J.
ANTHONY LUKAS
Troubled Ground:
Blacks and Jews in Boston
Early in 1968, the John Hancock Insurance Company announced plans
for a spectacular new Boston headquarters: sixty stories of shimmering
glass, five thousand silvery windows, a giant mirror in which the Athens
of America could read further confirmation of its storied charm and
grace. Not the least of the project's allure was its prime location hard by
Copley Square, one of the nation's great public spaces, fronted on three
sides by the great granite facade of the Boston Public Library, the
Ro–
manesque splendors of Trinity Church, and the rococo elegance of the
Copley Plaza Hotel.
Barely three months after these plans were made public, Martin
Luther King was shot dead in Memphis, and Boston's black community
erupted in a brief spasm of violence. By contrast with the convulsions in
Washington, Chicago, and other northern cities, Boston's riots were
mild: nobody killed, thirty-one wounded, thirty arrested, barely $50,000
in damages, most of it to white-owned stores in black Roxbury and
north Dorchester.
Yet the rage unleashed by Dr. King's assassination proved enduring.
Boston's small black community, hitherto known for its moderation and
gentility, now made some unprecedented demands on white leadership.
On April 8th, five thousand blacks, with whites specifically excluded,
gathered in Roxbury's sports stadium and approved, by thundering voice
vote, twenty-one demands for black control of their own community:
all white-owned businesses in the black community to close immediately
pending transfer of ownership to blacks; every school in the black com–
munity to have all black staffs; black control of all public and private
agencies that affect lives of blacks; and an immediate no-strings-attached
grant of $100 million to the black community. Before long, Mayor
Kevin White was besieged by whites eager to go as far as possible toward
meeting these demands. Corporate executives, few of them previously
distinguished by their passion for racial or social justice, bombarded the
mayor's office with schemes designed to assuage the restive black com–
munity. More eager than any was Robert Slater, president of the John
