Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas

helped equip an Orchard Park Security Patrol, made up of men in the project fed up with crime and vandalism. And $100 went to the nearby Robert Gould Shaw House, the settlement house which Mrs. Twymon, her brothers and sisters, and now her children attended.
    Such expenditures were merely stopgaps—firebreaks to hold back the holocaust. More grandiose plans were being contemplated.
    The Sunday after King’s assassination, Sheldon Appel, a Boston paper box manufacturer, was at breakfast in suburban Newton when he noticed an article on page one of the
Herald
headlined “City’s Negroes Cool Their Own.” It told how Bill Wimberly, director of the Roxbury YMCA, and his sidekick, Marvin Butler, had rescued a white man badly beaten in Roxbury that week, and how they had otherwise sought to control violence in the black community followingKing’s death. The
Herald
had selected Wimberly and Butler to represent the hundreds of black community leaders, ministers, and social workers who had been out in the street trying to cool things during the riots. The reporter closed his piece: “Bill Wimberly sat in his office with the green curtains drawn back and the April sun shining in on him, thinking about the summer. ‘We need a gym here real badly. It will cost $250,000…. We can’t raise it in the black community. We need help.’ ”
    Shelly Appel had been overwhelmed by King’s assassination, and was feeling, as he later put it, “the guilt of centuries.” Putting down the paper, he exclaimed to his wife, “Somebody ought to help these guys. Here their leader has been gunned down and they spend all their energies trying to save white people. My God, I’ve got to do something! This is something I can do.”
    During the next few days, Appel called friends and acquaintances asking them to help raise money for the gym. Someone suggested he try Ralph Hoagland, president of Consumer Value Stores, a Massachusetts chain of cut-rate drugstores.
    Hoagland was something of a phenomenon in Boston business circles—a Princeton and Harvard Business School graduate who, while still in his twenties, had built CVS into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. But he approached his social responsibilities with equal intensity. In 1961, while still at the business school, he asked one of his professors how he could help Negroes. “Why don’t you teach them what you learned last year?” the professor suggested. So that fall, Hoagland began teaching business at a Roxbury social service agency, to a mixed group of clothes pressers, junk men, and house painters. He was convinced that if he could pass along what he knew to these black men, they could make it in the business world. But it rarely worked, usually because his students lacked the necessary capital. Once he founded CVS, he dropped the course, but he retained a burning conviction that such men could make it if only they could put expertise and capital together. Staggered by King’s death, he was more than receptive when he got a call from Shelly Appel.
    Nine people gathered in the Hoaglands’ living room on Saturday, April 13. Quickly, they abandoned the gym idea. As Ralph Hoagland put it, “Blacks don’t need more basketball courts. They do very well as it is bouncing the ball off a stoop. We have to shoot for something bigger than that.” But they couldn’t agree on what that should be. One by one, the guests began drifting away, leaving Appel and Hoagland staring at each other over the coffee cups. “Well,” Shelly Appel said, “I guess it’s up to us.” They agreed to meet again at Appel’s home on April 22.
    In the meantime, Hoagland spoke with his black friends, among them Bryant Rollins, a young writer and social activist, who told him, “You want to help us, then give us the money and let us decide what we’re going to do with it. The time is over for white people to be telling blacks what to do. We’re going to control our own destiny now.” In part, Rollins