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the only victims of the B-BURG venture; plenty of blacks suffered as
well. So eager were the banks and blockbusting brokers to get the loans
out there and the properties turned over that they did little screening of
either real estate or borrowers. Within two years, sixty-five percent of
the houses sold under the program needed major repairs. Within five
years, more than half of all the purchasers, unable to keep up their
payments, lost their homes. Many of the houses stood vacant for years,
refuges for drug addicts or the homeless, contributing to the relentless
decay of these once vital neighborhoods.
This story, whose broad outlines have been known for some time, is
told now in full compass and richly evocative detail by Hillel Levine, a
professor of sociology and religion at Boston University, and Lawrence
Harmon, editor of
The Massachllsetts Brookline Citizen.
Their book,
Tht
Death of an American Jewish Commllnity: A Tragedy of Good IlltelltiollS,
combines the rigor of good scholarship with the obsessive curiosity of
good journalism, fused here by a controlled anger at the human costs of
this unhappy episode . In it are some painful lessons for our time.
The first lesson implicit in this work is the scandalously haphazard
fashion in which we Americans make public policy, even in a city said to
be drenched with social science "expertise" and academic "excellence."
Levine and Harmon make very clear that the revival ofB-BURG in 1968
was part of a panic response to the King assassination and the black un–
rest it set off, a conclusion echoed by my own study of that time and
place.
It is easy for us now to chuckle at Bob Slater's desperate efforts to
curry favor in the black community and keep his glass tower intact. (The
story is all the more ironic in light of the Hancock Tower's future.
Within months of its completion, hundreds of those windows began
tumbling streetward, a design flaw wreaking infinitely more havoc to
that shimmering facade than black insurgents were ever likely to do.) But
if the Hancock was acting in its own self-interest, so were many other
Boston institutions and individuals. The dashikis, the shaved heads, the
copies of Frantz Fanon's
Wretched of the Earth
brandished in the air,
all
that talk of a twentieth-century "slaves' revolt" or "day of reckoning"
were taken quite literally by many Bostonians who at three o'clock in
the morning envisioned black guerillas creeping up their porch steps.
Public policy was shaped very quickly indeed to pump a lot of money
into the black community so that whites could again sleep soundly.
.Surely there was deep guilt about the conditions of black life in
Boston, the growth of the Roxbury ghetto, the racism that continued
to blight Massachusetts institutions from the notorious Boston public
schools to the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Fenway Park. Surely,
B-
