I first read Common Ground when I was living in Dorchester and teaching at Nativity Prep. I was inspired to revisit it this summer because a student in my Practical Law class did independent research about the (troubled) implementation of Brown v. Board of Education. After conversations with this student, I wanted to think more deeply about busing and why the desegregation efforts of the 1970s (and 1980s?) failed so dramatically.
This is a stunningly good book. The scope is breathtaking, as Lukas examines numerous topics that take up a disproportionate amount of my own thinking time: governance, politics (especially the balance between private actions and public policy), race relations, and religion.
Lukas even explores, to my surprise, charitable giving. One chapter provides a deep history of the Hyams Trust (a family foundation) and its relationship to the United Way and other charitable organizations in Boston. The context is the charities' decisions about whether to take a stance in the busing controversy by supporting advocacy groups on one or the other side.
Lukas gets inside the heads and hearts of various protagonists, including multiple generations of the McGoff family in Charlestown. The mom, Alice, balances her Catholic identity (she loves the rituals) against the church's (tepid) support of busing, which conflicts with her own opposition.
One of the McGoff daughters, meanwhile, finds a sort of religious awakening through activities (including a CYO basketball team) led by a local pastor.
After telling these stories, Lukas backs out and provides the story of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, Boston's first non-Irish American cardinal in more than a century, who -- facing bigotry because of his own outsider status -- had to search his soul as he struggled with whether and how to lead on the issue of race relations while confronting the early stages of Americans turning away from religion.
In short, there's so much going on in this story! It's like every page is an entire history book of its own. I will not possibly finish it this summer, but what a gem of a text to help me think about issues of (1) individual rights, (2) remedying the wrongs and injustice of the past, and (3) finding ways to build stronger, fairer communities.
Arthur Garrity is a key protagonist of Common Ground. Here's a brief summary of his role, from Wikipedia:
"As a federal judge, Arthur Garrity was at the center of a contentious battle over desegregation busing in Boston from the 1970s to the 1980s. In a 1974 ruling, he found a recurring pattern of racial discrimination in the operation of the Boston public schools and concluded the schools were unconstitutionally segregated. As a remedy, he used a busing plan developed by the Massachusetts State Board of Education to implement the state's Racial Imbalance Law, which required any school with a student enrollment that was more than 50% nonwhite to be balanced according to race."
