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.
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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.
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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. So as a kid, most
of her classmates, she would tell me, were Irish Catholic,
and Italian schoolgirls, and they hung out together, and
they would go down to, you know, Downtown Crossing and shop
together, and they grew up together listening to Frank
7
Sinatra, and going to the movies together, and so forth,
and so on. But what’s really important here, she said, was
that her teachers didn’t hold her to a lower standard. In
fact, during a -- at some point in her maybe middle school
years, when her sort of outgoing, flamboyant personality
might become a sort of classroom management issue, [12:00]
she would go to the principal’s office, and the principal
was -- told her on several occasions that despite herself,
she was going to make sure that she succeeded. She was not
going to let this young girl fail, and she pointed out that
back then, the mostly women, largely Irish Catholic
educators in the Boston public school system that she had
took it as a matter of personal pride to not promote and
graduate idiots, actually. You know, or people without --
Q: So would she have gone to the -- was it the Hyde School for
Girls?
EVANS: I think she did. I think she did, that rings a bell.
But you know again, and that’s I think a really important
part of this history, because it stands in stark contrast
to what sort of precipitated the need for the desegregation
of Boston [13:00] public schools in the early ’70s, and the
current status of affairs in the Boston public schools,
vis-à-vis the quote unquote “achievement gap” of non-white
students that now comprise the majority of the system’s
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school population. So, there’s that. She was born
actually at Dimock community health center, up Columbus
Avenue from -- so more towards Jamaica Plain, right, from
Lower Roxbury, and the reason she was born there was her
mother believed in, whenever possible, having like women
doctors and nurses attend to her stuff. And you know, as a
child, you know, it took decades before a plaque would bear
this out at Dimock, but as a child, Amanda Houston knew,
from her mother, that Mary Eliza Mahoney, the first black
registered nurse in North -- in the United [14:00] States,
was trained there at Dimock, and practiced there at Dimock.
So from a child, she always placed herself in sort of the
history of the race, and it’s --
Q: And were her parents Garveyites, or?
EVANS: Mrs. Houston’s? Interesting question. No.
Q: Why?
EVANS: They were of the stripe that were maybe a little bit
more critical of, and thought maybe some of the notions of
Garveyite thinking were a little -- you know, at the time,
you know, in the context of the time, a little beyond the
pale. But what her mother was, was a saloniere with
William and Ro Trotter. And W.E.B. Du Bois, and folks like
that.
Q: What was her [15:00] mother’s name again?
9
EVANS: Alice Samuels. For -- Alice Marie Samuels. I think
kept her -- her (coughs) maiden name.
Q: So she came up from Florida at some point, and was working
in Chestnut Hill, and do you know what was -- I’m just
asking because what you’re saying is ringing a bill with
the women’s activities on Mass Ave, and I’m wondering was
she a part of either of those, because I’ve heard a story
that before William and Ro Trotter trotted out, that’s so
cliché, Black History Month nationally, he came to the --
one of those women’s organizations on Mass Ave and
presented the idea to them, and had them do it here. So
that really, the precedent for Black History Month, and I
guess then it was Black History Week, or something.
EVANS: Negro history.
Q: Negro history was here in Boston, the year before it rolled
out nationally.
EVANS: That wouldn’t be surprising. I mean, she often told -
- I mean first of all, her mother would have been in the
middle of anything like that. Her mother was a [16:00] --
and she’s more of a Trotterite than a Garveyite, or a Du
Boisian than a Booker T. Washingtonian. You see? Because
those pretty much were the two tracks, if you will. I
think, you know, as evidenced by the history of the rest of
her life, you know, Mrs. Houston certainly found fertile
10
ground for both of those traditions, you know? As they’re,
you know, falsely portrayed historically, I think, to be
completely divergent. But her mother definitely would have
been in the middle of that stuff. She -- let’s see. She -
- quite honestly, her mother was a socialist.
Q: OK. I’m just putting my finger up because I have a women’s
service club, I interviewed someone’s mother who was a part
of it, and in [17:00] the 19-- I’m not even going to try
and guess the year, I’ll show it to you, there’s an ad from
the Socialist Party in this, yeah.
EVANS: Yeah. Her mother was a bona fide socialist.
Q: From the Massachusetts State Secretary of (inaudible).
EVANS: Yeah. Mrs. Houston’s mother was a socialist, and she
believed in -- you know, she didn’t raise her -- she raised
her -- it’s interesting, her childhood was interesting.
She forced her to attend Sunday school in the different
churches where her friends and neighbors attended church,
whether they were Baptist, or Methodist, or St. Cyprians,
you know, with the Episcopal, but her mother was an
atheist, as was she, a lifelong atheist. And they believed
in what at the time was sort of new sciences like
psychoanalysis. And so, from a child, Mrs. Houston’s
mother would take her to [18:00] -- for psychoanalysis,
which is very interesting for a black kid in the 1930s and
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’40s anywhere. But that was going on here, in that house with that family. Her mother was a feminist, you know, and
Amanda Houston proudly pointed out that in the ’40s, she herself was a Zionist, you know, for an independent Israeli state after World War II, you know? She organized, in the tradition that she inherited from her mother, the small handful of young women who operated the elevators, the old- fashioned Otis elevators, the cages, at the Park Plaza
Hotel, somewhere we have a picture of her and them, shortly after they -- with their little collective bargaining experiment, won like these concessions, you know, and like this -- you know, they had like a sort of an ad hoc union, you know? [19:00] So she was always a unionist, very much pro-labor, a feminist. She was raised to be that by her mother. A socialist, and a black nationalist. And what’s also -- another important part, and this is more I guess cultural than political, but it fascinates me about the
Harlem Renaissance and particularly its manifestation in
Boston, Mrs. Houston was so very proud of growing up in an environment in which Southern New England and Caribbean
African American cultural tradition converged. And she said that this was the reason why a number of folks who passed through Boston during formative and important years of their personal education went on to be the most
12
insightful and well-spoken [20:00] analysts of the racial
circumstances of black America. Because of things that you
can learn in a place where you’ve got three stripes of
African American running concurrently in the collective --
or more, right? Or more. And you’ve got even more stripes
of white folk. From the Jewish, the Irish, the Italian,
and of course the Brahmins. And without the Yankee in the
mix, you’ll never get a full appreciation of the nature of
oppression in America, North America, the United States,
right? Without Anglo-Saxon, old Mayflower Yankees. So as
a kid, and as a teenager, of this woman, Alice Samuels, in
that world that she was raised in, in Lower Roxbury, and
Boston, and Massachusetts, in those years of the twentieth
century, [21:00] she was afforded the best sort of American
studies, you know, urban studies, labor studies, women’s
studies, social science, you know, education that a child
of any era or any place could be afforded.
Q: Did she have siblings?
EVANS: No, she was an only child, so she actually was the
sponge that sucked it all up, without any competition.
Q: So her father was a porter, he’s bringing papers in from
all over, and I’ve often been fascinated by how porters,
despite how they were portrayed in Hollywood films, were
actually so much on the cutting edge of everything that was
13
going on, because they would be going from place to place,
you know, gathering information, and then taking it back to
wherever they were. Whether it was Boston, New York, or
someplace far off the beaten track in Mississippi.
EVANS: Well I mean, [22:00] one of the things people forget
is that they were required to be college graduates so that
they could conduct a whole conversation with some of the
well-heeled, educated, traveled passengers on some of these
trains. So her -- in fact, just like the Negro
schoolteachers, like Carter G. Woodson was a high school
teacher with PhD in history at Dunbar High School in
Washington, DC. And so many other PhDs who could not get
employment, you know, like Du Bois before them, right, in
the Ivy League colleges, or whatever, where they were
qualified to teach, or who chose not to go into the deep
South and teach in some of the land grant colleges there,
found themselves in places like this, being school -- high
school, public high school teachers. And so I kind of
think of those high school teachers and those Pullman
porters as the intellectual elites of black community.
[23:00] And the porters frankly, you know, were
unparalleled, because the geographic coverage that the
trains afforded them, which is why you know, in the ’40s,
14
A. Phillip Randolph, whose statue is down there on the
Orange Line now, well that’s --
Q: Back Bay?
EVANS: Back Bay, but A. Phillip Randolph (coughs) excuse me,
was -- you know, he went to President Roosevelt and
threatened a march on Washington if they didn’t get the
fair labor practices executive order, that later became the
pretext for affirmative action. And when Roosevelt asked
his special assistant or aide standing next to him was this
person capable of pulling off this very ambitious threat.
He said absolutely, because for all intents and purposes,
he’s the head of the most organized, informed, and fast
[24:00] moving grapevine, if you will, of information
network anywhere in America, and that was the Pullman
porters. So her father was a Pullman porter.
Q: And did you tell me his name? I don’t remember.
EVANS: You know, I -- it’s --
Q: It’s fine, I just thought I would ask if -- you know, we
can always find that out later.
EVANS: Yeah, I can find out. Now he -- so let’s see. So she
went to Boston public schools graduation, she went to
Northeastern.
15
Q: Oh, that’s right, he was (inaudible) about 20 minutes ago.
So I had asked you what she studied at Northeastern, if you
knew.
EVANS: At Northeastern, I can’t say what her undergraduate
major was.
Q: OK.
EVANS: I’d have to -- I’ve got her diploma somewhere.
Q: All right, go ahead.
EVANS: So anyway, you know, like I said, she -- her lifelong
friends were people [25:00] who represented, you know,
several cultural or socioeconomic strata within Boston’s
black community there. And you know, another thing that
she would point out to me that was very instructive was
how, you know, red lining in the patterns of segregation
that occurred here were actually in some ways, much like in
the South, very useful in being incubators of community.
You know, because no matter what the circumstances might be
in your tenement flat, you had a neighbor upstairs,
downstairs, or next door who might see a gift in you, and
help you turn that gift into something, whether it was a
school teacher, a nurse, a minister, or really anybody. A
peddler of newspapers. [26:00] So, you know, and so she
grew up on the Orange Line, in and out of downtown Boston
and so forth to --
16
Q: That wouldn’t have been the Orange Line then, she grew up
on the -- or was it the Orange Line?
EVANS: Yeah, it was the Orange Line. Washington Street.
Q: Was it the Orange Line? Was it still -- OK.
EVANS: Yeah, it was beautiful. I came here right before they
tore it down. I can’t believe they tore that thing down,
that was the coolest elevated train in America. She wrote
a piece once for the Boston College Magazine, a little --
they asked her to do a little thing about her Boston. And
she told the story of driving down Washington Street one
day in a snowfall, and just being disoriented, and longing
for you know, the old Boston with the clickity-clackity-
clackity-clack, and the screeching of the wheels of the old
Orange Line that went from Forest Hills station through
Eggleston station, Dudley Square station, on down to,
[27:00] you know, past the cathedral, past the original
Boston College, which is in the South End. And on into
downtown, into the wondrous world -- and you know, that was
the other thing, she was like -- her generation, and her
individually, never failed to take full advantage of living
in the Athens of America. You know, this place with these
museums, and these universities, I mean she encouraged me
as an undergraduate in the ’80s, that if I had a half of a
day off and Howard Zinn or whoever, some person might be
17 lecturing at another university that happened to be in
Boston, it’s like, get on the train and go there and listen. Don’t isolate or silo yourself within the gates of
Boston College, or any other place. Don’t confine yourself, you’re in the richest sort of intellectual, cultural, [28:00] you know, and geographically reachable, you know, compact energy center, you know, perhaps in the
Western -- you know, in the world. So that’s what her childhood was like, and for her friends, you know, they were just -- that community cranked out some really remarkable families and children. And it wasn’t a function of them having enough to eat, or you know, incomes that were, you know, commensurate with their skill levels or their needs. But instead, just the concentration there of all of those things that were present, that made it a good village in which to raise children. I think it’s kind of cool [29:00] that in 1968, Henry Hampton, who started
Blackside, the first black-owned documentary film production company, did it just, you know, a block off of
Mass Ave, you know? In the South End, in this place where
I like to think -- well I know, because I walked those streets, you know, sort of as an undergraduate, and a graduate student, and a young adult, you could still feel -
- you could still feel the -- like there were these
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brothers that had this bookstore on the corner of Worcester
and Tremont, like up in there, or Worcester and Columbus,
and it -- I mean these guys would be sitting in there, you
know, smoking their cigars, and talking their politics, and
having these books on sales for 50 cents apiece, you know,
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, [30:00] or whatever. You
know, and just these books, and maybe even a few shirts on
a hanger. You know, and I was like yeah, you know, this is
-- this is some residual legacy stuff, and it’s just been
really sad to see the South End, Lower Roxbury, just kind
of transformed basically ever since after my arrival, so I
kind of caught the last of it, you know Pathfinder Press
was, you know, the socialist bookstore was still on the
corner of Mass Ave and Shawmut. Right now, there’s some
kind of like Tedeschi’s food mart, some chain that purveys,
you know, 0% juice, juice.
(laughter)
EVANS: Right?
Q: Yes.
EVANS: OK. What kind of tradeoff is that? So yeah and then
Symphony Hall was right up the street, [31:00] shit man
there was no place in America. Boston Pops, you know,
Leontine Price, and you know whatever, this was it. Mass
Ave.
19
Q: This has been a -- you know, especially the people who I’ve
talked to who came here say in the (inaudible) as children
in the ’20s, on Sundays between church services, they would
walk to the MFA, they would go to something at Symphony
Hall. You know, they would cut -- I talked to a man
yesterday who would cut church every Sunday and go see Duke
Ellington or whoever uptown and, you know, all -- and they
tell me that they were taught in school that they were
Bostonians first and that, you know, they were to be proud
that they lived in the hub of the universe or whatever.
And that they should take advantage of all these cultural,
artistic, political, whatever that was there. And that
even if you didn’t have a nickel or whatever it cost
[32:00] for the streetcar, you walk there.
EVANS: That’s right. You know, and you know what’s
consistent with that? In the 1960s, Richard -- damn,
what’s his last name? Richard. I’m going to come up with
his last name. He was a Congress of Racial Equality person
who had -- here in Boston, he had a friend -- he was
friends with Sergeant Shriver, who of course was the first
director of the Peace Corps under his brother-in-law,
President Kennedy. And he ran for president himself -- or
vice president, on the McGovern ticket, in ’72, and for
president himself in ’76. And here he’s the father of
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Maria Shriver and the Shriver boys. But Richard Williams was -- and this is so typical, because where else would this have happened? AT some point, again, I think in those late ’60s, he wanted to think of a way [33:00] to broaden the horizons of the children in this community. And so what he did was he started youth enrichment services. And what they did was they got all of these people, mostly wealthy white folks, who ski routinely, all over New
England in the wintertime, to donate used skiing equipment and so forth, and they started taking youth out -- and this is the ’60s, the ’70s, and the ’80s. You know, Harold
Sparrow, my friend Harold Sparrow, whose father was the first black detective on the Boston police force, grew up -
- Harold is 50 now, you know? Or maybe even a little older, grew up going on these ski trips into -- I mean they actually figured out a way, right there on Mass Ave, across from Wally’s Café, where YES is, [34:00] with that big basement, you go down in there, and they’ve got the -- you’ve been there? OK, and they started taking these kids who were, as you say, Bostonians first, and who were imbued with that value of this is your time in this place to absorb all of this great stuff, and rich stuff that’s going on. Well consistent with that, he actually would take kids out and give them exposure to their New England, and their
21
hills, and to ski in their region. You know, and to come
back to the South End, Lower Roxbury, and have done -- you
know, done that. And of course, you know, you’ve got the
Harriet Tubman House, and just, this is a cool place man,
you know? And then every -- you know, the clubs, the Hi-
hat, and you know, it’s just a really rich, rich little
small census tract that -- yeah, did you say it goes as far
as Huntington, what you’re [35:00] studying?
Q: The train tracks, so what’s that?
EVANS: The new tracks?
Q: The new tracks. We’re just saying the new tracks, yeah.
The new tracks.
EVANS: Yeah, yeah, OK.
Q: What someone has described, that Lower Roxbury’s borders
are very porous. And I thought that was -- and --
EVANS: Yeah, but there’s definitely an energy field that’s
basically, it’s concentrated right there, like on Mass Ave,
between -- you know, where you got the intersections of
Mass Ave, of Tremont, Columbus, and Shawmut, and then back
out towards Dudley.
Q: The other thing that I should tell you is that when the
Reverend Hays, he also has a concentration area of
Frederick Douglas Square, which is -- what is that?
Frederick Douglas Square is right where Monica Todd is.
22
EVANS: Oh yeah, right there.
Q: Right there. So, you know, just --
EVANS: Well yeah, that’s a hot spot. [36:00] I mean shoot,
you’ve got St. Cyprians right there, you’ve got -- I mean,
you know what’s cool? I don’t know if you’ve shot them
yet, but there’s still some of the old, just -- remember
the Ferdinand’s sign on the brick in Dudley, that you can
kind of still make out? And there’s one for I think
National Biscuit, which is of course, Nabisco. But it
would be called Nabisco, that’s up right across from there
still. You can still catch it, you know? And some of that
kind of stuff.
Q: I was going to ask you something about, if you could tell
me more about -- if you know any more, or tell me some, you
know, some stories that might come to your mind. Mrs.
Houston as a sort of middle school kid. So let’s see, she
was born, tell me what year she was born again.
EVANS: Nineteen twenty-nine.
Q: Nineteen-twenty-nine. So ’39, she’s 10, the first of some
big changes are starting to happen, I know by then,
property was taken [37:00] to make the Lenox Street
projects, and --
EVANS: Was it 1929?
Q: That seems about right.
23
EVANS: I think it is 1929. Her and Malcolm X --
Q: Here, I’m going to just turn this off for a second and ask
a -- [37:17]
END OF AUDIO FILE
Q: All right.
EVANS: I mean you know, I’m sure somebody told you that when
sort of out of town college students, or graduate students,
African American, would come to Boston to go to school,
they often would, you know, stay in some of the rooming
houses that were available to them in Lower Roxbury. And
when he was a graduate student at BU --
Q: He who?
EVANS: Dr. King. When Dr. King was a graduate student at
Boston University in the early 1950s, he was an avid --
well he loved to shoot pool and play cards. And Mrs.
Houston actually was part of a group that would meet from
time to time, including Dr. King, to play cards, to play
poker. She was a great poker player. [01:00] Also, when
she married, which I want to say was -- I don’t know when
she married, but her band -- the band that played her
wedding reception was -- well now Louis Farrakhan’s group,
you know? His performing group. And so she had a lot of
24
sort of just familiar, you know, stories about these
personages, just living in real-time, you know? As people,
playing poker, or singing at a wedding reception. And
yeah. The -- even Malcolm X, she remembers Malcolm X as a
teenager, sort of terrorizing, [02:00] cutting it up, you
know? Lower Roxbury.
Q: And you said that sometimes, some -- you would either, what
-- I don’t remember if you said you would walk, or drive
through different neighborhoods, and she, you know, might
point something out, or --
EVANS: Yeah. A lot of those places. Like she would say this
corner, that building, you know, this is what happened
there. Yeah.
Q: And so as a historian, one of the things I originally came
to talk to you about, I don’t know that we ever said Ms.
Houston’s full name (inaudible).
EVANS: Amanda Verdell Houston.
Q: OK. But you had said that, you know, you had been thinking
for a while about a Roxbury, what did you call it? Roxbury
heritage, something like that?
EVANS: [03:00] Yeah, because you know what you have, first of
all, dude, I’ve learned to appreciate this even more since
going home to Mississippi, is how you can layer that gone
geological history, like environmental history? And then
25 human interaction or interface with the environment initially, and then you know, the successive waves of how land and space is lived on by, you know, over time. Like for instance, that area is filled in, right? That area is filled in. And in fact, when it was built, it was built up in the 1880s, right? Like there’s all this like really great 1880s-ish, [04:00] you know, Henry Hobson-Richardson inspired brownstone and brick, you know facade architecture. It’s like the quintessentially most 1880s boomtown looking, you know, townhouse strip in America.
One of them, you know? And it’s -- what’s interesting is that the area was built on speculation, because the -- just prior to that, the development of the town homes on filled in land in what we call Back Bay was so profitable for the developers, where these wealthy people -- I mean New
England and Boston, rich people were making money hand over fist after the, you know, in the latter part of the 1800s.
You know, somebody said to me recently [05:00] that when the world or the nation’s economy declines dramatically,
Boston’s declines a little bit, and when it bounces -- the world’s bounces back up a little bit, Boston’s shoots up dramatically. You know, the place has been reinventing itself culturally and economically repeatedly since the
1600s. There’s no other city or community in America
26 that’s been doing that. And so, you know, the 1880s was one of those boom times, you know, before the big -- they used to call them panics, these recessions. You know,
1896, and the Populist Revolt. But you know, with the influx of all the immigrants, because of the need for labor, and all of the new technologies, and the railroads, and the buildings now being built 20 stories and taller, the economy was booming. You know, like never before, as the country sort of marched towards the 20th century, and at this time, you know, these real estate [06:00] land speculators and developers decided that you know, the development of these high-end townhouses down those streets and side streets of Back Bay had been so profitable, they could do it again by filling in the rest of that area, you know, to its east, which is what we’re talking about, and they did it, and -- but they overbuilt. And there was more housing than there was a market. And then there was, you know, the continued influx of immigrants, and this sort of pre-World War I recession. You know, the economy slowed down, and it wouldn’t be until after World War I that migration would pick back up to the cities, you know, and the industrialization would really get charging forward again. [07:00] And so what happened in that time is that what we call the South End, you know, Lower Roxbury,
27 became, with the initial Irish and Italian, you know, immigrants and everyone, the folks coming up, looking for a place to stay, rooming houses, wherever, it became an instant slum, initially, right? Because -- like with these tall ceilings and great, you know, plaster on the ceilings, and these moldings, and these grand foyers, and these elegant staircases going up to these buildings, that, you know, was kind of largely what happened in the South End.
And it’s interesting, because it started off with a history that was very different than what was envisioned when that land was made available, [08:00] if you will, for development. But, or and, because of its location, at the heart of the southwest corridor, you know, Boston, the city, it became a new center of the line that you could draw from downtown Boston outward, of the options that the city had to grow in. As far as directional. So what I mean is, you know, as opposed to years earlier, you know, the city, and maybe -- you know, you can’t expand across the river into Cambridge, and it can’t expand out into the harbor or the ocean, or over into Brookline, or -- you know, but that southwest corridor, which explains the gradual movement of black folks from the original black community in Boston, which was the north slope of Beacon
Hill.
28
Q: Or the North End before that.
EVANS: Yeah, or the North End [09:00] before that. You know,
this constant movement out, OK? And then this sort of
created space, right? This sort of created space of, you
know, this filled in land, this marshland. I mean, Roxbury
Crossing, to its southwest, is called Roxbury Crossing
because that was the first place you could get a dry
crossing across this swampy, marshy stuff, similar to what
the Fenway is named for, you know? This marshy sort of
alluvial flood plain. So the -- it’s an interesting
history. And so when black folks really started to
comprise, you know, the concentrated majority of folk down
there, they walked into this beautiful, you know,
architectural environment. You know, [10:00] when they
came up to buy property, or to rent, or to live in rooming
houses, or what have you. I always thought that was
interesting. And I really wish that in the ’80s, in the
’90s, they had known how to better hold on to some of that
stuff that we’ve seen become gentrified, and turned into
Walgreen’s, or whatever, you know? [10:35]
END OF AUDIO FILE
29
EVANS: Yeah. Like in this area, well he grew up actually
here. Now see, this area was called Tommy’s Rock right
here. And this is another low-lying area. Man, this ain’t
nobody’s hill right here. You know, and we’re really kind
of close to Dudley Square, but separated by that hill, that
Fountain Hill right there, which is not the same hill that
the fancy Negroes moved up to. I mean, these are some --
this is Dudley Square folk, not Grove Hole, not Eggleston
Square. Right? And Judge David Nelson, African American,
Jamaican parentage, son of Jamaican immigrants, grew up --
and a federal judge, grew up on the corner of this street.
You know, he was a contemporary of Mrs. Houston’s, [01:00]
and eventually president of the board of trustees of Boston
College. And there was -- who was I going to say? Oh, and
the guy who bought his house, the house from his family,
man it was Mr. Perry. Let me tell you about Mr. Perry.
Mr. Perry, please ask people about Mr. Perry. Did you know
Mr. Perry? Mr. Perry graduated from Boston Latin School, I
believe in 1941, OK? Samuel Perry, black man. Brilliant.
Went to World War II, and was a -- I guess like a field --
like he would write up the field reports and stuff, OK?
Came back, graduated from Harvard College, [02:00] all
right? Sam Perry. And then became a writer for the Boston
Chronicle, right? And what was really cool about Mr. Perry
30 is that from the 1950s through his death a couple of years ago, this guy tutored in Latin, various languages, the mathematics, whatever. The whole, you know, classical, you know, core curriculum. The -- every black student of
Boston Latin School that -- whose family wanted to avail themselves of his services, and he would do it in the reading room, the great reading room at the Boston public library, every day, every evening, every weekend, this guy,
[03:00] man he put so many of those kids into really good schools. Sam Perry. He was -- you know, he was a member of the Negro Press, friend of like, you know, James Hicks and these guys, and so he was a really interesting, quirky guy. And yeah, he’s -- how old would Mr. Perry be? I figure if he was living now, he might be 90, you know?
Well let’s see, 1920, yeah, pushing 90. Sam Perry, ask folks about Sam Perry. Especially if they have any connection at all to like Boston Latin School, or the arts and letters, and what have you. I would like for him to be historicized, man. Sam Perry. He was all over Lower
Roxbury, [04:00] and the South End, and around here. He lived right down there on the corner, by himself, in a three family house full of paper. Full of old, probably every edition that was every printed. Photographs, and they bulldozed it with the contents inside. I’ve got
31
pictures of them doing it. I’d like to share the pictures
of them doing it. Inspectional Services Department
bulldozing all of Mr. Perry’s stuff, man. One man filled
three stories and a basement of a large triple decker on
the corner of [Wakull?] and Rockland Street with all of
that Negro history, and it got bulldozed.
Q: Yeah, that always -- that hurts, really. Which is why I’m
[05:00] (inaudible). Oh wait, I just found something. It
was why I always go into old buildings and search around,
and drag out papers, and you know, even if I don’t know
what they are, because I know they’re something, and I hold
them at my house until I find a place for them to live.
EVANS: Right.
Q: (laughter) And I’ve -- you know, I’ve been doing that for a
while. Like I’ll find people’s family -- I’ve lived in
houses where I go in the attic and find a box of
memorabilia, and I -- you know, there’s one box of
memorabilia I’ve been, you know, 25 years I’ve been
carrying this around -- [05:41]
END OF AUDIO FILE
Q: OK. Who was that, Roland?
32
EVANS: Roland Hays was an African American -- well I guess, I
was about to say tenor, but no, he was a baritone, I guess,
who sang in opera houses all over the world. And you know,
New York, Carnegie Hall, Boston. He was huge man, he was
like Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
(laughter)
Q: Right, so people would come up here from the South because
they couldn’t go out to cultural stuff in the South, and
they’d come up here and visit their, you know, relatives in
Boston, and go to the symphony, and go to the museums, and
go to the, whatever they couldn’t do back home in South
Carolina.
EVANS: I hear you. [00:47]
END OF AUDIO FILE
EVANS: -- nationally significant people.
Q: OK, the mic’s on. Nationally significant people, so it’s
not (inaudible).
EVANS: Well Olive Lee Benson, you know, who started Olive’s
Salon there? Also, to find out more about Amanda Houston
and her -- this is going to be a minefield, I mean a
goldmine, I should say, not a minefield, of information.
If you contact -- if you talk to her daughters, Paulette
33
Houston, who lives here in Roxbury still, and her daughter
-- look, this woman was so proud of herself, she named her
daughter after herself, Amanda Houston-Hamilton, who’s a
psychoanalyst, a doctor out in the San Francisco Bay area.
They remember a lot about like, their grandmother, Alice
Samuels. And sort of their mother -- even more years of
exposure [01:00] to their mother’s stories about -- than I
had, about --
Q: Do you know, does any university or any place hold her
papers?
EVANS: You know --
Q: Amanda’s?
EVANS: -- not currently, but we were -- when she died, we
were talking about that. I think that you know, we were
talking about like BC doing it, I don’t think they do, I
think Northeastern, which is her alma mater, is something -
- you should talk to Paulette.
Q: Because it’s part of what I’m to be doing.
EVANS: There’s now a traveling fellowship at Boston College
named for Amanda Houston. She believed that travel was an
important and missing feature of many sort of black
students’ full education, you know? And so there’s the
Amanda Houston traveling fellowship at Boston College, but
Paulette’s basement up there at Mrs. Houston’s house, Mrs.
34
Houston eventually moved up to the hill, Homestead Street,
which is where she lived when I met her, just down the
street from Elma Lewis and up the hill a little bit [02:00]
from Sarah Anne Shaw. And then interspersed with a whole
bunch of just people. She’s got a lot of stuff man, in
that basement, and in that house. Pictures, history. I --
Q: Yeah definitely, if you can put me in touch with her, it
will be someone that I would -- [02:24]
END OF AUDIO FILE
Q: Here we go.
EVANS: Yeah, you know, just that the Boston branch of the
NAACP, which is located historically on the corner of Mass
Ave and -- that’s Columbus, right? OK, opposite of -- not
on the corner of the Harriet Tubman House, not on the
corner with New York Pizza, but that -- between the two.
But that’s where -- you know, that was the branch
headquarters, the branch office. And the NAACP,
historically, the strength of the NAACP, the effectiveness
of the NAACP lies in its branches. And the Boston branch
of the NAACP, because as a Trotter and a Du Bois and an IB
Wells creation, was always an important branch, so to
speak. And in the 1960s and ’70s, early ’70s, it was
35
[01:00] that branch and its president, Ruth Batson, who grew up in the projects down there, and their attorney, Tom
Atkins, who successfully sued the Boston School Committee, you know, in federal court, and won the judgment that lead to the desegregation of Boston public schools, which is another nationally significant story, right, of, you know, what black folks in Boston got started, or do, you know what I mean? Rippling, just like the shot heard around the world on Bunker Hill, that same dynamic is frequently at play in Boston’s unknown, invisible history in its black community. And so that’s an important place in the story.
And later, if you fast forward to the ’80s, the same -- president of that branch, Lewis [Alisa?], [02:00] and now state Senator Diane Wilkinson, who was then counsel to, successfully got the ball rolling for what eventually became the Federal Community Reinvestment Act. Because of their complaints here, and you know, about these New
England and Boston-based banks not affording the same quality or quantity of service, like ATMs and what have you, in the hood. Or issuing, you know, a proportionally equitable, you know, number of loans for home ownership or business development. That happened -- that’s here, you know? That’s people here that are breathing this air here, and fertilized [03:00] in that sort of same -- like I said,
36
that spirit, that ground, that hallowed ground, where these
people, from these 1920s socialists and feminists, and
Garveyites, and (inaudible) you know, all the, kind of set
some stuff into motion. Very, very civically minded, and I
think nationally significant breeding ground for black
civic participation and thought and stuff.
Q: Just one more time, if you could maybe just encapsulate
that piece about Boston’s renaissance? I mean, I think you
maybe said it well already once but, you know, you were
just talking about the Harlem Renaissance, and the Boston
renaissance, and -- or maybe it’s not called the Boston
renaissance, but however you would like to --
EVANS: It was, I think the Harlem Renaissance, quite frankly,
was a national phenomenon. It was the coming to fruition
of what an elder scholar of that time, [04:00] Alan Locke,
described as the new Negro. You know, and these were the
grandchildren of slaves. You know, Langston Hughes, Claude
McKay, County Cullen, Zora Neil Hurston. And because of
this book, black -- what is it? Well, it’s not Black
Metropolis, well because Harlem was the demographically
largest and richest sort of manifestation of, you know,
these new Negroes who hailed from the -- some originally
from the North, some from the South, recently, you know,
post-World War I, northern migration, the great migration
37 from the South to Boston, New York, Chicago, what have you.
And also, from the islands, those who didn’t go to [05:00]
England, you know, from Jamaica or what have you, but they would typically come to New York or Boston, or something like that. Well consequently, if you think about it,
Boston, with its sort of stage already set, with all the cultural institutions, and all of the political discourse, and civic action and participation, that’s just part and parcel of Boston’s history. No matter who you are, you know, that’s what happens if you’re engaged in public life.
The public sphere is as important as the private in Boston, more so than anywhere in America, off Capitol Hill. You know what I mean? And so, to come to this place, to make home, or to come to this -- or to have people come to this place where you are, and to be a 1920s, or then a
Depression-era, 1930s, or a World War II era, 1940s, or a
1950s era, and urban [06:00] renewal, and all that, to be any one of those periods of American urban history, and to be living that era, or that period in Boston,
Massachusetts, is always going to give you a distinct and rich, and compact, right, and blend, or story, that actually whether it ever gets documented or not, always ripples outward to make a difference. For instance, the
Rainbow Coalition that is attributed, most often, to Jesse
38
Jackson’s run for president in 1984? Actually, is more attributable to the candidacy in 1982 of Mel King for the mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, to be elected, it was hoped, by a coalition of people of all colors, ethnicities, and [07:00] socioeconomic backgrounds. A rainbow coalition. That was coined here. You know, the Free South
Africa movement, in this country, in this country that eventually took over college campuses all during the 1980s, and that culminated with the release of Nelson Mandela, and remember he came to -- he did his national tour, and he came to Boston, and then went down to, what is it, the
Esplanade, and he spoke. Trans-Africa, Randal Robinson,
Willard Johnson, these guys that were here in Boston in the late 1960s, when the [Harpursville?] Massacre occurred, and the (inaudible) uprisings, and Steve [Bickel?] and these people were murdered in South Africa, they, with their international perspective, they -- you know, they created, at the same time, Henry Hampton created Blackside, as a black, you know, filmmaking -- black-owned film production company, in this fertile ground is where these -- and
[Natemba Villakaze?], [08:00] you know, of the ANC, of the
African National Congress, when the average American citizen didn’t know who or what Nelson Mandela was, it was in these places and spaces down here, where these folks
39
would frequent, and they would live and play, and work and
study, and go to school, and be engaged in civic life,
right? That what they did, and the relationships they had,
and the work, that -- their output of their creative and
collective juices, made a different nationally and
internationally. Eyes on the prize. You know, Trans-
Africa really spearheading the Free South Africa movement.
I mean, that was here. You know, like I said, if you go
back to the Harlem Renaissance --
Q: So that’s what I was going to ask.
EVANS: -- if you go back to the Harlem Renaissance, I mean
there’s a Boston -- a uniquely Boston, perhaps even richer
twist to that, a current in Lower Roxbury. Because why?
[09:00] Because it’s Boston, right? Because it’s small,
and it’s intimate, you know what I mean? And it’s got that
same convergence of cultures, of African American cultures,
along with sort of that New England, or more specifically
Boston convergence of civic-mindedness and participation
with cultural, art, you know, high art, and what have you.
It’s actually a really great case study that you probably,
if you looked at it closely, you can tell more about the
Harlem Renaissance than looking at what happened in Harlem.
You see what I’m saying? In fact, it’s kind of like this.
Remember -- OK, Skip Gates won a MacArthur Grant, I think
40 around the time I started college. And he used it to unearth and discover a book by a woman who did -- an
African American woman who did live [10:00] named Harriet
Wilson, OK? And Harriet Wilson was not a slave, she lived here in New England, in Massachusetts, in the 1840s, you know, and ’50s, at the height of abolitionism, right? And she went to these Boston-based abolitionist speakers bureau, and publishers like William Lloyd Garrison, and you know, all these guys, these big fancy Brahmin abolitionists, to try to get her autobiographical novel published. They wouldn’t publish it, because she wasn’t
Southern, she wasn’t a slave. And they -- it wasn’t, you know, the market wasn’t there. Nobody wanted -- they wanted to read about Frederick Douglas, you know, coming up out of the South and lifting himself up by the bootstraps, and leading the race, [11:00] you know, blah-blah-blah. Or all the other, you know, hundreds of slave narratives.
Well, thank God Gates went back and found this book, republished it in the ’80s, 1980s, and pointed out actually, truly and consistently with what I was just saying about all these other periods of American history, and the black experience, and what it means here in Boston,
New England, and thus more broadly in America and the world, is that book tells you more about race in America in
41 the mid nineteenth century than any one of those slave narratives, or every one of them combined, because she wasn’t a Southern slave. So therefore, any consistencies between her story of being abused in the private domestic sphere of her household, a white household, in this area, with similar stories from the plantation South, tell you something not about race in the [12:00] South, or slavery, but race in America. That they can’t make the point, because they don’t occur in America, they occur in the
South. You see what I mean? Well same thing about the
Harlem Renaissance. Or you know, or like the history of the jazz clubs. You know, on Massachusetts Avenue, or the
-- in the ’60s, you know the promulgation of like these really cool, non-profit, or even for profit in the case of
Blackside, but these socially beneficial enterprises, non- governmental things, like the Youth Enrichment Services, or the NAACP actually, which had been around. Or Trans-
Africa, or Blackside, or what have you, that each one of them represents sort of like what Boston has always been since the very beginning, which is like this beacon on a hill to the rest of the nation and the world. But interestingly, because it’s been [13:00] black history, the beacon hasn’t shined as bright, you know, as it might otherwise. And I think you can really tell a lot about any
42
period in American history, including the Harlem
Renaissance, like I said, by looking closely at how it was
manifested here in Boston, even just before it broke
nationally, you know what I mean? And that’s just -- we
see many, many stories, or we know from our relationships
with people like Amanda Houston, and you know, Reverend
Haynes and others, that this is a recurring phenomenon,
right? Coming out of Lower Roxbury, or specifically, and
Boston’s historic black community more broadly. You know,
whether it was colonial to now, you know?
Q: And in so many different ways. Like you’re telling me
about this, but then I was talking to someone last night
about Olive, is her last name Benson?
EVANS: Benson, yeah. [14:00]
Q: Benson, and you know, how she was this hair care
revolutionary, and you know, so it doesn’t -- it didn’t
just have to be politics, or --
EVANS: Anything.
Q: Anything.
EVANS: Anything.
Q: And this concentration of people that were -- I don’t even
know what’s the square mileage of that Lower Roxbury area.
But because of the redlining, like you said earlier, and
they were forced to live in this small area, or some people
43
chose, they were like, you know what? I’ve had enough of
western Massachusetts, or Vermont, or Nova Scotia, so they
chose to come live in Lower Roxbury, because of, you know,
to be in the proximity of people who look like them.
EVANS: And whether they knew it or not, it was like you said,
a geographically small, demographically intimate crucible
of individual and collective creativity. I mean Alan
Krite, [15:00] the last surviving great of his generation -
- I mean this guy is basically a -- what would you call
him? I mean, he was a younger -- he was a much younger
sort of -- he was sort of like the youngest elder, you
know, of the Harlem Renaissance, you know, art tradition,
where you focus on the immediate surroundings -- you know,
the culture right here, you know, the Crystal Stair, my
life ain’t been no crystal stair for me. You talk -- you
make art, and make high art out of -- and proudly, as
African American urban people, in this new quasi-plantation
scene, right? You turn the everyday common experiences and
visions and sights and [16:00] sounds into high art. I
mean, that’s what the Harlem Renaissance, it was the
anthropology of Zora Neil Hurston, or the political
writings of -- or sociological stuff, you know, the -- what
are these guys, Jay Weldon Johnson, you know, these guys --
Dr. Du Bois, I mean they predicted that G3, those third
44 generation, those grandchildren of slaves, would be these new Negroes, and these really innovative folks that kind of took the nitty gritty of the black experience and sort of the high-mindedness that comes with being born free, and being free to explore the museums, you know, so to speak, and to expose yourself, and to expose yourself too, right?
The public sphere, [17:00] as an artist, as a writer, as a poet, or whatever. And they kind of set that off, and it’s funny because their grandkids, you know, end up doing the new black aesthetic in the ’60s. Right? Another explosion of taking the nitty gritty, you know, with some of these artists, including here in Boston. I mean just like that was a national phenomenon, you can look at that locally, the new black aesthetic, artistically, of the late ’60s and early ’70s that, you know, nationally evokes names like
Nicky Giovanni, Sonya Sanchez, you know what I mean? And some of these painters and photographers and so forth. And all you’ve got to do, with any one of these disciplines, or arts, or any one of these eras or time periods in which that art is occurring, and ask yourself what was going on with who in Boston at that time? And you’re going to find some stuff going on [18:00] that is like what I would call like, the doors. You know, the passageways to some new thing. I mean that goes -- that’s -- as far as black
45 history goes, that goes back to abolitionism, if not sooner. You know, this was where, you know, they -- what later became the national thing of having black folks who had been slaves or whatever on like the speaker circuit, you know what I mean? To tell it, you know? Or whatever.
I mean, this place is really, really inventive. Generation after generation after generation. Whether it’s known or not. Right? What that generation contributes on all those planes to American history. [19:00]
END OF AUDIO FILE
46