J. Anthony Lukas (1933–1997)

Common Ground opens with the cataclysm of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April 1968. It ends at Southview Cemetery in Atlanta, where King's body was interred, where Joan Diver's "throat throbbed with the loss of so many dreams buried there in the red Georgia clay" (647).

The book recounts the effects of the Boston busing "crisis" upon the lives of its main three subjects and their families. We witness their personal hopes and the social promise of desegregation crash against the show more shores of intractable racial animus, economic inequality, and emotional, political, and social exhaustion. Alice McGoff, Irish-Catholic, an inveterate Townie, mother to seven children, finds herself caught up in the racist throes of the anti-busing movement, transformed from a passive observer into an active participant. Rachel Twymon, a devout black churchgoer and patron of the arts, becomes caught in a bitter feud with her sister and watches her two daughters run away from home and one of her sons be incarcerated. Colin Diver, a Harvard Law School graduate, Yankee, and striving liberal, forsakes his belief in racial and economic justice and abandons the South End neighborhood where he lives with his wife.

Other characters, who sit at the heart of power, betray their ideals, too. Kevin White, the young, progressive mayor of Boston, sacrifices his support for integration on the altar of political expediency when confronted with the anger of his white constituents. The Archbishop of Boston Humberto Medeiros approaches the subject of busing gingerly, fearing the anger of the church’s Irish base. Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, makes “frantic efforts to offend no one,” somehow managing “to offend everyone” (507).

The thoughts and actions of the book's protagonists are not actually as reducible as I have described. Many of the book's subjects are intensely self-aware and fully recognize the compromises they pursue to bridge the demands of their other-directed ideals with their own calculating self-interest. J. Anthony Lukas deftly shades the complicated reality of his subjects. He admitted in an interview that writing the book took him from “the party of simplicity to the party of complexity.”

Class is one such complicating factor. When Colin and Joan Diver move to the South End in the summer of 1970, they are cognizant of the gentrifying effects of their move. In spite of this, they seek to strengthen the racial and socioeconomic diversity of their new community. Among their efforts is their support of the Bancroft School, an experimental and racially integrated school with an unstructured curriculum. When they learn that their son, along with others, will be sent to a school in Lower Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood, they marshal the school community to block the planned busing. Within a year, the Bancroft, “[d]esigned as the cornerstone of the New South End… had become an object of contention splitting the community down the middle. Parents like the Divers were tugged first by self-interest, then by their vision of a model urban school, their motives so mixed they couldn’t disentangle them” (338). Ultimately, their self-interest prevails as they depart the South End for the suburbs in 1976. In a resolution that displays the economic and social forces of gentrification, we learn in the epilogue that the Bancroft School has been converted to luxury condominiums.

The positive effects of busing on minority communities, especially in the southern United States, were substantial and lasting. As a recent essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones asserts, busing "transformed the South from apartheid to the place where black children are now the most likely to sit in classrooms with white children. It led to increased resources being spent on black and low-income children... We now know that school desegregation significantly reduced the test-score gap between black and white children—cutting it in half for some black age groups without harming white children. No other reform has reduced the gap on this scale."

These outcomes have been obscured by the narrative of failure that surrounds busing. Busing achieved, in part, what it was intended to achieve: integration and some semblance of equality. Its failure to endure was the product of white resistance, both in statehouses and in public squares, economic inequalities that enabled the rich to insulate themselves from its effects, and a lack of true racial reconciliation. Hannah-Jones concludes that "Busing did not fail. We did."

History doesn't follow a linear path towards progress, it doesn't bequeath the earth to the meek, it doesn't arc towards justice. It is telling that Common Ground does not, in fact, end at the side of Martin Luther King Jr.'s grave, but in the yard of Colin and Joan Diver's suburban home in Newton, where they have beat their retreat from the South End, where their white picket fence rears "its ivory spine against the world" (651), where their ambitions have shifted away from enacting racial and economic justice and, instead, towards getting more of what's theirs. show less

This book's core concerns itself with early 20th century labor violence in the western mines, but thereafter sprawls wondrously through all sorts of historical asides, including the history of the Pinkerton Detective agency. Whereever Lukas takes you, you enjoy the ride and he seems to capture an era in American history through the single incident of a bomb explosion that killed a former governor of Idaho and the ensuing trial of its alleged perpetrators.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest works of sociology ever written, Lukas' novelistic account of the desegregation of Boston's school system is by turns heartbreaking and outrageous, yet always rigorous and scrupulous to fact. The irony that Boston, intellectual headquarters of abolition, was by the 1970s one of the most segregated cities in America is explored through the stories of three families, the upscale Yankee Divers, the working-class Irish McGoffs, and the poor black Twymons, show more each of whom must confront the wrenching changes that busing will bring to their lives. Encompassing the courts, the schools, the police, the media, the Catholic Church, and seemingly the whole city of Boston, this deeply humane book offers one of the most complete and thoughtful looks you'll find at how America deals with race, power, and crime. show less

Had J. Anthony Lukas chosen to write a straightforward history of the murder of the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, and the conspiracy trial that arose therefrom, the book, "Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America," would have been 200 pages long instead of the present 754 pages. But, oh how much the poorer we all would have been! In a remarkable feat of research and writing, Lukas spins together an unbelievably rich tapestry of show more politics, crime and culture to dress the framework of murder and intrigue, so improbably set in turn-of-the-previous-century Idaho. I am a native Idahoan, yet I learned more of Idaho history, labor wars, criminal detection, class warfare and political and legal shenanigans than I thought possible. And this does not exhaust the multitude of other topics addressed. For example, on the slenderest thread of connection to the trial of the conspirators in Boise, Lukas manages to interweave a charming and fascinating history of baseball in Southern Idaho in 1906-07 which launched the career of one of the greatest pitchers of all time, Walter Johnson. Yet he manages to do so without losing the reader or the main topic - the criminal trial. The writing is accessible and extremely enjoyable. Lukas's own political stance in refrence to the happenings can be apprehended, yet there is an even-handedness throughout that saves the book from becoming a preachy polemic. How unfortunate that Lukas took his own life the day he made final changes to the manuscript. The seven years he put into the reseach for this book were not wasted, but it is sad to know that there will be no more such writing from this author. show less