Free The Fence by Dick Lehr Page B

through with the same kids.”
    He was a freckle-faced boy of five, with a big smile and a mop of hair, when the buses began rolling in 1974. They carried black students from Roxbury to South Boston High School, and they transported white students from Southie to other city neighborhoods. It turned Southie into a war zone. State police patrolled school corridors, riot police flooded the streets, and police snipers took up positions atop three-deckers to enforce the law against the often violent anti-busing protesters. Many in Southie did not deny the school system was segregated, but they found unacceptable a solution that forced students out of neighborhood schools. But to a national television audience the angry confrontations between blacks and whites made Southie seem a hotbed of intolerance. Some of the ugliest moments showed Southie women shouting,“Niggers go home” at buses filled with black children trying to get to school.
    The clash of politics, law, and educational equality was over Kenny’s head. But the high school was only a few blocks from his house, and the protests and street fighting were all around. Kenny, Kris, and their mom were eating dinner at a neighbor’s first-floor apartment one evening when the front door flew open and a teenager came running through the house. “No one locked their doors back then,” said Kenny, “and this kid came in and ran through the kitchen and out the back door. There were a couple of cops right behind him. It was crazy. We watched and went back to dinner.”
    During the early years of busing some of Kenny’s peers were swept up in the anti-busing fervor and joined the demonstrations. Not Maureen Conley’s son. “I was the kid, when they were egging buses, I was always coming home.” Fourth Street was a route protesters took to the high school for a demonstration, and Kenny, his sister, and their friends were sometimes hauled off the street by a watchful parent. “I can recall being told to hurry and get inside,” Kris said. “But I didn’t really know why at the time.”
     
    For high school Kenny wanted to follow his pal Mike Doyle, who was a year ahead of him, to the Don Bosco Preparatory High School in Boston. Never a star academically, Kenny went to summer school in 1982 so he could get in. He took courses in English and math. It worked. He began attending the Catholic school in September, catching the number 9 bus each morning at the corner of H Street and East Broadway for the ride through Southie and across the bridge into downtown Boston.
    The extra effort may have gotten Kenny into Don Bosco, but starting out he was at best a mediocre student. Freshman year he got mostly low B’s and C’s. Then during sophomore year Kenny began to click—his grades improved steadily. That year and the next he earned mostly B’s and A’s. He peaked his senior year, both in class and on the playing fields. He played varsity basketball and football, and his grades were so strong he made the National HonorSociety. “It felt good being able to come home having a 100 on an exam,” Kenny said. His perfect grades—100s across the board—in his religion class earned him the Religion Award at graduation in the spring of 1987. He also was named a Golden Bear, one of the school’s highest honors, awarded for character and leadership. The previous year’s Golden Bear was none other than Mike Doyle.
    The awards left Kenny feeling a little dizzy. To be sure, he enjoyed them, but he was not used to the attention and did not consider himself “an awards or medals guy.” Glory-seeking was not what made him tick; instead, like his mother, he was a “doer.” Kenny Conley saw himself as one of the guys who got the job done without fanfare.
    Kenny was coming of age in the long aftermath of busing and shifting sands in his hometown—namely gentrification. Slowly, young professionals were discovering the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown, its sea breezes, and its water