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Chain of Power Edition
- Boston Ujima Project
- 15 hours ago
- 12 min read
As Juneteenth marks an incomplete end to slavery—a condition in part describable by the total alienation of Black people from their creative and productive capacities—we take this time post-Juneteenth to celebrate the continued efforts made by Black organizations in Boston to break down the “veiled slavery” of wage labor and to fight for community control of labor and development.
In this edition of the Ujima Press Wire, editorial manager Alula Hunsen takes a look back at the concerted efforts of Black Bostonians to wrest back control of their labor power, lifting up a history first composed in Mel King’s Chain of Change and connecting this history to present action.
Our power remains in our hands.
Much of our most real power lies in what we contribute to the economy by way of our work. Following theorists and practitioners—following Du Bois, following Ella Baker, following Fannie Lou Hamer, following Cedric Robinson–and following countless organizers honored in Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s Collective Courage, we may recognize that the Black worker’s condition, from slavery until the present day, is characterized in large part through the labor relation. As such, fighting for access to economic opportunity, fighting to control our own labor power, fighting to become economically self-sufficient, and fighting for community control of economic development (possibly fighting, further, for control of the means of spatial reproduction) are paramount strategies for our liberation from material conditions still analogous to the yokes of slavery, colonialism, and wage-slavery.
The organized (or perhaps, bureaucratized) labor movement at-large, in the United States and in Europe has had mixed responses to Black economic demands and struggles, at times supporting Black struggle and at others, in turn, strategically decoupling from brotherhood and solidarity with the Black worker to prioritize and uplift wages for whiteness. This labor movement has, too, struggled to understand and support Black movement towards self-determination; however, historic examples point to support from Communists abroad for numerous strategies (from the Black Belt to the Black Panthers), and—more to the point—there exists a rich history of Black labor organizing to produce the economic power necessary to free us ourselves. Indeed, Black labor organizers were early constituents in the movement toward cooperative business structures owned and operated by members of the Black working class (1).
Much of this local history towards economic self-determination can be found in the pages of Mel King’s Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development (2). This essay lifts up and extends our local histories, and links movement for community control of our economies to the development of a solidarity economy and the movement towards worker self-governance and worker ownership.
Early Economic Organizing
In commonly retold histories of the Civil Rights Era, boycotts were our primary method of economic protest, a tool of choice implemented by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to desegregate how we consume. Less known from this era are the boycotts and protests against workplace discrimination, boycotts to ensure that Black workers could accrue earnings for themselves amidst post-Great Migration industrial and geographic shifts in work that led to higher Black unemployment in Northern cities. This strategy was employed in Boston in the early 1960s, the height of the traditional Civil Rights Movement, to bring consumer and labor power together, straining revenue and capital flows to force businesses to hire from the more-than-qualified Black working class. The Boston Action Group initiated this action, and was followed by the “STOP–Time To Reconsider” movement, which combined consumer boycotts with work stoppages and picket lines to protest not just discriminatory hiring practices, but also housing and school segregation and police brutality (2).
From this strategy blossomed many more; first, from the consumer strike bloomed the labor strike.
Labor, Solidarity, and Development: The United Community Construction Workers
As Black communities continued to develop consciousness and organizing capacity around the power of our consumptive dollars throughout the middle of the 20th century, we have maintained a critical awareness of the power of our labor—the very labor that produced not only monetary wealth, but the built environment that shapes wealth, consumption, leisure, life.
Large urban renewal projects coming online in the late 1960s in Roxbury and the South End, downstream of a national push towards redevelopment and suburbanization in the postwar era (and forecasting a future push toward what we now know as gentrification), represented such a point of contention: these projects were planned to reshape largely Black and multicultural areas, and should have provided increased opportunities for Black employment in the construction trades,drawing especially from the labor pools within the neighborhoods themselves. However, these construction and rehabilitation projects would often refuse to hire, or would fire, Black workers who were typically not unionized, and were often the last hired and/or first fired on a job site.
In response, Black laborers who had been fired from a construction project in Roxbury in 1968 organized themselves after meeting and planning at Freedom House, and got themselves rehired by mobilizing and picketing the Grove Hall offices of the Boston Urban Renewal Program in the southeast corner of Roxbury. Calling themselves the United Community Construction Workers, led by Leo Fletcher and founded in part by founding Ujima member and luminary Chuck Turner in 1968, they became the first Black construction trade union in Boston to bring Black workers onto construction sites and to negotiate fair pay.
UCCW arrived at a demand for community control of development in Black neighborhoods. [...] They refused to reify the ghettoized conditions which Black working-class people had been shunted into with their own labor.
Still, this opportunity—presented by their newly-organized ability to agitate for fair hiring and pay practices on construction projects—was complicated. As urban renewal continued to remake Boston into an unfamiliar image through the late 1960s and early 1970s (urban renewal meant negro/working class removal, borrowing from James Baldwin and Mel King), into a city that could be for its white gentry and working class instead of the city that was filled with a multi-racial working class, United Community Construction Workers took a stand. With their foot in the door as laborers, they decided to weigh in not just on pay and access to work, but also on what kinds of projects they felt comfortable working on, and UCCW arrived at a demand for community control of development in Black neighborhoods. Some unionized workers with UCCW ultimately decided against working on “slum clearance,” or urban renewal projects that would have displaced Black neighbors altogether; others decided they would not erect subpar and shoddy buildings in working class communities of color, contrary to standard practice in many of these urban renewal projects. They refused to reify the ghettoized conditions which Black working-class people had been shunted into with their own labor.
Black Bostonian leadership in labor militancy, and in labor struggle at sites of development, spurred on other organizations and minoritized sectors of the working class to struggle together. Seven years after the founding of UCCW, the Third World Jobs Clearinghouse arose from partnerships initiated by the UCCW with the Asian American Civic Association (AACA, then the Chinese American Civic Association) and Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion (IBA) to build solidarity-based, labor-focused community control of construction projects within their respective neighborhoods. When white workers began organizing opposition to this program, Chuck Turner and others decided to organize with them to build a wholly-inclusive Boston Jobs Coalition across neighborhood organizations, fighting for Bostonians' rights to employment on projects within the City of Boston.
This coalition, formed in 1977, was able to make demands with its newfound cross-racial, majoritarian representation, and fought to make an official city ordinance for 50% of employment on city projects to be Boston residents, 25% to be minority workers, and 10% to be women workers— an ordinance which still stands, made into law by Mayor Kevin White in 1979. It is an enduring example of how important employment, community involvement in development, and labor militancy were to economic organizing and struggling for better futures in our communities.
When white workers began organizing opposition to this program, Chuck Turner and others decided to organize with them to build a wholly-inclusive Boston Jobs Coalition across neighborhood organizations, fighting for Bostonians' rights to employment on projects within the City of Boston.
Consolidation: The Boston Black United Front, and Freedom Industries
Alongside the worker’s strike and the demand for community control grew a consolidated approach, advocating across Black organizations for the benefit of Black working class members of Boston’s communities.
The foremost of these became the Boston Black United Front (the Front). Following Kwame Ture’s admonishment for Black organizations to come together across class positions and issues of focus —to build consolidated Black Power across wide swaths of Black communities and organizations, including churches, community development organizations, immigrant communities and more—Chuck Turner and a few other key organizers took heed and began laying the groundwork for a broad coalitional approach. Their last planning meeting took place at the Roxbury YMCA (then the Roxbury Multi-Service Center) the night before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated; following his death, the Front kicked immediately into gear, rapidly coalescing other community organizations to work together as part of its structure.
Beginning first with unsuccessful demands upon City Hall and Harvard’s endowments to cede funds to Black business and community development for community control of their local economy, the Front (held together by community organizing veterans like Leroy Boston, George Morrison, Bertram Alleyne, Drew King, Chuck Williams, Daleno Farrar, and Francine Mills) was able to extract no-strings-attached seed money from white business owners—including Ralph Hoagland, co-founder of CVS—for economic development and to create a new Fund for Urban Negro Development (FUND), which in 1970 would become the United Front Foundation (UFF). This foundation was described as “the first Black vehicle in Boston which allocated funds for community development,” as well as the “‘first community controlled corporation’ in Roxbury,” (3) and raised upwards of $100,000 to invest in community-controlled economic development. The UFF invested across industries in Black-owned businesses in Roxbury, and almost began investing in land development projects before shuttering in 1973. While only in operation from 1968 to 1973, the Front was still able to pull in labor organizers from the UCCW, political and mutual aid organizers from the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party, economic development professionals from larger organizations like the (New) Urban League Chapter of Massachusetts (led and re-christened by Mel King), and incarcerated community members at Norfolk State Prison, towards shared aims of steering a community-controlled economy and polity by Black Bostonians, for Black Bostonians.
The Boston Black United Front also took up decarceration and abolitionist struggle, although not known by those names at the time (4). The Front took a strong stand against police violence, hyper-surveillance, and incarceration in Black communities, publishing a set of “Black Laws” which decreed that Black members of the Front’s constituent communities must not comply with the state or police on any level. They arranged alternative structures for seeking justice (including a “high council”) which would not disappear Black people from our communities, and in this way fought not just for economic power but also for agency over our own bodies and authority over public safety.
This effort to develop a coalitional approach to Black political, economic, and freedom struggle became co-terminous with the instantiation of a Black economic ecosystem-based approach. Two years prior to the founding of the Front in 1966, a retreat for Black leaders organized by Mel King and fellow organizer Hubert Jones gave birth to CIRCLE (Centralized Investments to Revitalize Community Living Effectively), “a federation of twenty-eight community-based organizations that marshaled the skills of its members to run a consulting business while developing itself as a proto–community development corporation”(5). CIRCLE, under the leadership of MIT Professor Willard Johnson, and later Chuck Turner, would go on to raise $100,000 for job, employment, and small business development training, and became a critical advocate of land struggle in Roxbury as part of the significant highway fight in the late 1960s. CIRCLE joined the Front and many other organizations in successfully halting government plans to flatten Black and working-class neighborhoods into a highway, coordinating planning efforts to instead prioritize community needs for education, green space, and housing along the Southwest Corridor.
Freedom Industries, founded by Archie Williams—a lawyer-by-training turned activist-businessman—sought to take CIRCLE’s initiative a step further by independently building up a series of Black, interlocking businesses in Roxbury and taking up community control of small business development. Freedom Industries arose in the face of white opposition to true racial integration of Boston's economy, which included refusals by white business owners to meet the demands of local organizers to turn over their financial interests in Black neighborhoods to Black neighbors. Williams’ goal was to circulate the Black dollar within the Black community, and his plan included building up financial infrastructure, in the form of a Freedom Foundation, which would bring profits from Black-owned businesses into new business and community development.
This approach, too, faced tribulations: Williams’ initial ventures toward founding the first wholly minority-owned supermarket chain, Freedom Foods, were thwarted by robberies and an institutional refusal to insure these stores. Nevertheless, Williams would go on to found Freedom Electronics and Engineering, and cultivated a relational approach to business which brought Roxbury’s community, and his employees, into mutual progression (6) while also building up a technologically capable local Black workforce.
Cooperation: Boston Workers Alliance, and Boston Ujima Project
These consolidated approaches planted the seeds for a cooperative approach to Black economic organizing to take hold four decades later—an approach we are living within and co-producing now. In the recent past and present, a variety of organizations are taking up the call for collective action towards community ownership and stewardship of economies. In 1994, Rebecca Johnson, a Black woman, founded Cooperative Economics for Women (CEW) in Jamaica Plain, threading together technical assistance, literacy, community- and trust-building practices to support cooperative approaches to building wealth and developing communities. Prioritizing immigrants, refugees, and other women of color, CEW became an incubator for a variety of women’s cooperative businesses. Johnson stayed on for fifteen years as a director for the organization; in her words, the path to success was to, “start with those who make up the majority of those living in poor communities—women—and respond to their self-defined problems” (7).
In 2005, the Boston Workers Alliance began organizing in Roxbury against hiring discrimination on the basis of a criminal record, and against the enduring crisis of un- and underemployment in Black communities. A few of their strategies—community member leadership, and cooperative development—influenced the Boston Ujima Project. Taking one of their projects as a case study helps trace the interconnective moment we entered with their founding.
Labor and economy-building remain the ever-present levers through which we must make and take power.
Chuck Turner, forty years after the height of his organizing involvement with the Black United Front and only a few years after his career as a city council member representing District 7 (from 1999-2010), began working with the now-defunct Boston Workers Alliance in 2012 to organize a waste reuse program (taking waste from local restaurants to be used as fuel for clean(er) energy generation).This program developed into a cooperative called Roxbury Green Power, and would merge into another recycling co-op effort, led by Ujima co-founder Aaron Tanaka, to become the CERO Co-Op, a major inspiration for the Boston Ujima Project’s Ujima Fund (and the recipient of our first investment dollars) (8). The Boston Center for Community Ownership was founded in this same year, by organizers affiliated with CERO, the BWA, and other co-op movements in Boston (led by Aisha Shillingford and Stacey Cordeiro); and the Boston Ujima Project would officially launch five years later in 2017, supported (among many, many others) by Chuck Turner, Lisa Owens, Stacey Cordeiro, Aaron Tanaka, and our executive director Nia K. Evans.
Since our inception, we at the Boston Ujima Project have been in the midst of continuing strategies from the past: from the Boston Black United Front’s FUND approach, to the Boston Workers Alliance’s cooperative-building praxis, and Freedom Industries’ ecosystem dreams, we are a synthesis of, and reflection on, Black economy-building and labor organizing which predates us, and we hope to support continued economic organizing and action towards liberatory urban futures in Boston and beyond.
Still, there remain under-explored opportunities for us as Black Bostonians, as Black people nation- and worldwide, to exert our will: amidst a resurgence of interest in and joining up among labor unions, how may worker-ownership at a smaller scale, and labor organizing (and militancy) at a larger scale, come to be not just in-dialogue but in-concert? How are these labor struggles, and co-op movements, intersecting themselves with our present-day abolition struggle to decarcerate Black people from systems of war, slavery, extraction wrought upon them through prisons?
Answers to these questions must be fought through, not talked through; but labor and economy-building remain the ever-present levers through which we must make and take power.
Endnotes:
Special thanks to Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and her book Collective Courage for providing much of the cooperative history undergirding this essay. See especially Chapters 2 (From Economic Independence to Political Advocacy, section on the Knights of Labor) and 7 (Continuing The Legacy, section on Cooperative Economics for Women).
Gordon-Nembhard, Jessica. 2014. Collective Courage : A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Special thanks to Mel King and his book Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development for providing much of the local history I retell and re-contextualize in this essay; see especially Chapters 4 (Economic Development: Black Boycotts and the Police Riots), 8 (United Community Construction Workers), 9 (The Assassination Of Martin Luther King: The Black United Front), 14 (Racism In The Unions: The New Boston Plan), 15 (Boston Jobs For Boston People), and 16 (Freedom Industries).
King, Mel. (1981) 2016. Chain of Change : Struggles for Black Community Development. Boston: South End Press.
O'Hara, Dylan Grosvenor, "“To Choose is to Be Free”: Black Urban Separatism in Boston, 1965-1992" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4027. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/4027
Sikowitz, Joseph W., "The Boston Black United Front and Community-Centered Alternatives to the Carceral State" (2021). Graduate Masters Theses. 695. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/masters_theses/695
Crockett, Karilyn. 2018. People before Highways. University of Massachusetts Press.
Phrase borrowed from noted local rapper and philosopher Ajary Alexandre.
Johnson, Rebecca. 1997. “Poor Women, Work, and Community Development: A Reflection Paper.” Mimeograph. Cooperative Economics for Women, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
Special thanks to Stacey Cordeiro, Director of the Boston Center for Community Ownership, for sharing this story in an interview in our Spring 2025 Investor Report.
Alula Hunsen (he/him) is an Editorial Manager at the Boston Ujima Project, working on narrative-building towards liberatory urban futures.
