I’m old enough to remember the Urban Renewal days of the early ’60s, as our family home at 21 Munroe Street in Roxbury was taken by eminent domain by a then nascent Boston Redevelopment Authority. The reasoning for the taking, then and now, was blight and urban decay. But none of those reasons fit our home, begging the question: Why would a city do this to not just our family, but any family, and what blight and urban decay are you talking about? We don’t see that, define it please!
These days we see these city land takings for what they have always been: hurtful bias and racial bias against the working poor and working class, emigrants and people of color in Boston.
I started high school at Boston Technical High (now John D. O’Bryant) — when Judge Garrity ordered Boston’s schools be desegregated, ushering in an era of bussing school children, meant to level what was a very separate and unequal educational playing field.
As a member of the White Stadium Impact Advisory Group (IAG), observing injustice and seeking justice isn’t new to me. I see the privatization of White Stadium to women’s soccer as seminal as the harms of Urban Renewal and bussing combined! In my IAG capacity, and as a citizen of Roxbury for so many years, I never supported plans to privatize White stadium and realized folks in my neighborhood would be better served if I joined the Emerald Necklace Conservancy effort to fight on the side of real justice and became a plaintiff in the environmental justice lawsuit now pending against the city of Boston.
In 1963, from a Birmingham jail, Martin Luter King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The Wu administration isn’t privatizing the Public Garden, or the Boston Common, the more affluent areas of the city, but she’s privatizing parts of Franklin Park and White Stadium. What happened to the equity platform the mayor ran on and always reminds us of?
The Wu administration’s calculus for privatization is that the land is only being leased for thirty years and in that time, the stadium will be modernized, and women’s soccer is responsible for the upkeep of the new facilities. But wait a minute. Isn’t that just kicking the “injustice can” down the road for future mayors to deal with when the 30 years is up? And if that weren’t bad enough, Boston school athletics are displaced and the taxpayers of Boston are subsidizing women’s soccer, given the cost to renovate the stadium is far less than the $50 Million dollars the city of Boston is kicking in on the deal!
With the recent opening ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics, we note that Boston could have hosted these games, if not for not knowing how to include everybody in the spoils as a city, and we all would have had to pay for it, whether we liked it or not!
But the real injustice that led to years of White Stadium neglect was because of its location in the mostly Black and brown neighborhoods of Boston – that’s how we got here! Roxbury is the geographical center of the city of Boston. By design, Olmstead planned that the entire city would have equal access to a glorious city-wide greenspace. We can find adequate funding for the Public Garden and Boston Common, but not White Stadium? That’s the very same separate, but equal racial bias, school desegregation and bussing was supposed to address, right?
And it’s shocking to hear Mayor Wu talk about plans for White Stadium. In a roundtable press discussion, following a WBUR interview, where the mayor was asked what if women’s soccer fails to happen at White Stadium? Is there a plan B? Wu replied, “There is no plan B!” Joe Battenfeld of the Boston Herald pushed back on Mayor Wu’s answer: “No plan B? Why isn’t the mayor listening to constituent’s voices?” Many of us, me included, supported and voted for the mayor’s progressive agenda. But here I agree with the Herald, because they were on point and correct! What’s that about?
Boston is an old city, where the historical, evolving tapestry of its neighborhoods and voices tells collective stories that call out our creed and struggle and define the core of who we are in this city. Mayor Wu seemingly has no context of that core, what matters, and rarely listens to the voices that can help move the progressive needle that put her in office.
More than sixty years have passed since MLK’s call to justice from a Birmingham jail cell. Yet we never appreciated the real blight in our city that was undervaluing and not building the human capacity of people who call the city of Boston home. It was never about real estate or a real estate deal but should have been about people! So here we are sixty years later, having learned little, and willing to choose profit over justice at White Stadium.
Rodney Singleton, a resident of Roxbury, MA serves as co-chair for the Highland Park Project Review Committee and is a member of the Franklin Park Defenders.
