People's History Podcast: "False Hope" (S1E6)
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2020
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Columbia Point tenants face new management and a private police force.
This is the final episode of the first season of People's History Podcast! "The Point: Rebellion and Resistance in Boston Public Housing" traces a social history of Boston from the urban rebellions of the 1960s, through busing in the 70s, into the Clinton era.
We investigate these events from the lens of one community: Columbia Point, the largest public housing project in New England. Built on an isolated landfill site next to the Boston city dump, it was the site of major organizing, from welfare rights to a Free Breakfast for Children program. It was also the first public housing project to be sold off and redeveloped as private "mixed-income" development (and was a model for the federal policy "HOPE VI").
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My mother, my father, my father, my grandmother, both grandmothers. I've been out there all my life. From the time I was born in |
| 0:17.0 | 1964, all the way up until Pride Night93-94. |
| 0:24.6 | We used to hang out on the blocks |
| 0:26.3 | because we had a place called the blocks. |
| 0:29.5 | Everybody lived in one circle then and the blocks were a bunch of blocks built and it was like a |
| 0:38.7 | playground for the kids and they have blocks where we everybody at night when it's nice and hot hour or something. |
| 0:46.0 | That's where we always to go and sit down and smoke cigarettes and drink and you know everybody sit around because it's hot and we used to hang out. I was |
| 0:58.5 | messing around with this dude that he was from New York and he wasn't living with me but he used to come over, you know, hang out with me and we used to go out and stuff. you know, he used to come by, visit. Never spent the night though, never. He used to just be over here, you know, and leave maybe about 1 o'clock in the morning |
| 1:23.7 | so you know walk on down to the other end but I never knew that he was a fugitive. |
| 1:31.2 | So being there he used to hang around by my house and stuff. |
| 1:37.0 | Then I went through that eviction process. |
| 1:40.0 | They arrested him. |
| 1:41.0 | And then the next couple of about a week later, they could send me a letter. |
| 1:47.0 | Because they were like, oh, we've seen them coming out to your house, you know. |
| 1:52.3 | So they figure he was coming out my house, he was selling drugs and all that stuff, which he wasn't doing it in my house because I didn't know if he actually was doing it and not because he never did things around me. |
| 2:08.0 | I went to court and they really didn't have nothing on me but just that that he was my |
| 2:20.4 | boyfriend and all that stuff so then I had a choice either they evicted me because of that or I will move. |
| 2:28.0 | And I moved. |
| 2:32.0 | I went into a shelter. |
| 2:35.0 | And then I still had sort of like a hard time getting an apartment, |
| 2:50.4 | because when I first try to get an apartment, I went to Mission Park. I applied for them and then they had accepted me but in between them accepting it they had to go through the quarry and all that |
| 3:00.5 | Then they called the people |
... |
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