And at Tuesday's vigil, Myette presented a stark contrast to the fiery rhetoric of Jean Wallace-Benjamin, who addressed the crowd in front of the former school building. In a relatively subdued voice, Myette read a statement thanking the marchers for their support but made little mention of the city-wide controversy.

"Our needs are simple," Myette told the crowd. "Students, students and scholarship funds for them."

And because politics have tended to take precedence, it is difficult to determine what actually forced Commonwealth Day to leave.

Many petition signers, including Tribe, say that they were legitimately concerned about traffic problems and the safety of the school.

"You have to look at the context, the history of what was going on in the neighborhood," says Lee. "Everybody hates development in this city."

Many petitioners, like Duehay, contend that an institutional use is simply not appropriate in a residential area.

"Realistically speaking," says Myette, "racism exists in America. The extent to which it exists in a single neighborhood, I don't know."

"Is it racism?" he asks. "Is it elitism? Is it `not in my backyard?' I don't know."

But Myette says many Brattle St. residents who signed the petition may not have realized the petition's context.

"I have a feeling--and this is just a feeling on my part--that whoever brought the petition around, they embellished, and maybe some of those people were duped," says Myette.

And some petition signers, including Tribe, have tried to dissociate themselves from the document now that its underlying implications have grown clearer.

"I'd be very dubious that more than a very small number of the people involved are racist," Tribe says.

"I just cannot see from any of the people I know that that was a racist issue," says Crompton. "I think that's a false assumption to draw."

Even among Black activists in the city, opinions differ as to what really happened to the Commonwealth Day School.

"This is 1989, and this is Cambridge, and what you really have here is a segregated neighborhood," says council candidate Kenneth E. Reeves '72, who is endorsed by the CCA. Reeves says it is impossible to sidestep the issue of racism.