Neighborhood Voices: An Oral History Internship

By: G. R. Peterson

In the 1960s and 70s, the areas along Dudley Street in Boston’s Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods were the target of intentional disinvestment and isolation by Boston banks, public and private developers, even including the City of Boston. These individuals and groups were influenced by many motives, foremost among them a toxic mix of greed and racism. An initial refusal to provide individuals of color with access to mortgages and other financial loans, combined with developers secretly intimidating the neighborhood’s white residents, particularly Jews who had already paid off their mortgages, prompted departures, and ultimately led to a dismal housing market. Houses started burning down almost every night, some torched by landlords eager to leave the neighborhood with the most cash possible—collecting homeowner’s insurance was known to produce a larger sum than selling property. Burned out lots became vacant. Vacant lots eventually became vacant blocks. To add insult to injury, throughout the 1980s many outsiders to the neighborhood, including City contractors, used the lots as dumping grounds for the city’s trash.

Fires blazed on and off for a decade in the 1970s, sometimes night after night, leaving behind vacant lots. Screenshots from the documentary Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street by Mark Lipman and Leah Mahan, 1996

In response to the devastation, as well as the irrepressible belief that the neighborhood could be a successful urban neighborhood, community members organized the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in 1984. Community members included residents, area business owners, and leaders of local nonprofits. DSNI’s mission is to empower Dudley residents to organize, plan for, create and control a vibrant, diverse and neighborhood in collaboration with community partners. The neighborhood’s residents specifically identify the right to a hazard-free environment, affordable housing, affordable childcare, education for and training of children and adults, and to be treated in a culturally sensitive manner by the wider society as major values. In short, DSNI is a community organization for the community, constituted and determined by the community. Most of its board members are residents and represent the four major ethnic/racial groups in the neighborhood (African American, Cape Verdean, Hispanic, White). Community youth as well as representatives of businesses, agencies, and religious organizations located in DSNI’s catchment area also sit on the Board. Since 1984, DSNI has undertaken a massive cleanup of the neighborhood’s vacant lots, won ownership of neighborhood land from the City of Boston, and built 226 new affordable homes on their property. DSNI is one of the only community organizations in the United States that owns city land. Effectively, this ownership means DSNI controls the terms of the land’s development, thus protecting its residents’from displacement that often accompanies development.

Today DSNI still confronts the challenge of systemic dangers. The development of a new shopping, eating, movie-watching, and residential area a la Somerville’s Assembly Row fifteen minutes from DSNI’s headquarters, for instance, threatens Dudley Street neighbors with displacement by gentrification.

But DSNI has a history of success in building a strong neighborhood that serves it residents and businesses. This past offers vital lessons for today’s challenges. Over the course of their 30 years, DSNI accomplished many of their goals and stabilized the community. Perhaps this history could serve a new generation of residents and activists, although there are very few published sources that narrate the history of this Boston neighborhood since the 1960s.

Streets of Hope is one of the only book-length texts with historical information about the Dudley neighborhood’s disinvestment and later renewal through community efforts

This is what inspired Rosalind “Ros” Everdell, a recently retired long-time employee at DSNI, to undertake a neighborhood oral history project. Building on her long and deep connections with the diverse racial and cultural groups, individuals and organizations in the neighborhood, Ros conceived Neighborhood Voices–a cross-generational project that records spoken, first-person stories documenting the Dudley Street neighborhood history since the 1960s. The audio-recordings will be placed at UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections in the Healey Library, and portions of the interviews will be uploaded onto the DSNI website. The project will ultimately produce over 20 individual interviews over the next two years.

Although a relative newcomer to the Dudley Street neighborhood—I arrived in 2014—I developed a passion for the Neighborhood Voices project. My landlord, Bob Haas, had told me many stories of his own experiences in the neighborhood as a resident and active community organizer since 1971. The project also provided an opportunity for me to bring together my interests in community-based history, oral history, and my commitment to the neighborhood. Mentored by a skilled and experienced community organizer with a vision, I signed on as an intern to learn public history by doing, and create a program to train project participants, including myself, in some of the rudiments of oral history. I organized an oral history workshop to train resident interviewers, and produced materials on oral history procedures, and a pertinent history timeline to provide local, regional and national historical context. As a relative newcomer to the neighborhood, I had the opportunity to interview my landlord, and thus practice some of my emerging oral history skills.

Blogpost author, Genny Peterson, right, interviewed Bob Haas for the Neigbhorhood Voices oral history project. Photo by Keiko Hiromi.

Through interning with the Neighborhood Voices Project, I learned about the importance of personal connection and individual respect necessary in oral history work, versus the distant observation for which history is traditionally known. As a result of Ros Everdell’s personal networks built on relationship-building and respect and resulting from years of community organizing for better living conditions in the neighborhood, this project was possible and will continue to record the stories of the Dudley neighborhood residents.