When Harmony Was Banned in Boston

When J. Anthony Lukas says Boston is a battleground, he isn’t talking about the American Revolution and the Battle of Bunker Hill. He’s talking about the here and now, about the conflicts of race and class that threaten to mortally wound the urban body politic. He’s describing a city that he sees as a microcosm of national metropolitan woes.

In “Common Ground” (Knopf: $19.95), Lukas has presented his report on this conflict. The book is a novelistic narrative of three real families--black, Irish, Yankee--and a few of the public figures whose lives were swept up in the desegregation of Boston schools during the 1970s.

While the protracted and turbulent battle over Boston’s schools is the book’s focal point, “Common Ground” also is a broad, naturalistic portrait of modern urban life. The wrecking of good intentions, the demolition of hope and the hardening of divisions between rich and poor, black and white, give the book’s title an ironic touch.

And Lukas, 52, a former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, is finding that the book is making at least a few readers uncomfortable because it presents such a bleak landscape.

“People have asked me, ‘What is this book?’ They say, ‘It doesn’t have a conclusion, doesn’t have an introduction, doesn’t have footnotes, doesn’t have an index. What is it that you have given us?’ ” Lukas said in an interview here. “For a while I struggled to come up with a term and the term I’ve finally adopted is that it’s a yarn. It’s a yarn, but I hope that it’s an instructive yarn.”

By book’s end, when liberal, white Colin Diver and his family have retreated from their home in the inner city to a suburban house guarded by a white picket fence, Lukas wants “the reader to be as confounded by the complexity of a large American city as I was,” he said.

When he began working on the book eight years ago, Lukas was a fairly traditional liberal who believed “that there were some reasonably simple solutions, at least clear-cut solutions, to the problems of racial discrimination, cities, poverty, that whole agenda,” he said.

‘A Chastened Liberal’

Today, Lukas describes himself as “a chastened liberal” but also notes that he isn’t quite sure what kind of political animal he has become in practical terms.

“More than anything else I shifted from the party of simplicity to the party of complexity. . . . I now no longer believe that there are any simple solutions to the problems of the cities,” he said. “I think what the book did was make me feel that these problems are very complex and we don’t fully understand the ecology of cities.”

Lukas also observed that “this book is in part a book about what happened to the liberal agenda of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the whole liberal orthodoxy of which I was a part and in some sense am still a part.”

To Lukas that agenda was a failure because liberals put too much faith in superficial solutions.

“It seems to me that one of the ways in which it (the liberal agenda) didn’t work and one of the things this book is about is how much faith liberals had in legal solutions,” he said. “We believed that if rights were violated, you went to court, you sued, you got a judge to order that you be granted those rights and frequently that was the end of it.”

But often legal remedies only addressed one symptom. “It would be my view of Boston during these years that although the black plaintiffs in the busing case got legal justice, the city did not get social justice because of the class issue,” Lukas said.

The Function of Class

“Common Ground” has received a good deal of attention, in reviews and elsewhere, because it addresses the function of class--as well as race--in the making of today’s cities.

“I think we as a society simply have to decide how much we care about equality,” Lukas said. “It may be that this society really doesn’t care very much, that we pay lip-service to it. It may be that most middle-class Americans are very comfortable with the notion of living in the suburbs, of having their children go to predominantly white schools . . . of having blacks and poor whites and poor Hispanics living in the core city and sending their children to integrated but probably somewhat inferior schools.”

Ultimately, Lukas said, the lines between class and race could become as hardened as those in South Africa.

‘Not Really Surprised’

“The term apartheid, I think, is thrown around too much,” he said. “ . . . but I do think that if this continues that there will be a kind of American apartheid.”

Lukas said this jaundiced view is reinforced even at moments of hope. Late last month a conference centered on the book was held at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston, Lukas said, adding that it was a time for “self-congratulation” over the progress that the city has made since the mid-1970s.

“At the very time that that conference was taking place,” Lukas said, two whites accompanied by a black teen-ager were set upon by a crowd of 20 or so juveniles in a white area of the city. “It was clear, according to the police, that this was aimed at the blacks,” he said. “I say I’m not really surprised . . . Maybe it was salutary that we had this incident as a reminder.”

If his book has a political impact, Lukas hopes it is one of provoking thought in the liberal community.

“I would like to see people who believe in social justice, who want to address problems of race and class in the cities, to use the time that they’re out of power to do some creative thinking about solutions,” he said.

“I’m a little worried. It seems to me that a lot of time is spent by people who care about issues these days just inveighing against the troglodytes in Washington. I believe we have to rethink some of the old, easy solutions . . . I just believe that if you spend as much time as I have in public housing projects over the last 10 years, you’ve got to believe there’s a better way, a more humane way of housing poor people. I think we can find a better way of integrating our cities than solely putting it on the backs of the poor.”

Now that the book is out and has made some best-seller lists, the families involved--the Divers, the McGoffs and the Twymons--have reacted differently to their sudden fame. The white, liberal Divers and the black Twymons have generally enjoyed the publicity and attended the conference at the Kennedy library, he said. But the Irish McGoffs did not show up at the conference and seem to have withdrawn into themselves and the shelter of their Boston neighborhood, Lukas added.

It wasn’t easy finding families that would cooperate in what proved to be a seven-year project. “A lot of families turned me down because I insisted on using real names,” Lukas recalled.

In a joking aside, Lukas, who married three years ago or well into his work on the book, said another problem was dealing with the skepticism of parents about a bachelor investigating the schooling of their children.

To find the Divers he interviewed “30 or 40 families” before a friend suggested that family to him.

The McGoffs were the third Irish family he worked with. One family dropped out early on and Lukas said he dropped the second because “at the end of four years I concluded they would not work in the book dramatically.”

The Twymons were suggested by a social worker.

In all three cases, Lukas, a New Yorker who practically became a resident of Boston while researching and writing the book, traced the family histories as far back as possible. In the case of the McGoffs, he went to Ireland to do research.

While there he took a rock from the foundation of the ancestral home and had it embedded it in Lucite as a present for one of the McGoffs.

“They were flabbergasted that I would go to Ireland to track the history of their family,” Lukas said, adding that the McGoffs can’t afford a trip to Ireland themselves. “When I came back from Ireland, the whole family gathered to hear me tell them their story in Ireland . . . There was no great secret in gaining their trust.”

All three families admitted him into their private lives and seemingly held little back. In an agreement with Lukas, each family was allowed to read the portions of the book about them and to correct “any undisputed matter of fact.” Lukas said he made the concession because he “was so massively invading these people’s privacy.”

As for himself, Lukas decided that he would not tailor himself ingratiatingly to the three families.

“I wear button-down shirts, ties, fairly conventional reporter’s garb,” he said. “I drive a 1968 Mercedes. It’s pretty battered but a Mercedes nonetheless. So I faced the question as I made the rounds of this triangle: Was I going to put on a new face at each corner of the triangle? Was I going to wear a dashiki and carry a ghetto blaster when I went into the black community? Was I going to wear a work shirt in the Irish community? The obvious answer is, ‘Of course not.’ ” As a result, Lukas said he became friends with the families but he was careful to “maintain perspective, to retain some honesty.” He thinks it worked. The families told a Boston newspaper that “he was more than a reporter, he was a friend.”

But the families themselves are not likely to share common ground in the near future.

“These three families, who were fervent supporters of John Kennedy, 15 years later were at each other’s throats,” Lukas said. “Today, they look at each other very warily at best.”