HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

For decades, a 1967 riot that rocked Roxbury’s Grove Hall neighborhood was generally referred to in the mainstream media as a “race riot” or as “the welfare riot,” while a handful of articles and books by Black authors called it “the police riot.” A group of mostly African American women who led a group called Mothers for Adequate Welfare were staging a sit-in protest at a welfare office on Blue Hill Avenue. When tensions escalated, the police stormed in and used force to remove the group. Onlookers were outraged by the violence and attempted to stop the police. The resulting riot spanned three nights in Roxbury, with arson, looting, and shots fired both by and at the police, and the scars it left behind took decades to heal.

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• Coverage of the protest and riot from the Boston Globe: June 3, June 3 evening edition, June 4, June 5, June 5 evening edition, June 6, June 7, June 7 evening edition, June 10, and June 11.
• A wire story carried in the June 4 San Bernadino Sun.
• A 1968 Boston Globe Magazine special on race in Boston.
• Coverage in the Harvard Crimson on June 13 and June 15.
• Grove Hall Memory Project interviews with Paula Doress-Worters and Arthur Sutton. (audio and transcript available)
• 50th anniversary retrospectives from the Globe and the Crimson.
• Boston’s Struggle in Black and Brown: Racial Politics, Community Development, and Grassroots Organizing, 1960-1985 by Tatiana Maria Fernández Cruz
• Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development, by Mel King
• An overview from Timeline.
• A booster-ish history of Grove Hall.
• How the Highland Street Railway changed Grove Hall.
• Pictures via Getty:
  • A child eavesdrops on the sit-in.
  • A photographer captures the moment the protest turned ugly.
  • Broken windows in stores and a fire truck.
  • Mothers for Adequate Welfare march in front of USES.
• Header image via the Boston Globe, June 3, 1967.
• Raw footage shot for WHDH showing the MAW sit-in and subsequent riot all mixed together. The caption says that there is also footage of the 1968 riot after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, but I believe this is nearly all from 1967. At 6:19-7:354, you can see the MAW sit-in at Grove Hall, with shots of looting after that. At 12:00, police muster at Schoolboy Stadium. At 31:43, police take bolt cutters into the welfare office to cut the chains. The header image is taken from 31:50-32:12 and shows protesters being dragged out of the welfare office, as violence becomes inevitable.
• I’m not sure if the scary music and racist voiceover were in the original news footage below, or if they were added when the video was uploaded to YouTube.

Published by the UMass Press in 2014, A People’s History of the New Boston, by Jim Vrabel applies the ethos of Howard Zinn’s ever popular People’s History of the US on a local scale, taking on Boston in the 20th century. Vrabel is a historian, community activist, and longtime city employee. His other works have tried to assemble a complete timeline of Boston, from pre-history through today, but this one focuses on postwar Boston. Here’s how the publisher describes it:

Although Boston today is a vibrant and thriving city, it was anything but that in the years following World War II. By 1950 it had lost a quarter of its tax base over the previous twenty-five years, and during the 1950s it would lose residents faster than any other major city in the country.

Credit for the city’s turnaround since that time is often given to a select group of people, all of them men, all of them white, and most of them well off. In fact, a large group of community activists, many of them women, people of color, and not very well off, were also responsible for creating the Boston so many enjoy today. This book provides a grassroots perspective on the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when residents of the city’s neighborhoods engaged in an era of activism and protest unprecedented in Boston since the American Revolution.

Using interviews with many of those activists, contemporary news accounts, and historical sources, Jim Vrabel describes the demonstrations, sit-ins, picket lines, boycotts, and contentious negotiations through which residents exerted their influence on the city that was being rebuilt around them. He includes case histories of the fights against urban renewal, highway construction, and airport expansion; for civil rights, school desegregation, and welfare reform; and over Vietnam and busing. He also profiles a diverse group of activists from all over the city, including Ruth Batson, Anna DeFronzo, Moe Gillen, Mel King, Henry Lee, and Paula Oyola. Vrabel tallies the wins and losses of these neighborhood Davids as they took on the Goliaths of the time, including Boston’s mayors. He shows how much of the legacy of that activism remains in Boston today.

The third annual transcribe-a-thon at the Massachusetts Historical Society is coming up on July 13. The first transcribe-a-thon was held in July of 2017 to mark John Quincy Adams’ 250th birthday. Sara Martin, the editor in chief of the Adams Papers for the Massachusetts Historical Society, describes the project of digitizing over 15,000 pages of John Quincy’s diaries and how volunteers on the transcribe-a-thon contributed to American historiography:

John Quincy Adams (JQA, 1767–1848) is one of America’s great statesmen. The oldest son of founders John and Abigail Adams, his distinguished career in public service spanned six decades and included roles as diplomat, secretary of state, president, and congressman. For 68 years, JQA kept a diary of his public and private experiences. The 51-volume diary comprises the longest continuous record of any American of the time and provides an unparalleled resource not only for scholars—the traditional audience for this type of publication—but for educators, students, and a general public interested in history. Building on a project completed more than a decade ago that digitized the entire JQA manuscript diary and created basic metadata for every date entry, the DJQA project will make JQA’s diary truly accessible for the first time by presenting a verified and searchable transcription of each entry on the MHS website.

Participatory engagement with transcription of a historical archive can be a powerful marketing tool, but adequate quality controls must be built in to a project in order to yield a transcription that meets the standard of the documentary editing community. In the summer of 2017, the MHS attempted to bridge this divide when it held its first transcribe-a-thon to commemorate JQA’s birthday. Over the course of several hours, 30 participants transcribed nearly 80 pages of the diary. To provide some control, we asked each participant to start by transcribing the same short paragraph that contained many of JQA’s quirks of handwriting. This gave us a qualitative baseline by which to review the transcriptions and make quick determinations about usability. Overall, approximately 90 percent of the transcriptions were incorporated into the project’s transcription files. The transcribe-a-thon also yielded a handful of volunteer transcribers, another way the DJQA project is trying to engage the public in its work. All transcriptions, however, will be verified before being published online, a vital step of the process and one that is best done by project staff in order to maintain the standards of the Adams Papers edition as a whole.

If you’d like to participate in this year’s transcribe-a-thon at the MHS on Saturday, July 13 from 10am to 3pm, please register through the MHS. Attendance is free, and lunch will be provided. Thanks in advance for all you do to make the Adams Papers online an even richer historical resource, and helping to digitize the full text of JQA’s diary for people like me to search through and read online.