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Transcript of Interview with Derrick Evans, January 4, 2008

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Transcript of Interview with Derrick Evans, January 4, 2008 Evans, Derrick Q: All right, so you know, as you may know, the area for this, the Lower Roxbury black history project is Dudley Square to Mass Ave, Albany Street over to the train tracks, 1910 to 1965. And I’m here with Derrick Evans. EVANS: That’s me. Q: D-E-R-R-I-C-K E-V-A-N-S. EVANS: Middle initial C. Q: Middle initial C. Of? EVANS: Of around here. Q: Of around here. All right, and -- EVANS: And elsewhere. Q: -- this is -- what’s today’s date? This must be January 4th, 2008. EVANS: Your guess is as good as mine. Q: And you want to tell me a little bit about yourself before we get started? EVANS: Sure. I first came to Boston as a freshman college student, attended Boston College, I arrived in September of 1984, where within a matter of weeks, I met the director of [01:00] BC’s black studies program who became my lifelong mentor, a Roxbury native -- Lower Roxbury native, Amanda Verdell Houston, who was born in 1929 in Lower Roxbury. 1 And her fascinating personal history, and for years, shared with me the community history that shaped her life, and the life of other folks, you know, here in Boston, that we either know, or know about. She -- during the time that I was a student at Boston College, you know, she introduced me to all of her lifelong friends, like Ruth Batson, Alma Lewis, Kim [Guscat?]. Even some of the younger folks, like Sarah-Anne Shaw, and [02:00] Mel King, and Byron Rushing, and Henry Hampton. And so I spent quite a number of years between 1984 and 2000 exposed, or immersed, in a really rich, both personal and historiographic context, by virtue of being so close to Amanda Houston. And her friends, and being really interested in the history of this place that I actually now continue to call, it’s one of my two homes. Q: And you are a historian? EVANS: Yeah, I’m a historian; I studied history at Boston College, I’ve been -- you know, I was a researcher for the Eyes on the Prize film series, which was made in the South End. I taught civil rights history at Boston College for years. Obviously now I’m -- for the last four or five years, I’ve been [03:00] very much involved in my original home on the Gulf coast, down in coastal Mississippi, the Turkey Creek community. But this is a very -- this is an adopted home that I’ve -- I mean I own property here now. 2 And I hope to -- for the rest of my life, to call this home as well as Turkey Creek, equally. So, you know I think the first thing I want to start off with is that Mrs. Houston, it was interesting, she was very proud of sharing the exact same birthday as Malcolm X. Which we believe was May 19, 1929. If I’m not mistaken, May 19, and you know, the only house that’s visible from this window -- Q: And where are we now? Which -- EVANS: We’re at 79 Dale Street, just south of Dudley Square, looking [04:00] south towards what’s now known as Malcolm X Park. And it’s -- so we’re at the foot of the Sugar Hill, of the hill. So we’re in that sort of, right now we’re in that sort of transition zone between Lower Roxbury and the upper Roxbury. And -- where you know, your first out migration of folks from Lower Roxbury up the hill would have started, you know, leapfrogging in this direction. And the only house that’s visible from this window is actually Ella Collins’ house, which is the home that Malcolm X came to in the ’40s when he came to Boston as a teenager. (coughs) Excuse me. To be -- which is, you know, chronicled in his autobiography. So anyway. Mrs. Houston’s mother was born in Florida, and was one of the -- that wave of Southern migrants [05:00] post-World War I Southern migrants, that came to Boston. You know, to 3 escape Jim Crow segregation, and so forth and so on. Her father was a Pullman porter. And she used to tell stories of how on Sundays, he and all the other Pullman porters -- because Boston was, you know, with South Station and so forth, was an important place in sort of the rail, before air travel and so forth. The rail systems, and it was a terminal, a terminus type of a place, where you know, it’d be a layover for these Pullman porters. And what they would do is, you know, they would bring in all their copies of the black newspapers from other places, and they would meet out on the plaza in front of -- in Copley Square, at the Boston public library, and they would go into the library, check out books, return books, talk national or local politics with one another. [06:00] And she remembers her father being sort of part of that milieu. And of course, that was, you know, they were there because the library was there. But the places where you would more often find them getting their hair cut, or having their meals, or staying over in the rooming houses, would have been in the area of Lower Roxbury that your project covers. Right? So she was very much part of that scene, OK? Born into it. (noise) Thank you. She -- now her mother, Alice Samuels, was actually -- 4 Q: Can I just ask you, you were saying her father. So do you know anything about her father, his name? EVANS: Yeah, his name was -- Q: And what time period we’re talking about when he was a porter, and they would go to the library and so on? EVANS: That’d be in the ’20s and the ’30s, OK? [07:00] Her mother was a trained -- a college graduate, a registered nurse, and the daughter of an AME bishop, African Methodist Episcopal bishop, down in Florida, in Winter Haven, Florida. In that part of Florida that Zora Neil Hurston chronicled in Their Eyes are Watching God, you know, one of the seminal texts from the Harlem Renaissance, this African American anthropologist. And her -- Mrs. Houston’s mother, Alice Samuels, apparently had a really fiery tongue that of course, everyone who knew Mrs. Houston knows she inherited. And really, for her own personal safety, the family arranged for her to leave Florida, to come to Massachusetts, to Boston, to -- and what she was able to find for employment [08:00] was work as a domestic in the home out in Chestnut Hill, on Hammond Street, of -- check this out, the family of Governor Alvin T. Fuller of Massachusetts, from that early twentieth century time period. So she got a pretty good -- by being a little girl in that house during the daytime, while her mother was a 5 domestic, she got a really good -- because she was such a precocious kid, got a really good education pertaining to, you know, public affairs, if you will, in Massachusetts. And she often would tell me stories of how she -- you know, her mother would chide her, you know, to keep her mouth shut. (laughter) You know, and not be so engaged in the conversational comings and goings in the Fuller house out in Chestnut Hill. But home, of course, again [09:00] was Lower Roxbury, Arnold Street. Which is no longer there, it’s between what’s currently known as Melnea Cass Boulevard, and what is that down there? Before Mass Ave, sort of in that area where, for years, they stored all the snow when they would plow it, and pile it up. And now it’s that Jim Rice ball field. OK, she lived down there. And I have a picture of that, I just -- (break in audio) EVANS: -- Northeastern University, which was across the street, kind of, you know, from where she lived. She attended the Boston public schools. Q: Do you know, you said she went to Northeastern, did she graduate from there, and what did she study? Could you tell me? EVANS: Jesus. Q: Do you remember? 6 EVANS: Well let me back up first and say she attended the Boston public schools. And she graduated from Girl’s English High School. And she often told the story, this is key, because one of the things [10:00] that some people even then -- a lot of people, actually valued, as far as urban life, was the quality of public education. And when she was a child, and I think this is why she, as an adult, was such a lifelong education advocate here in Boston, and a defender of Boston public school children, is because when she was a -- she was very -- she was known for pointing out that as a child, as a black child in Boston, in the 1930s and ’40s, the color of her skin did not as adversely impact her educational experience as it would later in that same public school system. And for a number of reasons. One, Boston’s black community was still small. And sort of the, you know, just like apartheid or racism in the Mississippi Delta, when the proportion [11:00] of Negroes, right, to the larger -- or to the other white constituency rises, so does the severity of the racism that the black people are wont to encounter.
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