For Some, For Now: Remembering a Time When One Word Changed Everything

Each school day started the same.  We stood up at our desks and faced the corner of the room, put our right hand over our hearts, and said:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for some.”

What?  Wait a minute.  You don’t say liberty and justice for “some.”   Down at the American Legion Post, where my dad was the commander, you say it properly: “With liberty and justice for all.”  Yeah, that’s right, for all.

Who said “some?”  Why does that stick out so much?

It was the kid in front of me.  We were different.  I was white, and he was, before he was black, a negro.

This happened at Central High School in Providence, Rhode Island, in September 1965.

How did I get to Central High School?

No one graduated from Saint Anthony’s School without going through Mother Saint Henry, who taught 8^th grade.  She used to read a book with us entitled The Good Bad Boy.  I think her intent was to get us to acknowledge that in our teenage years and beyond, we had the capacity to do good or otherwise. She hoped we’d do good, because that is what God expected of us.

Mother Saint Henry, in the Spring of 1963, asked me where I planned to go to high school. My parents could not afford to send my brother or me to LaSalle Academy, run by the Christian Brothers.  We would have to settle for public school, and the best public school in the city, if not the state, was Classical.  When I told Mother Saint Henry that I would be going to Classical, she fixed me with a gaze and said, “You know, Thomas, that Classical is for scholars.”

Well, okay.  I had the makings of a scholar.  Right?

In 1958, when I was nine years old, a man named Pete Dawkins won the Heisman Trophy as the best college football player in the country.  He played for the Army, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  What a great role model!  He was also a Rhodes Scholar and, of course, a soldier.

My parents were both World War II veterans.  My father was the commander of the American Legion Post down the street from our house.  Neither of my parents attended college.  Going to college was the ticket to a better life, where you worked with your mind rather than just your hands.  My father had been an athlete in his youth, and we had an Uncle Bill, who was not our uncle but a close friend of my dad’s, who taught school and coached football at Central High School.

So, there was the formula:  I would do well in school and become a scholar, then play football and get a free college education, and then serve my country in the military.

So, off I went to Classical High School to start my journey.

Classical High in 1963 was a disaster.  I flunked everything except gym and lunch.  I was utterly lost.  To add tragedy to injury, one day in November, in a hallway at Classical, the teachers told us to go home in the middle of the school day.  Something terrible had happened.  President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

I went home.  The television was working that day, and I watched in stunned silence as Walter Cronkite told me that our President, like Abraham Lincoln, had been killed.

For a Catholic kid in Rhode Island, President Kennedy was a part of our culture, just as much as clam chowder.  Those who pretended to know him well referred to him as “Jack Kennedy from down the Cape.”  He was one of the two Johns that we prayed for at Saint Anthony’s; the other being Pope John XXIII.  He had been married in Newport.  He talked like us, saying “hot” for “heart.”  He was a Navy man, and Rhode Island, the Ocean State, is a Navy state.  He stopped to watch the Navy football team in its preseason practice at Quonset.

In 1963, like many boys in Rhode Island, I had a fixation with sports.  My idea of good literature was Sport Magazine.  Our house was not filled with books or classical music.  I wasn’t like the kids who lived on the Eastside and maybe had parents who went to Brown University, an Ivy League school.  We lived in Olneyville, not far from the Atlantic Mill, the company that sponsored my little league baseball team.

I sat on the couch in the Spring of 1964 and told my dad that I was a failure and asked what I should do.  He fell back on a good Knute Rockne slogan: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  So, I went back to Classical to retake 9th grade and show those kids walking in front of me that I could do it.  Classical was a little more tolerable the second time around.  For one thing, they let me play JV football and be the spotter for the varsity games.  I would sit in the press box at City Stadium and identify who made the tackles for Classical’s Class B champions.

Classical and Central High Schools are separated by one city block, but they might as well have been in different states.  If you wanted to be the president of a bank, you went to Classical, but if your intent was to be a teller, you went to Central.  Some students from Classical went to Harvard, while some students from Central went to Vietnam.

Classical and Central shared the City Gym.  Classical students took physical education classes there, then showered and went back to class.  My first encounter with black people was in the showers at the City Gym.  Tom Caito was a physical education teacher at Central High and the football coach.

By the Spring of 1965, I wanted out of Classical.  I was miserable. All I did was labor over books.  They had a language lab at Classical, and on different channels, you got to hear a foreign language.  At the beginning of a lifelong struggle with technology, I learned that it was hard to learn French when you couldn’t get off the German channel.

Tom Cailo told me that if I came to play football for him at Central, he would help me get a college scholarship.  I transferred to Central.

Thus it was that I found myself reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, standing behind a black kid named Doug Johnson at Central High School in September 1965.

Like just about everyone, I had heard about or seen Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.  I had heard about Bobby Kennedy’s fight to protect black students who wanted to go to college in Alabama.  But I was just a kid, and my attention wasn’t focused on what was going on in Washington but what was going on in school.  My attention was on that girl Patty, who was so pretty, and Arthur, the center on the football, and my best buddy and teammate.  My focus was on what was going on in school and on the football field, and not on what was going on in the streets of Providence and the nation. As students, we were protected from all that.

But Doug Johnson, who sat in front of me in homeroom, was black, and he said, “With liberty and justice for some, not all, some.”

Central essentially served two communities and two groups: the Italians from Federal Hill and the blacks from South Providence.  A few folks of Irish descent, like me, somehow got thrown in the mix.

The Central football team was very good in 1965.  Our star was Bobby Thompson, who went on to play at Oklahoma and professionally in Canada and for the Detroit Lions.  Our leader was Lenny Allen, our quarterback, who was a good student, a leader of his class, and perhaps the best signal caller in the state.  Art Fiore was from Federal Hill, where his dad spoke Italian at home, and Frank Chello was a strong offensive tackle.  When practices and games were over, Art and Frank would walk home, as would I suppose Lenny and Bobby, and I would get on a bus to Olneyville.  We played well together, but we didn’t have dinners at each other’s homes.  Our athletic world was the same, but our social worlds were far apart.  There was racism.  We might not have liked each other or been able to relate to each other, but we played football well together.

At a preseason scrimmage in Warwick, Lenny Allen told Coach Caito, pointing at me, “He can play.”  Thereafter, I did not care if Lenny liked James Brown or Rap Brown; I just had a high opinion of our leader.

The years 1965 through 1968 were difficult times in America.  There were race riots and long, hot summers.  The war in Vietnam raged on the nightly news.  There was also the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that had a profound impact on the number of black elected officials.  There were challenges to the nonviolent leadership of Dr. King and the emergence of the black power movement.  There was so much going on in the streets of our city and in Washington that it couldn’t help but infiltrate my high school.

We had a good football team in 1965 and won the Class B championship in 1966.  By 1967, things were about to change as graduation took away some of our best players.  In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the racial climate around our team got worse.  We had to take a bus to football practice, and my black teammates designated one bus as ‘the soul bus.”  I regularly rode the soul bus and heard, “you are on the wrong bus.’

One day, my science teacher and track coach, Carl Lauro, had us set aside our books and led us in a discussion of social deprivation.  We were curious about what he meant and how social deprivation manifested itself at Central.  It was noted that Classical, one block away, had a band and orchestra with all manner of fancy instruments.  Central didn’t have a band. We happily listened to the Four Tops on the radio and sang our own version of Mickey’s Monkey while we beat on our helmets on the bus before a football game.  Classical even had a practice field for football while we were bused to a field near Rhode Island Hospital that had an ample amount of beer caps and broken glass.  The Providence Journal did an article on the contrast entitled something like, “Does Gimbels Watch Macy’s?”

Throughout my high school career, I harbored the goal of playing football at West Point.  I was recruited by Coach Tom Cahill’s staff.  I had many enrichment opportunities because I did well in school.  Maybe I was now scholar material!  I attended American Legion Boys’ State at the University of Rhode Island and was chosen to attend Boys’ Nation, just like Bill Clinton was when JFK was in the White House.  I spent a lot of time with the National Conference of Christians and Jews.  I received an appointment to West Point from Congressman Robert O. Tiernan (D-RI).

It was time for me to leave Central and go to college.

After my homeroom teacher, Matt Smith, who later was elected Speaker of the Rhode Island Legislature, engineered by appointment to West Point, he pulled me aside for a serious conversation.  He told me I could be proud of my achievement, but that 1967 and 1968 were terribly bloody years in Southeast Asia, and when I graduated from West Point, if I attended, I would be on the first plane to Saigon.  If I could live with that, it would be good to take a free education and a chance to play in the Army/Navy game, but if not, I should think long and hard about going to the banks of the Hudson.

I decided not to go to West Point.

I wasn’t opposed at that point to the Vietnam War.  I joined ROTC in college.  I was, on the other hand, very much in favor of the civil rights movement and the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy.  MLK and RFK were focused on the need to make our deeds of “liberty and justice for some” match our creed of “liberty and justice for all.”  I wanted to march…with them.

I wasn’t supposed to march with Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy.  In the months before my high school graduation, both were murdered.  A teacher and my counselor at Central asked at my graduation if America was coming apart at the seams.

The morning before graduation day, my mother woke me and told me to come downstairs because something terrible had happened.  I watched Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary announce his death, ending with the words, “He was 42 years old.”

I had written an essay that I read at my graduation ceremony.  I dedicated it to Senator Robert Kennedy, and I got a standing ovation for my effort.  I then read my essay on racial equality, including the observation that the civil rights revolution was “just as difficult and just as necessary” as the American Revolution, and calling on us “To call each other brother and mean it.”  I got a standing ovation for that, too.

That night, I was seated in the auditorium at Central next to Doug Johnson.  When I returned to my seat, Doug had a big smile for me and vigorously shook my hand, and then shook it again.  I hope Doug knows that my high school career unfolded because of his observation of “liberty and justice for some.”

I got a half football scholarship to the University of Connecticut.  The other half of my college costs came from a Rhode Island State Scholarship.  At UCONN, I proved to be a bad investment as a football player, and I struggled in school until I declared a major in sociology in my junior year.  I overcame an addiction to football and acquired one to politics.  I found a niche at the Campus Christian Foundation.  I was befriended by the Rev. Jack Allen, a United Church of Christ minister and a Ph.D. candidate and former jazz musician, Thornell Jones.  Jack and TJ ran training labs to enhance racial harmony on the UCONN campus.  They made a home for me, and they cared deeply about “liberty and justice for some.”

The years have passed, and we have reached a sorry state.  I wonder what would happen today if a student were intent on disturbing the peace and observing that we have yet to achieve liberty and justice for all.  Perhaps his fellow student would be unsettled, as I was, to hear someone say that America’s creed still does not match its deed.  Maybe that unsettled student would report Doug to the proper authorities.  Maybe Doug would be suspended for being “woke.”

I think Doug, in his own quiet but firm way, was saying in 1965 that Black Lives Matter.  They do.  My faith teaches me that all lives matter.  Doug helped me observe that the trouble with America is that some lives matter a lot more than others do.  Our creed proclaims that all lives matter; our deed still denies that claim.

Creeds without deeds are lies.

Tom Howarth
Warren County, VA

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