Oldies but Goodies
Casting a new lens on the rich history of Lower Roxbury
Osceola Nathan with a photo of her mother.
By Karen Feldscher
Osceola Nathan remembers moving from Newport News, Virginia, to Boston in 1924, when she was ten. A country girl, she’d never lived in a tall brick building before. She thought she was living in a factory.
Charles and Pauline Thomas remember Boston in the 1920s, too. Forget cobblestones—the streets were laid with wooden planks, they say.
And before there were snowplows, Alfred Sisco Jr. recalls, he and his siblings literally shoveled their way to school after big storms hit.
These pieces of twentieth-century Boston history are just a few slivers of information being gathered through Northeastern’s Lower Roxbury Black History Project. The goal is to assemble as much oral, pictorial, and documentary history as possible, then categorize the results for use in a website, books, exhibits, and materials for schools and Boston’s Black History Trail, says coordinator Joseph Warren, special assistant for government relations and community affairs.
The project grew out of a fall 2006 meeting between President Aoun and members of Roxbury’s clergy. Aoun asked if there were anything more Northeastern could do to make the university a better neighbor.
The Reverend Michael Haynes had an idea. He told the president no one had ever done a history of Lower Roxbury and it would be good to have one. Aoun loved the suggestion.
Since then, Warren has drawn on the expertise of Northeastern staff and faculty, such as archivist Joan Krizack, history faculty William Fowler and Gerald Herman, associate African American Studies professor Robert Hall, and television training studio manager Ron Starr, to ensure a first-rate project.
Early on, the university taped oral histories by Haynes and state representative Byron Rushing.
And last fall, the university hired Lolita Parker Jr., a photographer and documentary film researcher with long-standing ties to Lower Roxbury. She serves as the project manager, the collector of the photos, oral histories, and other data.
She’s always been intrigued by old buildings, elderly folks, and history in general, she says. Her first job out of high school in California was interviewing elderly residents forced through eminent domain to leave their homes to make way for a highway.
“I find that I have more in common with these eighty-year-old women than I ever could have imagined,” says Parker Jr.
“One of the things I’m hoping,” she adds, “is that people get the idea that what’s in their family album is a physical link to the past. Many people have much more than they realize in their family albums, in their scrapbooks, in their basements.
“I can’t tell you how many people say to me, ‘I didn’t know that was important—I threw all that stuff away.’ That’s why getting the word out is so necessary.”
Says Warren, “We’re finding fascinating stuff. This is wonderful history. And the process has been phenomenal. We’ve got cooperation between community leaders and some of Northeastern’s finest historians, to really concentrate on something of value.”
Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.