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An Interview with Mel King

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An Interview with Mel King Transcription: Mel King Interview with Diane Turner 3/1211990 Mel King: My name is Mel King. I live in the South End, Boston. I am currently on the faculty of the Massachusetts 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 South Boston. 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.
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