Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas Page B

principal go-between with the black community.
    Hoagland, Appel, and the others brought the same almost religious zeal to their recruiting for FUND—one FUND officer told another, “Now I think I know what it must have been like in the early days of Christianity”—and at first it paid off. Over the next months, they held hundreds of seven o’clock breakfasts throughout Boston’s ring of white suburbs and brought in an impressive roster of members at $1,000 apiece. At the start, the recruits came principally from among their friends in the liberal Jewish communities of Newton and Brookline. But gradually during the weeks following King’s assassination it became fashionable to ante up for the black community. Senator Edward Kennedy was an early donor. So were Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, wife of the Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Ambassador’s son, George. FUND’s membership list was a tightly held secret, but most of those who joined the organization were substantial citizens of the Yankee suburbs: among them, Robert Saltonstall of Ralph Lowell’s trust company; Philip Weld, publisher of the Beverly
Times;
Standish Bradford of the law firm of Hale & Dorr, and Francis Hatch, a state representative from the North Shore. One wealthy suburbanite even gave FUND his Porsche.
    There were failures too. Hoagland took a long walk up the Ipswich beach with novelist John Updike, but came away empty-handed. And Joan Diver went to a FUND meeting at the home of friends on Beacon Hill, but gave nothing, partly because the Divers didn’t have that kind of money, partly because they harbored doubts about FUND’s approach.
    The early money raising went so well that on May 23, FUND presented the United Front with its first installment—a check for $75,000. But that was a long way from $100 million. Soon FUND’s leaders realized that if they were going to reach that goal they needed to get it in larger chunks. One day Hoagland and Harvard theologian Harvey Cox lunched with Robert Slater, president of the John Hancock Insurance Company and chairman of Boston’s branch of the Urban Coalition, a year-old organization which sought to enlist big business in the war on urban poverty. In a private dining room at the Somerset Club, they asked Slater to funnel some of his vast resources into FUND.
    “No, I won’t,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why. The people you’re dealing with are Mafia and Communists.”
    Indeed, much of Boston’s establishment—black as well as white—regarded the United Front’s leaders as either crooks who would take the money and run to Brazil or revolutionaries who would buy guns and bombs. Among those who harbored such suspicions was Kevin White. When FUND’S leaders went to see him at City Hall, he castigated them for “picking the wrong black cats” and warned, “If they go out and buy machine guns, I’m holding you people personally responsible for the bloodbath that ensues.”
    Six months later one of the Front’s leaders—an ex-con named Guido St. Laurent, who headed the New England Grass Roots Organization (NEGRO)—was in fact gunned down with two of his aides in what police called a “gangland-style murder.” But most United Front members were well-intentioned if clumsy social activists. The $1 million which FUND presented to the Front between 1968 and 1972 went principally into loans for small black enterprises, most of which eventually went out of business.
    Quixotic and ill conceived as it was, the FUND-United Front alliance outraged City Hall and State Street principally because it skirted the traditional channels of private philanthropy and good works; because it involved—both as donors and as recipients—volatile new forces in the community who wouldn’t play by the old rules; and because it threatened established institutional relationships. If substantial money could flow from progressive Jewish businessmen and their guilt-ridden Yankee allies to a bunch