The evening was warm. The Yard, as ever on such spring evenings, was restless. Two Harvard freshmen strolled down to the Charles's grassy banks. They were Peter Varnum Poor, son of famed Painter Henry Varnum Poor, and Craig Philip Gilbert, son of a Manhattan lawyer. A group of high-school boys shouted at them, but they paid no attention.
The group closed in. One of them asked the freshmen: "Are you Jews?" Poor and Gilbert made no answer, tried to hurry on. Two pursuers blocked their path, insisted: "Are you Jews?" "No," said Poor. He was not—Gilbert was. They quickened their pace. When Poor, to cover his nervousness, reached into his pocket for matches to light a cigaret, one of the gang yelled: "They have a knife!" Seven or eight boys leaped on the two freshmen. Badly mauled, both spent the night in Stillman Infirmary, Peter Poor had two stitches taken in his lip.
Strange Delegates. Harvard hushed it up. But three nights later tension in Cambridge rose higher. Last week, after a day of record Boston heat, crowds of young hoodlums began to gather at the Cambridge end of the Western Avenue bridge across the Charles. Most were from "Kerry Corner," Cambridge's Hell's Kitchen, but others came from remote points in the Boston metropolitan area. They carried lengths of rubber hose and two-by-fours, fish knives, baseball bats, bayonets. Calling themselves "delegates" and lining up in well-disciplined ranks, they began to march, some 200 strong, up Western Avenue toward "the coast," Cambridge's Negro district. A group of Negro boys were waiting.
The Boston area for days had been thick with rumors of trouble: that a white boy had been killed by Negroes; that three Negro girls had beaten up a white school girl ; that a Negro had stolen a white boy's girl. As the column of "delegates" approached the Negroes, Cambridge police arrived. They seemed loth to intervene.
When a bystander asked "What's going on?" a policeman replied, "These kids are going to beat up those niggers." But the advancing column hesitated, began to fall back. Soon patrol cars of the metropolitan district police arrived and helped break the mob into smaller groups. A few "dele gates" fired a salvo of rocks, breaking a police car window. Small squads raced through back alleys hunting for Negroes. By morning, Cambridge had subsided into uneasy peace.
Strange Dean. Town & gown bitterness in Cambridge is an old story; Cambridge's famed Councilman Michael A.
("Mickey") Sullivan, the townsmen's testy champion, was once kicked in the pants by undergraduates. But last week's racial out break was something new and ominous in Harvard's experience.
Harvard's Psychologist Gordon Allport, in a quiet, unpublished study of Cambridge "morale," had found the town, which is 77% Irish Catholic, rife with Coughlinism, antiSemitism, Anglophobia.
Because Harvard is now largely in uniform, Cambridge hoodlums have lately paid less attention to students, more to Jews and Negroes. Harvard liberals have been distressed to find antiSemitism, with which metropolitan Boston has seethed for months, raising its head within the university itself.