Transcription: Mel King Interview with Diane Turner 3/1211990

Mel King: My name is Mel King. I live in the South End, . I am currently on the faculty of the Institute of Technology.

Diane Turner: Ok. Mr. King, how long have you lived in the South End?

M K: Sixty one years.

D T: All right. What do you think contributed to the sense of community during the earlier period?

M K: I think one major thing was the sense of a shared experience, in the sharing of the land and the streets around it. I've experienced being in part of the diversity of the people living there which became kind of a sense of pride in knowing that you live with diversity. In part the fact that all of us came from families with an income (unintelligible word) and so just sharing our resources when we had limited resources helped to create a sense of community. And the other thing that I think about is that since we had a lot of kinfolk around that you had community with your kin and you had community with your neighbors. And without the automobile taking people away, without television there were a lot of things that took place right on the street. For example, I remember a wedding reception that was held and people obviously couldn't afford the Church, the wedding reception was held right on the street and all the people, there were lines of people (?), got out with mops and buckets and brushes and cleaned the street down and then the reception took place with the music, the dancing, [and] the different foods. So it was that kind of thing that contributed to the sense of community; that there was an openness and a sharing of festivities and activities.

D T: Ok you mentioned the diversity in the community; could you elaborate on that a little?

M K: On the street where I lived or even in the building where I lived there was a family that was Polish, a family that was Portuguese or Cape Verdean, and there was a family that had come from the southern United States. Next door to me lived my aunt and her son on the first floor, on the next floor was a Jewish family, on the floor above them was an Italian family, on the floor above them was another Jewish family, next to them was a Jewish family on the bottom, then Greek families, two Greek families, and another Italian family. And you could go down the street, across from us was a family lets say they were English and then on the same block there were people that were Lithuanian, Albanian, and thinking about some of the events that are going on today about all the different groups in the Soviet Union that are breaking away, attempting to ... Well when those things took place over there, those folks moved, those who could get away, and many of them came to the United States, and those that came to the city of Boston, usually came to live in the South End or other neighborhoods in . But we seem to be a port of entry for people from different parts of the world and as a result of that I can remember when people from Spain came, directly related to what was going on with the Civil War in Spain, and before that where people had come from also had to with whatever strife was going on in Eastern Europe or with some of the struggles in Ireland or places where the economic conditions were a problem. Now did I know that the economic conditions were a problem for those folks when I was seven, eight, nine years of age? No, but I did at nine know about the war in Spain and I did know why people came from Albania and Lithuania to the neighborhood. At the Junior High School that I attended there were 32 different racial, ethnic cultural groups. When my children went there, there were 42 or 43 so that's an indication that there were lots of different kinds of people in the community.

D T: How were the new comers accepted into the community?

M K: Well from a child's standpoint, I could remember some fights that used to take place with people who came in because like they had to prove themselves but basically they seemed to fit because everybody else was a new comer. So whoever came, how could you say something about a person who had come in from Spain or from Portugal, because most of the people came from someplace else.

D T: What role did institutions play for community such as the church?

M K: Well I'm going to mention the church as in asking what role institutions play, several roles, there are a few that I would lift up. One is, it became a place where people would come from other places could find their common tongue and speak it and find their common culture. And the second is that it became a mediating force for dealing with other institutions that they had to deal with whether it was schools or government or business. So you could see the church playing those roles and in other instances it was where people got help, in sometimes economic, but help in trying to deal with and negotiating through the day to day life on these streets. The church that I went to, The Church of All Nations, was unique in that it offered opportunities for religious expression to people of different races and ethnic backgrounds whereas most of the other churches were very iso-ethnic. (unintelligible name) was for example Italian and then there were Jewish Synagogues, there was the Greek Orthodox Church, or the Russian Orthodox Church. So each of them had a name that dealt with the ethnic group that came in but ours was called the Church of All Nations and, although all nations weren't there, it attempted to open its doors to people from every group that came in so that there was a service for people who were Syrian, a service for people who were Chinese, a service for people who were African American, a service for people who were Italian; so that those folks, those groups, could come in, have a service, have somebody who spoke their language and could communicate with them and who could in counseling and others help them mediate and negotiate with other institutions.

D T: What impact did the Church of All Nations have on you as a child? M K: Well, as a child, quite a bit. One of its institutions or programs was a camp called South Athelol (?).We called it South Athelol (?)and it gave us all an opportunity to get off the streets and excel and it also gave us an opportunity in so doing to acquire some different skills, some athletic, some in tuned to crafts, and some in tuned to understanding the aspects of nature. So that did play a good role. The other thing that the church did was to expose us to people, and this generally because of segregation, who came from the South to attend Harvard Divinity or Boston University School of Theology or Andover Newton Theological Seminary (unintelligible) and people who because of discrimination, segregation, and racism in the South could not go to the schools of theology in the South. They couldn't I think go to Gammon, but most of them when they wanted to get a graduate level degree had to leave the South and when they needed a place to practice and to intern they would come to the Church of All Nations and in their corning I got to learn about Morehouse and Clark, and Morris Brown, and others. Although they put more of a picture on the schools and I was about to say that we used to read about them in the Baltimore Afro American newspaper and the Chicago Defender because that's where you could learn about some of the schools in the Southern part of the United States. So those folks did give us information and insight and it's because of them that I ended up at the Claflin College in South Carolina, which is a Methodist School, and others that I know ended up in Morehouse and Morris Brown and institutions like them because these people had gone to school there and then they talked to us about them.

D T: Were there any other institutions that you could recall that contributed to the community?

M K: Well, yeah, we had the settlement houses, in particular: Lincoln House, Dale House, and Harriet Tubman House.

D T: What was their role?

M K: Well, it's an interesting thing. For those of us who were of color, particularly those of us whose parents had come from the West Indies or from Africa or even from the South more recently, one role was to get us, again, more of those skills, a little more recreational skills, some crafts, etcetera. For adults they were working on getting them Americanized. Getting them to speak the language if that was the case but basically getting them to the place where they could adopt American values. Some of them provided citizenship courses, so that's what a lot of their function was. And as settlements and as service agencies they worked on public welfare needs or welfare needs of people; referring people to different public welfare and public service organizations that would meet their particular needs.

D T: What kinds of forces contributed to changes in your community?

M K: Well one force that is known to have contributed to change was the war [WWII]. Many young people went away to the war and when they came back they came back with the GI Bill allowing them to get access to education and or business or mostly housing opportunities and so people moved. And so you can see between 45'[and] 46' and just a short period of time the numbers of people moving out who had been the baseball team who were at twenty when they left and now at twenty five and thirty were no longer around and getting married and moving off. So that was one of the things, the end of the war [and] the access to the housing resources. The second thing was Urban Removal and here in a very contrived way the city and the media and the business community conspired, if you will, to take control of certain pieces of the land and in so doing the renewal program called the places slum, said we lived on Skid Row, and then they set up this process of urban removal and people got moved out and the irony of it is that the two institutions who moved first into that neighborhood after the land was cleared was the newspaper, The Traveler, and the First National Bank of Boston. And so when you think of how the media and the money combined with the government to move people off that land and then they were able to take advantage of that, they had a right now, you get a sense of a power of the rich by calling it a slum and Skid Row it legitimized the deed that they could do something about (?). So the two major things I would say would be the war and Urban (Removal).

D T: Ok, let's talk a little bit more about the actual, physical location and the Urban Renewal. What was that process?

M K: Well, initially the process was one of clearance because it was supposed to be slum clearance and the community that I grew up in did not understand what was happening and people got moved out, at least that part of it called the New York Streets, and got moved out. So the people who were on the other side of Washington Street, who were attending Lincoln House, I have entered a point where I am back and working there, raised some questions about the issue of clearance as opposed to clearance, well, and then putting businesses up they said if you clear it then we want housing up and so they organized and in the rest of that part of the South End between Washington Street and Tremont Street, between Dover and what was then Castle, they struck out a relationship which said that one third of it would go for industry but two thirds of it had to go to housing and so the Castle Square Housing Development Project was built. So when you ask about the process or what took place the first part clearance and then buildings for commercial, the second part clearance and then housing. So that was the first two phases. The third phase in the rest of the South End, south of Milford Street (?), became rehabilitation because people saw what happened in the South End, I mean they saw what happened in the New York Streets, they saw what happened in the Castle Square area and they knew that happened in the West End where people were being moved out and so people insisted that the next part of the plan would be rehabilitation. That they would save the buildings and in that way people would be able to get better access to remain in the neighborhood.

D T: What were the politics around the whole issue of Urban Renewal?

M K: Well the politics around Urban Renewal is always struggle for the land and for me there were two struggles: one for the money and one for the land. If you win the struggle for the money you could win the struggle for the land. The politics were one, how do we move from a self anointed group of people who have the ear of the city to one in which we get an elected individual committee which would then speak to the needs of the people that elected [them]. And so we started with wanting to make sure that people who were living on the site, who were getting moved off this place, will be able to be relocated on the site and to press that point we went first to the redevelopment authority office in the South End and took it over. Well the first time we just came with a little picket group and then when no response came the next time we went back and took it over.

D T: You mentioned we?

M K: Well people who came together as a group called Community for a Unified South End (Cause). And that group took it upon itself to work to make sure that the Urban Renewal Program worked in the interests particularly of people who were tenants in the community. And so what we did was to go and do those things which would bring attention to those issues that we thought needed to be addressed. And so the politics became tenants and their advocates against the home owners who had been doing most of the speaking on the Urban Renewal issue along with business community and the agencies. So the politics then was to stop that appointed or anointed Urban Renewal committee and get it replaced by one that was elected. And the actions that we took were geared to lead us in that direction including the taking over of the parking lot and developing what was called Tent City and twenty years later seeing the buildings called Tent City erected on that site.

D T: Could you describe the parking lot incident for me.

M K: Well as I said earlier, we were trying to, through a number of actions to get the city to respond to how decisions were made and who made the decisions around Urban Renewal. And we had first pick of this site office and then we took it and we locked the people who worked there out and the mayor out. After doing that we decided that it would be important to deal with this parking area because another building had been taken down, people were dislocated, and instead of setting in motion a process for putting up housing it was used as a parking facility. So we went there and decided we were not going to let people use it as a parking lot. We had a big truck and a bus and we put it on one side because it took up a city block. Put it on one side and then formed a human chain around the rest of the lot. One person who was in a car, who did not like that he could not get in, drove into a group of us and knocked me down and people reacted by going after him and his windshield got smashed and in the long run they arrested some of us and in the long run we went to jail. And then when we got out people met and decided that we should build what later became the famous Tent City.

D T: Ok. Can you talk about the famous Tent City?

M K: I can, what do you want to know about it?

D T: Lets talk about it in terms of the politics around that and also the social implications of Tent City. M K: The politics around the Tent City Housing Development have to do with getting control of the land and whether the city was willing to take it by imminent domain from the Fitzgeralds who owned the parking lot and the city was reluctant to do so. Well the Copley Place Program came in and it turned out that they needed parking and so they bought the land from Fitzgerald so that they would be able to do that. But the community group there, initially was to set criteria for what was supposed to go on that land; that it had to be housing: 25% low, 50% moderate, and 25% market, that it had to be available for people who were displaced from the South End [and] it had to hire people from the community to do work on the construction. So we had that as criteria and so that anybody who was going to take over that land had to meet that criteria. A series of negotiations took place, and now this is over a twenty year period, and we finally ended up with an agreement with the Copley Place people that they would build their parking area under ground and that above ground the land would be available for housing. So the politics were principally one of first how do you get the commitment to take that land, b) how once you have it do you make sure that it meets certain housing roles and c) the politics then became one of how do we get these new people who own the land to join with us in building housing. And so whatever political way we could to discredit them because of the need for housing we were able to do that and finally another group was able to work through the business of negotiating out and then working with a development team and you see the results.

D T: What was the name of the other group?

M K: The other group that. ..

D T: ... negotiated with ...

M K: Oh, the Tent City folks and we negotiated with the Copley Place folks and then with the city and others around getting the necessary resources to put the housing up and so when I talked about developing and the other groups we are talking about the development team that we needed in order to get the housing built.

D T: What were the social implications of Tent City?

M K: Well the social implications of Tent City, the main ones, are around saying that you can develop an entity in a community and make it available for people from that community or for people who left that community and to do it in a way that reflects the social and economic makeup of that particular community. So that whatever the proportion of people of color is in the South End is reflected in Tent City, whatever the income mix is, is reflected in Tent City and so it shows that you can develop housing and make it accessible in a way that meets the needs of people in a community both from the standpoint of their income and from the standpoint of their race and gender.

D T: Ok can you recap any other main highlights of community struggle against Urban Renewal? M K: Well there are lots of them if you are talking about the South End. You have the IBA Struggle [Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion, or Puerto Rican Tenants in Action] which leads to Villa Victoria which is the development of eight hundred units. You have the, well it started out as the Emergency Tenants Council and they organized against both the Urban Renewal displacement and owners of property that were exploiting them. You then have the South End Tenants Council which organized and now has four hundred units housing that they have been able to develop as a result. So you have those two groups who were being exploited, getting organized, and now developing housing for themselves. So those are just a couple of other areas where there were Urban Renewal struggles in the South End. There were Urban Renewal struggles in Lower Roxbury. There were Urban Renewal struggles in Madison Park where the community came in with a better plan for the area then the city did and in so doing and with the kind of political organizing that went on, were able to get Madison Park Housing Complex developed.

D T: Could you talk about your involvement in the Madison Park piece?

M K: The struggles there were all part of the struggles around Lower Roxbury, around the high way, around the land that was taken for the hi gh way, and around the land that was going to be taken for the school. And journeyed with people who were in Lower Roxbury like Chuck Tuder (?),, and Alex Rodriguez(?), Andrea Benton; those folks organized people first around food, income issues, and then around controlling the land. George Morrison(?) ... So there was a good chunk of people who were involved. They then were able to get people like urban planning aids to come and help with that plan. And I was involved in working with some of the organizers, making some of the connections between what was going on in the South End and what was going on in Lower Roxbury.

D T: In terms of organizing, why was organizing so successful at this particular point in time? Were there networks?

M K: Well networks [are] something I was important in organizing. I believe one of the reasons why organizing was so successful has a lot to do with who was doing the organizing on the one hand and on the other, the kind of times we were in. And we were in the middle of Civil Rights struggles, we were in the middle of struggles that pushed for community control, [and] we were in the middle of struggles where we were defining ourselves as being deserving of inherent rights and so people could easily get caught up with that and people were taking direct action and we were seeing the results of direct action. But it was done because there was a lot of door to door work going on. It was effective because it really touched people where they were, where their issues were, where their needs were, where their survival was, and by getting people involved. It was successful because people saw something positive happening with organizing in one area and they said if they can do then we can do it as well. So you can see that kind of thing spreading. For example, in the Chinese community they were able to have a memorandum of understanding on what the redevelopment was, it was the first one, to make sure that some of their land would be protected. So looking at that the people in Lower Roxbury could get a memorandum of understanding. We were able to fashion out the first elected Urban Renewal Committee in the South End and therefore other groups began to think about getting an Urban Renewal Committee such as in the Fenway. So all of these things began to build on each other.

D T: What was the role of the Urban Renewal Committee?

M K: Well the Urban Renewal Committee's role was one initially of seemingly to represent what the city had put out and when it became an elected Urban Renewal Committee it acted with real veto power even though it really did not have it. So that nothing would take place in the South End that this committee did not approve. So it had approval power over the plans for Urban Renewal. It had approval power over who would get to develop different parcels and that is how (unintelligible name) and others got to be the developers of parcels of land in the South End.

D T: What was the process of election for this committee?

M K: We drew up lines and it was done by neighborhoods and there were some people who came from neighborhoods and there were some that did not and anybody who was, I guess, eighteen years of age or older, it may have been sixteen, was eligible to vote.

D T: Was the struggle healthy for the community?

M K: I think struggles are always healthy. Struggle, I don't remember who it was that said it, is the highest form of education and so people learned. If you go talk to the people in (unintelligible name) who were there in the beginning when we did the struggling you'll see that they acquired enormous political [and] economic skills. They know how to manage. They know how to develop. If you go look at the Emergency Tenants Council and you go on Mass Ave you will see buildings named after people who were involved in that struggle. So out of the struggle housing came. Out of the struggle most importantly [came] a sense of self worth in the sense of knowing one can win, one can make things happen positively in their lives. Yeah it was very, very positive.

D T: What does the future hold for the community?

M K: I can't say. I think the community itself has to say. I think it's still an ongoing struggle to make sure that the land is shared by people whose incomes are low. We have had some recent struggles on that and that's come up favorably. (unintelligible) ... have to make sure that the people that develop are able to come through. So I think that there will still be more struggles for the land. That people because this land is viable will always want and I think that the community has to be ever vigilant to make sure that particularly those people who are of color and whose incomes are low and people whose incomes are low have access to housing. I think that's going to be a major ongoing struggle in the community. D T: Is that same sense of community that was once there, does it exist today?

M K: I think that if you think about it from the standpoint of a community of people who are committed to provide access and who see in providing access a sense of justice then yes it does exist. It's a different community now. The needs of the people in the community are different. The access to other things is different. Although probably more so in the South End then in any other place that you would go around that you would see neighborhood associations each having their own little block party. So if you come and you witness them for the most part they are an attempt at community [and] they are an attempt at doing things on the street. They vary but basically almost each association has one and opens up to the rest of the South End but principally its purpose is to demonstrate that sense of community.

D T: You mentioned the fact that the needs are different, why are they different?

M K: Well the people who are corning in to the community are different. There are some people who are corning in who are corning from other parts of the world but nowhere near as much as twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, [or] sixty years ago. So that's very different. The people who are corning in now their level of income is much greater. They might come in here because of their economic need. Be corning here because they see this community in its brick and mortar, its row houses. They see the community in terms of its access to their jobs and to businesses. They see it as an 'in' place to be. Other people, who came, came because this was a place where they could survive and thrive and grow. A lot of people who are corning in now with money have homes elsewhere for the summer and for weekends. For people who came before this was it. So those are some fundamental differences in who was here and if they're different at that level then their needs are different. If in the past there were lodging houses and rooming houses they don't exist in the way that they did then. And so people who need the city hospitals presence don't exist. In the past they lived if they got older in those lodging houses, now there are several towers for those folk to live in , housing for the elderly. So they are isolated in those places I think a lot more by their age then they were before in terms of living in places, in rooms, with families, etcetera. So the needs are different for people there. In the past more of them lived in situations where they relied heavily on being able to get to other services and they were there. Now people can get driven by vans and what not and they are catered to quite a bit. There are programs in the schools, not the schools, [but] in the settlement houses. There are feeding programs in the settlement houses and in churches and others for people who are elderly. So those needs are being met in ways that they did not get met before.

D T: You mentioned the schools; do you have any thoughts on decentralizing the school boards as they have been done in Chicago?

M K: I believe very strongly in the need for the schools to be decentralized and that the power be put into the hands of parents, principally, and shared with the teachers and administrators school by school. And I think that the model that they have in Chicago over time is going to prove out to make sense and I think that if the current superintendent had recognized that and had been an advocate for it he wouldn't be involved in negotiation about buying out his contract and I think that it makes sense, its timely, and I think ultimately it will lead to an improvement in quality of education for the children.

D T: Ok last question about Mandela, the issue around Mandela playing in Boston. How do you feel about that?

M K: I think again that this is a struggle for the land and a struggle for the money. And I think that the issue around Mandela is principally a struggle for the money. And if people believe in themselves and in the fact that they have the capacity to fashion out a community that will provide for its residents and its people in ways that are vastly superior to what is being offered to them now then they should go for it. The fact that people are not going for it, I believe, is more of a testimony to the fact that they don't believe that they have the capacity within themselves and that's unfortunate. And to the extent that people go back and look at how Madison Park has been developed, how EAP (unsure of spelling) has been developed, what's happening with the groups, it ought to tell them that we have the capacity to take and shape this neighborhood of any part into a place that can work. And once they do that in their minds then some of the dependency that exists and which has robbed people of their creativity I think we will be able to eliminate that and once we do that it won't make any difference whether it happens legally, we can do it because politically, socially, and culturally we will know what we must be about. And so for me the concept of Mandela is a state of mind and that if we are able to get people to understand that, then we can move forward.

D T: Do you support it?

M K: I'm sorry you did not get that message from what I said. Yes I do.

D T: All right thank you.