Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  It wasn’t easy for her to get from Orchard Park to Union, more than a mile away. On Sundays, devout church members who lived nearby would drive her down and back; on weekdays, one of the other women who helped at the daycare center often took her there, but she usually had to find her way home alone. With her increasingly painful legs, that could be difficult or, if she took a cab, prohibitively expensive.

  The January night in 1970 when she nearly froze coming home from Hello, Dolly! was the final straw; it convinced her to apply for an apartment in the new housing project, to be called Methunion Manor, which her church was constructing along Columbus Avenue in the South End. The project, she thought, would be the solution to all her problems: it would get her out of Orchard Park; off the third floor and into a building with an elevator; closer to the theaters, movies, and restaurants she loved; and right next door to her church, where she was already spending so much of her time. The more she thought about it, Methunion Manor seemed a godsend.

  To the Reverend Gilbert Caldwell, pastor of Union Methodist, the housing project seemed like the answer to a multitude of problems confronting his famous old church. It would, he hoped, begin to resolve a tension between the church’s duty to its members and its responsibility to the broader black community, between its century-old vision of itself and the social reality in which it was embedded.

  Union United Methodist Church had its origins in a small group of Negroes who, beginning in the 1790s, attended Boston’s predominantly white Bromfield Street Methodist Church. No sect had pursued Negro members more vigorously than the Methodists, and none had reaped a larger harvest. Blacks were attracted by Methodism’s evangelical fervor, by its challenge to social conventions, most of all by its explicit opposition to slavery, passed down from its founder, John Wesley, who branded the slave trade “the execrable sum of all villainies.” After baptizing the first Negro Methodist in 1758, Wesley asked in his diary, “Shall not our Lord, in due time, have these Heathens also for his inheritance?”

  In the revolutionary era, Christianity’s egalitarian implications were reinforced by the rhetoric of natural rights. Methodists responded with increasingly uncompromising stands against slavery. Finally, in 1796, the annual conference required members to emancipate their slaves or face expulsion. But this was an advanced position which the Methodists could not hold under fire. As the cotton gin made slavery more profitable, Southern Methodists realized they would be at a competitive disadvantage in the South if they maintained their adamant stance against “the peculiar institution.” Faced with a choice between “purity and popularity,” antislavery Methodists gradually worked out a temporary accommodation with their slaveholding brethren. As one delegate put it, “Slavery is a great evil, but beyond our control; yet not necessarily a sin. We must then quietly submit to a necessity which we cannot control or remedy.” By 1840, Methodist ministers in the South were admonished, “Your only business is to promote the moral and religious improvement of the slaves … without in the least degree … interfering with their civil condition.”

  But the sectional conflict could no longer be papered over. Northern Methodists became ever more zealous in the abolitionist cause, and in 1844 Methodists separated into Northern and Southern churches—a division which William Seward, later Lincoln’s Secretary of State, called a “sinister prophecy.”

  Even before the schism, Methodists North and South had segregated their congregations, compelling their black members to sit separately in the “African corner,” or “Nigger Heaven.” For some Northern blacks, such practices proved intolerable. In 1797, when black members of Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Church were required to surrender their seats and stand “around the wall,” they left the church and founded their own African Methodist Episcopal Church. A similar dispute in New York led to formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

  But, especially where Negroes were few in number or where, as in Boston, they valued their relations with whites, most chose to remain within the predominantly white Methodist Church. Indeed, as Southern blacks migrated to Boston, frequently forming their own fundamentalist churches, membership in an established, predominantly white church became a badge of status. For a time, blacks and whites worshipped together in the little Methodist church on Bromfield Street. But the “colored” membership grew steadily and, in 1818, “it was thought desirable that they should have public exercises among themselves both for their own enjoyment and for the benefit of that portion of the city in which they resided.” The whites had become uncomfortable with the “vigorous” forms of worship practiced by their colored brethren; the blacks wanted more freedom to worship as they pleased. The division of the congregation into “colored” and “white” meetings was a typical Bostonian solution, permitting continued formal association between the two groups without the need for much personal contact.

  Over the next century the “colored” members moved frequently, each successive building paid for by the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, which continued to look after its former members—often referred to in church minutes as “our brethren in black.” By 1928, when the congregation began construction of a new building in Lower Roxbury, it was on its own financially. The basement was complete a year later when the stock crash and subsequent Depression made further fund raising impossible. Construction ceased, and for the next two decades the congregation—by then known as Fourth Methodist—held its services and other activities in the spartan basement on Shawmut Avenue. Only in the relative prosperity of World War II could the church begin raising money again. Its membership was small and poor, so the new building fund had to be raised bit by bit. Adults contributed a penny a day; children chipped in a nickel a month; the church choir sang at white Methodist churches around Boston, the proceeds going to the building fund; and, ultimately, the New England Conference of the Methodist Church—impressed with the sacrifices Fourth Methodist was making on its own—appealed to its member churches to “come to the help of our loyal Negro friends with substantial and generous gifts.”

  In 1948, just as construction was about to resume, an extraordinary opportunity presented itself. With white Protestants leaving the city in ever-greater numbers, Union Congregational Church, once one of the South End’s most distinguished congregations, put its building at the corner of Columbus Avenue and West Newton Street up for sale. Built in 1870 at the height of the South End’s prosperity, Union was a Victorian Gothic cathedral of Roxbury pudding stone, with a 420-foot steeple towering over the neighborhood; a giant sanctuary, lit by eight stained-glass windows, which seated 1,500; a downstairs banquet hall; a kitchen; six classrooms, a conference room and offices. All this was available for $65,000, far less than it would cost to complete the structure on Shawmut Avenue. The deal was irresistible. The New England Conference purchased Union and deeded it—debt free—to “our Negro friends.” The long hegira of Bromfield Street’s “colored members” was over.

  But the new building proved less of a blessing than an albatross. As time passed, the cost of maintaining the huge structure increased geometrically while the congregation grew only modestly. On the average Sunday, barely 250 of the faithful filled the front pews of the vast, echoing sanctuary, and the dimes that dropped on the collection plate fell increasingly short of the church’s needs.

  This reflected a more essential problem. In moving from Lower Roxbury to the South End the church had turned its back on the heart of the black community. The South End of those days was both less black and less respectable than Roxbury. Thousands of white roomers filled the lodging houses around the church, and the Southern blacks who poured into the district following World War II were more likely to attend Baptist churches or the fundamentalist storefronts which cropped up along the avenues. West Indians generally preferred their own Episcopal churches. Some of Roxbury’s older Methodist families didn’t care to visit the South End, which they associated with vagabonds, alcoholics, and criminals. So as other black churches
developed new constituencies, Union Methodist continued to draw principally the old loyalists who had stuck by it through the lean days on Shawmut Avenue. Many of them had prospered, moving further out into Dorchester, Mattapan, or the suburbs, and the church remained their last tie with the ghetto. On Sundays, their large late-model cars filled the adjacent streets, a striking contrast to overflowing trash cans, empty wine bottles, and ragged children. Every year, Union Methodist’s members were further out of touch with the blacks who lived in the shadow of its impressive steeple. Even the church’s seating pattern reflected the deep divisions within the black community. The Black Brahmins tended to sit up front, directly before the pulpit; a large group of West Indian Turks occupied the pews on the right, while a much smaller group of Southern Homies huddled on the left.

  The Reverend Egbert C. McLeod, Union Methodist’s pastor from 1948 to 1964, did little to bridge the gulf between his church and the broader black community. Indeed, he may have deepened it. McLeod was an aloof, patrician figure who, one parishioner later recalled, “acted as if the Lord picked his nose for him.” Union Methodist began to turn a different face toward the community in 1964, when McLeod was replaced by his young assistant, Gil Caldwell. Gil’s father was an old-style Southern preacher from Greensboro, North Carolina, eloquent on the rewards of eternal life, passive on racial justice in this world. But Gil had entered Boston University’s School of Theology in 1955, just a year after Martin Luther King left. When King launched the Montgomery bus boycott, Caldwell invited him back to address a student audience and soon took him as a personal model.

  In the summer of 1964, Gil went to Mississippi to aid the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voter registration drive. After two white volunteers and a black colleague were found in a shallow grave in Neshoba County, he wrote the Boston Globe: “I hope that Bostonians realize that they are not free until the Negro in Mississippi is free.” The next spring, he answered King’s call to Selma, where he was among the last people to see Jim Reeb alive. By then, Caldwell was vice-chairman of the Boston branch of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In that capacity, he proudly served as master of ceremonies when King spoke on the Boston Common in April 1965. And like King himself, Caldwell gradually shifted his attention northward. After visiting the scene of the Watts riots, he addressed another warning to Globe readers. Watts, he reported, suffered from “unemployment, landlords, merchants with no sense of responsibility to their customers, a dramatic lack of municipal services, and arching over all this is a massive feeling of anger, frustration and despair. This is not much different from the Boston that I know. The main difference is that as of yet there has been no uprising, no revolution, no united attempt to ‘take what’s coming to me.’ May we in Boston begin to act before it is too late.”

  As Union’s new minister, Caldwell wasn’t immune to the church’s high-bourgeoisie style—in 1966, he and his wife launched Boston’s first black debutante cotillion, called the Snowflake Ball because it took place in early winter. But beneath his middle-class attitudes, Gil Caldwell was an increasingly angry man. If he admired Martin Luther King, he also respected Malcolm X for “daring to describe what it was to be black in America.” And he was disturbed by the assimilationist style of his own church. “The black church in the black community has an initial responsibility to its community,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the black church, like other institutions, has spent too much time, consciously and unconsciously, ‘trying to be white’ and thus has become irrelevant.” In particular, he worried about his church’s responsibility to its immediate South End community. By 1964, barely 15 percent of Union’s membership lived within ten blocks of the church, and they came largely from the old black middle class, descendants of the conductors, porters, and other railroad workers who had settled along the tracks in the 1870s. Moreover, under Egbert McLeod, most of the church’s programs were inward-looking—spiritual and social activities for its own members—rather than efforts to serve the surrounding community.

  Determined to change all that, Caldwell began by moving his own family into the South End. Although Union Methodist had a comfortable parsonage in Roxbury, he bought a house on Greenwich Park, just two blocks from the church, and began walking the streets, chatting with neighborhood blacks who had never met a Union Methodist minister before. In the evenings, he sought out community groups, assuring them that the church cared about their problems. The church’s basement meeting room, hitherto reserved for membership functions, was thrown open to the community.

  It was about this time that Caldwell first heard of the city’s search for nonprofit organizations to sponsor low- and moderate-income housing in the South End. The neighborhood’s renewal plan called for demolishing hundreds of crumbling tenements and apartment buildings, displacing some 3,550 households, most of them poor, many of them black. In return, the plan provided for construction of 2,500 new rental units in federally subsidized projects which, it was assumed, would ultimately house most of the families forced from their homes.

  The new buildings were to be built under a program called 221 (d) 3, the centerpiece of John Kennedy’s housing policy. Named after the relevant section of the Housing Act of 1961, it was designed to remedy defects in earlier efforts to house the poor and near-poor. Kennedy and his advisers had sought to steer a middle course between the bureaucratic insensitivity of public housing and the avarice of private development. Instead of the government building and administering housing for the needy, private groups were induced through government subsidies to provide such housing. Section 221 (d) 3 reduced interest rates on mortgages for such projects to 3 percent, which, in turn, permitted the sponsor to charge rents 20 percent below those in comparable non-subsidized apartments. This housing was intended for moderate-income families, not poor enough to qualify for public housing, yet unable to secure decent accommodations in the private market. In his housing message that spring of 1961, Kennedy declared, “In 1949 the Congress, with great vision, announced our national housing policy of ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.’ We have progressed since that time; but we must still redeem this pledge to the 14 million American families who currently live in substandard or deteriorating homes.”

  Four years later, the pledge remained unfulfilled—indeed, racial and social unrest was provoking talk of an “urban crisis.” In a March 1965 address on urban policy, Lyndon Johnson declared, “The modern city can be the most ruthless enemy of the good life, or it can be its servant. The choice is up to this generation of Americans. For this is truly the time of decision for the American city.” Johnson unveiled an array of new housing programs, among them the rent supplement, which he called “the most crucial new instrument in our effort to improve the American city.” Rent supplements took the subsidy concept one step further—for the first time directly paying a portion of the needy family’s rent. As amended by Congress, they became an additional subsidy, piggybacked on 221 (d) 3, permitting low-income families who would otherwise have been relegated to public housing to live in subsidized projects. Such families paid only 25 percent of their incomes; the government paid the rest.

  By 1965, 221 (d) 3 housing was heir to the loftiest idealism of the New Frontier and the Great Society: these were not to be mere real estate deals, but havens for society’s disadvantaged. At first, the program was limited to nonprofit groups—churches, fraternal organizations, and community groups. Later, limited-dividend commercial operations became eligible. But in Boston’s South End, as elsewhere, the program retained a bias toward churches, which were assumed to possess the requisite altruism. The Boston Redevelopment Authority, trying hard to live down its high-handed treatment of the West End, had particular reasons to prefer non-profit sponsors rooted in the community. Moreover, since most of those to be rehoused in the South End were blacks or Puerto Ricans, it was hoped that black churches would have special credibility with prospective tenants.

  Gil Ca
ldwell wasn’t sure that Union Methodist had much credibility, but he hoped to gain some from sponsoring comfortable, attractive, low-priced housing. Urban renewal too often meant “Negro removal,” and the South End was already beginning to fill up with young white professionals, but the project would at least assure that a substantial number of blacks remained in the neighborhood. If some of them should express their gratitude by joining the church, all the better.

  Gil Caldwell had an even larger vision: “We envisioned ourselves as not only putting up housing, but having an ongoing responsibility to the persons who lived there, whether they were members of our church or not. Here was a real opportunity to bring some of Union’s middle-class blacks together with inner-city residents. People who had been able to move out of the South End and Roxbury could relate to their brothers and sisters who were still caught there. We envisioned a sense of reciprocity—residents and non-residents talking together about how you make that a human environment.”

  In March 1965—even before the South End renewal plan was approved by the City Council—two BRA representatives met with Caldwell in the pastor’s study to outline procedures for a 221 (d) 3 project. Soon, the church formed the Columbus Avenue Housing Corporation to sponsor such a project. By May, a site had been selected, stretching four blocks down Columbus Avenue and occupied by several shabby apartment buildings, the five-story Braddock Hotel, the notorious 411 Lounge, and other bars frequented by black prostitutes and the white hunters who pursued them. In place of all this squalor would rise four new buildings to be called Methunion Manor.

  In December 1965, the church chose Henry Boles, a respected black architect, to design the project, and Boles came up with an ingenious idea: instead of flat slabs, he proposed a series of duplexes stacked one on another to form the six-story buildings. The two-story units would be staggered to create a grid, breaking up the concrete façades and echoing the surrounding blocks of nineteenth-century town houses. Caldwell and his housing committee were delighted; buildings like these would make a handsome contribution to the new South End, they thought—a lasting symbol of the church’s concern for its neighbors.