Tuesday night in downtown Boston and, despite the familiar vista of collars, ties and dress suits swapping business cards over cocktails, the Modern bar was virtually unrecognisable to a regular.
The music was a little funkier than usual. The skin tone of most of those swaying to it was a whole lot darker. Ask the bartender how many black people would be there normally and she shrugged.
‘Not many,” she said.
‘How many is not many?”
‘OK, none,” she admitted. ‘Downtown Boston is pretty segregated, so you just don’t see it. Not normally.”
But Tuesday was not normal. Tuesday night was a ‘friendly takeover†— a mixture of racial ambush and social networking. The bar’s name may be Modern but, like most social spaces in Boston, its usual clientele looks nothing like the city beyond its walls. Blacks make up more than a quarter of Boston’s population, but are rarely seen downtown at night.
When Reggie Cummings, a software developer, got tired of being the only black face out after dark, he came up with the idea of the friendly takeover. He sends e-mails, contacting every local black professional group, from the Society of Black Engineers to the National Association of Black Flight Attendants, not to mention the university fraternities and sororities.
He tells them 48 hours ahead of time which venue in downtown Boston ‘could use a little colour”, but doesn’t tell the venue.
‘Boston is one of the best cities in the world in terms of culture, arts and music,” said Cummings, who will admit only to being ‘thirtysomething”.
‘Yet I find myself living in a world that doesn’t look like me. So I thought there are all these great places. Let’s take them over.”
Tuesday night at the Modern there were about 60 African-Americans and few whites. ‘It’s better when there’s more of a mix,” said Cummings, who insists that numbers are less important than impact. ‘Sometimes it works out like that and sometimes it doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter if two people or 200 show up. These are public places and we’re the public.”
He stood back, nursing a drink and watched the fruits of his labour.
‘Initially they react with some shock and they can feel uncomfortable,†he said, referring to the bar owners and their patrons. ‘I have seen people walk in and walk out when they’ve seen so many black people in a place where they are not expecting them.
‘That’s not the reaction we want, but we can’t help that. But nine times out of 10 they welcome us. We spend money and we don’t make trouble. It’s friendly. But it’s a takeover.”
While his immediate aim on Tuesday night was for a social takeover of the Modern, he also hopes his idea will lead to a racial makeover for the city. For when it comes to race, Boston, one of only a few major United States cities never to have had a black mayor, has an image problem.
It dates back to the 1970s when a court decision to enforce the busing of black children to mostly white schools provoked a violent backlash.
‘What I remember most about that period,” said Cummings of the attacks that took place in 1974, ‘is that I was a little kid and I was thinking, why are these people throwing rocks at me?â€
Two years later, Ted Landsmark, a black man, was photographed being beaten viciously by white youths with the staff of an American flag just outside Boston City Hall. The picture won a Pulitzer prize and cemented the city’s status as one of the nation’s least tolerant cities.
Serious problems undoubtedly remain. The Democrats had second thoughts about holding next year’s annual convention in Boston because the welcoming committee that greeted them contained few minorities. But the fact that they decided to hold it there anyway is one indication that, whatever racial problems remain, they are nothing like on the scale they used to be.
Nonetheless, there is a sense of unease that is as vague as it is prevalent among the city’s African-Americans.
Articulate as all revellers at the Modern were, none could quite find the words for it, yet all of them feel it. They talk about not feeling ‘comfortable” in bars and restaurants, often dining, dancing and drinking in couples, or as the only black person in a group full of white workmates.
‘We get used to the fact that we’ll be the only black people in the restaurant,” said William ‘Mo” Cowan, head of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers’ Association that sponsored the friendly takeover, who was there with his wife, Stacy. ‘We want to come to something like this to see other people who look like us. Everybody has their own comfort zone.”
Dig a little deeper below the melanin content and it becomes clear that the friendly takeovers are inspired at least as much by class as by race.
The inhabitants of Roxbury, Mattapan and South Dorchester — all black, working-class areas of Boston — do not share this angst because they have organic social scenes in their neighbourhoods, although by all accounts there remains a sense of alienation.
Cummings is keen to attract the right kind of African-American. ‘The professional is as important to us as the black,” he said. ‘We are not an elitist organisation, but we appreciate people who respect themselves and who are prepared to act appropriately.”
Black professionals, dispersed to the suburbs and often isolated at work or university, find little opportunity to socialise in their own image. ‘You work hard and then you go home,” said Stacy Cowan. ‘You come into the city to work, then you leave the city to live.”
The process of integration has been strong enough to elevate them into jobs and lifestyles that distance them from most African-Americans, who are poor. Yet racism has proved too stubborn for them to secure the kind of meaningful social relationships with their white colleagues and neighbours with similar economic and professional aspirations.
If friendly takeovers are about integrating downtown Boston, they are also about asserting a black identity within it. If white people organised groups on such racial lines they would be accused of racism. The fact is, Mo Cowan pointed out, they don’t have to.
‘White people in the US have had the comfort zone all their lives,” he said. ‘They don’t have to go looking for it. It’s always interesting to me to observe even the most positive, forward-thinking progressive member of the majority culture when they are surrounded by minorities.
‘All of a sudden they have to struggle with the fact that they are now the minority. But that is what most black people in the US have to deal with all the time.” —