The Fence - Dick Lehr [4]
Mike and Craig were inside the Cortee’s to perform some quick reconnaissance near the end of their regular shift. It was part of a larger plan. To cops, Hip-Hop Night might as well have been called Gang Night. The music attracted the gangs, and, Mike said, “wherever they go, there is going to be trouble.” He and Craig had gotten “intelligence,” or word from informants, there was conflict in the air. Mike and Craig wanted to size up the scene and make certain the club was humming. They and a handful of other teams from the gang unit then planned to return and set up outside before closing time—2 A.M.—when the crowd would begin pouring into the street.
The unit had high hopes for a rich return on their investment.
Seated at the table, Mike and Craig looked around. Even if they’d wanted to talk, the music was too loud to be heard. The only light was over by the bar area. Neither was too worried that anyone would make them. “They’d really have to get right in your face to recognize you,” Mike said. But it was their look that was mostly the source of confidence in not being identified. “Craig is a good-sized guy, and I’m a good-sized guy, and we’re dressed up like that. Most people are not thinking, Oh, cops.
“They’re thinking, Whoa! Like, stay away from them.”
Mike saw gangbangers from a number of different street gangs—Humboldt, Castlegate, and Corbett, to name a few. “Craig would see somebody, hit me, and I’d look, and I’m like, yeah, yeah, I see.” They both felt the combustibility in the room. The two stood up, walked back across the floor, and left. They’d seen enough and would be back, confident closing time would be the right time for the gang unit to be hiding nearby in the dark.
The civil rights movement made itself heard in Boston in 1965 with a legal blockbuster. The Boston branch of the NAACP sued the city’s school committee in federal court seeking to desegregate public schools. The lawsuit marked the formal beginning of legal and civil conflict, building nine years later to court-ordered busing.
Two days after the court filing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew into Logan Airport to tour Boston and then lead an estimated twenty-two thousand protesters from a playground in Roxbury to the historic Boston Common downtown. In the rain on April 23, King said, “The vision of the New Boston must extend into the heart of Roxbury. Boston must become a testing ground for the ideals of freedom.” The crowd roared with approval.
Two months later, on June 17, 1965, Michael Anthony Cox was born to a family living in the heart of Roxbury. He was the youngest of six children. His parents, Bertha and David, had lived in Boston for a decade. They were from Tennessee, where they’d met, married, and started a family. Their move north was part of the great migration of blacks during the 1940s and 1950s. They had followed Bertha’s mother, Rosa, the first to come, who found work as a maid for a wealthy Jewish couple, Norman and Helene Cahners. Norman Cahners oversaw a publishing empire he built from a single magazine, and he was known for his generosity and philanthropy. They owned homes in the city and in Brookline, just west of Boston, and Mike’s grandmother Rosa moved between the different homes. The Cahnerses also purchased a house in Roxbury for her to live in: 62 Winthrop Street, which was half of a large, side-by-side two-family home.
When Rosa’s Jewish neighbors put their side on the market, Rosa urged her daughter Bertha and son-in-law to move north, and on January 20, 1955, they bought 60 Winthrop Street. The Coxes paid $6,500, borrowing $5,500 from a Roxbury bank. Everything fell into place nicely. Bertha and David settled into 60 Winthrop, with Rosa right next door. Rosa then persuaded another daughter, Ollie Parks, and her husband to move north; eventually Ollie went to work for the Cahnerses as well.
The Coxes’ Winthrop Street was a one-way street running westerly from Blue Hill Avenue, Roxbury’s main thoroughfare. From the opening at Blue Hill Avenue, the