There are a lot of tales about how Boston’s urban renewal programs of the 1960s actually made life worse for many low-income residents. Many have memories of city blocks and full neighborhoods being bulldozed. Black families recall how the Washington Park project promised to improve the lives of people living in dilapidated housing but ultimately pushed out thousands of Roxbury residents.
But none of those are this story.
This story is about a trip I took to look at the files of Freedom House, and the four remarkable pages I found in those files.
Freedom House was the community-based, Black-led nonprofit that helped the city of Boston sell the Washington Park plan to Roxbury’s Black residents. And the files that Freedom House kept of that time period now sit in nearly 90 boxes in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
I called over and the archives folks warmly welcomed me to browse a small sample of the Freedom House collection. When I arrived, they had set aside two banker’s boxes full of numbered file folders.
It was in box 32, folder 1111 that I struck gold. Or, more accurately, yellow.
Four pages of yellow notepad paper, filled with cursive handwriting. It was a report about a special conference called to address the “Low Income Housing Crisis” in Boston on Nov. 22, 1963.
That date rang a bell. Wasn’t that the day JFK was shot?
It was.
And the memo documents how that tragedy played out in real time 1,700 miles from Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
The notetaker at that conference, a Freedom House neighborhood organizer named Frances McGill, wrote that the meeting began with a panel discussion that revealed “a depressingly impressive mountain of statistics” about the gravity of the crisis. The panel also noted that the ongoing urban renewal project was making matters worse for low-income Bostonians, because it “decreases the housing that will be available within the financial means of these people.”
That raised the possibility of an intentional plan, one that current housing activists have also raised as the city’s true motivation:
“The implication is that the city does not want these people at all — and by making certain that they have no place to live, intends to force them to go elsewhere.”
The group broke for lunch and then began breakout sessions … until they were interrupted.
“Bob Gustafson knocked on our door with the announcement that there was a confirmed report that President Kennedy had been shot and an unconfirmed report that he was dead.”
In extraordinarily poetic terms, McGill writes that the group tried to continue with its important work of addressing low-income housing needs, but it was difficult to concentrate.
“... people were sobbing uncontrollably and our spirits kept foundering under the awful waiting vigil our hearts were keeping at the side of the president.”
When Kennedy’s death was confirmed, McGill wrote how the collective weeping grew. She witnessed a priest across the room as his face “crumpled helplessly.”
The attendees abandoned any effort to continue their work, and a closing prayer was offered.
“Charles Abrams was scheduled to deliver a special address at the close of the conference … but he had no heart to give the speech he had prepared. He talked about the tragedy and its implications instead — very briefly. Dr. Barth closed the conference with special prayers for the President, the bereaved family, and for the healing of the sickness of violence and hate in our country.”
Standing in a library basement with these pages in my hand, I was struck by how much that prayer still rings true 61 years later.
And Boston still has a low-income housing crisis.
