People's History Podcast: "Grove Hall" (S1E2)
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2019
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
<h4>As urban rebellions arise in cities, welfare rights advocates in Boston public housing use militant tactics to get services they are owed.</h4><h4>This is episode two of the first season of a 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.</h4>
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 | Freedom. |
| 0:03.0 | Freedom. |
| 0:06.0 | Freedom. Freedom. |
| 0:07.0 | Freedom. |
| 0:08.0 | Freedom. |
| 0:10.0 | Freedom. Freedom. |
| 0:12.0 | In the summer of 1963, a group of African American parents packed a courtroom building in downtown Boston. |
| 0:18.0 | It was a major school committee hearing and the parents were there to disrupt it, to present the all-white |
| 0:23.8 | administration with a list of demands. The demands included things like an end to |
| 0:28.5 | discrimination in hiring teachers, an investigation into why Boston had no black principles in a review of racist |
| 0:35.2 | intelligence testing. Above all they demanded that the committee make a public |
| 0:39.9 | statement. An immediate public acknowledgement of the existence of de facto segregation in the Boston school system. |
| 0:46.6 | The school committee feels this it cannot do. |
| 0:50.8 | What kind of segregation is there? The segregation is segregation that is the result primarily of housing patterns. |
| 0:57.0 | And this we recognize, we have said to the school committee, |
| 1:01.0 | segregation exists. The fact it is a result of |
| 1:05.0 | housing patterns is another problem. The fact that it exists is the school |
| 1:09.4 | committee's problem. The committee ignored the protesters so the parents decided to pull their kids, 6,000 of them, out of Boston schools. |
| 1:18.0 | They put them instead into churches which had been converted temporarily into radical workshops called Freedom Schools. |
| 1:25.0 | To Make the Play What Freedom? |
| 1:27.0 | Do you make the Play What Freedom? |
| 1:30.0 | Freedom! |
... |
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