Dudley Street Becomes a "Street of Hope"

by Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar

Long Boston's most impoverished area, the Dudley Street neighborhood is living an extraordinary story of community rebirth shaped by the dreams of ordinary people of different races and generations. This inner city neighborhood, like so many around the country, was treated like an outsider city--separate, unequal and disposable. The resident-led Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) is rebuilding it with the power of pride, organizing and a unified vision of comprehensive community development.

For years, Dudley has looked as if an earthquake had struck, leveling whole sections. Streets crisscross blocks of vacant lots where homes and shops used to be. In the summer, the lots bloom with violet wildflowers, nature's gift to a community working to rebuild against great odds.

The earthquake that hit Dudley was neither natural nor sudden. Instead, in a pattern repeated nationally, a thriving urban community was trashed and burned. It was redlined by banks, government mortgage programs and insurance companies in a self-fulfilling prophecy of White flight, devaluation and decline. While tax money subsidized the building of segregated suburbia and upscale "urban renewal," inner city neighborhoods like Dudley were stripped of jobs, homes and government services.

The distance between downtown Boston and downtrodden Dudley could not be measured by the less than two miles between them. One area reflected privilege and reinvestment, the other prejudice and disinvestment.

Beginning in the 1950s, disinvestment, abandonment and arson turned Dudley homes, yards and businesses into wasteland. * By 1981, one-third of Dudley's land lay vacant. It became a dumping ground for trash from around the city and state. The dumping wasn't legal, but the violators came and went without fear of the law, blighting the neighborhood with toxic chemicals, auto carcasses, old refrigerators, rotten meat and other refuse. Adding insult to injury, Dudley became an illegal dumping ground for debris from housing and other construction elsewhere around Boston.

Che (pronounced Shay) Madyun, longtime president of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, first moved to Dudley in 1976. For two years she and her family lived in the home of community activist Jessie Farrier in the historic Mt. Pleasant section of Dudley, an area with numerous longtime homeowners, many of them African American. Farrier's son had been a classmate of Madyun at Emerson College. Farrier encouraged Madyun to register to vote for the 1977 election in which John O'Bryant became the first Black person elected to the Boston School Committee in the twentieth century.

Originally from Alabama, Farrier has lived in the Dudley neighborhood since 1950. She committed herself to staying and making things better as more and more houses burned down around her. Every New Year's Day, Farrier has an open house to which all are welcome. In her plant-filled living room, pictures of her children and grandchildren are mingled with her awards for community work. "I didn't buy this house to sell it," Farrier asserts. "As long as any of my children are in Boston, I want them to be in this house here." [1]

In 1978, Che Madyun and her family moved to a larger place in the Cottage Brook Apartments on Dudley Street. "Fire engines used to run up and down the street every night," Madyun recalls. "You could always smell smoke, and I used to get real afraid [thinking] that our building was going to get burned also. I remember when the building behind us burned--directly behind us--and the smoke was coming inside and the windows were closed. It was scary. . . Cars used to get burned a lot, but mostly it was houses. And then, of course, eventually they got torn down." Fire trucks were a familiar sight, but not other city services. "I don't remember seeing any street cleaners," she says.

As her three children grew older, Madyun went "to great lengths" to take them "all over the city so they could get involved in different activities, and I used to think it was a shame I always had to go so far away." A talented dancer herself, Madyun took her children to music, dance and swimming programs in the South End and other Boston neighborhoods.

"Everything was over there, over there, over there," she recalls. "There was nothing ever in here."

Today, Madyun and her family live in a new cooperative purchased partly with "sweat equity." Her children have participated in DSNI's Youth Committee, summer programs and multicultural festivals and helped design a planned community center. In the future, no parent will have to lament, "Everything was over there, over there. . . nothing ever in here."

PEOPLE WITH SOLUTIONS

The unnatural earthquake didn't destroy the whole Dudley neighborhood. Many homes remained, some businesses survived. Newcomers moved in--some from across town, others from down South or across the ocean. Old-timers and newcomers--White, Black, Latino and Cape Verdean--joined together to rebuild their neighborhood with the power of hope and pride, organizing and community-controlled development.

The Dudley population is poorer and younger than that of Boston as a whole. Unemployment is at least twice as high and per capita income is half that of the larger city. Dudley's official poverty rate--more than one out of three residents--is nearly twice Boston's average. Over a third of Dudley residents are under 18 years old. One out of two Dudley children lives below the official poverty line--a line set well below what is actually needed to buy adequate food, housing and other necessities. [2]

Though it is Boston's most underemployed and economically impoverished neighborhood, Dudley is also richly diverse and industrious. The DSNI story challenges those who mask disinvestment and discrimination in slanderous, scapegoating stereotypes about an "underclass culture of poverty." As one major study put it, "Areas of concentrated poverty emerge from much of the historical and contemporary underclass literature as monolithic islands of despair and degradation." [3]

The stereotypical inner city neighborhood is full of hoodlums and not neighborly. It's stereotypically a savage jungle where the heroic, hardworking few, if any, struggle onward amid the many presumed to be hooked on crime, drugs and government "handouts." Stereotypers might count DSNI members among the heroic, but DSNI members are not few; they are many. As Dudley residents demonstrate poor people are not generically lacking in values. Their government often is.

Terms like "underclass" and "persistent poverty" imply that poverty persists in spite of society's commitment to end it. In reality, the economic system reproduces poverty no matter how persistently people are trying to get out or stay out of poverty. Since 1973, reports the Children's Defense Fund, "most of the fastest increases in poverty rates occurred among young white families with children, those headed by married couples, and those headed by high school graduates. For all three groups, poverty rates more than doubled in a single generation, reaching levels that most Americans commonly assume afflict only minority and single-parent families." [4] (Italics in original.)

The DSNI story challenges those who see inner city residents as people who have only problems, not solutions. It shows how effective community development begins by recognizing and reinforcing the resources within the community. It encourages low-income neighborhood residents to take stock of their varied individual and community assets and think boldly as they envision the future together.

DSNI is an intergenerational organization, with elders and teenagers among its diverse leadership. The DSNI story encourages others to nurture the positive power of inner city youth who are too often feared and expected to fail. Dudley's young people are playing an increasingly dynamic and inspirational role in the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.

Beginning in the 1980s with a "Don't Dump on Us" campaign to clean up the vacant lots and close down illegal trash transfer stations, DSNI organized hundreds of residents, forged a new sense of neighborhood identity and power and forced city government to respond. DSNI then turned the traditional top-down urban planning process on its head. Instead of struggling to influence a process driven by city government, Dudley residents and agencies became visionaries, created their own bottom-up "urban village" redevelopment plan and built an unprecedented partnership with the city to implement it. DSNI made history when it became the nation's frst neighborhood group to win the right of eminent domain and began transforming Dudley's burnt-out lots from wasteland to wealth controlled by the community. Launched with the strong backing of the local Riley Foundation, DSNI developed a growing network of public and private sector supporters.

Organizing is the renewable energy that powers DSNI and community development. DSNI's campaigns are punctuated with summary slogans: "Don't Dump On Us," "Take a Stand, Own the Land," "Building Houses and People Too," Dudley PRIDE--People and Resources Investing in Dudley's Environment," "Unite the Community, Celebrate Our Diversity," "Economics With People In Mind." Like quilters, the people of Dudley are working together, mixing old fabric and new, to create something warm and beautiful.

The Dudley neighborhood still has many vacant lots, many people without jobs or sufficient income, many children being shortchanged by society. Yet every year, Dudley residents see more of their holistic vision of community development become reality.

DSNI's challenge is enormous. It is striving to assure fair opportunity for people long treated as disposable, at a time when more and more people are being dispossessed of secure livelihoods. It is striving to build a sustainable, mutually beneficial, multicultural community, at a time when so many others choose divisiveness over diversity. The people of Dudley are pathfinders, guided by a vision of the future in which no one is disposable.

"RE-MEMBERING"

DSNI activist Paul Bothwell has lived in Dudley since 1976--a White church worker who arrived with his family after so many Whites had left. In October 1990, Bothwell was riding his bicycle when he was hit by a stolen car on the run in Dudley Station. "My head and face were crushed," he explained almost two years later. "It's just been devastating. . . and I'm still slowly in the rebuilding process. A lot of what has gone on through this recovery process, which was miraculous in itself, has been related to or has come from the effect of head injury on my brain and on my psyche and everything else. . . What it feels like inside is terrible, terrible dismembemment where you're terribly fractured psychically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally and physically as well. Just terribly fractured."

Bothwell describes his recovery process as a long, step-by-step process of being "re-membered. That is. . . the broken pieces, the scattered pieces. . . little by little, are being picked up and re-membered. What comes out is something different. I'm not the same as before and I never will be the same as before. It's different."

"I think that same thing has happened" in Dudley, says Bothwell. "That's why I tell my story so much. . . This community wasn't shattered in 1972 on July 4th or something. It was a long process of dismemberment. Literally, it was torn limb from limb and heart from heart and person from person. . . I think it rested at that place being terribly dismembered for quite a long period of time. There were some little spurts of hope, but it rested dismembered.

"I think that DSNI [was] able to identify the heart of the community and start with that. It. . . began to pull the heart back together again and began to get something that people could say, 'Hey, that's me! That's what I feel! Little by little, what I feel in this community begins to matter.' That's the first time that's ever happened. Somehow, the heart began to grow and grow. Very little by little, pieces of this community have sort of re-membered again, pulled back together. It's not whole by any means yet. You dream and hope it will be, whatever wholeness means and can be. It's being re-membered. . . It will come out different than it was before. . . It will reflect who is here now. That's the way it ought to be. It's great. . . It's a process of finding its way."

Bothwell cites an African proverb he learned while growing up in Zaire: "'Together we find the way.' Nobody knows the way. 'We ought to go this way. We ought to go that way.' The fact of the matter is that together, we find the way. It's a process. . . There are lots of ups, lots of downs, lots of wrong turns and everything else. Together, we'll find the way. I feel that's what's happening with DSNI. Together, we'll find the way."

NOTES

* Throughout this book, Dudley refers to the Dudley Street nighborhood as defined by DSNI boundaries (see earlier map--not available online), not to the Dudley Station commercial district that borders the neighborhood.

1. All quotes are from author interviews or firsthand knowledge unless noted otherwise. See list of interviews [not available online].

2. See census data in Apendix tables. . . .

3. Michael B. Katz, "The Urban 'Underclass' as a Metaphor of Social Transformation," in Katz, ed., The 'Underclass' debate: Views From History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.), p. 21. . . .

4. Children's Defense Fund, Vanishing Dreams: The Economic Plight of America's Young Families (Washington, D.C.: Children's Defense Fund, 1992).

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