By Gloria Negri, Globe Staff, 5/13/2004

It was a foiled basketball game that landed Patrick A. Cusick on a North Carolina chain gang for more than a year.

In 1963, the white establishment wasn't too happy about a young white man -- the great-grandson of a slaveowner and a Klansman -- helping to lead a rebellion of black college students.

After the judge paroled him and told him to get as far away from North Carolina as possible, Mr. Cusick came to Boston and spent four decades here fighting poverty.

Mr. Cusick, 72, died Monday at Harborlights Rehabilitation and Nursing Facility in South Boston.

"Pat was probably one of the most influential community organizers in Boston," said state Representative Byron Rushing. "He always made sure the voices of the poor and the working class were at the table at discussions about housing, economic development, or planning." For the last 20 years, Mr. Cusick led the South End Neighborhood Service Center of Action for Boston Community Development. He and board chairman Jeanette Boone were responsible for affordable housing initiatives and citywide policy changes that made it possible for thousands of low-income families to stay in their neighborhoods, according to Robert Coard, ABCD's president and CEO.

Mr. Cusick lived in a flat in the South End until a stroke and then the loss of both legs from diabetes forced him to move into Harborlights last year.

Mr. Cusick was born in Gadsden, Ala., the only child of Frank and Katie S. (Daly). His father was a steelworker and his mother was a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

"My great-grandfather, William Perry Hollingsworth, was the largest slaveowner in north Alabama, an officer in the Confederate Army, and the founder of the first Klan unit in Alabama after the War Between the States," Mr. Cusick wrote in a chapter of "White Men Challenging Racism: 35 Personal Stories," published in 2003 by Duke University Press.

He grew up in Gadsden, studying at a Catholic school and then at a Benedictine boarding school in Alabama.

His activism was born early. He wrote that the decisive moment for him came in Gadsden when he was 10 and standing with friends on the sidewalk. As a black boy came along on his bike, they taunted him and threw things at him. Instead of running, the boy got off his bike and "gave us a tongue-lashing," he wrote. "For me, it's an example of how, if you stand up and do the right thing, it will affect things."

After finishing high school, Mr. Cusick served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1953 as an air controller supervisor in Germany. For the next three years, he worked as an assistant chemical engineer for General Electric Co. in Rome, Ga. He attended Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, N.C., from 1956 to 1959, when he enrolled at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, graduating in 1963.

The same year, he recruited 150 college students, mostly black, "who were willing to die," Mr. Cusick wrote in the 2003 book. "We sealed off all five highways coming into town with bodies. Then, since the basketball game of the week was between Chapel Hill and Wake Forest, we got onto the floor and seized the basketball. That was my idea," he said. "I think that was the real reason I got arrested -- for trying to stop the basketball game."

Mr. Cusick, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington, brought his knowledge of civil disobedience to his Boston activism.

"Pat believed in direct action," Coard said.

In 1970, he seized the stage at the Harvard University commencement, to try to persuade the school to build housing for poor and working-class residents instead of student dorms.

In 1998, he chained himself to a fence at Northeastern University to try to pressure the school into providing low-income housing in addition to dorms.

His tactics often worked.

Harvard enlisted him to lead tours for international students through Boston's diverse neighborhoods, and to lecture about urban planning.

In the early 1990s, Boston was building a mixed-use development in the South End that was supposed to include a small number of units for low- and moderate-income residents. Under pressure from Mr. Cusick, Langham Court eventually became two-thirds affordable.

A big man with a heart to match, Mr. Cusick was never interested in gaining attention for his own sake, and his good works often went unnoticed.

"It was the way Pat liked it," former state representative Mel King said. "He was the backbone of the movement."

"He was a hero," said his friend, Robert Bell of Brooklyn, N.Y. "The unsung hero people didn't know about." Services will be held at 2 p.m. May 23 at St. Stephen's Church in the South End.

This story ran on page C16 of the Boston Globe on 5/13/2004. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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