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"We didn't create this area, we just described it. The city of Boston is so incredibly segregated, it was easy to divide."
-Andrew Jones2
"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."
-"Mandela," Massachusetts rap song; lyrics by Andrew Jones 3
November 4, 2016, marks 30 years since the historic referendum in which close to 50,000 citizens of Boston living in or near the predominantly Black area of "Greater Roxbury" voted on whether the area should leave Boston and incorporate as a separate municipality to be named in honor of former South African president Nelson and Winnie Mandela, or remain a part of Boston. The new community, what planners called "Greater Roxbury," would have included wards in much or all of the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, the Fenway, the South End, and what was then known as Columbia Point. Although it was defeated by a 3-to-1 margin in 1986, the measure was raised again in 1988, with a different organizing strategy that spoke to the more turbulent climate of the late 1980s. This campaign included an expanded focus on issues of gang violence, drug abuse, and other forms of lawlessness that plagued the Black community. This attempt, too, went down in defeat. Conceived a mere 12 years after court-ordered school desegregation in Boston, Mandela symbolized in many ways attempts to address equity issues that were never completely resolved after the school desegregation crisis of the 1970s.
As Pierre Clavel writes in Activists in City Hall: The Progressive Response to the Reagan Era in Boston and Chicago, "They asked Flynn to hold a plebiscite in Roxbury on the question, and when he refused, gathered the five thousand signatures necessary to put the question on the ballot as a nonbinding referendum. Their success in getting the signatures in August, three months before the November election, apparently took both the city administration and the black leadership by surprise." (Clavel, 2010, 81)
As Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly write in a critical...