Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

"Common Ground is one of the great books of the twentieth century. As a matter of craft, it’s a foundational text of rigorous longform narrative journalism—one that gets at so much that resonates with the racial tensions of our own time, even though it’s written about a time almost exactly fifty years in the past. “ Common Ground is one of the great books of the twentieth century.” Through intensive interviewing, J. Anthony Lukas tells the story of America in the twentieth century, especially late twentieth-century Boston, through three families: a Harvard-educated white do-gooder of Protestant dissent, a Charlestown-based white Catholic family, and an aspiring African-American family from Roxbury who seek to realise the promise of Brown v. Board of Education in their own city. Lukas masterfully teases out the social geography of the place. Lukas has tremendous empathy for where his Charlestown townies who resist the end of de facto segregation in Boston schools come from, ideologically as well as economically. This quality puts one in mind of works like J D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right . Lukas is a civil rights warrior: he takes up the fight where Martin Luther King was bringing it at the end of his life to cities of the North, the places we classically associate with racial injury and segregation, and to places with an insidious apartness rooted in the cradle of liberty. The irony is that the anti-immigrationist family he follows lives on Monument Avenue in Charlestown, literally in the shadow of the Bunker Hill monument. That tension—between the land of liberty that wants to allow for opportunity but not create the conditions of equality—is one that resonates all the way back to Winthrop’s time through the moment where Lukas’s story really picks up, which is in the 1930s or 1940s, all the way forward to today. He traces families from their Massachusetts and immigrant origins, so you get a long sweep of history in it, too. It depends on where and how you look. One of the wonderful things about the kaleidoscopic quality of Lukas, where he’s consistently moving the camera around, is we see the ways that race has been inscribed into the urban fabric of the city are firm and quite resistant. Boston is not known, even today, as a friendly place for people of colour. But there is not a Boston equivalent of the scale, violence and deprivation of Chicago’s south side, say. It’s not necessarily that Boston is a more porous place. It’s that during the Great Migration—the mid-century movement north of Southern African-Americans free-people and their descendants—Boston was a secondary destination compared to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Great Migration re-made those cities, creating large urban ghettos, but also thriving black middle-class suburbs. Boston’s Great Migration history is different. Lukas traces some of it: there is an influx from the South, where the new black population from the South mixes somewhat uneasily not only with the white population in the city, but also with the ancient black population in the city. But it doesn’t remake the city in the way that it does with those other places. Yup. There are many varieties of what used to be called ‘white ethnic’ both power and poverty here. That’s one of the things that really comes out in Lukas: the ways that Irish immigrants, for example, engrossed an enormous amount of political and patronage power at the same time that places like Southie and Eastie were white ghettos of a sort. There is a native-born white underclass here. I’m not a twentieth-century urbanist, so I’m not an authority to quote on this."