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‘Fraternity’ by Diane Brady

BOOK REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 04, 2012|By James Sullivan

Holy Cross faculty member Father John Brooks. (Joe Dennehy/Globe File )

In the spring of 1968, a young black student-athlete from Queens named Eddie Jenkins was invited to the Holy Cross campus on a recruitment drive. It was his second visit. Though Jenkins was being courted for the school’s football team, this time he quickly realized there was a much bigger initiative at work. And he liked what he saw.

“He found it heartening,’’ writes Diane Brady in “Fraternity,’’ “that the people running Holy Cross might feel as uncomfortable with its overwhelming whiteness as he did.’’

In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the college, led by a progressive-thinking faculty member named Father John Brooks, was hoping to attract a few promising young African-American students to Worcester. Brady’s book tells a compelling story about a fractious moment in American history and the extraordinary efforts of one institution - one man, really - to make amends.

Jenkins accepted, as did several other young black men (the school had yet to admit women) with leadership potential. The new recruits turned out to be a remarkable bunch: In addition to Jenkins, who played on the Miami Dolphins undefeated 1972 team before becoming a state official and youth mentor in Massachusetts, the students included a future Pulitzer Prize winner, a deputy mayor of New York City, and a Supreme Court justice.

Curiously, the future justice, Clarence Thomas, earned a prophetic nickname while growing up under his grandparents’ care in Savannah, Ga. For his skills on the basketball court, his friends called him “Cousy.’’ Bob Cousy, of course, is the former Holy Cross All-American who went on to greatness with the Celtics.

The author reports that Thomas displayed some of the same tendencies at Holy Cross that have marked his tenure on the Supreme Court. He spoke infrequently in class, and in meetings of the newly formed Black Student Union he preferred to play devil’s advocate: “Rarely did Thomas himself ever suggest an idea; he merely liked to shoot them down,’’ she writes.

Yet Thomas was clearly a leader, as were several of his peers in the Class of 1972. The opportunities being afforded a new generation of black Americans were far greater than those of their fathers and grandfathers, but they would also be tested in new ways. “They were being handed a chance to fail without necessarily being given all the support they needed to succeed,’’ Brady writes.