Date of Award

Summer 8-16-2024

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

Advisor

Nathan Godfried

Second Committee Member

Mary T. Freeman

Third Committee Member

Mark McLaughlin

Additional Committee Members

Llana Barber

Micah A. Pawling

Abstract

Twice in the twentieth century, in 1968 and 1986, Black activists in Boston, Massachusetts, organized initiatives to separate their neighborhoods from the city. At those two points, twenty years apart, Bostonians’ frustration with city services like housing, welfare, and local elections reached a boiling point that drove radical Black activists towards neighborhood independence. This dissertation tells the story of how Roxbury, a predominantly Black community since 1960, twice decided that neighborhood independence was a feasible solution to inequality in the urban core. White citizens and politicians refused to support the full integration of Boston, thereby denying Black Bostonians access to well-funded city resources. In response, Black separatists concluded that Black neighborhoods should be allowed the opportunity for official self-governance.

The dissertation explores the history of Black separatism in Boston between the 1960s and the 1990s. Over three decades, the effects of the urban crisis and the dissolution of Civil Rights reforms created the unequal landscape that Black organizers protested. That landscape inspired and reinspired Black separatism in Roxbury. Over time, Black organizers altered their demands and changed the language they used to call for autonomous Black communities. The work of Black separatists complicates understandings of radical organizing in New England, where organizers melded national and local articulations of freedom to push for a separate Black city. While Black separatists were ultimately unable to separate Roxbury from Boston, their repudiation of the hollow policies of integration opens up new ways to understand the post-Civil Rights period and the battle against underdevelopment in New England’s Black communities.

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