, conked, and curled, marching, walking, clapping, keeping on keeping on, a frenzy of hope shooting us into the stream of history. Mississippi sharecroppers in overalls, Detroit church ladies in their Sunday dresses, collared and uncollared preachers of the miracle of redemption, and everywhere that day strode the young, possessed with our numbers, our freshness and vitality, and the words! Words that made words suddenly not mere words: I have a dream, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, solid, felt, carried in our hands, in our stride, giving us confidence in the future, our future—a future that lay, unknown and unknowable, slumbering like a snake under a supple sun.

There among the singing, swaying, clapping throngs, at the age of sixteen, I felt fully grown, a new person, a righteous warrior for justice.

Given my connections to SNCC, I was riveted by the behind-the-scenes drama of John Lewis’s speech. Lewis was then the head of SNCC and as such was to be a major speaker. His original draft was harshly critical of the Kennedy administration. Several SNCC friends relayed to me that he had been pressured by the march organizer, A. Phillip Randolph, and Dr. King, both of whom insisted that he tone down his remarks. Hearing this, I was, of course, totally on the side of SNCC. Still nothing could dampen the spirit of that day, the tangible reality of being part of something so large, that great throng of hopeful people demanding America should be America for all its citizens. I worked my way up toward the Lincoln Memorial, the sun warming me, and then thrilled to the music and speeches. Even toned down, Lewis’s speech called to me.¹² Like everyone else there, Dr. King’s words lifted my hopes to new heights.

As thrilling as Dr. King’s speech was, I firmly cast my lot with SNCC. I already believed that as important as the marches were, grassroots organizing would be the real engine driving social change. It would be organizing that built power, organizing that would change a world in desperate need of radical solutions.

Today I am amazed at how history has treated the March on Washington. Gone is any controversy. Dr. King’s speech is now iconic. It feels as if the march must have been accepted, embraced by the whole country. King’s words must have unified the nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the weeks before the march, Gallup polled a national sample asking how many people had heard of the march.¹³ Seventy-one percent said that they had heard of the impending march. Of those, only 23 percent had a favorable view of it, and most thought the march was dangerous, unwarranted, and should not happen. Politicians denounced it. No one was confident that such a large number of Black protestors would remain peaceful.

In May 1964, Gallup asked, “Do you think mass demonstrations by Negroes are more likely to help or more likely to hurt the Negro’s cause for racial equality?” In response, only 16 percent of Americans—including just 10 percent of white people but 55 percent of nonwhite people—said such mass demonstrations would help the cause.¹⁴

Segregation was still rampant throughout the land, racist violence a common occurrence. That march and the organizing behind it was a courageous act of defiance.

Eighteen days later, the white supremacists of the South gave their answer to the march. Four members of the Klan blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, intentionally injuring more than a dozen people and killing four young Black girls. More martyrs added to an already too long list. It was hard to believe that nonviolence could be sustained. However, the movement pressed on, and my hopes remained ebullient. I believed that it would be a long, hard slog, but the movement would transform the nation, no matter how much violence was thrown at it.

That November when President Kennedy was assassinated, everyone around me was shocked, grieving, bereft. I was not. I did not love the Kennedys. They had failed to protect the civil rights workers. Any progress that had been made had been forced by the movement, by those who risked death and beatings—not by the liberals in the Kennedy administration. Those same liberals had taken us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe over Cuba. I did not cry for the fallen president as I cried for the four Black children killed in their Birmingham Church by a racist bomb. I thought Malcolm X perhaps had it right when he talked of chickens coming home to roost.

I did not stop to reflect on the assassination, what it might mean for the nation. I was too busy learning at Commonwealth and on the streets of Roxbury. And soon, too busy falling in love.

In the fall of my junior year, Tim, Ronnie, and I frequently added a fourth companion to our excursions: Amy Merrill. She was the daughter of the headmaster. I had, of course, noticed Amy before, but she seemed to me aloof, apart, snobbish. For her part, she had found me to be insufferably earnest, cocky, and arrogant. Now suddenly she seemed alluring, mysterious, beautiful. She had long brown hair that tinted red when she sat in the light of a tall window. She wore sandals that laced up her shapely legs. She spoke French and Russian without effort.

Soon I was a regular visitor to the old brownstone building in the first block of Commonwealth Avenue where the Merrills lived. Increasingly I found myself there for dinners, walking Amy home after school, playing with her three younger brothers.

In addition to the house on Commonwealth, the Merrills owned a “farm” in Hancock, New Hampshire. That winter I was invited to Hancock with the family. Snow was on the ground. The sun went down early. Amy and I tobogganed down a steep snow-covered dirt road, somehow managing to overturn the toboggan on every run, flinging us together, flopping onto each other’s well-padded but still exciting bodies. After dinner, we took a walk. Snow crunched underfoot. The air was crisp. The stars rotated about us. Being shy and responsible, I did nothing despite feeling the growing tension of desire. I was saved when Amy kissed me, and I discovered to my delight the mystery of tongues. We became a couple, inseparable, so very young and so very much in love.

The Merrills seemed to think that I was the perfect high school boyfriend for their second daughter. They welcomed me and had no qualms about what I was doing with her late at night in the library at the back of the house once everyone else had gone to bed. In that large library lined with volumes of books, we made the couch a place for languid and then not so languid exploration. Despite the long time we spent late and later in that library, there were never any interruptions, never any questions. I was determined to be a responsible boyfriend. Exploration was one thing; sexual intercourse would have to wait until we got married.

My senior year at Commonwealth, I had a clear plan: get into a college, then head to Mississippi in June to answer the call for a Freedom Summer. SNCC and the larger Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) had issued a call for one thousand white college students to come to Mississippi, that bastion of segregation, hate and endless violence against Black people. My friend Ron and I planned to go together.

I was more excited about Mississippi than I was about which college I would attend. I was confident that I would get into a good college—largely because I had the Commonwealth School teachers and headmaster working on my behalf. I needed a large scholarship, as my parents could contribute nothing. Both Amherst and Harvard accepted me and offered great packages of work, loans, and huge scholarships.

I pretended not to care whether I went to Harvard or Amherst, in the end opting for Harvard. There was no way that I could admit even to myself that I wanted to go to Harvard because it was the more prestigious, because it was the pinnacle of the elite. That conflicted with everything I claimed to believe in—but that is exactly why I chose it.

Ron and I made our plans to go south, looking forward to the training sessions that would start the Freedom Summer. I was excited but anxious. We both knew that Mississippi would be dangerous that summer. Anyone going, even Northern white students, would face arrests, beating and possibly worse. Still, I urgently wanted to be part of the thousand young students descending on that retrograde state to force the eyes of the nation to focus on the violence that was an everyday occurrence for Black residents.

Before the final plans were set, my mother took me aside. She confessed that she was at her wit’s end. My father was driving a cab but was terrible at it, not even taking home $100 for seven days of twelve-hour work. She was doing her best to make money by tutoring, but they were desperately short of what was required to pay the bills. The family needed me; she needed me. Could I once again crank up the student painting crew that had been so successful in past summers? While she was sorry, there was no way I could go South.

And that was that. The end of my Freedom Summer. Ron headed south without me. I was heartbroken. However, I knew my duty. I re-formed the student painting crew, once again hiring young women, as well as men, telling the women that it was fine to wear short shorts, the shorter the better—inevitably we received bigger tips at the end of the job when they did.

That spring, Noel became the first ever Black candidate for Congress in Massachusetts. Running as an independent, Noel challenged the powerful speaker of the House, John McCormack. I was totally surprised when I was offered the one paid staff position on the campaign. I talked with my painting crew who agreed that if I continued securing the jobs, I could draw a salary even as they did all the painting. That meant I could take the lower paying organizer job and with the money from the painting crew, still have enough to give my mother.

Noel was exceptional. He grew up in Harlem. His maternal grandfather, Frederick R. Moore, was an escaped slave who became a newspaper publisher, alderman, philanthropist, and unofficial “mayor” of Harlem. Noel entered Dartmouth in 1949, three months before his sixteenth birthday. There he became close friends with future fellow leader James Breeden. After graduate work at CCNY and teaching, Noel became the executive director of St. Mark’s Social Center and was at the center of civil rights organizing in Boston.¹⁵

While I knew little of this background, Noel seemed larger than life to me. He was overweight but moved with the fluid grace of an athlete. Intensity marked everything he did.

I met with him on a hot, early June day in 1964.

“Michael,” Noel began, “here’s our strategy. As you know, the movement in Boston has proven that we can mount nonviolent direct action. We did that with the Stay Out for Freedom campaigns that had school kids walk out of school. We did it with the boycott of Wonder Bread. You were there. You know what we were able to pull off.”

I smiled in agreement.

“But there are real challenges. Can we sustain the movement? The community is ready to act—but can that be on more than one issue? Can we create a community that is committed to real social change and not just amelioration? Can we surface multiple issues so that we can sustain action on a number of fronts instead of one issue at time?”

“So here is what we are doing. We are going to use a campaign for Congress not to win …”

Here Noel positively beamed at me.

“We know we cannot beat the speaker of the House. But we will use this campaign to create two Action Centers. The campaign is going to raise critical issues, issues of housing, of welfare, of lead paint, of education, of jobs, of community development. And the campaign is going to spell out a vision of social change. We are going to use running for office to build the foundation that can sustain a community committed to social change. So, everything you are going to do this summer is about organizing.”

I was excited. “So, what is success?” I asked.

Noel leaned back. “If we create a new organization of welfare mothers, if we create at least ten new block organizations of tenants, if we start a campaign about lead paint poisoning our kids, and if we can create two ongoing Action Centers, one in Dudley Square and one in Washington Park, that will add up to success. Getting that done through this campaign will be your job. Are you up for it?”

Of course I was. I was thrilled.

Being the field organizer for the Noel Day Campaign in the summer of 1964 was my first paid organizing job. It was not Mississippi, but it meant that in my own way I was part of Freedom Summer.

Immediately I set to work on the campaign, kickstarting it with the formation of the two “Action Centers” that would be the focus for neighborhood-based work. Using many of the contacts made through BAG and the Massachusetts Freedom Movement, we were able to form groups working on lead paint poisoning, other tenant issues and going after slum landlords. We pulled together a feisty group of women on welfare to launch Mothers for Adequate Welfare. And we got Noel the signatures needed to be on the ballot.

I organized the door-to-door canvassing and signature gathering. In the white neighborhoods, we occasionally were heard to slip and refer to our candidate as “Noel O’Day.” In the Black neighborhoods, there was rarely a need to explain who he was.

In the end, we received only 5 percent of the vote, but the Dudley Street Action Center was launched and continued after the campaign ended. Mothers for Adequate Welfare took off. Campaigns around slumlords and lead paint poisoning continued. That summer I felt I had finally become an organizer. That fall, while I was still committed to the campaign, I was heading to Harvard. I was also ready to try organizing something else: a new student movement.

I had the sense that with so many students, my generation, the baby boom, pouring onto campuses, with the heroic example of young Black students so vividly fresh in our minds, and the experienced organizers returning from Freedom Summer, the time was ripe to harness that power, to create a new student movement. There had been significant stirrings already in Berkeley and Ann Arbor.

That August of 1964 there were two events that would reverberate for years, significantly shaping my future. While at the time I paid them close attention, I had no idea how profound their impact would prove to be on the country and on my life.

In the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam, the United States claimed that its ships had been attacked by the North Vietnamese. The administration of Lyndon B. Johnson used the incident to have Congress pass a resolution giving the president authority to escalate the American intervention in Vietnam without a declaration of war and without additional congressional oversight. The resolution was opposed by only two senators, Senators Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK). The United States claimed that North Vietnam had launched two unprovoked attacks against our ships in the gulf. Even then it was unclear what the truth was. Years later documents would reveal that much of what Johnson used to justify the escalation was embellishment and fabrication.¹⁶ I quickly added a section to our basic Day for Congress brochure opposing the air strikes in North Vietnam and the escalation that would lead to wider war.

That same month, I was transfixed by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s (MFDP) challenge at the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. The convention was supposed to be a coronation of Johnson. The Freedom Summer organizers and the civil rights organizations in Mississippi pulled off a democratic election of an integrated delegation to the convention. They challenged the all-white “regular” delegation, which not only was segregated in violation of the rules of the national party but had already openly announced its support for Barry Goldwater, the nominee of the Republican Party! Those Mississippi Democratic Party “regulars” were intertwined with the White Citizen’s Councils, the local sheriffs, and the forces of segregation. The same people who early that summer had brutally killed the three Freedom Summer volunteers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.

I was convinced that the MFDP would be seated, especially after the convention heard the moving testimony of its leaders, including Hamer. President Johnson, however, decided that he could not risk further alienating the already angry conservative Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Johnson forced the longtime civil rights supporters Senator Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers to oppose seating the MFDP. They in turn convinced many liberals and even civil rights leaders, including Dr. King, to agree to a “compromise,” seating only two leaders of the MFDP as token “at large delegates.” The compromise was announced as a done deal without any consultation with the MFDP. This was a part of the price for Humphrey getting the vice presidency.

The MFDP refused. The parade of liberal leaders telling the MFDP to accept it was played out on national television. The political pressure was unrelenting. Yet the delegation from Mississippi led by Mrs. Hamer did not bend, did not break, did not yield.

I watched, riveted by the drama, as did tens of thousands of young people also getting ready to go to college. We saw the moral corruption of liberal leadership and its “pragmatism.” In contrast, we saw the courage and moral fortitude of sharecroppers, of ordinary people who had had enough. No better example of the failure of liberal leadership could be presented to five million young people before we were to head off to our colleges and our new lives.

I knew in the core of my being which side I was on. It was not the side of President Johnson and the soon-to-be Vice President Humphrey and the national Democratic Party who had failed the moral test presented by the MFDP.

I was heading off to college. Our liberal leaders had made their choices, made them in Atlantic City, made them in Washington, made them in the skies over Indochina. The wrong choices. Looking back from today’s vantage point, it is hard to remember how solidly America in 1964 was led by liberals, corporate liberals as we called them. There was a broad and “liberal” consensus that dominated American political thought. It was liberals who continued to test nuclear weapons. Liberals who told the Civil Rights Movement to slow down. Liberals who were sending bombers to Vietnam. I and my friends felt a profound alienation from liberal leaders. Despite the white supremacists of the South, we did not perceive a serious threat from the right. The kooks of the John Birch Society seemed only a joke. Our fight was with the liberals who dominated politics, the media, and the culture. We were rebels and we were rebelling against a liberalism whose moral bankruptcy was on vivid display in Atlantic City.

Now I would be part of a great river of young people sweeping onto the campuses of America. We felt our numbers. We saw the choices those in power in Mississippi, in the White House and in Congress had made. Now we would make ours.