A VISIONARY HEADMASTER
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r. King was invited to Groton for a simple reason: Headmaster Jack Crocker and his wife Mary were outspoken and visionary. “They were way ahead of their times on the race issue,” said former faculty member Jake Congleton. From his sermons, Groton students understood the headmaster’s impassioned desire to right the world and build character and morality in his students. “As for the cause, this was clearly a national issue that was at Groton School because of Mr. Crocker,” said Warren Cook ’63. “The issue was front and center. I remember reading and discussing ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ with Mr. Crocker, and it made a huge impression on me, then and now.” Warren said he clearly understood civil rights and social justice issues because of his years at Groton and “mostly my time with Jack Crocker. Perhaps he is one of the reasons I have been involved in hate violence prevention here in Maine for the past 20 years.” Dr. Crocker communicated clearly through both words and actions. His values and priorities were unmistakable. Besides Dr. King’s speech, Warren Motley ’67 remembers vividly a presentation about voting rights in the South by four members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “In an unprecedented break from what was then very regular protocol, at the end of their talk in the Schoolhouse, Reverend Crocker invited them back to his study in Hundred House and invited us all to come, well after normal lights-out hours, and listen to more of their personal accounts,” Warren Motley said. “It wasn’t cast in any particularly dramatic way; it didn’t need to be. Whether the School’s guests understood it or not, the message couldn’t have been more loudly conveyed that attention should be paid.” Dr. Crocker had admitted Groton’s first black student in 1952, years before most schools. “You would have thought the world was coming to an end,” said Jake. “Trustees got pressure. Some of them got cold feet. Jack never batted an eyelash because it was morally correct.” Mary Crocker, a Quaker, was a partner in marriage and ideology. “Mary just said, ‘We do what’s right,’” remembered Jake. Roger Daly ’63 sought guidance from the headmaster, even after graduating; they corresponded regularly, often discussing Roger’s civil rights work. “He was bold in his expression of kindness and justice and what was good,” Roger said. Alumni said that Dr. King’s speech at Groton was not particularly controversial, but the headmaster’s decision, two years later, to take students to a civil rights march in Boston was. Jake can still hear a conflicted Dr. Crocker seeking his advice, which he still refers to as “the greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten.” “I was totally 100 percent in favor of the civil rights movement,” Jake said, “yet there were faculty who thought the School shouldn’t be getting involved in this.” Rebellion, he added, was loosening your tie an inch until someone told you to tighten it up. In the end, Jake estimates that 75 to 100 students marched. “He would not allow Lower Schoolers to go unless they had parental permission,” Jake said. “He thought they were too young to make that decision.” Several alumni remembered that march, and tied it to other outreach efforts that followed Dr. Crocker’s tenure, such a tutoring program in Roxbury and longtime English teacher Frank White ’51’s founding of the Upward Bound program, which helped prepare low-income students for college.
Above: Jack and Mary Crocker; the headmaster allowed dozens of Groton boys to attend a civil rights march in Boston in 1965. His lessons about justice and civil rights lingered after he stepped down as headmaster—for example, through a Groton tutoring program (below) in the roxbury neighborhood of Boston.
Quarterly Winter 2013
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