Mass. Appeal
The 14-year-old boy with a big Afro came to Massachusetts on his first trip away from home alone. He had a scholarship to go to prep school and a chance to get away from gangs. This was in 1970, long before the Bloods and the Crips. The gangs in his poor neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago near me Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project, called tiiemselves the Blackstone Rangers and the Disciples. Deval Patrick wanted nothing to do with them.
Milton Academy, however, was interested in him. The elite school, located in me Boston suburb where the first President Bush was born, was bringing in its biggest class of Black students. Patrick was one of that pioneering dozen from around the country, each carefully screened for high academic ability. The scholarship came from a well-meaning nonprofit that still goes by the hopeful name, A Better Chance.
“It was my first time away by myself. Woo, I was scared,” Patrick recalls. He was entering a foreign world, so foreign that after the school informed his mother he would need a jacket, she and his grandmother bought a ski jacket to keep him warm during the cold New England winters. Milton Academy meant a blazer to wear to chapel.
But Patrick, with the bravado of a teenage boy, swallowed his fears. He studied hard and delivered newspapers early in the morning to make spending money. “I realized at times like this, you must keep your head about you. That is a lesson I have learned over and over again,” he says. “Now, I’m pretty cool under fire.”
Racial tensions simmered at some New England prep schools as they integrated, because affluent White students and Black newcomers of lesser means were unfamiliar with each other, and often wary. Patrick joined the Black student group at Milton, “Truth and Soul.” Around campus, he made friends, Black and White.
“Even then, he was a person who saw ways to build connections across differences,” says Anna Waring, a Black classmate originally from Boston who now is president of Josephinum Academy, a Catholic girls school in Chicago.
From Milton Academy, Patrick went across the Charles River to Harvard and then on to Harvard Law, where he won an award in the school’s moot court competition. He launched a varied career in the law, as a civil rights lawyer, partner in prestigious Boston firms and counsel for major corporations. Patrick traveled in Africa before law school, and afterward to serve as a clerk to a federal judge in Los Angeles, on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) in New York and in Washington at the Justice Department where he served as assistant attorney general for civil rights. But he kept returning to his adopted state.
Not many would have predicted that Patrick would make history in politics as the second African American elected governor. Starting as an underdog, he applied lessons he had learned at prep school. First he built a grassroots following in communities across Massachusetts and then, once he spurted ahead in late summer, slougrung off attacks from his rivals with grace. “Together We Can” was the slogan of his campaign, which did not focus on race.
In the Democratic primary, Patrick defeated two opponents, including the state attorney general anointed by the party establishment, with 50 percent of the vote. Even more impressive was the first-time candidate’s victory in November, a landslide wim 56 percent of the vote over me Republican lieutenant governor and two other candidates. As Patrick prevailed in a state where 7 percent of die population is Black, four African Americans running for governor or senator in states with Black populations ranging from 10 percent to 29 percent were going down to defeat.
One other African American has won statewide in Massachusetts, a Republican. Edward W. Brooke became the nation’s first African American elected a state attorney general in 1962, the first elected by popular vote to the Senate in 1966 and then in 1972 the only one re-elected to the Senate. Brooke, 87, lives in Florida now. From across party, generational and state lines, he admires the accomplishment of Patrick, who is 50.
“He certainly demonstrated excellence in his qualifications, his ability to campaign and his ability to communicate,” Brooke says. “I think he ran an excellent campaign and think he was rewarded with the size of his majority.”
Instead of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick might have settled in California, but for love. He was planning to join a law firm in San Francisco after his one- year clerkship for a liberal U.S. appeals court judge in Los Angeles. Then he met Diane Bemus, a lawyer with a local firm. They left California and moved to New York City, where she opened a new office for her firm, and they married.
Having backed away from the San Francisco offer, Patrick was without a job. A mentor at Harvard Law School, knowing of his protégé’s passion for civil rights law, told him about a rare opening at the LDF in New York. Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall’s successor as the defense fund’s director, hired the young lawyer in 1983 to handle death penalty cases. Colleagues included Lani Guinier, now a Harvard Law professor, and Theodore M. Shaw, currently the fund’s director-counsel and president.