Hope was built in 1936 in the middle of the Depression with money from the Works Progress Administration, one of the federal projects created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to get the country up and moving again. It rose across the street from the Hope Street High School, an old red-brick school that had been built in 1898. The new school was set on land that had been a public reservoir since 1875, complete with a stone pump house on its north side.
It was a showplace when it opened, one of the largest high schools in the country, big enough to accommodate 2,200 students. It had sixty classrooms, an auditorium that could seat over a thousand kids, a library, a modern cafeteria that could accommodate seven hundred at one sitting, a gym, a smaller girls’ gym, and a locker room big enough to have 105 individual shower stalls. There was a music room and a music library. There was a machine shop, a woodworking shop, and a metal shop. There were two white cupolas on top of the brick school that gave Hope, from a distance, anyway, the look of an impressive building in the middle of an Ivy League school. Hope was completed in June 1936, at a cost of $1,995,748 dollars.
And until the late ’60s, by all accounts, it was a school that worked; it was the very definition of a large, comprehensive high school of the era. Students were assigned to one of three tracks—college, commercial, and vocational—often moving through their days as if in three different parallel universes, only coming together for home room, lunch, and physical education classes. This was the era of academic “tracking,” a time when everyone going to college was not the goal. Most of the kids came from the East Side and Smith Hill, so in many ways it was a neighborhood school, even if there were exceptions.
Hope won the state basketball title in 1961, a team that finished 26-0, then advanced to the New England Tournament, played on the famed parquet floor in the old Boston Garden where the world champion Boston Celtics of Bill Russell and Bob Cousy reigned. Hope lost in the semifinals to Wilbur Cross of New Haven, Connecticut.
The star of the team was Al Lopes, a thin, silky-smooth light-skinned black kid. He was six-foot-six and had grown up as one of ten children in his family, who lived in the Fox Point section of Providence, down past Brown at the south end of Hope Street, but less than a mile from Hope. The other black player was Norman Lambert, a skinny six-foot-four kid who also came from Fox Point and lived with an older woman known as “Miss Tillie,” a foster parent. The other forward was Carlton Chace, a white kid from Washington Park in South Providence.
The two guards were both from Smith Hill, the white working-class neighborhood less than two miles away, but not on the East Side. It was a neighborhood of narrow streets and wood triple-deckers in the shadow of the Rhode Island State House, a white domed building that looks out over downtown Providence to the south. One guard was Henry Giroux, who would go on to teach at Boston University and Penn State, among other colleges, write over fifty books, and be called by one website one of the fifty most influential progressive educators in the world.
The other was Tom Cannon, who went on to be a college teammate and lifelong friend of Jim Calhoun, the Hall of Fame basketball coach at the University of Connecticut. Cannon was the crafty point guard, a product of the very strong Catholic Youth Organization basketball culture in Providence at the time. In an era when no one had ever heard of AAU basketball, innumerable city kids learned the game in the CYO leagues that were all over Rhode Island at the time. Cannon played for St. Patrick’s on Smith Hill, always one of the top CYO teams of the era, one coached by a man named Joe Hassett, whose son, Joey, would grow up to star for nearby Providence College and later play in the NBA. Hassett was one of those old-school coaches of legend who coached for the sheer love of it, for there was no money, not much recognition, and certainly not many tangible rewards involved.
It was a more innocent time, of course, a time of Sadie Hawkins dances and poodle skirts, of letter sweaters and dances in the gym. In 1961 Vietnam was still in the future. Drugs were in the future. The counterculture was in the future. So were many of the things that would divide America by the end of the decade. High school was its own cocoon then. And if there was occasionally something on the nightly television news about “sit-ins” in the segregated South, it could have been happening on the far side of the moon for all the players knew.
“We never had a racial problem,” Cannon said. “Not one. We were all teammates. Hope was really a melting pot back then. A lot of blue-collar kids. But it worked. It was a good school.”
The Hope coach was Mike Sarkesian, one of those tough taskmasters the era all but had a patent on. It was Sarkesian who helped his players go to college, and when he heard that Lopes was enlisting in the Air Force he went down to the induction center and said, no, this kid is not going into the Air Force, he is going to college. After Lopes spent two years in a junior college in the Midwest he went to Kansas, where he played with future NBA player Jo Jo White on a team that came within a basket of going to the Final Four in 1966. It’s a famous game in college basketball history, as White was called out of bounds after making a shot that would have beaten Texas Western, the Cinderella school that upset heavily favored Kentucky in the championship game to win the national title, the little school no one had ever heard of that started four black players and was immortalized in the movie Glory Road.
“Mike Sarkesian changed my life,” Lopes recalled, having become a lawyer in Lawrence, Kansas, far away from the Hope of his childhood. “My only other option was to go into the Air Force and come home and work for the city like everyone else in Fox Point did back then. So many kids now have the wrong idea of what a basketball scholarship is. Basketball is supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. It’s gotten out of hand. It’s frightening, actually. Basketball gave me an opportunity, and I took advantage of that opportunity.”
All five of the starters on that ’61 Hope state championship team went on to college.
The team was a mix of different kids, diverse before anyone knew what the word meant. The school was, for all practical purposes, a neighborhood school. So there were the Jewish kids from the East Side who didn’t go to Classical, the academically elite high school where there was a quiz a day in every subject. There were the working-class kids from Smith Hill, who, while not on the East Side, lived within walking distance of Hope. There were the black kids from nearby Camp Street. There were the Cape Verdean and Portuguese kids from Fox Point. And there were the other neighborhood kids from the East Side, many of them Jewish. All together in a big red-brick building on busy Hope Street that had two white cupolas on its roof, a building that once had been a showcase but now was starting to show both its age and all the effects of nearly three decades of teenage feet scuffling through its halls.
By many standards of measure, Hope was a success story for different kids with different aspirations. Ed Shein, who had started high school at Classical, transferred to Hope, and ended up going to Brown, remembers that many of the black kids spent much of their time on the second floor, where the shop and commercial classes were, almost as if they attended a different school. But every year there were kids who went off to nearby Brown or to some of the other finest colleges in the country.
And the sports were great—not just basketball. A state title in hockey, where Hope played at the Rhode Island Auditorium a mile or so away on North Main Street, which ran parallel to Hope Street going north. Great in track, where famed Rhode Island high school coach Bill Falk routinely sent his stars to colleges all over New England. To look through a yearbook from the early ’60s is to see a very traditional high school from that era, the boys in long-sleeve shirts and khaki pants and short hair, the girls in skirts, their hair often styled. Yes, it was the ’60s, the beginning of them, anyway. But the ’60s that defined the decade, the time that began to change America in ways that were unfathomable back then, were still off in the distance.
“It was a wonderful building then, and a great school,” remembered Jerry Kapstein, who played football and baseball and graduated in 1961. He then won a scholarship to Harvard, became a lawyer, and began a lifelong career in sports, including being the CEO of the San Diego Padres and the senior baseball advisor to the Red Sox, among other things. “My father had graduated in 1935, where he had been a big football star, my mother in ’36. As a kid I had always had wanted to go to Hope.
“There were never any racial incidents. Lummer Jennings, who was black, was the class president and I was the vice president. We had great teachers who cared about us. It wasn’t a good school. It was a great school. I mean I liked Harvard. But I loved Hope.”
Then came court-ordered school busing.
Busing arrived on top of the tumult of the mid to late ’60s: the growing anti-war sentiment, the beginnings of the rise of the counterculture, the start of the Civil Rights era, the gurgling cauldron that would come to define the ’60s. No high school was immune then, especially one that was in the shadow of Brown, and just a couple of hundred yards away from the heart of Thayer Street, symbolic ground zero of youth culture on the East Side. Look at a yearbook from the late ’60s and you might not recognize it as being a representation of the same genre of universe as the one that had existed just a few years ago. White boys with long hair. Black boys with Afros. White girls with long straight hair. Black girls with Afros. And everywhere there were the accoutrements of the growing counterculture, from the ragged clothes to the obvious disdain of anything even perceived to be conventional, all the signs that change was everywhere, and that it wasn’t just the answers that were blowing in the wind.
It wasn’t just change; it was dizzying change.
Busing began in Providence in 1969, as a response to what a professor of education at Rhode Island College had called “decades of indifference at best and powerful opposition at worst.” Part of that sentiment, in retrospect, was that Providence always had housed a small black population. In the early ’60s the black population in the city’s schools was roughly 17 percent. In 1966 Hope had the largest percentage of black students of any high school in the city, at 15 percent.
The tumult of the late ’60s was challenging many of the old orders, and one of them was the schools. From curriculum to tracking, and from facilities to student expectations, everything was under attack, everything was being questioned. There were committees, studies, open meetings, innumerable stories in the Providence Journal about an antiquated school system in crisis.
And in April 1969 it all blew up at Hope.
The Bus Stops Here, the 1974 book by Anna Holden that chronicles the turmoil of three American cities, including Providence, describes one example: “Hope black students went on a ‘rampage’ through the school—smashing windows, lightbulbs, and furniture, assaulting some teachers and white students, and doing extensive damage … fire extinguishers were emptied and flags were ripped and burned.… The Hope rampage was the first outburst of its nature in Rhode Island and greatly shocked many whites.”
The ’60s had arrived at Hope, and the ramifications would last for decades.
“We called it Hopeless High,” said Steve Waldman, who went there from 1971 to 1975.
He grew up on the East Side, the child of parents who had both attended Hope. But the Hope his parents had known and the one he went to were two different worlds.
“It was a pretty intimidating place,” he said. “It had probably twice the student population it has now, a big monster.”
Waldman had gone to middle school at Nathan Bishop, an old brick building across the street from the Brown football stadium and in the heart of the residential East Side, stately brick homes just a street or two away. Nathan Bishop had been roughly one third black then, mostly kids from Camp Street, but nothing had prepared him for what he was about to see at Hope.
“Busing had started a couple of years before I got there, and there were a lot of Italian kids from the North End who were bused there every day, and the black kids from South Providence who also were bused in. They were like oil and water. Always fighting. And every year there would be a race riot. It would always be in the spring. There would be one at Central High School one day, and one at Hope the next. The white East Side kids would be hiding under tables. Or standing up against the walls with their trays up over their face. Nathan Bishop had been a mixed place, but people essentially got along. Hope wasn’t like that. Some of the black kids would go up to white kids and take their ice cream sundaes right out of their hands. Or else take their ice cream cone, give it a lick, then hand it back. It was an intimidating place.”
Waldman also remembered Hope as an old facility in the early ’70s. He had grown up hearing his parents talk about Hope being a friendly place in the ’50s, how the black kids had gotten dressed up for dances, how there was “no racial stuff.” The Hope he encountered was the opposite.
“I never went to a sporting event in all the time I was there,” he said, before adding that a couple of the basketball games back then were played in a “closed gym,” code for no spectators allowed, for fear of violence. “It just wasn’t a friendly place. The racial stuff always hung over everything.”
But the worst thing he ever saw at Hope?
“I had a math class up on the third floor, taught by an old guy who must have been a hundred years old, and a handful of black kids would terrorize him every day. They would make jokes. They would always fool around. They would sit there and read the paper while he was trying to teach. And one day—no word of a lie—they tied him to a chair, held him by his feet, and threatened to throw him out the window. He was shell-shocked. I’ve never forgotten it.”
He looked away, as though searching for a memory.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever been back there since I graduated,” Waldman said. “I don’t even think about it when I drive by, and I have driven by it thousands of times. I have no emotional connection to it. None. It’s just another old building.”
He looked away again, as if he were looking all the way back to the early ’70s.
“Busing was supposed to lift people up,” said Steve Waldman softly. “Instead it sucked everything else into the sewer.”