Fraternity: In 1968, a visionary priest recruited 20 black men to the College of the Holy Cross and changed their lives and the course of history

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 black 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-