Mayor for a New America by Thomas M. Menino Page A

concern was the future of Boston’s only minority official, Wilson’s successor, Superintendent Harrison-Jones.
    She had a rough time of it in Boston. Ray Flynn sniped at her. The
Boston Globe
editorialized against her. She got off on the wrong foot with me.
    It happened when I was still a city councilor. I was being interviewed by a television reporter in City Hall. Harrison-Jones was passing by. Hearing me mention a threatened strike by school bus drivers, she stopped in her tracks. Why are you asking
him
about
that?
she asked the reporter. He doesn’t know anything about it . . . After that introduction, I bet she hoped that Jim Brett would beat me for mayor in the ’93 election.
    Little more than a month after the election, new tensions arose between Harrison-Jones and me.
    On his way to a Dorchester Christmas party, Louis Brown, a fifteen-year-old straight-A student who dreamed of being the first black president, was killed in a gunfight between gangs. He was carrying a Secret Santa gift for a friend in Teens Against Gang Violence, the group holding the party, when he was shot in the head and dropped to the pavement, still holding the gift.
    I drove out to Louis’s house. Walking up the stairs, I remember thinking,
What can I say?
I rang the doorbell and Louis’s mother, Tina Chéry, came down to see who it was. “I’m here to help,” I said, and sat with her that night, listening to her stories about Louis. Consoling the loved ones of murdered children is part of a mayor’s job in gun-saturated America.
    The next day I attended Louis’s funeral at St. Leo’s Church. During the service, teenagers wearing black STOP GANG VIOLENCE sweatshirts stood in front of the wooden casket. In his sermon Bishop John Patrick Boles, Cardinal Bernard Law’s representative, honored their cause when he spoke of Louis Brown as a “gentle young man who saw that opportunity could only be realized in a city of peace and hope.”
    I had to respond to Louis’s murder and the contagion of gang violence. I proposed a twelve-month “boot camp” for fifty troubled (and troublemaking) teens recommended by school principals. I discussed it with the sheriff of Barnstable County on Cape Cod, who pioneered the state’s first boot camp for adult offenders. The sheriff would run it, an in-the-woods experience to instill self-discipline. After boot camp, to reinforce the character they had found in themselves, the kids would be matched with long-term mentors. I had read a remark somewhere that D-Day was won in the CCC camps that FDR started during the Depression. Dispirited boys came out of the woods proud young men. I wanted that transformation for Boston kids tempted to seek self-esteem in gangs.
    To me the boot camp was a matter of public safety. “It’s an alternative program for these kids to get them back in the mainstream,” I said. “It’s better to do this than spend $50,000 . . . putting them in jail.” Harrison-Jones saw it as an education issue—and met with me privately to complain that I had not cleared the idea with her. In the leak about our meeting that appeared in the press, “sources said she strongly register[ed] her disapproval.”
    Â 
    Despite “the chilly winds that have blown between 26 Court Street and City Hall,” I invited Superintendent Harrison-Jones to join my cabinet. The
Globe
applauded this “powerful statement of the mayor’s commitment to educating the city’s children.” As I explained to reporters, this was “my way of reaching out. If we don’t do something in the next two years, the schools are gone.”
    In a speech to business leaders in August 1994, I called the coming school term a “test year in which our commitment to carry out our agenda for change will be closely scrutinized.” I had prodded the City Council to approve a $5 million increase in the