BOSTON: DUDLEY STREET BAPTIST CHURCH

In Roxbury, officially known as the “heart of black culture in Boston,” the government demolished the Dudley Street Church and replaced it with a police station.

The govt displaced approximately 2,600 families (~8,600 people in 1960) in the Nubian Square area (formerly Dudley Square) of Roxbury during the “Washington Park Urban Renewal Program.” All across Roxbury many thousands more were displaced in various other freeway and “renewal” schemes (in particular the Southwest Corridor--more on that to come).

Pictured here is Nubian Square before and after “renewal.” Under the auspices of the Boston Redevelopment Agency (BRA), the govt leveled roughly 60% of the structures in the neighborhood—the vast majority of them residential. People who owned were offered well below market-rate, and those who rented were given no assistance at all. Like the neighborhood at large, the majority of those displaced were African-American.

“They gave my mother $5,000 for that house,” said Reverend Michael E. Haynes. “She cried when she learned the BRA was going to take her home, and later had a heart attack.” (The psychological and physiological effect of displacement is documented in Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s book “Root Shock.”)

Later, Reverend Haynes would preside over the closure of the Dudley Street Baptist church and the dispersal of its majority-black congregation. The BRA demolished this gothic revival church, built in 1852, and replaced it with a cinder-block police station. The rest of the structures on the block were also demolished and replaced with parking lots, including a large movie theater (the triangular building behind the church), a small opera theater, and several businesses. The street grid itself was overhauled, with new roads cutting through existing blocks (as seen on the top right in the bottom image and in the videos) and existing roads widened for cars. The train was ripped out and replaced with a bus.

Quotes from @baystatebanner