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cell for hours denouncing God so vehemently that he became known to fellow inmates as “Satan.” Then he met a veteran con who converted him to Islam. Staring out his barred window at “the white world” of Charlestown, which rose in bleak three-deckers up Bunker Hill, Red Little became Malcolm X.
    By 1958 Malcolm was Islam’s minister in New York and it was Gene Walcott—now Louis X—who founded the temple on Boston’s Intervale Street. When Arnold Walker heard what his old friend was up to, he came by the temple out of sheer curiosity; when he heard Gene preach, he was electrified. He took special pleasure in Gene’s gibes at Christianity as “the white man’s religion,” and at Christian preachers, symbolized by “the Right Reverend Bishop T. Chickenwing.” Through Gene, Arnold was drawn to Malcolm, regularly going to hear him whenever he was in Boston. He was at the Boston Arena on August 18, 1963, when Malcolm derided King’s forthcoming “March on Washington,” calling it “the Farce on Washington.” He applauded as Malcolm condemned “white liberals who denounce what the white man has done to us in the South while they do the same thing in the North—the Northern Fox is more vicious than the Southern Wolf because he poses as your friend.” He cheered three months later when Malcolm told the Ford Hall Forum, “We want no part of integration with the wicked race which enslaved us.” And when Malcolm was gunned down by three black assassins in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, Arnold remained convinced that whites had somehow contrived the death of the prophet of black pride and self-reliance.
    So when Martin Luther King was assassinated three years later, Arnold Walker and his sister Rachel Twymon saw the event from different perspectives. To Arnold, King was a great man, but also a great temporizer, a timid reformer who had long kept his finger in the dike, restraining the torrent of black rage. His death, Arnold hoped, would free blacks to make a clean break with whites and achieve a substantial degree of autonomy. To Rachel, such hopes were misguided. Boston was a primarily white city, America a primarily white nation. Whether they liked it or not, blacks had to learn to live with whites. If King’s death served any useful purpose, she thought, perhaps it would persuade a guilt-ridden white America to grant a genuine measure of integration.

3
McGoff
    I t was the moment she liked best, the vegetables spread out before her in voluptuous profusion: squeaky stalks of celery, damp lettuce, succulent tomatoes, chilled radishes. From the sink rose the earthy smells of wet roots and peels, and from all about her the clamor and fracas of a busy kitchen, gearing up for dinner only minutes away.
    Three nights a week, Alice McGoff served as salad chef at the Officers Club of the Charlestown Navy Yard, a break from her usual job as the club’s hatcheck girl. Taking coats and hats was more rewarding—tips could run nearly $200 a week—but Alice liked the sounds and smells and breezy camaraderie of the kitchen. That April night she was cheerfully tossing her greens when she noticed a commotion across the room. A black busboy was in tears. Eventually someone told her that Martin Luther King had been killed in a Southern city.
    Through her mind flashed a memory five years old, a solemn television announcer reporting the President’s assassination in another Southern city. She’d mourned that night as never before, an anguish so acute it might have been for her husband or brother.
    She didn’t feel that way about Martin Luther King. You had to admit he’d done one hell of a job for his people; if she were black, she would have been the first one in line behind him. And you had to support his crusade down South. No right-minded person wanted blacks to sit in the back of the bus, eat at separate lunch counters, or use different toilets. That sort of thing was just plain wrong. But when King