Common Ground (38 page)

Four years later, the pledge remained unfulfilled—indeed, racial and social unrest was provoking talk of an “urban crisis.” In a March 1965 address on
urban policy, Lyndon Johnson declared, “The modern city can be the most ruthless enemy of the good life, or it can be its servant. The choice is up to this generation of Americans. For this is truly the time of decision for the American city.” Johnson unveiled an array of new housing programs, among them the rent supplement, which he called “the most crucial new instrument in our effort to improve the American city.” Rent supplements took the subsidy concept one step further—for the first time directly paying a portion of the needy family’s rent. As amended by Congress, they became an additional subsidy, piggybacked on 221 (d) 3, permitting low-income families who would otherwise have been relegated to public housing to live in subsidized projects. Such families paid only 25 percent of their incomes; the government paid the rest.

By 1965, 221 (d) 3 housing was heir to the loftiest idealism of the New Frontier and the Great Society: these were not to be mere real estate deals, but havens for society’s disadvantaged. At first, the program was limited to nonprofit groups—churches, fraternal organizations, and community groups. Later, limited-dividend commercial operations became eligible. But in Boston’s South End, as elsewhere, the program retained a bias toward churches, which were assumed to possess the requisite altruism. The Boston Redevelopment Authority, trying hard to live down its high-handed treatment of the West End, had particular reasons to prefer non-profit sponsors rooted in the community. Moreover, since most of those to be rehoused in the South End were blacks or Puerto Ricans, it was hoped that black churches would have special credibility with prospective tenants.

Gil Caldwell wasn’t sure that Union Methodist had much credibility, but he hoped to gain some from sponsoring comfortable, attractive, low-priced housing. Urban renewal too often meant “Negro removal,” and the South End was already beginning to fill up with young white professionals, but the project would at least assure that a substantial number of blacks remained in the neighborhood. If some of them should express their gratitude by joining the church, all the better.

Gil Caldwell had an even larger vision: “We envisioned ourselves as not only putting up housing, but having an ongoing responsibility to the persons who lived there, whether they were members of our church or not. Here was a real opportunity to bring some of Union’s middle-class blacks together with inner-city residents. People who had been able to move out of the South End and Roxbury could relate to their brothers and sisters who were still caught there. We envisioned a sense of reciprocity—residents and non-residents talking together about how you make that a human environment.”

In March 1965—even before the South End renewal plan was approved by the City Council—two BRA representatives met with Caldwell in the pastor’s study to outline procedures for a 221 (d) 3 project. Soon, the church formed the Columbus Avenue Housing Corporation to sponsor such a project. By May, a site had been selected, stretching four blocks down Columbus Avenue and occupied by several shabby apartment buildings, the five-story Braddock
Hotel, the notorious 411 Lounge, and other bars frequented by black prostitutes and the white hunters who pursued them. In place of all this squalor would rise four new buildings to be called Methunion Manor.

In December 1965, the church chose Henry Boles, a respected black architect, to design the project, and Boles came up with an ingenious idea: instead of flat slabs, he proposed a series of duplexes stacked one on another to form the six-story buildings. The two-story units would be staggered to create a grid, breaking up the concrete façades and echoing the surrounding blocks of nineteenth-century town houses. Caldwell and his housing committee were delighted; buildings like these would make a handsome contribution to the new South End, they thought—a lasting symbol of the church’s concern for its neighbors.

But the design quickly ran into trouble. The BRA liked it, but the Federal Housing Administration—which would have to insure the mortgage—regarded it as “unrealistic” and overly expensive. Months dragged by in administrative wrangling. A Boston construction company which had bid on the stacked duplexes pulled out, to be replaced by Bonwit Construction Company of New York, which scrapped Boles’s design and ordered him to come up with more conventional slabs. In the spring of 1968, Boles presented his new design to government officials and church representatives. The BRA didn’t care for the cold, austere result, preferring a “more esthetic approach.” Even Herman Boxer, Bonwit’s president, conceded, “I’d have liked a better-looking building, rather than a plain box, but I didn’t think it could be done with the money involved.” Indeed, nobody was particularly happy with the redesigned project.

Less than a month later, Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. In the black anger which followed his death, one target was the city’s failure to complete housing for the poor displaced by the South End renewal program. Methunion Manor was still on the drawing boards more than three years after it had been conceived, and other projects lagged even further behind schedule. Kevin White and his BRA director, Hale Champion, had promised to speed up the program, and following King’s death, they put increasing pressure on Boston’s banks and insurance companies, seeking pledges of additional low-income housing. But black leaders were increasingly impatient. Reggie Eaves, a South End activist, warned, “Let’s start stacking brick on brick, not word on word.”

On April 26, 1968, forty demonstrators blocked entrances to a South End parking lot. The activists—members of a group called Community Assembly for a United South End (CAUSE)—handed out notices reading: “Dear Car Parker: South End people want to live in decent homes at reasonable rents. No housing has been built. People have been moved, of course. Housing should be built on this land.” Sporadic clashes broke out during the day between the demonstrators and police. Five people were arrested.

But, as City Hall sought to cool the confrontation, CAUSE was temporarily permitted to occupy the lot. The demonstrators pitched tents and erected crude shacks; as the occupying force swelled past two hundred, support grew.
Martin Luther King, Sr., father of the murdered leader, took time from a memorial service in the city to visit the lot and pay tribute to its occupiers, who, he said, were acting in “my son’s spirit.” The Youth Alliance, which had helped restore peace after King’s death three weeks earlier, now provided security. Churches sent barbecued chicken, potato salad, and fruit salad. At times, the occupation took on a carnival air. As night fell, a saxophone wailed as dancers snaked through the lot, now known as “Tent City.”

When the demonstrators voluntarily struck their tents on April 30, they had won at least a symbolic victory. The next day, Hale Champion issued a sweeping edict halting further demolition of homes in the South End and promising that a major low-income housing program would be launched within ninety days. The Mayor, trying to pacify the city’s black community, yet determined to show that he wasn’t caving in to pressure, denied that Tent City had forced any changes; it had merely “called attention again to some of the urgent problems we have been working on for four months.” But, whether power politics or guerrilla theater, Tent City publicly committed the city to a new sense of urgency on low-income housing.

Even the new political imperatives couldn’t entirely break the Methunion logjam, for a new party had entered the dispute: the young white professionals, represented by the South End Project Area Committee (SEPAC), the committee elected by area residents to pass on the renewal program. Many of the newcomers were artists or architects; others had been drawn by the South End’s aesthetics. When SEPAC representatives first saw the revised designs for Methunion Manor, they exploded. “The ugliest housing I’ve ever seen,” said one architect. Objecting to the high density, minimal setbacks, lack of landscaping or adequate play space for children, the committee lobbied for revisions in the project design. City officials argued that it was too late, that a mortgage commitment had already been given on the basis of the current design; moreover, they warned, if the project was delayed again, or—God forbid—canceled, that could jeopardize the whole South End renewal program, from which the newcomers stood to benefit the most. Josh Young, the West Newton Street banker who had become one of SEPAC’s leaders, told his colleagues, “We may not like the way it looks. But there are thousands of people in our neighborhood who desperately need decent, reasonably priced housing.” Young’s arguments prevailed. In autumn 1969, SEPAC reluctantly endorsed Methunion.

But the dispute left some of the newcomers with a sense of grievance against Union Methodist Church. On several occasions they had sought to discuss the project design with the Reverend William Bobby McClain, who, in mid-1968, succeeded Gil Caldwell as Union’s minister. An Alabamian, educated at Boston University’s School of Theology, McClain had worked for a time in Boston’s poverty program. Gil Caldwell was an angry man, but McClain practically seethed with rage at white society. “God help me,” he once told Rachel Twymon, “I hate white people so much!” Certainly he had no
interest in debating architecture with them. When a delegation of whites called on him to talk about Methunion, he flatly refused to discuss the matter. “Those buildings will last a hundred years,” he snapped. Later he charged that several South End whites had been so determined to block the project that they had offered to buy the church.

Bobby McClain was an electrifying preacher who mesmerized his congregation with the power of his language. To the quiet dignity of Union’s sanctuary, he brought the evangelical techniques of Southern revivalism, and his message had a new, cutting edge. Black Methodists, he said, were “like Jonah in the belly of a white whale. We are still like Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones. We, like the man in the Good Samaritan story, are still ‘fallen among thieves’—thieves of Jericho who have stolen our names, our heritage, our rights, our religion and robbed us of our culture and our self-concept.” If Gil Caldwell’s style had reflected the mid-sixties ascendancy of Martin Luther King, McClain’s mirrored post-King disenchantment and militance.

During Caldwell’s ministry, fifteen or twenty whites regularly attended Union Methodist, but McClain’s denunciations made them deeply uneasy. Ultimately, Mary Holman, a prominent black parishioner, advised McClain to “go a little easy.” McClain dismissed her words of caution. “If they can’t take what I’m dishing out,” he said, “they shouldn’t come here anymore.” In the following months, most whites stopped attending Union’s services.

Before blacks and whites could worship comfortably together, McClain believed, the former slaveholders had to expiate their sins. In mid-1969, he devoted his formidable energy to the crusade for “reparations” from white churches, a notion introduced that spring by James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he interrupted services at New York’s Riverside Church to demand $500 million—“fifteen dollars per nigger”—as reparations for past injuries suffered by blacks. As chairman of New England Black Methodists for Church Renewal, Bobby McClain led a fight for $1,500,000 in reparations for his area. When the New England Conference allocated only $235,000, and failed to pay all of that, McClain leveled a polemic at his church, warning the white New England Methodist that blacks were now “coming to him as assertive missionaries rather than as docile menials who once accommodated his paternalizing charitable benevolence by saying ‘please’ for the crumbs under his table.”

As her new pastor confronted the church’s white leadership, Rachel Twymon looked on in astonishment. Still a devout integrationist, she would never permit herself to voice such open anger at white people. Yet she nursed her own quiet grievance at many white Methodists. As a board member of the Cooper Community Center, she resented the remote stance many white suburban church members adopted toward the needs of inner-city Methodists. They might send money, food, or secondhand clothing, much like the handouts they gave their maids or gardeners, but they rarely came anywhere near the center. It was clear to Rachel that suburban whites didn’t mind blacks
belonging to their church—indeed might even welcome them as a badge of virtue—so long as they didn’t get too close. Gradually Rachel found her way into Black Methodists for Church Renewal, eventually becoming secretary of the New England branch, hoping the organization would become “a thorn in the side of our white brothers and sisters, so they won’t forget we’re here.”

His dramatic struggle for “reparations” diverted Bobby McClain’s attention from the technicalities of Methunion Manor. For many reasons negotiations dragged on. Not until April 7, 1970, did the FHA give its final mortgage commitment of $4,231,949. In only fifteen months, rising construction costs had added $1,275,100 to the project’s bill. Five weeks later, on May 17, 1970, ground was broken at last. Rachel and her mother, Helen, were among the church members who gathered in the abundant sunshine across the street from the church as McClain led them in a litany written for the occasion: