Race, Land, & Power

Image:  Robert K. Nelson, et al. 

The neighborhood of Roxbury lies near Boston's geographic center, just minutes south of its downtown. As Lisa Owens suggested, it is predominantly black. In 2015, the neighborhood was composed of 53% African Americans and 29% Hispanics, the last 18% a combination of White, Asian, and other racial identities. In contrast, Boston as a whole was only 23% African American and 19% Hispanic, relative to its 45% White population (BPDA, 34). However, Roxbury was not always a uniquely black neighborhood.

According to a 1937 Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) residential security map, Roxbury as defined then was only 5% black, and the South End, whose then neighborhood limits include parts of today's Roxbury, was only 25% black. Yet it was precisely that 1937 HOLC map that sparked in Boston what was already a nationwide trend of suburban "white flight" and condemned Roxbury to its increasingly segregated composition.

Between 1935-1940, the federal government's HOLC worked with real estate firms from cities across the country to designate a letter grade – and a constituent color – to determine a neighborhood's "mortgage security," or the relative risk involved with a bank's investment in the neighborhood through housing loans (Nelson et al.). A neighborhood's grade was determined by its overall housing quality, rental and sale values, and, "crucially," its racial, ethnic, and class makeup (Nelson et al.).

The two areas comprising present-day Roxbury – D8 and D9 – were stamped with red shading – "redlining" – deeming them the most risky investment and encouraging banks "refuse to make loans in these areas [or] only on a conservative basis" (Nelson et al.). In the original descriptions for these neighborhoods, the HOLC warned of "infiltration" of "foreign Irish and Negro," "obsolescence," and low family incomes.

While neighborhoods like Roxbury were given D-grade ratings, suburbs to the South, like Milton (A1, A2), received green A's, enabling middle class whites to leave the cities by securing mortgages and jumpstarting social mobility. Meanwhile, banks systematically denied black Americans loans, consolidating them to neighborhoods like Roxbury as more and more African Americans migrated to Boston from the South and West, tripling its black population between 1930 and 1960. Within the Dudley neighborhood of Roxbury (D9), the proportion of black residents increased from 5% in 1950 to 20% in 1960 to 53% in 1970 (Medoff & Sklar 1994, 14). As whites fled to the suburbs, they took industry and jobs with them. Neighborhoods like Roxbury were denied public and private investment in everything from "schools and housing to business and street repair, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of disinvestment and decay wrongly blamed on newcomer people of color" (14). The number of manufacturing jobs dropped from 20,000 in 1947 to just 4,000 in 1981 (14). This process played out across decades, however, the legacy of redlining leaving its mark on Roxbury over a half-century beyond the drawing of the original 1937 maps.

"As the wave of suburbanization… swept over the country, Boston [was] sorely impacted, but Roxbury was devastated"

(Boston Redevelopment Authority Housing Market Report, quoted in Medoff & Sklar 1994, 16)

Promoting housing development in "blighted" city neighborhoods was only the ostensible goal of Urban Renewal. As much as cities like Boston enjoyed fanning their egos by citing benevolence and equality as motivations, the impacts of urban renewal on black communities nationwide reveal the underlying importance of commercial and industrial redevelopment to the city's intentions. Between 1955 and 1966, the federal government funded hundreds of urban renewal projects that displaced (conservatively) a third of a million people, and over ten thousand in Boston alone (Digital Scholarship Lab). Under the policy of eminent domain, "for the improvement of the community," the government acquired land upon which "sub-standard" homes stood, evicted their tenants, and razed their buildings in order to build new public and (more frequently) private developments in their place (Mahan & Lipman 1996).

The tension between outside planners and neighborhood residents originally outlined by Lisa Owens stands out particularly stark in the context of urban renewal, where not only did plans originate from Boston's power brokers in city hall, but funding came all the way from Washington. This tension was only reinforced by the neighborhood's stark racial composition: in 1960, Washington Park was 71% black, compared to 16% of the city as a whole (BRA Research Division 2015, 28). Aware of the optics of this stark divide, Mayor John Collins and the BRA made a concerted effort to brand the Washington Park plan as a a distinctly collaborative effort between the city and the community.

In this section, I explore the presence – real or perceived – of the black Roxbury community in the planning process of the Washington Park project, the role of class divisions within community participation, and the limitations to community collaboration in the context of its outcomes for the neighborhood. Consistent through this history is the tension between the unavoidable effects of urban renewal on Roxbury the neighborhood, and the persistent participation, resiliency, and independence of Roxbury the community through the planning process.

A December 1962 Boston Globe article suggests palpable excitement surrounding the Freedom House's proposed collaboration with the BRA to plan Washington Park's urban renewal. The author relays a scene in which a Roxbury "civic and church leader" representing Freedom House handed the final copy of the Washington Park plans to Mayor Collins, exclaiming, "We've worked for many months with the Boston Redevelopment Authority and this is what we think we'd like for our area. Let's get on with it!" (Yudia 1962). Despite the suspiciously performative nature of the scene and the quotation – cameramen and newscasters surrounded them in the Mayor's office; the church leader's frustrated insistence does not quite align with the mayor's grateful acceptance – the anticipation of a real collaboration between the black community and city planners could not be mistaken.

Muriel Snowden, also quoted in the article, expressed to the crowds at the planning presentation, "Our being here is in the expression of citizen interest and concern that has existed in Roxbury for a long time" (Yudia 1962). To Snowden, participation in the Washington Park planning process was a matter of recovering the long-ignored, though long-sustained presence of community demands and political ideals of Roxbury's residents. This was, in effect, a seat at the table. And Roxbury's community contributions to the plan were not negligible. The Freedom House negotiated the inclusion of a $53 million investment in municipal facilities, public elderly housing, commercial development, and private rehabilitations (Yudia 1962).

While honoring the importance of the city's recognition of Roxbury's demands, it remains necessary to question who was ignored from this process altogether. According to Mel King, a class stratification emerged within the black community of the 1950s from the combined influx of of Black and Puerto Rican low-wage workers and the loss of industrial jobs to suburban white flight. While the majority of black wages remained near the poverty line, a small black middle class formed from the few who secured professional-class jobs (King 1981, 25).

Peter Medoff, a Roxbury organizer active in the 1980s, claims that Roxbury's working class black population was altogether ignored in the Washington Park planning process. He even asserts that the middle class black residents led by Snowden similarly viewed them as a "blighting" influence and supported their removal (Medoff & Sklar 1994, 19). Similarly, historian John Spiers argues that Freedom House's "planning with people" approach privileged middle-class values like home ownership over the broader and more basic needs of the predominantly working class Roxbury (Spiers 2009, 222).

Symbolically, Freedom House's infiltration into the city's planning process represents a landmark in the black community's participation in planning. However, anything but a monolith, Roxbury's black community had diverse needs unrepresented by its integrationist middle class. The material outcomes of urban renewal on Roxbury the neighborhood help illuminate the obscured intentions of city planners and the limitations of Freedom House's narrow planning contributions. But beyond bearing the brunt of renewal, another side of Roxbury the community – its majority black renter-class – resisted its detrimental effects through independent organizing efforts.

"Urban Renewal... means Negro removal"

- James Baldwin, 1963 

No matter Snowden's early intentions, the outcomes of the Washington Park plan for Roxbury residents were unanimously disastrous. The first suggestion that the plan might not actually prioritize rehabilitation over dislocation as originally promised was the BRA's early expansion of its proposed boundaries. On the brochure's planning map above, the scant red symbols indicating new housing occupy only a fraction of the units, appearing to leave the majority for preservation, but this obscures the original size of the plan. A 1961 study found that over half the residential homes of the original 186 acres proposed (only 1/3 the size of the brochure's map) would be demolished – a statistic too politically untenable to proceed with, even for the BRA. Thus, in order to dilute the proportion of homes to be demolished, the BRA enlarged the proposed project area from 186 acres to 502 acres, while keeping the original clearance area the same (Medoff & Sklar 1994, 19). The outcome was a brochure that could advertise the project as prizing preservation, and the political tenability to displace just as many families.

Of the housing eventually developed after demolition and dislocation, the vast majority consisted of private rentals, which working-class black residents of Roxbury could not afford (Spiers, 229). Three-quarters of all families displaced were eligible for public housing, but the only public housing built was 200 units for the elderly (Medoff & Sklar 1994, 19). The below map from the Digital Scholarship Lab highlights the disproportionate number of families of color displaced due to Washington Park urban renewal: 1.7k families of color (73%) compared to 461 white families (27%). This was the highest percentage throughout the whole of Boston, and represents the third largest government-financed project across the country. Indeed, it would appear that the tension between outside planners and Roxbury's black community – the same tension the BRA attempted to avert in their brochure – were only confirmed by the project's outcomes.

By 1964, Muriel Snowden had begun to challenge the efficacy of the BRA's plan for Roxbury's working class residents, whom the Freedom House had originally excluded in their vision. At a meeting that year, she expressed concern over the lack of public housing. Indeed, her growing perception of the BRA plan's failure to meet the needs of Roxbury's poor renters catalyzed a shift in her relationship to city planning and race. Meanwhile, Roxbury's working class tenants began organizing independent of the BRA. The grass-roots organization Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), marginalized from the planning process and lacking representation from the business sector or city government, operated workshops on everything from job training to small-business development to mental health advising (Spiers 2009, 237). Local chapters for the Congress on Racial Equity (CORE) and the Urban League advanced more militant politics, engaging in rent strikes and negotiations to enforce landlord compliance with housing codes. By the mid-1960s, even Freedom House, whose original mission depended on integration and collaboration with city planners, regularly hosted workshops dedicated to black nationalism and black self-sufficiency (Farmer 2011, 22). After the abject failures of urban renewal for the neighborhood, Roxbury's organizing culture had shifted its priority from collaborative planning to self-reliance.

“In this organizing stage, we understood that not only are we deserving of services in our own right, but we are also capable of serving ourselves on our own terms”

-Mel King, Chain of Change, 1981 (King 1981, xxvi)

With the hindsight of the tremendous racialized displacement urban renewal brought upon Roxbury, we can better understand the limitations of the city's narrow so-called "planning with people" model. While Muriel Snowden's Freedom House offered one route toward community recognition through collaborative planning, it was limited by its neglect of the community's majority: its black renter-class. Through a combination of independent working class organizing and the increasingly apparent failings of urban renewal, a cultural shift in the community's relationship to race and planning informed a new set of practices. In the next chapter, I fast forward several decades to engage with the evolution of Roxbury's politics of black self-reliance in the face of new threats of displacement.

By the 1980s, the BRA continued to produce neighborhood development plans not unlike those during urban renewal. While in the 1960s, the most pressing threat of displacement was sheer demolition through eminent domain, the 1980s brought a new wave of real estate speculation that threatened to displace residents by way of the housing market. The city depended on continued private investment to boost revenue, but the downtown area had begun to reach its growth limit. Kennedy compares this process to an exploding combustion engine (Kennedy et al. 1991, 108):

"There is a sudden violent expansion of the activities now concentrated downtown, but there are strong constraints against the expansion. The energy has to be directed somewhere."

Just minutes from Boston's downtown, Roxbury was a prime target to direct this energy. In 1985, the BRA proposed a $750 million plan to develop Dudley sq. into a historic town plaza, replete with a galleria, new police headquarters, high-rise business park, and single-family housing. Without posing the threat of direct displacement – as the new construction was proposed to be built on already vacant land – the threat of indirect displacement arose immediately after the plan was leaked. According to a 1985 Boston Globe article, housing prices in the Dudley neighborhood had already quadrupled between 1980 and 1985, and were expected to double within the following two years (Kaufman 1985). As the reporter put it, these predominantly poor tenants were "living in a gold mine" (Kaufman 1985). This results in what geographer Neil Smith calls the rent-gap, in which there is a "gap between the ground rent actually capitalized with a given land use at a specific location, and the ground rent that could potentially be capitalized under a [different] use at that location" (Smith 1984, quoted in Kennedy et al. 1990, 99, emphasis added). In other words, by converting low-rent apartments into condominiums, landlord could attract the ready swell of wealthier tenants in which to capitalize on the potential profit of that increasingly valuable land. However, Boston’s rent control laws specifically protected long-term and elderly tenants from sudden rent-hikes and displacement, restricting free speculation. Therefore, the only way for landlords to seize on this profit was to forcibly displace them.

In 1986, the Boston Arson Prevention Commission reported an "alarming increase" in the number of suspicious fires around Dudley sq. since the announcement of the Dudley Sq. plan. Through the 70s and 80s, arson had become simultaneously one of the most successful ways to forcefully evict tenants and ways to devastate the community.

Muriel Snowden and the Roxbury community of the 1960s had already begun to question the value of working alongside city planners to influence their neighborhood's future. With the rise of the Black Power movement and transnational anti-colonial struggles, themes of self-reliance and community control appeared increasingly frequent in Boston's political discourse. As arson and other violent symptoms of city planning appeared to strip control from Roxbury, the community increasingly viewed independent, local control over land as a necessary way to address the root causes of their struggles.

“Without the power to command the use of resources, it is impossible to change the structure and the psychology of the inner city”

– Mel King, Chain of Change, (King 1981, xxii)

In 1986, a grassroots organization called the Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project (GRIP) proposed a ballot initiative to the city that would re-incorporate Roxbury, the South End, and parts of Mattapan and Dorchester – all of which had been neighborhoods within Boston city limits for over a century – into their own city named after then-imprisoned South African freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela (WBZ Boston 1986). This would mean that the new city would be responsible for decisions over everything from its police force to its housing policy. According to a 1986 Washington Post article, “the 12.5-square-mile city of Mandela would include one-quarter of the city's land, one-quarter of its 620,000 population and 98 percent of its black residents” (Hornblower 1986).

"We feel that we have a colonial relationship with the city of Boston. We feel that the city has treated us like second class citizens, and we’re fighting for basic rights to citizenship.”

– Andrew Jones, co-founder of GRIP, 1986 WBZ interview (WBZ Boston 1986)

Insinuations to colonial struggles permeate the language used surrounding the project. Indeed, by invoking the imprisoned activist Nelson Mandela, the movement was as much transnational as it was hyper-local, connecting their fight for community control to anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles the world over. One late-night reporter explained how the plan would create a new city "out of what some businessmen see as the next frontier for Boston development" (WBZ 1986; emphasis added). GRIP co-founders explained: "We want land control because land-control is the key to self-determination" (Kennedy et al. 1990, 123). This was the ultimate articulation of the evident historical tension between outside planners and predominantly black community members. It was also the most explicit expression of the importance of space – both to the empowerment and disempowerment of the community.

Mel King helped illuminate how the city's policy of redlining and disinvestment originally contributed to the "creation of the ghetto" in Roxbury, consolidating working class blacks and latinos to the area without even the potential for control over one's own property. For decades, the neighborhood endured – and resisted – the legacy of these policies through urban renewal and displacement. The previous maps portraying redlining, urban renewal projects, and arson spatially reflect the consolidation of Roxbury, "the ghetto," and the violence the city effected upon it. However, GRIP's proposed map redrawing the city's boundaries to include Mandela – the area effectively created and acted upon by city planners – must be read as a counter-map. Perhaps fittingly, counter-mapping is a practice historically used by indigenous groups to map and reclaim rights to colonial settlements and challenge arbitrarily imposed borders. It is subversive in its rejection of colonial geography and the relationships to land and resources those colonial boundaries impose.

The counter-map of Mandela is at once a rejection and a re-appropriation of the planners' original policies. The map rejects the legacy of violent planning by declaring ownership over the space of their neighborhood – place-making – including control over land and resources. Simultaneously, it re-appropriates city planning by claiming those borders which were originally created through racist and profit-seeking policy. To borrow Lefebvre's terms, it is a declaration of place amongst the abstract space of the neighborhood. Lefebvre originally used this framework to characterize a city's downtown as it became increasingly commodified and homogenized. I maintain this significance as it applies to the gentrification of Roxbury, but expand its meaning here to consider the importance of self-reliance to place-making. In this way, the Mandela initiative is a way of symbolically rejecting the definitions of space enforced by planners and the effects of gentrification, and replacing them with a newly imagined relationship to the neighborhood defined by control over land and the black liberation movement.

Ultimately, however, the initiative failed by a 3-1 margin. The results represented not only the black-white divide in the city, but also tensions within the black community. Black public support for the initiative was split between community organizer Mel King, and the first black president of the Boston City Council – the so-called “patriarch of Boston’s mainstream black political dynasty” – Bruce Bolling Sr. (Miletsky & Gonzalez 14). This split reflects the lasting tension between integration and independence sparked during Snowden’s original work at the Freedom House.

But beyond the results of the vote, it is nonetheless necessary to view the Mandela initiative as a crucial political moment in Roxbury's history. Amidst the backdrop of arson and displacement, Roxbury the community declared a full-out rejection of city planning–a claim to Roxbury's land and its people. It was more than a form of resistance. It was a declaration of a new relationship to space.

Representing Roxbury's history through displacement and resistance may not seem like such a radical feat. Indeed, in listening to CLVU's Lisa Owens speak about the need for Roxbury's community members themselves to lead movements for housing justice rather not city planners, the roots of her organizing are practically spelled out by the neighborhood's history. When Owen describes current residents' fears of development, rent increases, and building-wide clear-outs, we see the effects of the 1963 Washington Park urban renewal and the thousands of families displaced, the 1985 Dudley Sq. plan and the threat of upscale arson. But we also think about Muriel Snowden's Freedom House and Roxbury's transition from a collaborative to an independent struggle for community control. We think of the Mandela initiative and the fight for self-reliance against the threat of gentrification. Knowing the history of Roxbury's community-led struggle sheds light on the context and importance on current movements for neighborhood control. But unfortunately, that history is vastly overshadowed by histories of Roxbury's passive submission to the violence of development, displacement, and arson.

The maps displayed throughout this project – the one exception being the Mandela counter-map – unanimously reflect the violence of city planning affected upon Roxbury the neighborhood. Considering the power of maps to obscure this violence, such as the BRA's Washington Park planning map, it is indeed necessary to provide maps such as those from the Digital Media Lab that reflect the costs of displacement on families, or those that depict the toll of arson on neighborhood. These maps do the important work of unveiling power and violence, but fall short of accounting for the very real history of Roxbury the community and the political agency inherent throughout its legacy.

This is the first reason why pairing a spatial history of Roxbury's displacement with a history of resistance may indeed be a radical choice. Other than the Mandela counter-map, it appears that, while geography is inherent to the the community's philosophy of neighborhood control and self-reliance, mapping may be a limiting medium through which to reflect the legacy of community agency. In reflection, I find that stories, images, and personal accounts might better reflect this legacy.

And yet, as we conceive of this legacy in historical terms, the power of spatial control cannot be ignored.

Returning to Lefebvre's notion of abstract space – the increasing commodification and homogenization of urban space – we find it has dangerous effects on the writing of history. As McCann explains in the context of another city in transition, the gentrification that continues to displace Roxbury's residents "elide[s] and marginalize[s] the traces of the city's racial geography and history" (McCann 1999, 170). Redlining, ghettoization, arson, and displacement are rendered ahistorical by new maps of Roxbury like the one to left from real estate service Zillow listing new condominiums for sale. But abstract space also has the effect of erasing the histories of resistance against those very forces.

As someone who grew up a short train ride away from Roxbury, the only history of Roxbury I even vaguely learned was that of displacement and incoming gentrification; the histories of place-making, negotiation, and resistance were missing. But to a young professional moving to Boston, one's impression of Roxbury is informed by ads like those from realtors, advertising newly-built luxury condominiums. Abstract space renders ahistorical Roxbury's legacy twofold: it erases the both the legacy of racialized, profit-seeking city-planning, and the deep history of resistance that shaped the neighborhood as it stands today.

If this project is any testament, the history of Roxbury's resistance is strong, and remains so today. In 2017, City Life/Vida Urbana, the housing justice organization Lisa Owens facilitates, turned 45 years old. Speaking at celebration for the occasion, Owens extolled the movement's vitality:

"City Life was founded by some disciplined people who sacrificed their time and their weekends and their weekdays... They made an intentional decision to move to the same community together, to study together, to work shoulder to shoulder with other working class people of color, in working class communities of color, to build the power of working class people so we can change society. So, for an organization like that, with roots like that, to weather the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s, and the early 2000s... think back to what was happening politically in each of those decades. So for a radical organization to not only exist, but to be thriving like this, is a miracle" ( Matthews 2018 ).

Today, despite the dual effects of gentrification to displace and erase, organizations like CLVU remain strong. Owens continues to fight against development, rent increases, and clear-outs. But the movement she is a part of aims beyond mere resistance to gentrification. Owens is fighting for policies to create lasting affordability – and in the spirit of Mandela, policies that provide "the highest level of community control" ( Matthews 2018) .

 Works Cited