Common Ground

Common Ground is the story of the Boston busing crisis told through three families, and it may be the most thorough act of listening in American journalism. When federal judge Arthur Garrity ordered Boston's schools desegregated by busing in 1974, the city convulsed, and J. Anthony Lukas, a Pulitzer winning reporter for the New York Times, spent seven years finding out what the convulsion meant. He chose the Twymons, a Black family in Roxbury whose children rode the buses into hostile Charlestown; the McGoffs, Irish Catholics in Charlestown itself, where mothers marched against the buses and sons threw the stones; and the Divers, white liberal professionals in the South End whose principles collided with their own children's schooling until they moved to the suburbs. Lukas takes each family back generations, through famine Ireland, the sharecropping South, and Yankee Boston, so that by the time the crisis arrives the reader understands it as the collision of three complete histories rather than a morality play, and the book's tragedy is exactly that everyone's reasons are real. Around the families he builds the city, Garrity in his chambers, Louise Day Hicks and the antibusing movement, the Globe newsroom, Cardinal Medeiros, City Hall, in chapters of extraordinary reported density. Common Ground won the 1985 National Book Award for Nonfiction, then the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, shared that year with Joseph Lelyveld's Move Your Shadow, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, journalism's triple crown, and it remains the essential book on race, class, and the American city, pressed on every reporter who attempts the form.