Ancient Wounds

Benjamin Franklin studied here. So did John Adams, John Hancock and two other signers of the Declaration of Independence. Leonard Bernstein was an alumnus. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. all earned diplomas at the Boston Latin School as well.

Bowdoin College students Christina and Lisa McLaughlin of Hyde Park, a racially and economically mixed Boston neighborhood, also graduated from Boston Latin, America’s oldest place of learning. But when Julia, the youngest of Michael and Caterina McLaughlin’s three daughters, applied to one of this country’s most elite, publicly funded secondary schools, a letter of rejection came in the mail.

The McLaughlins were baffled. For months, Dad had spent Saturdays coaching 12-year-old Julia as she boned up for the rigorous entrance exam to a six-year school known as the prep school of the working class. Julia was a bright, self-assured young woman, easily as intelligent as her two older sisters. As it turned out, Julia scored well on the exam--better than 103 students who did earn admittance to Boston Latin in 1994.

But those students are Latino and African American. Julia is white. Her parents are furious. And in this racially abraded city, torn apart in every sense by the infamous busing crisis of 1974, the question of Julia McLaughlin’s application to Boston Latin School was a bombshell.

“We thought we had reached a tacit understanding,” said Boston University economics professor Glenn C. Loury, director of that school’s Institute on Race and Social Division, speaking of the entire community. “We had not.”

In the end, Julia McLaughlin uneventfully entered Boston Latin as an eighth-grader this fall under a court order. But the larger issues are by no means resolved. Racial quotas or “set-asides” for the exam schools--officials use the terms interchangeably--are in the process of being revised in a contentious atmosphere.

On issues of race and class, Boston maintains an uneasy truce on a good day, and the lawsuit Michael McLaughlin filed against the Boston School Committee reopened old wounds. But he insisted that the case was about merit, not skin color. Julia is a competitive swimmer, ranked fourth in New England in the butterfly. His daughter told him, “If I won the race, I should get the medal,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin’s effort also cost him his job in a prestigious law firm because a black senior partner feared that the lawsuit would drive away African American clients and other partners complained that he had not warned them of his lawsuit. And it forced the mayor, the school superintendent and the same judge who oversaw the original busing case of 1974 to confront the practice of racial quotas at the city’s top public school.

In the end, the determination of one father to do what he believed was right by his daughter compelled City Hall, the school committee and the U.S. District Court to admit Julia McLaughlin to Boston Latin’s class of 2002.

“It was a David and Goliath battle,” said McLaughlin, who served as his daughter’s attorney and who has been panther-like in shielding Julia from interviews. The victory may have taken almost two years but, McLaughlin said, it proved “you can fight City Hall and get what is just.”

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Now, though, there is the matter of dozens of other nonminority students who scored in Julia’s range on the entrance test and were denied admission. Many are Asians, classified as white by Boston Latin. A group of those parents has approached McLaughlin about bringing a class-action suit on behalf of their children. McLaughlin is morally inflamed but financially chary. Julia’s case cost him $306,000, and Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. has yet to decide if he is entitled to legal fees.

It was Garrity who issued the 1974 decision that led to racial quotas at the city’s three exam schools, including Boston Latin. That desegregation order allotted 35% of slots in the city’s exam schools to African American and Latino students. About 37% of Boston’s 574,000 residents are African American or Latino, but about 80% of Boston’s public school students are minorities.

The school committee has adamantly defended quotas at Boston Latin and elsewhere. But even Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, once a supporter of exam-school quotas, has altered his view.

“The present system doesn’t work,” Menino said recently. “We have to come up with a different one. This is a different city than it was 20 years ago.”

Garrity’s decision to moot the McLaughlin lawsuit, but to admit Julia to Boston Latin anyway, came in the wake of a national backlash against affirmative action, as well as several recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings limiting affirmative action. While Garrity sent school officials back to reassess whether racial quotas can erase “lingering effects of the racial discrimination that has characterized the school system for many decades,” others bemoaned the way the decision reflects antagonism in many circles to any sort of affirmative action policy.

Hattie Mckinnis, director of Boston’s Citywide Parent Council, lamented that her city “has not gotten over its original feelings around busing, around desegregation.” The McLaughlin case, she said, “is just another piece of what is happening nationally to try to do away with affirmative action.”

Harvard education professor Gary Orfield, director of the Center on School Desegregation, agreed, calling the Boston Latin case “a symptom of a big sea change in civil rights policy. It’s part of the whole movement to undo desegregation.” The fact that the case took place in Boston, a city that kicked and screamed before agreeing to desegregate its schools, “just shows you how dramatically the players have shifted in this whole story,” said Orfield, co-author of the 1996 book “Dismantling Desegregation” (New Press).

In the 1970s, Orfield pointed out, “the Boston School Committee was the most recalcitrant in the whole country. Now you’ve got the situation where the Boston School Committee wants to take some action to help minority students and they are being forbidden to do it by the court. We now have a court that says there are no more historic problems of racial disadvantage to be addressed, and anything that would disadvantage a white student is impermissible. I think this is extraordinary.”

Another Harvard education professor, Charles V. Willie, was among the architects of Boston’s original 1974 school desegregation strategy. Willie faults McLaughlin’s lawsuit because “it stoked the feeling of entitlement that has been the characteristic of dominant people of power over the years.”

McLaughlin, Willie conceded, “was doing what he thought he should do for his daughter. I can understand that. I have a daughter too.” But by acting in a spirit of “narcissistic entitlement,” Willie said McLaughlin “fed into the anti-affirmative action fire.” The case is likely to reverberate beyond the halls of the sturdy brick school building, whose 2,000 students are required to complete a yearly course in the Latin language, Willie predicted.

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But for his part, McLaughlin is unlikely to be drafted as poster boy for anyone. He is a political independent who stresses that unlike many of his colleagues, he and his family never fled Boston for the largely white suburbs. He also emphasizes that he did not bring the Boston Latin complaint as “a crusade against affirmative action per se.” Rather, what he filed was “a lawsuit that says government cannot discriminate against my child based on her race, period.”

Yet in the current climate, defending a white schoolgirl--even his own daughter--was not the most popular of causes. On the commuter train to work, McLaughlin said black and white friends alike would sometimes offer quiet words of encouragement. But the American Civil Liberties Union turned down his requests for assistance, and every member of his old law firm backed away. Now that Julia has been admitted to Boston Latin, “Not one civil rights lawyer from around the country--no one--has called and said ‘good for you.’ ”

McLaughlin is unfazed by the absence of accolades. “I’m an ornery, disagreeable guy,” he said. “On this one, I was not going to back down.”

He comes by such toughness honestly. McLaughlin was not yet 3, the youngest of five children, when his mother died of a stroke. He lost his father, a bricklayer, to a heart attack when he was 16. His hair turned pure white the same year.

He finished high school living in a boardinghouse in the rough community of Brockton. To support himself, he worked in a shoe factory. A scholarship took him to Northeastern University, where he embraced crew because of its “work ethic,” and after graduation he took a job coaching crew at Princeton.

His legal specialty--which he continued when he set up solo shop after leaving his large practice--is defending borrowers in disputes with federal banking agencies.

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Knowledge of government bureaucracies served McLaughlin well in the school battle. Blocked by the school committee when he asked for data on test scores, he obtained the figures by filing a request through the federal Freedom of Information Act. While school officials conceded that Julia scored highly in the admission exam, they maintained that she was in the bottom third of applicants when a wide range of additional factors were considered.

One day, after an especially nettlesome encounter at the school committee, a brooding McLaughlin boarded an elevator when a hand suddenly reached out and blocked the door from closing. It belonged to a middle-age employee who had witnessed many of his clashes.

“They’re lying to you,” McLaughlin said the woman told him. Then she advised him how to go about finding the documents.

McLaughlin never did learn the woman’s name, but her suggestions did help him. He admits that it was unusual to find “a family that could undertake this kind of challenge without the help of anyone,” a parent who as a lawyer knew how to wage the battle and a preteenage daughter so set on claiming her academic “medal” that she urged her father forward throughout the long fight.

But not everyone agrees that the struggle is over. Orfield, at Harvard, said, “You can’t think of [the McLaughlin case] in terms of just one girl.” Instead, Orfield said, “the answer is, more kids need to be prepared for Boston Latin, and there need to be more Boston Latins.”