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Mandela Edition: A New City Was Forming, by Sofia Gulaid
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
Did you know that in the 1980s there was a referendum for majority-Black neighborhoods across Boston to incorporate and form an independent city called Mandela?
In their article “‘Separatist City’: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement and the Politics of Incorporation, Self-Determination, and Community Control, 1986–1988,” Zebulon Miletsky and Tomas Gonzalez mention that “scholars and journalists [both from inside and outside the community] have documented the story of Mandela fairly well,” but “many people in Boston have either never heard of it, vaguely remember it, or never understood it in the first place. Others would just as soon forget it and are happy to never bring it up again” . Miletsky and Gonzalez’s article title references the alarmist media framing which followed the referendum; the authors sought to tell the story of Mandela and to “consolidate the extensive media coverage of Mandela... despite its obscurity” on the 30th anniversary of its proposal in 2016. Unsurprisingly, less than five years after Miletsky and Gonzalez’s article, no one whom essay writer Sofia Gulaid spoke with in the Boston area had any idea about Mandela.
After a year and a half in an urban planning program a stone’s throw away from Greater Roxbury, Gulaid had learned all sorts of “obscurities” about Boston and its surroundings, but did not know that an independent, Black-led city had been proposed in the past few decades. In 2020-2021, Sofia created a public art project and thesis imagining speculative futures for Mandela, Massachusetts. She could not stop thinking: first, about the relevance of the issues mentioned in the referendum for Black neighborhoods in Boston today; second, letting her imagination run wild about what Mandela could and would have been.
“A new city is forming in the consciousness of some of Boston's Black population.” In October 1986, an article in the Washington Post opened with the above quote, in the lead up to a referendum which would be posed to residents of the City of Boston: Question Nine. Question Nine, or the Mandela Referendum, a non-binding referendum created by the Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project (GRIP), proposed forming a new city from several Boston neighborhoods that make up the predominantly Black Greater Roxbury area. The referendum, put before voters in 1986 and 1988, was motivated by a widespread undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Boston’s governance of Black neighborhoods, and a desire within for land control and self-determination. Over 50,000 Boston residents living in or near Greater Roxbury voted on whether their districts should secede to form a new municipality named after then-imprisoned South African activists Nelson and Winnie Mandela. The question on the ballot: “Shall the Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislating the following wards and precincts of the City of Boston into a new city of the Commonwealth?” (1)
Being part of Boston used to be OK
When the city used to allocate money our way.
Now all that’s changed and it’s plain to see
That the city only cares about property . . .
Let Boston see what it’s got to see
Mandela, Massachusetts, is the place to be.
In the early 1980s, Andrew Jones and Curtis Davis, newcomers to Boston, formed the Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project (GRIP), working with many longtime community activists including George Russell, Chuck Turner, and Sadiki Kambon to get the Mandela Referendum onto the ballot.
Andrew Jones, from Richmond, VA, first moved to New England to study at Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in New Hampshire. Later, he was a violinist at the Boston conservatory, studied journalism at Boston University, and was a television producer during the referendum; after the referendum, Jones became a foreign correspondent, settling in Johannesburg, South Africa (2). Curtis Davis, a Harvard-trained architect and community development activist, was working for the Greater Roxbury Development Corporation, a Title VII CDC in Roxbury, at the time of the referendum. He now lives and works in Arizona. Both Jones’ and Davis’ backgrounds informed the referendum: Davis brought a theoretical approach and understanding of urban policy to the proposal, while Jones leveraged his media knowledge. Mandela, MA made it on national news and was the center of lively debates on the Donahue show, inspiring alarmist news headlines nationwide like, “Irate Blacks Pushing for Secession in Boston” (3). Andrew Jones also brought into the proposal a familiarity with New England town hall traditions, emphasizing the importance of a communal gathering space and community collaboration that would lead to Mandela’s very own town hall (4).
The target area of the referendum, Greater Roxbury, was a term used by planners to describe a grouping of wards and precincts that included all of Roxbury, and parts of Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, the South End, the Fenway and Columbia Point. The proposed city of Mandela would have been a 12-square-mile-area (7,600 acres), and would have become the fourth largest municipality in the state (1). GRIP was motivated by the Boston city government’s “overassessment” and “underservice” of Black neighborhoods, and the undetermined fate of vacated land parcels across the neighborhood of Roxbury: some, the result of landlords burning down buildings to collect insurance monies (2). Greater Roxbury contained 2,500 parcels of cleared land in District Seven alone (4). The proposed area for Mandela included over 130,000 residents (74% Black and 10% Hispanic), 22 percent of Boston’s population at the time (1). In addition, the area would have also contained institutions including Harvard Medical School, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Northeastern University, and the John F. Kennedy Library (1).
The Mandela Referendum began germinating when GRIP began sponsoring monthly breakfast meetings with local organizers like Gloria Fox and Mel King in the early 1980s. Davis used his status as a Harvard faculty member to sponsor the meetings at the Harvard Faculty Club, believing that the Club would lend an air of seriousness to the meetings. Jones and Davis also worked with organizers and politicians George Russell and Byron Rushing on the first referendum, and Chuck Turner and Sadiki Kambon on the second referendum (2). It is important to note that while collaborators like Rushing and Turner stood with Jones and Davis as architects of the referendum, Mel King was not explicitly involved with GRIP, though he did shape the project. The geography of Mandela, and the geography Jones and Davis targeted with their referendum, was marked out by King’s unsuccessful runs for mayor in 1979 and 1983. King won Black wards, many of them contiguous, centered in Roxbury and emanating outwards, and these became the same wards/districts Jones and Davis proposed to include in Mandela (2).
Incorporation has a long history in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Roxbury itself was a separate city from Boston, founded in 1846, until it was annexed to Boston in 1868; so, the proposal did not suggest Roxbury’s secession from Boston, but rather reincorporating to return to its separate status (2). Preceding Mandela, politicians and organizers made reference to this separate history and the potential for Roxbury to govern itself twenty years before the referendum. Byron Rushing wrote “A Roxbury Government Open Letter” in the Bay State Banner in 1965, stating: “certain community leaders have recently been talking about setting up a Roxbury government. This is an excellent idea—only if they really mean it. I'm tired of symbolic actions and educational campaigns. I am ready to fight to win —for real power” (2).
Jones and Davis were influenced by anticolonial struggle; Jones shared via an interview with GBH that, “we feel that we have a ‘colonial relationship’ with the city of Boston...we feel that the city of Boston has treated us as second class citizens” (4). The internal colony theory, developed by antecedents in struggle like the Republic of New Afrika, held that Black inner-city neighborhoods and communities, like those across Greater Roxbury, suffered from low incomes, a small middle class, limited entrepreneurship, low internal markets, and limited demand for unskilled and semi-skilled labor, altogether an “internal colonialism” that can only be overturned through self-rule (2). GRIP took inspiration from global movements for Black land control and self-determination, from Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa policy and the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, and they proposed Mandela as a city where putting the needs and interests of Black people at the forefront would serve the needs and interests of all.
Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa concept of self-government and cooperative economics, specifically the concept of kujichagulia (meaning self determination, or “to develop oneself”), influenced Jones and Davis greatly (5). Mwalimu Nyerere’s words inspired the Mandela proposal’s focus on self-development: “A country, or a village, or a community cannot be developed,” Nyerere argued, “it can only develop itself. For real development means the development, the growth, of people”.
With many successful precedents, strong motivations, and a plethora of Black organizers advocating for self-determination, GRIP may have garnered enough support to win the vote for the Mandela Referendum. However, a number of limitations caused GRIP’s referendum to lose by significant margins both times it was proposed. A lack of community support and overall disconnect with the community hurt Mandela; Andrew Jones and Curtis Davis’ “lack of solid organizing left little to no support in the Greater Roxbury community” (2). Jones attended elite institutions; Davis and other aligned figures like Byron Rushing were Harvard graduates (2), and neither Jones nor Davis were raised in Boston. William Nelson, author of Black Atlantic Politics, called Jones and Davis “political neophytes,” and as newcomers to Boston they did not have a longstanding rapport with the community (6). The referendum was defeated by a 3-to-1 margin in 1986, and when the issue was raised again in 1988 it lost by a closer 2-to-1 margin.
Still, the Mandela referendum influenced the trajectory of Greater Roxbury, successfully pressing forward an agenda for land control and community agency which the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) carried forward; DSNI would famously go on to achieve “the historic step of extending eminent domain to the community-based organization” (2). DSNI had a comprehensive plan, a longstanding relationship with the community, and an incremental approach favored by city government, all of which Mandela lacked. DSNI was a grassroots organization, had grounding in previous projects (founded in part by La Alianza Hispana and Nuestra Comunidad Development Corporation, themselves organizations holding years of relationships and trust), and community willpower at its core (7).
DSNI started slowly, pursuing “short-term projects with immediate results to sustain the community spirit necessary for successful long-range development”: their first organizing campaign focused on neighborhood cleaning . This campaign’s success and its ability to bring the community together, “caught the attention of Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, who offered the city's support in this effort”. The organization’s next aim was to develop a long-term plan for the neighborhood, focusing on the notion of developing a self-sustaining "urban village" through the neighborhood control of a “critical mass” of parcels in the Dudley triangle. The sixty-four-acre triangle contained thirty acres of vacant land, half owned by the city of Boston and half privately owned. DSNI formed “Dudley Neighbors, Inc.,” an urban redevelopment corporation, then was able to convince the city to authorize its use of eminent domain to implement their neighborhood plan in a historic move (7).
Other initiatives for community control took root, too: Mel King himself became a key member of the Greater Roxbury Neighborhood Authority (GRNA), from which grew the Roxbury Neighborhood Council, a community planning vessel able to weigh in on the city’s master planning process. The Roxbury Neighborhood Council worked with the Boston Redevelopment Authority to create Roxbury’s Strategic Master Plan in 2004; now defunct, community members still dream of the establishment of a land trust that covers the whole neighborhood, and many hope to renew the Neighborhood Council.
In the time since, Roxbury’s Dudley Square has been renamed to Nubian Square, reflecting Roxbury’s Blacknessand pan-African influences; the memory of Mandela has been called up through workshops and murals (although the mural was eventually demolished).
Mandela’s legacy lives on; the disinvestment and displacement that motivated its creation are still present. So, too, is the spirit of self-determination alive in Black Boston.
Pitch us your story — what do you think Mandela could have been? What exists today in Mandela’s geography that you want to cover? Read more about what we’re looking for, and submit your ideas here.
Sofia Gulaid (she/her) is a Kenyan-Somali and American urban planner and mixed media artist based in Los Angeles. She primarily uses sculpture and cartography to explore hidden spatial histories. Her process centers on listening, collective imagining, and material exploration rather than pursuing a fixed outcome. Her work has been featured by the City of Redmond, Where Are The Black Designers, the Data Feminism Lab, and in books and academic articles.
Endnotes:
(1) Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project: A New Municipality. - DRS. https:// repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m042zc062. Accessed 18 Feb. 2021.
(2) Miletsky, Zebulon, and Tomás González. “‘Separatist City’: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement and the Politics of Incorporation, SelfDetermination, and Community Control, 1986–1988.” Trotter Review, vol. 23, no. 1, Sept. 2016, https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol23/iss1/8.
(3) “Irate Blacks Pushing for Secession in Boston.” Los Angeles Times, 7 Sept. 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-09-07-mn-12197-story.html.---. “Separatist City of ’Mandela’ : Boston Voting on Proposal to Let Black Areas Secede.” Los Angeles Times, 1 Nov. 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/laxpm-1986-11-01-mn-14606-story.html.
(4) GBH Series - GBH Openvault. https://openvault.wgbh.org/series. Accessed 11 May 2021.
(5) Meier, August, et al. Black Nationalism in America. 1970.
(6) Nelson, William E. Black Atlantic Politics : Dilemmas of Political Empowerment in Boston and Liverpool. Albany, State University Of New York Press, 2000.
(7) Taylor, Elizabeth A. 1995. “The Dudey Street Neighborhood Initiative and the Power of Eminent Domain.” Boston College Law Review. V. 36, n. 5 (September), 1061-1087.
