Racism in My Experience – Part 4
Boston and Legal Services
During summer of ‘69, I was lucky enough to be working as a summer intern in a two lawyer Boston Legal Assistance Project Office on Blue Hill Ave. and to begin a long and fulfilling career in Legal Services. I arrived shortly after one of the two lawyers left to take another job in DC, and I inherited her caseload of public assistance cases and learned the intricacies and complexities of the federal and state rules and regulations governing the lives of the poor in order to defend and represent my clients. At the time, Roxbury and that portion Dorchester along Blue Hill Ave. were the centers of the middle class, working class and poor African American community in Boston, the site of public housing projects and welfare offices for the poorest, the district courts where a steady stream of evictions and minor criminal cases were handled in nearly automatic fashion and of the small merchants and landlords who struggled to get by. My clients were predominantly African American women and their children, and I grew to learn their strength, warmth, courage and tenacity, and the resiliency of the extended black family support network. The police were mostly white, the judges mostly white, the social workers mostly white, the teachers mostly white, the legal services lawyers mostly white, the doctors mostly white, and our clients mostly black – hardly an ideal situation to provide equal justice. Many were allies; some were oppressors; some changed from allies to oppressors as they changed jobs and responsibilities. That complexion would change over time, but the underlying conditions of the poor did not. After a few years, our office was enveloped in a dispute between the older and more experienced white lawyers and the new black attorneys fresh out of law school who wanted to force out the former and take over leadership of the office. Everyone lost, and especially the clients who lost both the experienced and dedicated white attorneys and the very promising young black attorneys.
Later I worked in mostly Italian East Boston and the North End, and then in the South End, a melting pot undergoing rapid gentrification at that time. The conditions of the poor, their allies, and their oppressors were exactly the same. Racism added an extra dimension, however. When local white youth gangs harassed and tried to run blacks out of public housing in East Boston, the local police did not respond to protect them until one of the attorneys in our local office brought suit in federal court. http://bostonlocaltv.org/catalog/V_1CMKWJMRS5WDOYQ Segregation in Boston’s public housing projects continued well into the late 80’s. https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1988-NAACP-v-BHA.html When I lived there, Boston was one of the most racially segregated in terms of housing patterns (with the single exception of the South End) and racist cities in the North; that was equally true whether you were a poor black kid or a famous black athlete. Racism was used to grind down poor black communities, and affirmative action to uplift only a lucky few.
Poor white communities benefited by the Great Society programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and community health centers or Head Start as much as did the poor black communities. The poor white communities were dismantled by urban renewal projects, by the expansion of Massport, or the destruction of the West End, and nothing was put in to replace the affordable housing, and these working class neighborhoods were destroyed. It was systemic oppression of the poor in housing, education, jobs, criminal justice and daily subsistence, and the police were there as enforcers to keep it all running. The politics of busing and abortion were adroitly used as wedge issues to divide Boston’s working class voters who otherwise had important economic issues in common.
Some oppressors were truly evil monsters; others were corrupt, but the system that had appointed them and selected them, then protected them at great cost, until finally it didn’t, and the dam broke. Judge Jerome Troy of the Dorchester District Court was one of them, and it took the concerted effort of many lawyers and countless hours before he was finally removed from the bench. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_P._Troy His more benign successor as Presiding Justice of the Dorchester District Court had a checkered performance in dealing with African American defendants as well, and was eventually exiled to serve as a judge in white suburbia. https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/volumes/409/409mass590.html
The Boston Housing Authority and Boston School Board were similarly bastions of long-standing patronage and highly parochial incompetence in delivering their vital services to the poor, and it took decades of litigation, protest and political pressure to improve public education and housing – an effort that continues to the present day. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/26/archives/boston-housing-authority-is-placed-in-receivership-south-boston.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis and https://commonwealthmagazine.org/education/state-to-assert-new-oversight-of-boston-schools/
Boston back then comprised a series of ethnically defined neighborhoods/enclaves for Irish, Italian, black, Chinese, Puerto Rican and Jewish residents. The best public schools at the time were out in the white suburbs like Wellesley, Lexington, Brookline or Newton and nationally renowned. Boston had examination schools like Boston Latin or Boston English with top-flight educations. However the high schools serving South Boston and Roxbury were uniformly poorly performing when school busing was ordered between them. You may ask why Judge Garrity did not order busing from the inner city to the excellent schools in the suburbs, which would have been a much better educational remedy. However, it was the Boston School Board who had committed the acts of intentional segregation that were at issue in the case, not the underlying and continuing patterns of residential segregation between working class Boston and its affluent white suburbs. The US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts has signaled a full-scale retreat from voluntary busing and other race-based approaches used by school districts in Seattle and Louisville to achieve school integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Involved_in_Community_Schools_v._Seattle_School_District_No._1
The Boston Police and Fire Departments were then staffed by white officers because the standards and admission tests for getting hired were stacked in favor of whites and their relatives, and against blacks and Hispanics, such that less than 1% of firefighters were African-American when the litigation began in 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Society_of_Vulcans During the worst of the Boston violence about mandatory busing, the Boston police held strong in enforcing the law and keeping the peace in South Boston, Charlestown and Roxbury whatever their personal views may have been. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/12/archives/the-men-in-the-middle-boston.html
In 1975, a liberal Democratic reformer, Michael Dukakis of Brookline, was elected Governor of Massachusetts. The state budget was in deficit, and he proceeded to slash programs for the poorest of the poor. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/01/archives/budget-fight-on-in-massachusetts-governor-and-legislature-at-odds.html He eliminated medical coverage and public assistance for the very poorest of the poor, who also happened to be disproportionately black. He cut most social programs by 10% across the board. He not only failed to protect the most vulnerable among us, many of whom were minorities; he utterly dismantled their safety net.
At the time, Massachusetts was beset by losses of local factories producing textiles, shoes and other staples of its manufacturing economy to Southern states with lower wages and new, modern, more cost efficient factories. Towns like Fall River, New Bedford, Lawrence, Lowell, Springfield, Holyoke and Pittsfield were being decimated by factory closings. Laid off black and white factory workers depended on UI, AFDC, and GR to support their families and to pay for their medical care. Were there better alternatives than cutting their medical care and public assistance? Of course there were, and Dukakis and the legislature did increase some taxes as a part of the package. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/01/archives/budget-fight-on-in-massachusetts-governor-and-legislature-at-odds.html As a result, after his first term, Governor Dukakis had equally offended both his more liberal supporters and his more conservative critics; he was defeated in the party primary by Ed King, a very conservative, business supported Democrat who had run the Mass Port Authority.
Representative Mel King (no relation), clad in his classic dashiki, said during this time period, the most important anti-poverty program is a good job, with good wages and benefits; he promoted economic development in poor communities, like the South End and Roxbury. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_King Dukakis made economic development in the old factory towns a high priority. Dukakis’ second and third term coincided with the Massachusetts Miracle – the growth of the high tech industry around Route 128, the circumferential highway encircling Boston and its inner suburbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Miracle One could credit Mel King and Mike Dukakis with perspicacity and great economic foresight, or at the very least they were saying the right things at the right time, when the Massachusetts’ economy was approaching the springboard for a technological transformation and rejuvenation. However the old factory jobs and opportunities were not so readily replaced or duplicated by the growth of the new tech industry; these were very different kinds of jobs requiring a different skill set and higher educational achievement and they were on the periphery, not so readily accessible by public transit from either Roxbury or South Boston.
The Massachusetts experience of economic renaissance is an excellent example of the challenges facing the Rust Belt states of the Midwest and the need and possibility to renew our economic and manufacturing prowess, not by denigrating racial minorities and immigrants, not by blaming Mexico or China, but rather by investing in and building the economy of the future, by investing in hard and soft infrastructure so all of our nation’s citizens can thrive, not just its one percent-ers.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/4/20