roxbury

Ready to Research: Roxbury Tenants of Harvard records (Jeane Neville) and Ken Kruckemeyer papers

Two recently processed collections document the organizing power of everyday Bostonians who fought development proposals that would have negatively impacted their neighborhoods.

Roxbury Tenants of Harvard records (Jeane Neville)

The Tenants' View newsletter of the Roxbury Tenants (of Harvard) Association: May 7, 1970. Headline is "Harvard Agrees to Basics of Our Housing Plan!" and includes an article, map, and announcement for an upcoming Neighborhood meeting
The Tenants’ View newsletter, May 7, 1970. Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections

The Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (RTH) formed in 1969 to oppose Harvard University’s proposed expansion into the Mission Hill neighborhood, which would have displaced residents. RTH was successful in pressuring Harvard to build a relocation housing development instead of a teaching hospital complex.

The RTH collection captures the unfolding of events, and the negotiations between RTH and Harvard University, over the course of the 1960s and ’70s through meeting minutes and agendas, notes, reports, flyers, canvas sheets, writings, correspondence, and media coverage. Jeane Neville, a Radcliffe student in the late ’60s, became involved in organizing the Mission Hill residents; these records were retained by her and donated to the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections by her brother Padraic Neville after her death.

To learn more about the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records, explore the finding aid.

Ken Kruckemeyer papers

Hand-drawn map of proposed highways in Boston, outlined with snakes. Title reads "Caution! Highly Poisonous" with a skull and crossbones. Bottom left corner reads "Cuidado bastante peligroso!"
Cover illustration by D. Chandler Jr. of bilingual “Stop Turnpikes Over People” informational resource, undated. Ken Kruckemeyer papers, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections

An architect by training, Ken Kruckemeyer began organizing around issues such as transit and housing in the 1960s after moving to the South End. He soon became involved in the local anti-highway movement of that period. His papers document anti-highway activism, as well as activism around Tent City and Melnea Cass Boulevard. They also document the planning, environmental impact studies, and construction of the Southwest Corridor Project, for which Kruckemeyer served as project manager.

Explore meeting materials, reports, studies, notes, correspondence, newsletters, flyers, and more in Kruckemeyer’s papers. To learn more about what’s in the collection, check out the finding aid.

To access the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records or the Ken Kruckemeyer papers, email Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.

Archival Context: Freedom House at the Norman B. Leventhal Center

A faded flyer with red text reading "Clean Up Paint Up Join your neighbors Don your work clothes Get busy Make your town a better place to live in Safer too Start at home Make it bright Clean your streets Clean your yard Paint inside Paint outside Fix-up and repair Plant-up too

On March 18th, the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center in the Boston Public Library (BPL) debuted their exhibit “More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape.” The exhibit examines how social justice and injustice are confronted in the study of the “human landscape” and how we can use questions of social justice to help us build healthier and better environments for the future.

Northeastern’s contributions to the exhibit come from our Freedom House, Inc., records and in particular, their records on urban renewal and neighborhood-led clean-up campaigns. The exhibit features two fliers calling Roxbury neighbors to action in various clean-up and maintenance projects. Neighborhood improvement programs designed to protect Upper Roxbury from urban blight began in 1949 when Freedom House joined with community members to organize neighborhood clean-up projects and playground construction.

A multi-colored guide with the title "Let's get M.A.D. and clean up Washington Park"

Freedom House worked closely with the city to improve the services provided to Roxbury. At the same time, Boston was beginning a formal urban renewal campaign that did not initially include Roxbury. A telegram from Freedom House founders Muriel and Otto Snowden to Mayor John F. Collins resulted in the inclusion of the Washington Park Urban Renewal Project in Boston’s campaign. By 1963, Freedom House had entered into formal contracts with the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and the Action Boston Community Development to serve as a liaison between the planners and technicians and the residents of Washington Park. This relationship lasted until the BRA withdrew from Roxbury in the late 1960s, leaving much of its work undone.

The Leventhal Center’s exhibit takes our Freedom House records, and many other institutions’ records, and composes them into a complicated vision of how human landscapes were confronted and contended with in the past and how they can be reimagined for the future.

Visit the exhibit in person at the BPL’s historic McKim Building during the BPL’s visiting hours, which can be found here.

Or you can view the digital exhibit, along with lesson plans and resources for further study, here.

Find out more about the Freedom House records, the Snowdens, and Roxbury neighborhood history here.

Freedom House Collections featured in The Scout Report

Established in 1949 by two African American social workers, Muriel S. and Otto P. Snowden, Freedom House was created to centralize community activism in Roxbury, MA, a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood. The hope of its founders was to link community members to existing services and to create new services in areas that were lacking by focusing on neighborhood improvement, good schools, and harmony among racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Eventually, archives from the Freedom House came to Northeastern University and were digitized creating the Northeastern University Libraries’ Freedom House Collection consisting of 2,265 photographs, negatives, and slides. These images document a variety of topics including the organization’s early activities to create an integrated Roxbury, to initiate citizen participation in the urban renewal of Roxbury, and the early oversight of Boston Public Schools desegregation.  The images also include representations of well-known figures like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator John F. Kennedy. More recently, on March 18, 2011, the The Scout Report listed NU Libraries’ Freedom House Collection as a featured research and education source. The article can be found here. The The Scout Report is a weekly publication that provides information on new or newly discovered online resources of interest to researchers and educators. To sign up to receive the The Scout Report in text or HTML format go to: http://scout.wisc.edu/About/subscribe.php To find out more about Northeastern University’s Digital Collections go to http://www.lib.neu.edu/archives/digital_collections/