Boston's Struggle in Black and Brown: Racial Politics, Community Development, and Grassroots Organizing, 1960-1985

Abstract

“Boston’s Struggle in Black and Brown” recovers the comparative and relational history of African American and Latino community development, racial and political identity formation, and mobilizations for racial justice in Boston from 1960 to 1985. Subjected to exclusion from Boston’s parochial political system built on white ethnic patronage, African Americans and Latinos faced parallel and intersecting struggles in the same segregated neighborhoods. Consequently, they began forging overlapping racial and political identities as poor, nonwhite, ethnoracial minorities during the 1960s and 1970s. These shared identities served as the basis for increasingly similar political visions and civil rights agendas centered on ideologies of self-determination, community control, and racial uplift.

The shared racial and political identities of African Americans and Latinos did not, however, automatically materialize into collaboration or formal multiethnic/ multiracial organizing. While issues such as welfare, poverty, and housing drew these groups to work together, others such as education led them to break away and work independently. Additionally, the heterogeneous nature of these communities proved divisive at times, particularly along lines of class, gender, and nationality. This study considers periods, however brief, when African Americans and Latinos came together around common causes, pooling together their political power to form inclusive, multiethnic/multiracial organizations and movements. It also sheds light on some of the obstacles black/brown Bostonians faced in forming and sustaining these political alliances and coalitions. Examining a number of conflicts that emerged within black-brown communities that threatened cooperation, this study also draws attention to moments when these diverse groups strategically chose to diverge and advance the struggle for racial justice on separate, parallel paths.

Studying black/brown community development (or “upbuilding”) and grassroots organizing in Boston during the 1960s and 1970s exposes the limits of the black-white binary racial frame for understanding racial politics in the postwar urban north. It urges us to consider both the power of multiethnic/multiracial organizing, as well as the difficulties inherent in creating and sustaining coalitions. Lastly, this study sheds light on contemporary race relations, helping to explain how the growing political power of Latinos in the United States has been and will continue to be shaped by African Americans.