Resistance in Boston That Are Kinda Near the Emerald Necklace Sometimes, I Don’t Know, It Depends on Where You Stand

Our goal in creating our transect was similar to that of “A People’s Guide to Greater Boston” in that we sought to tell stories with our sites from the underdog perspective. We wanted to highlight the strife and struggle of the often overlooked, that is woven into the fabric of Boston. It is a place that prides itself on its relationship and centrality to the colonists’ resistance and revolution against Britain during the founding of our settler-state. This fact is plastered all around Boston through place names, plaques, and statues, making it impossible to ignore. This background creates an interesting tension with the histories of resistance we feature throughout this transect. The city of Boston is not shouting these stories of resistance from the rooftops because they show a deviation from their preferred narrative. They want to look at history through the stories of the rich, the white, the powerful, the male and hide anything that veers off this chosen path. We undermine this through our transect of unseen stories about those who fought to have their voices heard despite the odds and what they have left behind. 

Our walking tour loosely follows the Emerald Necklaces tract, but not really. This is for two reasons, firstly because it is not the star of this tour. Too often the Emerald Necklace is praised and elevated, and our tour’s mild attention to it helps ground the park system back to the level of the people. Secondly, it emphasizes the relationality of the park system. It doesn’t exist in its own vacuum but as the parks are connected to each other, they are also connected to the rest of Boston through struggle and human experience. 

This perspective of resistance and the overlooked is especially pertinent in relation to the Emerald Necklace because of who Fredrick Law Olmsted was and his vision for the parks. It would be hard to deny the genius of Olmsted as a Landscape architect and of his designs. The Emerald Necklace is one of his more notable accomplishments due to its expertly created natural beauty as well as its innovative functionality as a flood management system. However, as a person, Olmsted was not as great. He was a difficult man to work with resulting in him getting fired from numerous projects and he was complicit in, if not the perpetrator of, the destruction of Black neighborhoods for his parks [2]. He also had very particular views of what should be allowed in a park. He wanted his parks to be tranquil escapes from the city for everyone, a landscape for the mixing of all types of people, and a democratic environment, but only in the ways he deemed acceptable [2]. It’s not a large jump to think that mass protests and resistance movements would not fit into Olmsted’s rigid rules for his parks. Thus, the use of his parks in this way is in itself a resistance to his close-minded vision of what a park should be as well as a roundabout fulfillment of his flat claims of it being a democratic landscape. 

Viewing the Emerald Necklace as well as its surroundings through the lens of struggle and resistance helps create a much different picture of the parks; one created through its relationships with the underprivileged and deprived, rather than its relationships to the rich and powerful that are much more prevalent. A surface-level walk through the park system mostly presents an elitist and white environment. One gets the feeling, even if not explicitly stated or intended, that these are parks only for the affluent and advantaged. This walking tour challenges that idea and turns it on its head. It highlights the buried roots that anchor the parks as a place of the needy, the striving, and the fighting. It posits that the Emerald Necklace is not for those who are fixed in the status quo, but those pushing for a better future. Just like other areas of Boston, these relationships and stories are hidden just below the surface and simply showing this fact helps shatter the elitist facade that had been built. 

A large aspect of our transect is Black resistance, as several of our sites feature the obscured Black history within Boston. Throughout its history, Boston has been a highly racialized landscape and as the Boston Globe series pointed out, it continues to be one. Boston is still viewed as the most racist city in America and for pretty good reasons: Boston is the city with the highest proportion of white people, Black enrollment in the city’s top universities has been unmoving in the single-digits for the last three decades, the city’s treatment of Black athletes has been abysmal at best, and the healthcare system is still very segregated [1]. It also still largely reflects the remnants of redlining, which has left the city very segregated. The overwhelming fact is Boston has not been historically welcoming to Black people, and that history has physical consequences one can easily view in our environment.  Just taking a walk through the non-historically-Black area and trying to count the number of Black people you see shows this problem, and the city of Boston as a whole has done little to combat this issue. Although Boston is a place of a lot of racial tension and Black pain, it has also been one of Black resilience, joy, and community. By uncovering the histories at several of the sites on our tour, we are able to show this aspect. There have been so many instances of Black strength and excellence within Boston that show its racialization in a more positive light. However, since these instances have been obscured in the effort to erase Black history as a whole in Boston, only the more negative aspects are noticeable. Hopefully, by highlighting the more positive Black history in Boston, we are able to show that Boston, like everywhere else, has had both good and bad instances in regards to race relations, rather than the strictly negative image it has now. 

1. Team, The Spotlight. “Boston. Racism. Image. Reality: The Spotlight Team Takes on Our Hardest Question.” BostonGlobe.com, 10 Dec. 2017, https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/series/image/. 
2. Garey, Diane and Lawrence Hott, directors. Fredrick Law Olmstead – Designing America. Kanopy, PBS, 2014, https://northeastern.kanopy.com/video/frederick-law-olmsted-designing-america. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021. 

Jace Ijeh and Gabby Keller

Resistance in Boston

Our transect features sites of resistance of all forms, from both past and present, throughout Boston.

-resistance -protest -Shattuck Homeless Shelter -Franklin Park