Northeastern Voice

Telling stories, preserving history

The university's effort to keep Lower Roxbury's history alive has gathered steam after the hiring of a project coordinator with long ties to the community.

Lolita Parker Jr., a photographer and documentary-film researcher, said she has already collected 15 oral histories from longtime residents of the neighborhood — sometimes roughly mapped as Harrison Avenue in the southeast to the MBTA tracks in the northwest, and Massachusetts Avenue on the east to Melnea Cass Boulevard on the west.

And she has also been collecting what she calls "material culture" — tangible remains of the neighborhood's storied past. "Some people might call it trash-picking," Parker said, laughing. "I'm an above-ground archaeologist."

The Lower Roxbury Black History Project spring from a meeting university President Joseph Aoun held with Roxbury clergy early in his presidency. They urged him to commit Northeastern to capturing the neighborhood history that was slipping away as residents died or moved out.

Northeastern administrators and faculty joined with neighborhood residents and Rep. Byron Rushing to begin planning the project. Parker was hired just before Thanksgiving.

A southern California native, she was hired just out of high school. to compile oral histories of people displaced by a highway project.

Parker said she always liked listening "while the old people were talking" in her family — and her future career was further boosted by her grandfather's and father's interest in photography and her father's hobby of building his own audio equipment. "I came from a long line of nerds," she said.

She attended the now-closed Garland Junior College in Boston in the mid 1970s, and while there, accompanied a classmate who was doing work in the Orchard Park area of Roxbury. "I had never seen the inner city before. I was a country girl," Parker said. "Here I was, standing at a burned-out shell, with trash around me, and I could almost touch the Prudential. I wondered, why does it look like this here?"

When she returned to Boston in 1993, after film school in California, and got a job researching a documentary on Dudley Square, she found the answer: "There were political and economic reasons why neighborhoods looked like they looked," she said.

She started a photography business in Boston, capturing neighborhood events and scenes, and in 2001 returned to the film world to help research a documentary on the Madison Park Development Corp. Through that project she met Roxbury photographer Vincent Haynes. "I helped him digitize his old photos; he told me stories and took me on drives to show me what used to be where," Parker recalled.

She learned that Roxbury "looked poor, but it was very rich in social networks and community spirit."

Haynes' brother, the Rev. Michael Haynes, a longtime Roxbury community activist and former state legislator, helped create the Lower Roxbury history project and offered the invocation at Aoun's inauguration last spring.

Parker said her work history and breadth of contacts in the community, along with her skills — "cultural sensitivity, interviewing technique, research technique" — make her uniquely qualified to coordinate the history project.

Beyond that, Parker said, "I was called to do this work. I'll do whatever it takes to get this story told."

(in photo Lolita Parker Jr. with the Rev. Michael Haynes)