In 1974, when Richard Wise was hired as a community organizer in Boston’s Jamaica Plain,[1] there were thirty-one abandoned buildings in the center of the neighborhood. He remembers cars burning underneath the elevated train line nearly every week.[2] Banks refused to loan money to anyone who lived or wanted to live in the area, which meant no one could sell or improve their home. Today, fifty years later, the neighborhood is beautiful. Well-maintained triple-decker houses line narrow, tree-lined streets. Centre Street and Amory Street buzz with bars and restaurants. There are more than a dozen playgrounds, each within walking distance of one another. And the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is more than $2,800. The median sale price for a single-family home exceeds $1 million. Most Americans can only dream of affording to live there.
Richard Wise not only witnessed those changes, he also helped lay the foundation for them. Between 1974 and 1976, he organized local homeowners against the discriminatory lending practices of local banks. He built coalitions, filed petitions, and led direct actions to get banks to invest in their own communities. By the end of the 1970s, federal legislation, alongside Wise’s organizing, helped end the redlining in Jamaica Plain (JP) and spur an era of reinvestment and revitalization. JP homeowners saw their equity skyrocket over the next several decades. It was a clear victory for Wise—or, at least, it felt that way at first. When I spoke with him in 2024, his enthusiasm for his organizing was tempered, his memories somewhat clouded, by the knowledge of how drastically the neighborhood has transformed since he left.
I interviewed Wise and an organizer from neighboring Dorchester as part of a larger oral history project on anti-redlining activism. I started those interviews hoping mainly to learn about the experiences of 1970s community organizers. Instead, I found myself in conversations that moved in and out of time; conversations shaped as much by the current housing-unaffordability crisis as they were about past anti-redlining campaigns. For a historian on a fact-finding mission about the 1970s, this might seem like an unwelcome distraction—as if the organizers’ testimonies were contaminated by the lens of the present. But for oral historians, it is precisely this subjectivity and mutability that makes working with human subjects valuable. When we interview people, we get their version of what happened: a narrative influenced by their context, the interviewer, the politics and culture of the present moment, and the subject’s personality. In other words, we learn how individual people processed, and are still processing, the history they witnessed.[3] We learn not just about the past, but about popular understandings of the past—how individual people draw connections between history and their lives today.