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Diane Brady
FRATERNITY Spiegel & Grau (January 3, 2012) Hardcover: 256 pages ISBN-10: 0385524749 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 11/06/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * * review: Diane Brady's FRATERNITY is about the three or four years between 1968 and 1972 that five among twenty young black men spent in Worcester, Massachusetts . They were undergraduates of the all-male College of the Holy Cross, one of 23 institutions of higher education in the USA run by the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus, better known as "Jesuits." On April 4, 1968 Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. On that day only eight barely visible black students were enrolled at Holy Cross. FRATERNITY tells how King's killing propelled Holy Cross College, especially one Jesuit Priest, Reverend Father John E. Brooks, S.J., to reach out immediately and strongly to enroll more black students with leadership potential. When September 1968 rolled around, 20 black teens had been recruited, including, as a sophomore, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The other 19 were freshmen. Of them ten graduated with the Holy Cross class of 1972. They included Theodore Wells, "widely considered to be one of the greatest trial lawyers of his generation" (his clients have included Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff); 1973-winning Miami Dolphins running back Edward Jenkins; and 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones (author of LOST IN THE CITY, THE KNOWN WORLD, ALL AUNT HAGAR'S CHILDREN). Father John Brooks, a 44 year old teacher of theology at book's beginning in April 1968, went on to become President of cash strapped Holy Cross (1970-1994), balancing 23 consecutive budgets, introducing women to the student body, adding black professors and enriching the black studies program. Author Diane Brady dedicates this, her first book, to Father Brooks who created that "Fraternity" of young black leaders of the classes of 1971 and 1972 and the man whom all of those black men acknowledge to have believed in them, mentored them and given them a chance to show the good that was within them. The structure of FRATERNITY is simple, clear, helpful, natural and as a memory aid. (It is not easy for an average American reader to keep a dozen or so generally unfamiliar men's names and personalities straight.) Diane Brady begins by sketching America in the turbulent year 1968, with a half million troops in Viet-Nam, the Tet Offensive, the King assassination and with resultant race riots. She tells of Holy Cross College founded in the 1840s to be a refuge for young, mostly Irish Catholic men from anti-Catholic terror in Boston and elsewhere in Massachusetts. Ms Brady also makes clear what led Father Brooks to reach out in the teeth of faculty resistance or apathy to recruit through a network of Catholic high schools black teens with leadership potential. She carries five of those boys in some detail through their three or four years in Worcester to college graduation and finally shows us where they are today. FRATERNITY is not a collection of lives of saints. The boys pressed hard for privileges, including a black dormitory, a car to be provided by the college for the Black Student Union they founded, more black professors and more black content in the college's curriculum. They were lonesome for female companionship. When injustice was perceived, they walked out of the college as a body (within days Father Brooks cajoled them back). Clarence Thomas admires Brooks for treating each young black man as an individual with rights and talents, not as means to glory for the College of Holy Cross or as anything else. Said Thomas: "We weren't symbols to him. We were just kids."
This is very creditable first book. On any scale I would rate it 4 1/2 stars, rounding upward to five. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/218269962.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 11/07/2011 name of review: Of black students recruited in 1968 for Holy Cross, Clarence Thomas said: "We were just kids." rating: * * * * * review: April 4, 1968 changed the direction of thousands of American lives. On that day Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated in Memphis. That death accelerated existing plans of a Jesuit priest, Father John E. Brooks, to recruit and give full four - year scholarships to more black teenage high school graduates to study at all male College of the Holy Cross. That exclusively undergraduate college, founded in 1843 in Worcester, Massachusetts as a refuge for Irish Catholic males from anti-Catholic bigotry, is one of 23 American Jesuit institutions of higher education. It is academically rigorous. In the spring of 1968, Holy Cross had eight black students, typically each year had one from the North and one from the South, among its 2200 male enrollees. Father Brooks quickly drove to Catholic high schools in Philadelphia and elsewhere making the case for black teenage boys with leadership promise to visit Holy Cross over a weekend and study there on scholarships. Nineteen blacks agreed to join the Freshman class in September 1968. A 20th, Clarence Thomas, the future Supreme Court Justice, joined as a sophomore. Scheduled for public release in January 2012, Diane Brady's FRATERNITY focuses on the experience of five of those young men between April 1968 and their graduations from Holy Cross in the spring of 1971 and 1972, Those five, in alphabetical order, are -- Stan Grayson (ended hopes for a
stellar professional basketball career when a fall during a game
against Georgetown shattered his left knee and tore his anterior
cruciate ligament):
-- Eddie Jenkins (played as a running back on Don Shula's Miami Dolphins football team that won the 1973 super bowl); -- Edward P. Jones (graduated 150th in a class of 500, later won the Pulitzer and other prizes for his fiction); -- Clarence Thomas (angry at Catholic Church's attitude toward blacks, stopped going to Mass, later became Supreme Court Justice); and -- Ted Wells (played freshman year football; debated incessantly with Thomas, later became "one of the greatest trial lawyers of his generation," defending among others, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff). Diane Brady devotes twice as many words to Clarence Thomas as to Ted Wells or any of the other five students. But she talks even more about the central figure who held all the new
wave of black students together, Rev
Father John E. Brooks, S.J. who from 1970 - 1994 was President
of Holy Cross College.
Academic year by academic year between 1968 and 1972 Ms Brady places the score of so of lives (students, Jesuits, coaches, professors) that she describes upon a violent, at times close to anarchic larger stage of America at war in Viet-Nam, putting men on the moon, seeing black unrest on city streets and on college campuses. At Holy Cross the new crop of 20, then 40, then more black students on full scholarships demanded more black professors and a broader black curriculum. They founded a Black Student Union, got the College to buy them a car to visit Boston and elsewhere looking for bright black female companions (some long lived marriages resulted), worked with white radicals to protest Pentagon and CIA recruiting on the campus and much more. Of the nineteen black teens who in 1968 entered the class of 1972, ten graduated. Diane Brady first heard of Father Brooks (to whom she dedicates FRATERNITY) at a late 2005 business lunch in midtown Manhattan. She was a senior writer at BUSINESS WEEK. At table she met one of the subjects of her book, Stan Grayson, once deputy mayor of New York City and then president of a minority-owned investment bank. They discussed Grayson's classmate, lawyer Theodore (Ted) Wells then representing Scooter Libby. The conversation turned to Holy Cross College in the late 60s and early 70s where Wells had shared a dorm room with running back Eddie Jenkins. And on and on the conversation went. Ms Brady was fascinated. She then visited, interviewed and wrote of Father Brooks and his "fraternity" of young black men for BUSINESS WEEK. This led to FRATERNITY, her first book. FRATERNITY is one of the most personally satisfying books I have read in a long time. I am a (white) product of Jesuit education from grade seven in Shreveport through Master's Degree in Mobile. I have my own personal Jesuit heroes, just as the young black men found theirs in Father John Brooks. He was their mentor, sympathizer, refuge, a man who testified before the Senate hearings to confirm Thomas as Associate Justice. He stayed in touch with many of them after they left Holy Cross, witnessed weddings and baptisms. Some of those black Holy Cross students may be giants now. But as Clarence Thomas recently reminded author Brady about the boys' relation to Father Brooks, "We weren't symbols to him. We were just kids." Diane Brady writes clearly, organizes her material well, has done her homework via interviewing and work in the Holy Cross archives. This is a model marriage between instant journalism and moderate but careful scholarship and fact-checking. -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Diane _Brady_FRATERNITY-74-1780296-215112-Of_black_ students_recruited_in_1968_for_Holy.htm =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 11/08/2011 title of review: "White racism is to the white man as original sin is to mankind" (1969: Father John E. Brooks, S.J. of Holy Cross College) rating: * * * * * Review: Diane Brady's book FRATERNITY is about Jesuit-run Holy Cross College of Worcester, Massachusetts in the years 1968 - 1972. On April 4, 1968 the world changed for millions of people: Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in Memphis. FRATERNITY focuses on how that day redirected five black teens and one Catholic priest who brought them and other young black men to Holy Cross as scholarship students. The five boys were (1) footballer Stan
Grayson,
(2) future Miami Dolphins running back Eddie Jenkins, (3) future Pulitizer Prize winner Edward P. Jones, (4) angry ex-seminarian Clarence Thomas and (5) Ted Wells who would become the greatest trial lawyer of his generation. (6) The priest was John E. Brooks, S.J., theology professor, about to become President (1970 - 1994) of Holy Cross College. Father Brooks detested anti-black racism and what it did to the soul of his Jesuit college founded in 1843 to provide a shelter against ungodliness for the sons of Irish Catholic immigrants. Putting blacks down was instinctive to whites and it was sinful. Brooks said in 1969, "White racism is to the white man as original sin is to mankind." For some time Father Brooks fell into the trap of Socrates: that merely to see, to be aware of, evil would ensure action to abolish evil. And by raising the number of black men at Holy Cross from eight to 28 in one year via active recruiting and four-year scholarships, he made blacks visible on Holy Cross's immaculate campus. It was now impossible to miss what centuries of mistreatment had done to bright boys. But Brooks soon found that mere awareness that whites and the Catholic church had been wrong about blacks for centuries did not automatically make blacks feel welcome at Holy Cross. Structures also had to change. Brooks came to believe that the only person he could change was himself. And this he found to be true of Clarence Thomas and other young black students at Holy Cross. The best thing he could do for them was to encourage them to think for themselves, think new thoughts, share them with him, with white and black friends, and then set to work to become the men God wanted them to be and whom they chose to be for themselves. Semester by semester author Diane Brady carries the five young black men whom she focuses on and a handful of others through their experiences at Holy Cross and how those few years shaped their futures. In recent interviews conducted with all six principals, their friends, wives, professors and others, Diane Brady found a profound love among black students for Father John Brooks. Said trial lawyer Theodore Wells publicly of Brooks in 2008: "I love this man." And Justice Clarence Thomas added that Father Brooks treated him and others as distinct individuals. They were not symbols, not means for Holy Cross's end of doing penance for white guilt for injustices to blacks. "We were just kids." FRATERNITY is an astonishingly good book: well conceived, effectively organized, clearly presented, not preachy, but very convincing. Echoing, perhaps, the gospel according to Rudyard Kipling (in CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED and elsewhere, Father Brooks convinced his black "kids" to believe in themselves and in their salvation through hard work. There are also some at times disturbing overtones of Thornton Wilder's great THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY. What was God's plan in bringing those six people together? -OOO- recommended reading: -- Thornton Wilder - THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY -- John Henry Newman - THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fraternity -diane-brady/1013531258?ean=9780385524742&itm =1&usri=diane%252bbrady%252b-%252bfraternity =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 11/09/2011 Title of Review: Did Holy Cross College "Make" Justice Clarence Thomas? Reviewer's Rating of FRATERNITY: * * * * * FIVE STARS Review: Diane Brady's about to be (January 2012) published book, FRATERNITY, is a far better read than I had anticipated. -- First, the book
presents important facts and interpretations within a simple,
unpretentious chronological framing: the years 1968-72 in America; the
College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and several score
young American black men of military draft age coming of age during the
Viet-Nam war.
-- Secondly, FRATERNITY carefully selects certain individuals to guide us through a complex period in American history. This selection of a dozen or so persons fights any authorial temptation to dwell amid mere abstractions or generalities. As it was, I, for one, found it hard enough to keep straight the mere handful of unfamiliar young men. Thank Heaven that she did not focus on 20 more people! Thus, although author Brady mentions by name four Jesuit priests and college figures important to Holy Cross College since its founding in 1843, she showcases one: Father John E. Brooks, S. J. (born July 23, 1923), President of Holy Cross from 1970 - 1994. Similarly, Ms Brady moves from the eight black students on the Holy Cross campus on April, 4 1968 (the day Martin Luther King, Jr was done in) through the scores more added by graduation day 1972. She mentions a dozen or more by name, but she tells in fair detail the lives of (a) only one of them already on campus before the initial four-year surge of more young black men and of (b) only five more of the 20 who matriculated in September 1968. Among those five, four, possibly because they are best known or remembered today, receive most attention: -- Edward Jenkins (he
later played as a running back on Don Shula's Miami Dolphins football
team that won the 1973 Super Bowl);
-- Edward P. Jones (graduated 150th in a class of 500, later won the Pulitzer and other prizes for his fiction); -- Clarence Thomas (graduated 9th in his Holy Cross Class of 1971, currently one of eight Associate Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court); -- Theodore Wells ("one of the greatest trial lawyers of his generation," defended Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby). Within her several framing and simplifying devices, Diane Brady meditates on the varying degrees of anti-black racism then strangling American white society. In an interview in 1969 Father Brooks said, "White racism is to the
white man as original sin is to mankind."
Racism was that bad in 1960s America. FRATERNITY is the story of Father John Brooks and his effort to make of Holy Cross's 2,200 enrolled students and scores of professors a launching pad into multi-racial, achieving American society for black teenagers who, as Clarence Thomas reminds us, "were just kids." Father Brooks resisted the temptation to make Thomas, his ever-debating, brilliant young fellow-student Wells and the rest of the young black men either symbols or means to the greater glory of Holy Cross. In the spring of 1968 Brooks fought a cash-strapped college administration and won full four-year scholarships for twenty promising black boy-men recruited in haste through Catholic high schools in the northeast. His door was always open to each of the "kids" and they later testified to Diane Brady that he listened to them with great patience and respect for them as individuals. In their view, Father Brooks changed their lives. Though Diane Brady is not so explicit, I would not find it a stretch to regard Father Brooks in 1968 as a 44-year old Jason filling his ship Argo with youngsters worthy of his and their quest for a Golden Fleece -- or possibly just for the "sheepskins" that they received on graduation days in 1971 and 1972. Father Brooks, today 87, is presented as the greatest, holiest, most innovative figure in FRATERNITY. It is, therefore, no surprise that Diane Brady dedicates FRATERNITY "To Father Books, who has inspired generations of Holy Cross students." Nonetheless, Clarence Thomas and certain other of his fellow "Argonauts," all Brooks's proteges, are far better known throughout America than the man who first brought them together. For more on John Brooks and two other Jesuit presidents of New England Jesuit colleges and universities see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHa8-iSFzhg/. Did Holy Cross
"make" Clarence Thomas?
An angry Catholic ex-seminarian constantly put down by the grandfather who raised him near Savannah, Georgia, Thomas stopped going to Mass while at Holy Cross. He loved and was grateful to Father Brooks for treating him as a talented individual, and, along with Ted Wells, Ed Jenkins, Ed Jones and all the rest, still professed that love both publicly and in recent interviews with author Brady. Father Brooks allowed Clarence Thomas, an impoverished, angry young black man from Georgia -- a man in search of personal identity, respect from peers and a future role -- to vent his passionate hatreds of injustice and American anti-black racism. Father Brooks let Thomas, Wells, Jones and others quickly form a Black Student Union and persuaded the college to buy that Union a car (used off the all-male campus in large measure in pursuit of brainy female companionship). When Thomas led the Union's charge to walk away from Holy Cross because of a perceived act of racial injustice, Father Brooks patiently but very quickly persuaded the boys to come back and finish their schooling. *
* *
In 1973, Father Brooks, as President, made Holy Cross the last of America's 23 Jesuit institutions of higher education, to go coeducational. In 1991 he testified on behalf of Clarence Thomas in the U.S. Senate hearings to confirm Thomas as Associate Justice. See http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/senate/judiciary/sh102-1084pt2/63-67.pdf. At that time Father Brooks noticed that Thomas had been and remained a frequently reappointed member of the Board of Trustees of Holy Cross College. Brooks and others testified to Thomas's passionate recruiting of young blacks to Holy Cross and his year-in, year-out insistence to the College and its trustees that black students both be given a helping hand, held to high academic standards and made to feel welcomed on campus. *
* *
As usual, before writing my own thoughts, I have read earlier reviews at amazon.com of Diane Brady's FRATERNITY. Though only three in number as of November 9, 2011, each review is strikingly good. Like one reviewer, I wish that Ms Brady's treatment had gone deeper into several dimensions: America's malaise and lack of self-confidence in 1968, of turmoil within the Jesuit Order itself, and more about how the young black men of the late sixties, sheepkins in hand, navigated the 70s and 80s. Nonetheless, FRATERNITY is a superbly good first step, using both good journalistic and simple but adequate resarch techniques, to call readers' attention to a remarkable phase in the life of one American Catholic undergraduate college campus and the two-way impact between college and a growing handful of black students who had been selected by Father Brooks for their leadership potential. I do not, therefore, blame Ms Brady for sticking to her self-appointed, limited goal, which was not to write a definitive last word in FRATERNITY. She simply did what she set out to do -- brilliantly and convincingly -- and has made future follow-on studies all the easier for writers whom she inspires to take up her baton. Ms Brady inspired me, for instance, to google on line for more about Father Brooks and to read his Senate testimony in support of Clarence Thomas. Who can say what Diane Brady might inspire the rest of us to do? -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Fraternity-visionary-recruited -College-history/dp/0385524749/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie =UTF8&qid=1320496534&sr=1-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 11/10/2011 Review Title: Singing An Unsung Educator Product Rating: * * * * * FIVE STARS Pros: High praise for a teacher and mentor not even the author's own! Cons: Diane Brady might have probed more deeply anti-black racism, and American malaise in the 60s. The Bottom Line: Deliberately confining herself to what good journalism and moderate scholarship can quickly produce, Diane Brady has written a little masterpiece rightly praising an educator and his college. From time to time, I lift my eyes from immersion in Rudyard Kipling and Edith Stein and select from the amazon.com/VINE program a totally unrelated about-to-be-published title to read and to review. This time my choice, Diane Brady's FRATERNITY, resonates with both Stein and more especially with Kipling. For FRATERNITY is a book about Catholic education at Worcester, Massachusetts's College of the Holy Cross between 1968 and 1972. And Kipling's 1899 novel STALKY & CO. tells of schoolboy adventures of Kipling and two classmates, recalling the author's five years (1878 - 1882) at an experimental all-male, non-military, non-religious English boarding school prepping youngsters for military careers or as civilians in India. Future Carmelite nun and mystic, German Jewish born Edith Stein, converted in 1921 from atheism to Christianity, then taught 1923 - 1933 as a lay person in two Catholic schools in pre-Hitler Germany. She had a huge, positive impact on the young women whom she taught and who were never shy about thanking her. Soon I will discuss for epinions a book in German detailing Stein's first teaching stint (1923 - 1931) at a Dominican girls' school in Speyer. Taking power in January 1933, Chancellor Adolf Hitler saw Edith Stein and millions of others simply as Jews to be exterminated. Who cared how many student lives she had enriched or how many Aryan girls loved her? That Nazi mind-set first ended Stein's teaching career and later caused her to be gassed at Auschwitz in 1942. -- Is it only coincidence that beloved fictitious teacher Mr Chippinton of James Hilton's GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS lay on his deathbed shortly after Nazi assumption of power in Germany? -- Let us recall that Nobel Literature Prize winner (1907) Joseph Rudyard Kipling dedicated STALKY & CO. "To CORMELL PRICE, Headmaster, United
Sevices College Westward Ho! Bideford, North Devon 1874 - 1894."
In both the prosed episodes of STALKY & CO. and the verses introducing the novel, Kipling showed his love of his prep school teachers. He began: "'Let us now praise
famous men' --
Men of little showing -- For their work continueth, And their work continueth, Broad and deep continueth, Greater than their knowing!" * * * Brady names perhaps a dozen black men who interacted 1968 - 1972 with Father Brooks. Six are signaled out for moderately detailed biographic treatment -- one of them among the mere eight ("token?") black students at Holy Cross on April 4, 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, five more among twenty youngsters quickly recruited, mainly from Catholic high schools in Philadelphia and Baltimore, for the 1968 fall semester. Among the six receiving authorial showcasing are one sophomore from Savannah and four freshmen from different places. Most of Diane Brady's words wrap around four of the young blacks: Clarence
Thomas,
Theodore Wells, Edward P. Jones and Edward Jenkins. I suspect that that is because those four are best known of the black alums of Holy Cross. Do you know or can you
guess who was a running back when the Miami Dolphins won the 1973 Super
Bowl?
Or who graduated number 150 in a class of 500 but won a Pulitzer and several other prizes for his short stories? Or who sits silently on the U.S. Supreme Court? Which great trial lawyer defended Scooter Libby, VP Cheney's chief of staff? Carrying the young men from childhood till today, Diane Brady moves the future achievers (Clarence Thomas reminded her in an interview: "We were just kids"), semester by semester to and through graduation at Holy Cross. She does this through study of college archives, interviews with all the principals, with Jesuit and lay professors, with wives and fellow students. These three-dimensioned characters seem to jump off the pages before our eyes, grow their Afro hairdos, start a Black Student Union, cruise for chicks in the Union's car, renounce their four-year scholarships -- outraged at an apparent incident of racial insensitivity and injustice by campus administrators. Father Brooks, by then Holy Cross President, promptly fixed the problem and brought the boys back. More generally, author Brady sketches America in chaos, both destructive and creative, in the years when all Holy Cross undergraduates were subject to be drafted to fight in Viet-Nam, when Americans walked on the moon and when anti-war students were killed at Kent State University. She probes the sin of anti-black racism among Caucasians. Said Father Brooks in 1969: "White racism is
to the white man as original sin is to mankind."
Father Brady was in steady personal contact with all these young men. He placated wealthy white alumni who wanted their Irish teens to enjoy at Holy Cross a sanctuary from the violence and pushiness associated by so many whites with so many blacks. Father Brooks officiated at the weddings of a good number of his "kids," baptized their children and testified on behalf of Boston College Trustee Clarence Thomas at Senate hearings in 1991. In 2008 ClarenceThomas and his friend Ted Wells appeared together at Holy Cross, forty years after they matriculated there, pubicly to praise their old friend and mentor, Father John E. Brooks. "'I
love this man,' said Wells. Brooks, who was sitting beside
Thomas, had tears in his eyes.'"
FRATERNITY is a strikingly good first book by an author who knows how to tell a complex story without losing readers asea among too many names dropped or too many depths plumbed. Diane Brady makes us want to learn more, much more, about the great black "kids" of Holy Cross and their academically demanding college as well as about Jesuit priests, professors and coaches, who helped them go so far so well. If you, dear reader, are an alum of the College of the Holy Cross, perhaps the Man Upstairs is inviting you to write the deeper, more probing sequel. -OOO- p.s. Thank you, dear Pestyside Patsy, for making this reviewable for epinions.com Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/review/Diane_Brady_Fraternity_epi/ content_569698782852 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= A final note: Just after writing my fifth and final review of Diane Brady's FRATERNITY, I wondered if she might not be persuaded to write SORORITY, if perchance someone back in 1968 reached out from a Catholic college to black girls with four year scholarships. I think that I will write to Ms Brady and ask. TPK 11/10/2011. http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/brady_fraternity.html |