Can you make out the name on this headstone in Wyoming Cemetery? It’s not easy. It reads “SARAH E daughter George & Alice SNOWDEN.” The dates at the bottom of the stone are even harder to decipher, but seem to say “Sept 1877” and “Jul 1878.” Sarah was an infant who died when she was less than a year old. She was also Black.
George and Alice Snowden were Black immigrants to Virginia who first appeared in the 1880 census. This headstone is the only evidence that their daughter Sarah ever lived; there is neither birth nor death certificate on file for her. Yet the hearts carved into this stone, a design not found elsewhere in the cemetery, tell us how much her life meant to her parents, who had traveled to Melrose to raise a family far from their memories of the Virginia plantations.
George and Alice would live in Melrose for decades, have several more children, and eventually grandchildren as well. Perhaps one of their descendants left this synthetic flower for Sarah, which has just reemerged from beneath the snow.
The difficulty in deciphering Sarah’s headstone symbolizes the greater struggle in discerning Melrose’s Black past. Because their lives were undervalued while they lived, Black people were less likely to be included in written records and oral histories. The process of recovering their memory is not easy, and has required significant detective work. Yet the reward from this effort is priceless. It means making whole the history of this community that aspires to be open to all.
While Black History Month is drawing to a close, we invite you to join us in a continuing effort to recognize and memorialize Melrose’s Black history. Please complete the following survey, so that we can discern how best to proceed in this work. The survey is anonymous, but you do have the option of leaving your E-mail address for future updates: https://forms.gle/PhM7qeRx2maoj5mj7.
Thank you all for your comments and likes on our posts. When we first began this series, we expected trolls and naysayers. That this community has been open to hearing about some of the most painful episodes in our past bodes well for the future of all of us.
In 2004 a quiet revolution was accomplished at 314 Upham Street: for the first time in almost 350 years of Black presence in Melrose, an institution run by and for Black people was established when the Redeemed Christian Church of God purchased the premises of the former Hillcrest Congregational Church. Twelve years later, just before Christmas of 2016, a second Melrose Black church was established in the former Methodist parish hall at 643R Main Street when the Grace & Faith Christian Church bought that building. A few decades before, the idea of Black congregations moving into white houses of worship in Melrose would have been met with shock. The lack of such concern in the early 21st century attested to the decline of both the segregationist ideal and the Christian faith among Melrose’s white people.
The two churches draw their congregations from immigrant communities, respectively Nigerian and Haitian. This is not a coincidence. According to a comprehensive 2019 study funded by the Boston Foundation, Boston’s suburbs have experienced historic influxes of people of color over the past thirty years, and most of that demographic change can be attributed to recent immigrants to the United States. Melrose was about 1% Black, 3% POC, and 6% foreign-born in 1990; in 2017 it was estimated that those numbers had shifted respectively to 4%, 15%, and 14%, representing the fastest rise in both the Black and POC population in the city’s history.
If all of these trends hold steady, in another generation, Melrose may have more predominantly POC religious congregations than white ones. Should this happen, it would solve a major historic preservation question looming in the near future: who will pay to maintain the architectural gems that are Melrose’s historic houses of worship if their dwindling white congregations can no longer afford them? The answer may be that burgeoning Black and brown congregations will rejuvenate sacred spaces from which they were historically excluded.
Remembering a Civil War soldier and civil rights advocate
Published May 22, 2020
By JAMES BENNETT
FROM THE BOSTON GUARDIAN of January 13, 1912. (Courtesy Photo)
MELROSE — Early in the morning on Valentine’s Day of 1918, an 83 year old retired pipefitter named Wesley J. Furlong died peacefully in his bed at 47 Sanford Street. Some of his neighbors grieved his loss, but most Melrosians were too busy with the war effort to pay his death much heed, and six months later they had many more to mourn when the influenza pandemic struck Melrose. By then, Furlong’s children had sold their childhood home on Sanford Street, and memory of their father’s residence there would soon be forgotten. That collective amnesia was a great loss, for Furlong had been both a Civil War soldier and a civil rights advocate, and stood among the most heroic people ever to call Melrose home.
That he managed to survive and thrive was unlikely. He was born into the brutality of chattel slavery in 1835 in Martinsburg, Virginia. His mother was a member of the Methodist church there, and named her son after the founder of that tradition. The soil in that part of Virginia was exhausted, slavery was becoming less profitable, and one by one Furlong’s master began selling off his parents and brothers to slave traders in Baltimore, who then shipped them down to be sold in New Orleans. Sometime in his late teens or early twenties, before he could be carted off to the Baltimore slave pens, Furlong escaped north. Later in his life he managed to track down a brother in Pennsylvania. He never saw his parents or his other four brothers again.
By 1860 he was working in New Bedford as a waiter, living in a house with others who had escaped from slavery. When the Civil War erupted a year later, no encouragement was given to black men to serve in the Union Army, but following the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, desperate army recruiters began canvassing black neighborhoods looking for re-enforcements. In February of 1863, a concerted effort was made to drum up recruits for the newly formed Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry among the black community in New Bedford. Furlong was among those who answered that call. At one of those meetings he was chosen to address the other recruits, and declared that “The black man must put down this war,” for he wanted to be known as one who “fought for the liberty of his race and to prove himself a man.”
Furlong’s service with the Massachusetts 54th would be the defining event of his life. He was quickly promoted, serving as a sergeant in Company C, a unit comprised mostly of New Bedford recruits who adopted the sobriquet “The Toussaint Guards” in honor of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution. For Furlong and his fellow recruits, their service was both a pledge of loyalty to the United States and an act of extraordinary racial empowerment, as they would serve as agents of their own people’s liberation. Their most famous engagement came at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, when about one-quarter of the regiment suffered casualties. Furlong served as left guide in the charge on Fort Wagner, under the command of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Furlong survived the battle, Gould did not, and Furlong would later name his only son, Robert Gould Shaw Furlong, in honor of his commanding officer’s memory. The two-year tour of duty of the Massachusetts 54th would prove to be of more than just military significance. Prior to the service of the 54th, the 55th, and other all-black regiments, many white Americans doubted the bravery of black men and their fighting ability, as well as their loyalty to the United States. The service of Furlong and his fellow soldiers put that myth to rest—or at least it would for a short while.
In 1865, Furlong returned to New Bedford, where he served for some years as captain of the Schouler Guards, a military drill group made up of black Civil War veterans, who each year marched in the first of the annual Memorial Day parades. He also served as a leader in an African-American temperance society. Around 1875 he decamped from New Bedford, took up residence on the north slope of Beacon Hill in Boston, married his wife Elizabeth, and worked as a porter at the Bijou Theatre on Washington Street. He became a member of the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church, which would remain his spiritual home for the rest of his life. It was also in these years that he became Major of the Robert Gould Shaw Veteran Association, the alumni association of black Civil War veterans in Boston. In that capacity, Furlong led the honor guard at funerals, parades, commemorations, and other significant events in the life of African-American Boston for the next forty years, and became a well-known figure in the community.
In 1891, after spending his entire adult life in predominately black neighborhoods, Furlong moved to Melrose, a city with only a handful of black families. No doubt he made that decision for his children, who would now grow up in a less polluted, less crowded, and quieter setting than the tenements of Beacon Hill, albeit one where they would feel less comfortable in their own skin. Settling in the largely Irish enclave of Cork City, Furlong sent his daughter Edith and his son Robert to the neighborhood Gooch School, and then to Melrose High School, from which they would both graduate. Furlong would live in his Sanford Street home for almost 30 years, the longest he ever lived at one address.
In 1910 Furlong’s wife Elizabeth died. Both of his surviving children would soon marry and move from Melrose. Now in his late 70s, Furlong finally retired from his late career as a gasfitter. Yet only in these last years of his life would he reinvent himself as a modern civil rights activist. By the turn of the 20th century, the optimism of the Civil War’s aftermath had given way to the sad reality of a new racial accommodation in America: the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision had declared segregation legal, a violent regime of lynchings unleashed a reign of terror on African-Americans, and the Ku Klux Klan became a potent force in American politics. At the same time, a revisionist school of history began to argue that American slavery had been a benign institution and that the Confederacy had been a states’ rights movement that was the victim of Northern aggression.
Furlong, by that time one of only three surviving veterans of the Massachusetts 54th, was outraged. He joined the leadership of National Equal Rights League, a group that had splintered from the NAACP, preferring direct action and all-black leadership to compromise and white paternalism. In 1915 the NERL organized mass protests against the screening of “The Birth of a Nation” in Boston, and Furlong spoke at the rally at Faneuil Hall against the film. They succeeded in getting the movie banned in Boston. To little avail, the group lobbied Massachusetts Congressmen to stem the tide of Woodrow Wilson’s expansion of segregation. In 1917, less than a year before his death, Furlong was among the signatories to a petition that was dear to his heart, the racial integration of American soldiers marching off to fight in the Great War. A half-century after Furlong had marched south with the Massachusetts 54th, many white Americans speculated that black Americans could not be trusted to serve in the army. Furlong and rest of the NERL executive committee wrote:
“Give, Mr. President and all our governors, the same encouragement for volunteering or enlisting to white, to brown, to yellow, to black, Americans all, vouchsafing the same free chance to enlist, to rise on merit, and on return home the same right to civil service and to civil rights without bar or segregation. Now is the time for all in authority to declare for the abolition of all racial discrimination and proscriptions and for all to join in our unhyphenated Americanism for victory under the favor of the God of all mankind.”
Wesley Furlong, who had escaped slavery and fought the slave power, died at age 83 while still fighting against the racial hatred that had defined the course of his life. His funeral took place in Melrose at Memorial Hall, a new building that had just been erected to honor the Civil War dead. Since that February day in 1918, Melrose has largely forgotten him. Yet there are opportunities to correct course. The city has announced plans to renovate Memorial Hall, and a permanent marker that tells Furlong’s story could be part of that project. The neighborhood school that Furlong’s children attended, once called the Gooch and now called the Beebe, is set to reopen in the near future. It may be time to rename the school again, to honor a Melrose citizen whose life story touches on so many of the values that people in Melrose hold dear. No matter what route is chosen, one thing is certain: Furlong’s life deserves public recognition.
Author’s Note: I wish to thank Brigid Alverson for first telling me about Wesley Furlong. All research for this project was conducted during quarantine, and the final product suffers from a lack of access to archives and libraries. I invite anyone interested in memorializing Furlong to email me at jamesbennett1850@gmail.com.
These houses all have one thing in common: around 1966, members of the Executive Board of the Melrose Civil Rights Committee lived in them. They included Mrs. Charles LeDoux at 75 Perkins Street; Ben S. Hersey at 65 Clifton Park; Ernest W. Gordon at 279 Upham Street; Ruth Willey at 72 Ridgewood Lane; Robert F. Yaffe at 20 Goss Street; and Mr. & Mrs. Paul S. Anderson at 69 Harold Street.
The MCRC formed in the mid-1960s to fight against racial discrimination in Melrose, particularly in the area of housing. Unlike in the South, segregation in Melrose was not a local government policy. It was carried out by neighbors who quietly agreed never to sell their homes to Black buyers. In 1966 the MCRC wrote in an anti-segregation pamphlet “Although Northerners do not legislate segregation, we have developed remarkably efficient techniques for maintaining it.” The MCRC aimed to disrupt those techniques through anti-racist education and dialogue with their fellow white Melrosians.
Melrose now has a number of independent organizations engaging in similar education and dialogue initiatives. In 1992, the city of Melrose gave official sanction to such work through the formation of the Melrose Human Rights Commission; the formation of a new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion taskforce will strengthen those efforts. The MCRC attests to a long tradition of anti-racism among white Melrosians, which is heartening; that their work is unfinished all these years later is discouraging.
They had been in Melrose since the beginning. The first time they came unwillingly, as enslaved people, the second time voluntarily, as equal citizens. But in the middle years of the twentieth century, most white people in Melrose told their Black neighbors that they would no longer be welcome here.
A WHITE girl and a Black boy working together at Melrose High, taken from a publication produced by the Melrose schools in 1950. It was placed in a time capsule that was found in the Horace Mann School a few years ago. The boy is Charles Oliver; he graduated from Melrose High in 1950, the only black person in his class. The girl has not been identified.
They did not say this with burning crosses and water hoses and openly hurled racial epithets. They said it through neighborly agreements not to sell their homes to the wrong sort of people, and through realtor tours which steered clients away from neighborhoods where they just would not fit in. Federal government policies rewarded communities that followed these white supremacist practices, but the consent of the governed was never in doubt. All of these strategies were pursued quietly, in language so coded that anyone using it could easily deny racist intent. Over time, most white people in the city became so inured to this new vocabulary that they forgot how to talk openly about race at all. A century after this era began, we are in many ways still living through it — and if we do not come to terms with that reality, this era will never end.
Until the second half of the nineteenth century, there were two sorts of places where one could live in America: the city, and the country. With the coming of the railroad, a third sort of place was invented, the suburb, which would come to dominate American life in the twentieth century. City planners of the late 19th century lauded the suburb for its healthy access to clean air and open country, but not for its racial purity. Even suburbs which had enclaves created specifically for people of extraordinary wealth needed to have neighborhoods nearby which could accommodate the people who served them. As was detailed in the last article in this series, 19th century Melrose very much followed that unsegregated pattern, with Black families owning homes in neighborhoods where they could afford them, and in the more exclusive neighborhoods living in the homes of white families for whom they worked.
Nonetheless, driven by the racist science of eugenics that was the intellectual current of the day, many white people began to dream of a racially pure living environment. In 1892, the Melrose author Samuel Adams Drake, who lived at 23 South Cedar Park, described a visit he took to the Paul Revere house in the North End, writing “Pah! The atmosphere is actually thick with the vile odors of garlic and onions — of maccaroni and lazzaroni. The dirty tenements swarm with greasy, voluble Italians…. One can scarce hear the sound of his own English mother-tongue from one end of the square to the other…. How those old fellows would have stared, to be sure, to hear of a Boston with an Italian quarter, a Chinese quarter, a Negro quarter, etc.!” We can imagine the relief Drake felt upon exiting the train at the Melrose Depot and finding the air thick with the smell of baked beans and the streets mainly full of white Protestants like himself.
Such personal racial preferences would remain just that until the early twentieth century, when explicit white supremacy became a powerful current in national politics and culture. By the 1910s, the generation that had fought in the Civil War had begun to die out; along with them, the last generation of Black Americans who could remember life under slavery was likewise rapidly perishing. In Melrose, the war to end slavery was honored through the construction of Memorial Hall in 1912, yet nationally, in 1915 the war was repudiated by the ticket sales for “Birth of a Nation,” a revisionist film which depicted slavery as benign, Black men as rapists, the Union Army as tyrants, and the Ku Klux Klan as the nation’s saviors. Ticket sales were brisk, and the film received presidential approval when Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, showed it at the White House. Wilson promoted a new model of full-fledged white supremacist American nationalism, moving to segregate federal offices and discourage black men from serving in the military.
In Melrose, Major Wesley Furlong railed against “Birth of a Nation” and Wilson’s segregationist policies. He served on the steering committee of the National Equal Rights League, a Boston-based civil rights organization that was led by and for Black people. In 1915, the N.E.R.L. sent a letter to Wilson signed by Furlong protesting the segregation of Washington D.C.’s public transit, in which they wrote “Never before in the century and a half of the Republic’s existence has such segregation been found necessary. Surely it is now too late in the day of advancing Christian civilization to inaugurate any such practice and infamy.” Furlong was eighty years old when he signed onto the letter, and had personally witnessed the demise of slavery and the “advance of civilization” in his own life. He had lived in Melrose for twenty-five years and had seen his children graduate from the city’s schools. We can only imagine his distress upon seeing that some of his own neighbors had embraced the new ethic of segregation and had come to believe the lies spun about his own past enslaved life in “Birth of a Nation.”
Much as Melrosians professed distaste for the reports of lynchings that came up from the South, there can be no doubt that many were attracted to segregationist policies. In 1916, a Black Melrose woman, Rosa Plunkett, experienced this sentiment firsthand. On a cold March day in 1916, she was taken by cab from her home at 313 East Foster Street to the New England Sanitarium in Stoneham, which is now a housing development at 5 Woodland Road. Rosa was about to give birth, and her husband Hugh had signed a contract for the doctors at the Sanitarium to care for Rosa when her time came. Upon reaching the hospital, she was made to wait in agony for two hours, only to be informed by a doctor that she would not be received, because her presence would be “an inconvenience” for the white women in the maternity ward. She waited through the night until a cab became available, and the next morning was taken to a hospital in Boston that would accept Black women as patients. There, her son Charles was born.
The following Saturday, Melrosians gathered in Memorial Hall for a protest meeting presided over by Mayor Charles H. Adams. Local clergy gave rousing speeches decrying the treatment of Rosa Plunkett, as did Butler R. Wilson, the Plunketts’ attorney from the N.A.A.C.P. The gathering endorsed a declaration against racial discrimination. Yet what may have been most striking about this event was its anemic attendance. Only one Boston newspaper covered the meeting, and it estimated the crowd at about 100; by comparison, when the First Baptist Church across the street had first opened its doors in 1907, attendance at that first service had been estimated at 1700. A couple of weeks after the Plunkett protest event, at a dinner at Memorial Hall honoring C. F. Slayton, newspapers reported that hundreds attended. If this event was a gauge of Melrose opposition to segregation, the indications were not promising.
Following their ordeal, the Plunketts moved from Melrose to Malden. Upon his death in 1918, Wesley Furlong’s children sold the family house and moved first to Cambridge, and later to Roxbury. They were part of a new migration pattern that saw Black families forced out of Melrose and into neighborhoods closer to downtown Boston. Between 1920 and 1930, before government policies gave impetus to the segregation movement, the Black community in Melrose was reduced by almost fifty percent. While the precise decision-making pattern that led to this reversal remains difficult to interpret, the surprising fate of a Melrose street called Ingalls Court provides a clue. Ingalls Court is located off of Main Street, just south of East Emerson. Today it is the site of a medical office building. A century ago, it was home to a row of houses that for a period of about thirty years were exclusively inhabited by Black migrants from the South. In 1927, quite suddenly, all of the listings of Black residents on the street disappeared from the city directory, and they were replaced by poor immigrants from Europe and Canada. The complete racial replacement of the residents in one fell swoop, coming during good times before the crash of 1929, argues that there were forces in Melrose deliberately working to displace Black residents from the city.
The practice of segregation in Melrose was given government support in 1933 by President Roosevelt’s establishment of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The H.O.L.C. provided low-interest government loans to homebuyers. To provide guidance for local real estate agents, developers, and banks, the agency created a series of color-coded maps grading neighborhoods by the risk of investment. These grades were in turn based on evaluations submitted to the agency by the very same real estate agents, developers, and banks that they were supposed to inform, creating a closed circle of knowledge and power. These “redlining maps,” as they are now usually known, are often popularly interpreted as a top-down, government imposition of segregation onto an unsuspecting and unwilling professional class. On the contrary, the redlining maps were based on the perceptions and desires of white real estate professionals. They codified and gave new financial incentives for their pre-existing practices, and provide a glimpse into their collective mindset in the 1930s.
What we find is a professional culture profoundly obsessed with race, using language that we might more often associate with contemporary developments on the other side of the Atlantic. The evaluation sheets for Melrose, which had no redlined districts, have not yet turned up. In neighboring Malden, the sheet for one redlined neighborhood south of Salem Street complains of “the infiltration of Jews,” and that “the neighborhood has been largely Jewish for some time, with lower class Jews moving into the neighborhood at present.” It also notes that the district is “2% Negro.” The only neighborhood in Malden that received the second-highest, blue rating, located around Fellsmere Pond, was noted for its infiltration of “better-class Jews” but that “there is a tendency for the better class to move into the adjoining town of Melrose.”
The lessons of the redlining maps were clear: the racial composition of a district was ultimately more important than the actual quality of the housing stock. Analogous neighborhoods in Malden and Melrose, although just a mile or two apart and to all appearances of similar quality, were judged to be of differing investment value because of the people who were living there. This message, long spoken among developers, was now taught to homeowners. Based on the Malden evaluation form’s obsession with Jews, this lesson likely included a hefty dose of anti-Semitism that limited the migration of Jews from Malden to Melrose. In the case of Black people, the message was more extreme. Whereas the mapmakers conceptualized Jews as coming in lower and higher-class varieties, Black people by their essential nature were considered unacceptable. The message went out that the “infiltration” of a single Black family in the neighborhood would destroy the value of all of the surrounding homes there. The results were catastrophic for Melrose’s Black community, virtually wiping it out. By 1950, the census revealed only twelve Black people living in Melrose, the lowest number since the city had been founded a century before.
The segregationist dream had come true in Melrose. Just as more and more Black people were leaving the South to find their fortunes in big northern cities like Boston, they were forced into derelict neighborhoods that had been abandoned by white families, as suburbs like Melrose remained closed to them as effectively as if they had been surrounded by walls. Only part of this blame can be laid at the feet of government. In 1946, Massachusetts passed a fair housing law that barred discrimination based on race. For this reason, the explicit racial covenants and racist deed restrictions seen in other states are not in evidence in the postwar Melrose housing market. Instead, racist principles had to be articulated using coded language. An early example of this language can be found in an editorial in the Boston Herald in 1934 explaining why Melrose was the only large city in Massachusetts to vote to keep the ban on alcohol sales in that year: “The people are public-spirited, interested in culture, proud of their schools and playgrounds, their streets and lawns…. They are quite content to be “different” and many of the more discerning insist that their differences constitute an asset of high value.” Forty years before, Samuel Adams Drake had complained of the scent of garlic and onions; Melrosians in the twentieth century had learned to speak their racist disdain in roundabout language, making only vague references to a certain superior “discernment.”
In the 1960s, Melrose would have to confront what that “discernment” really meant. In 1963, Floyd W. McLaughlin, a white man known for his outspoken support of Black civil rights, was working to repair the gutters at 9 Simonds Road, the home of one of the only Black residents of the city, Stanley C. Harris. A passing white driver threatened him for working on Harris’s house. Over the course of the next week, the tires were slashed, the ignition cut, and the wheel lugs loosened on McLaughlin’s car. This campaign of white supremacist terror culminated in Molotov cocktails being thrown onto the porch of McLaughlin’s house at 59 Orient Avenue while he and his family lay sleeping. The frightened family fled the flames only to find (a nasty racist message, misspelled) painted in huge letters on the side of the house. Thinking of the safety of his five children, McLaughlin moved from Melrose, after threatening to sell the property to a Black family, much to the chagrin of his neighbors.
No one immediately rose to take up McLaughlin’s cast-off cross, but three years later, a ministry at the city’s Unitarian church formed the nucleus of what became a citywide activist organization called the Melrose Civil Rights Committee. They published a pamphlet in which they called on people in Melrose to end housing segregation. They wrote “In our society, segregation is a pattern, a way of life…. Although Northerners do not legislate segregation, we have developed remarkably efficient techniques for maintaining it.” The Committee described “areas of Melrose where one violates the “Gentleman’s Agreement” by selling or renting to a Jew or a Catholic or an Italian.” On Black homeownership in Melrose, the Committee dolefully concluded that “prejudice against the Negro is so deep-seated that, even with the weight of law against it, it will be with us for many more generations.”
In hindsight, we now know that the committee was correct. In the wake of Martin Luther King’s murder, Congress finally summoned the courage to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which brought the legal era of federally mandated segregation to an end. The reality of segregation, however, has been slow to die. President Nixon’s Southern strategy was based on appeasement of segregationists, and he deliberately undermined the plan for equitable housing put forth by his own Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, George Romney. No presidential administration has touched the subject in a meaningful way since. The Massachusetts affordable housing law passed in 1969, M.G.L. Chapter 40B, has for over fifty years existed primarily to enrich developers at the expense of communities, and has utterly failed to create sufficient affordable housing stock in the Boston area for people of all races. In 1974, Boston’s attempt at school desegregation caused more white flight to suburbs like Melrose. Aside from the bright spot of the Metco program, which has brought some level of racial diversity to the Melrose schools, government at all levels has proven unable to mitigate a segregation problem it had a large role in creating.
Despite these failures, we are now living in the age of Melrose’s third Black community. At some point between the 1990 and 2000 censuses, Melrose’s Black population rose to include just under 1% of the city’s people. It took eighty years, but the population had finally exceeded the previous highpoint that had been achieved around 1920, just before segregation began in earnest. In the past generation, that population has grown steadily, fueled largely by recent Black immigrants to the United States and their children. In a sign of the importance of those communities, Melrose’s first two Black-run institutions, the Redeemed Christian Church of God on Upham Street, and the Grace and Faith Christian Church on Main Street, were founded by Nigerian and Haitian migrant groups respectively. Despite the most unforgiving housing market in the city’s history, the 2020 census should reveal that the Black community has reached its highest numbers ever.
The story of that present-day community will have to await another time, and another writer whose talents for journalism are more honed than mine. I thank everyone who has read through these articles to the end. My goal in writing them was to establish a shared context and set of reference points for understanding the history of race and racism in Melrose. One unintended consequence of the long era of segregation has been the lost ability among white Melrosians to articulate race-related issues in our community. I hope that, in one way or another, this reading has helped to loosen tongues, make conversation more fluid, and grant us a shared, expressive vocabulary. Together, we can find our way out of this labyrinth of white supremacy.
The author invites readers to visit the social media pages of the Melrose Historical Commission, including Facebook and Instagram, where they can find supplementary images and text related to this story.
Fifty-nine Orient Avenue is a charming house on a tranquil street. Fifty-eight years ago, on September 26th, 1963, it was the target of a white supremacist terrorist attack.
Living in the house at the time were Floyd and Ruth McLaughlin and their five young children. Floyd had been raised in Melrose and graduated from Melrose High. An anti-segregationist, he had recently canvassed Melrose to urge his neighbors to call for the release of Ralph Allen. By day, he worked as a carpenter for Raytheon.
On September 16th, he had taken a job repairing the gutters at 9 Simonds Road, the home of two of Melrose’s only Black residents, Stanley C. Harris and his wife, Gladys. Harris was the leader of a popular swing band that played hotels, ballrooms, and social events. Simonds Road, with its easy access to Route 1, was the perfect location for someone with a job that took him all over the Boston area late into the night.
While McLaughlin was high on a ladder working to repair Harris’s gutters, a passing middle-aged white man yelled at him to stop working on a Black man’s house. A tense exchange ensued, and the white man ran away before McLaughlin could come down to confront him.
Over the course of the next two weeks, McLaughlin’s tires were slashed and his business sign was stolen from his truck. Finally, at 2:45 AM on September 26th, two plastic bottles full of gasoline were ignited on his back porch. The family escaped and the fire department arrived in time to save the house from the flames. Across the back of the house was painted “LEAVE NIGER LOVER.”
Fearing for his family’s safety, McLaughlin left Melrose, telling one newspaper that he would sell his house “to anyone, and that meant any Negro who wanted to buy it.” He died in 2007; his wife Ruth died in May of last year.
Stanley and Gladys Harris stayed in Melrose. Gladys died in 1996; Stanley joined her in 1999.
No one was ever charged in the attack on the McLaughlin family. While the perpetrator is likely dead, it is also likely that there is someone alive now who knows who committed this crime. If that person is you, please contact the Melrose Police.
Ralph Waldo Allen grew up at this house at 204 East Foster Street, and it was his legal residence during the summers of 1962 and 1963, which he spent working as a volunteer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, registering Black people to vote in Terrell County, Georgia. For his efforts, he would be shot at, beaten up, and thrown in prison repeatedly.
In August of 1963, Allen was arrested on charges of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer. He was sent to prison, and his bail was set at $40,000. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was urged to intervene, and he arranged for Allen’s defense to be taken up by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights. In December, he was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison. In July of 1964, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that Allen’s rights had been violated because he had been tried by an all-white jury. He walked free, and the ruling in his case led to the desegregating of juries in Georgia.
Ralph Allen spent most of his later life working as an English teacher at a high school in Pennsylvania. He died in 2005. His older sister, Dixie Clark, was a lifelong Melrosian, very active in the community, and passed away in 2018.
In a 1962 editorial, the Boston Traveler noted that in Georgia “such disparate figures as the Rev. Martin Luther King and a white Melrose, Mass. youth, Ralph Waldo Allen, have been jailed for their efforts to help Negroes.” Since Dr. King’s murder, he has become something of a national saint; but in the last opinion poll conducted before he died, only about one-third of American white people said they approved of him. Most white people were not standing with Dr. King while he lived. Ralph Waldo Allen did, and is the only Melrosian of his era who put his life on the line to do so.
Let’s play a game called “Has my neighborhood been redlined?” You see six residential streetscapes. Three of them are in Melrose, and were not redlined by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s, and three of them are in Malden south of Salem and east of Ferry, and were redlined. “Redlining” refers to the HOLC’s practice of placing certain neighborhoods inside of red lines and recommending that financial institutions not support loans for homebuyers within those bounds. No neighborhood in Melrose was redlined; some neighborhoods in Malden were.
If you are finding this game hard to play, it is because the HOLC’s definition of a redlined neighborhood had nothing to do with the quality of the construction and everything to do with the race and ethnicity of the people who lived there. The HOLC report for this part of Malden notes the “infiltration” of Jews, with “lower class Jews moving into the neighborhood at present.” It was also “2% Negro.” To avoid the fate of redlining, the message for bank loan officers, real estate agents, and white homeowners was clear: keep racial undesirables out. As a result of that philosophy, Melrose’s black population dwindled to 12 people by 1950.
In 1946, this redlined neighborhood of Malden elected the city’s first Black city councilor, Herbert L. Jackson; by 1950 he was serving as Malden’s state representative, as you can see by this proudly painted electrical box. We would love to show you Melrose’s first Black city councilor, but we are still waiting for them to be elected.
It was the first week of 1930, and Melrose and its surrounding towns were on edge. They were in the grip of a crime wave. Three young armed men were committing robberies nearly every day.
On New Year’s Eve, they were on the Waverly Avenue Extension—today’s Slayton Road (image one)—where they robbed Edwin Stillman, age 70, in a daring and traumatic home invasion. On New Year’s Day, they were on Swains Pond Avenue (image two) and attempted to rob a parked motorist, Edward Modeen. Modeen sped away, his car showered with gunfire.
The next day, they stopped to eat at a “negro lunchroom” on Route 1. It was owned by Joseph Fendell and his wife, Jennie. Fendell had come up from Maryland and was 64 years old. He had worked for years as a janitor in Boston, before moving to Swampscott and opening the restaurant in Saugus.
The men sat down at the counter, ordered their food, and ate calmly. When Fendell gave them the bill, they refused to pay, and drew their weapons. Fendell, in a panic, threw a pot of boiling water at one of the men; he in turn shot Fendell four times, killing him. A passing motorist who had heard Jennie Fendell’s screams alerted the police. An extensive manhunt ensued, and all three suspects were eventually caught. Two of them, both aged twenty, received life in prison; a sixteen year old was sentenced to sixteen years.
Did the gang choose to rob Fendell because they believed a Black man would be more vulnerable or less likely to report a crime? Did they shoot him because they thought his Black life was worth less? Probably.
In the years following the release of “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915, a pernicious myth was spread that Black men were naturally more violent and prone to crime than white men, and were a threat to white communities.
One of the more perplexing wedding photos in Melrose history was shot at 15 Howard Street on September 9, 1926. It was the wedding of Helen Knight, who lived in this house with her mother Cora, and Woodford Harris, who lived at 418 Lebanon Street. To show their belief in “international brotherhood,” they compiled a kind of human menagerie to serve as their wedding party, including “a Hebrew,” “a Spanish,” “a Japanese,” and “a Negress.”
The Black woman in this photo was Willie Kethleen Hunter, and she is most likely the person with the same name found in the U.S. Census living at Marshall, Texas in 1930. The connection between Marshall and Melrose is probably the officiant of this wedding, the Rev. Frederick D. Emerich, who was a leader in the American Missionary Association, a largely Congregational group that had been conducting missions to the American South since Reconstruction. One of their longstanding missions was at Marshall. Helen Knight was the daughter of a Congregational clergyman; did she meet Willie Hunter when she was on mission? It’s possible.
What is undeniable is the racial hierarchy at play in her wedding theme. Helen and her Melrose friends were labeled as “American”; Willie Hunter, despite being from America, was “a negro.” Helen was well-meaning, and was trying to celebrate diversity. Nonetheless, she asserted her own white, Protestant background as the true “American” identity.
The marriage of Helen and Woodford resulted in the birth of a daughter about a year after this photo was taken. She is now 93 and lives in Virginia.
On the evening of Saturday, March 27th, 1916 Rosa Plunkett stood on her porch at 313 East Foster Street awaiting a cab. She was about to give birth, and she knew where she had to go. Weeks before, her husband Hugh had signed a contract for her to be received and cared for at the New England Sanitarium. It was a long ride across Melrose to the hospital (image 2), which is now the site of a housing development at 5 Woodland Road in Stoneham.
When she arrived, she spent over two hours in agony in the waiting room. Finally, Dr. Ora Cress approached her, only to inform her that she would not be received, because her presence might inconvenience the white women in the maternity ward. By that time of night, no cabs were available, and she had to spend several hours longer in the waiting room before being transported to Boston the next morning to a hospital that would receive Black women. Her son Charles was born in Boston the next day.
Melrose was soon in an uproar. The next Saturday a rally in support of the Plunketts was held in the newly-built Memorial Hall (image 3). Mayor Charles H. Adams presided, and speeches were heard from the Plunketts’ attorney, Butler R. Wilson of the NAACP, as well as local clergy. A resolution was adopted condemning racial discrimination. The sanitarium apologized, and the Plunketts successfully sued them, alleging that Rosa had suffered extreme physical and psychological trauma.
The Plunketts had moved into Melrose from Malden just a few months before. Hugh, an immigrant from Jamaica, had recently founded the U. S. Tropical Fruit Company (image 4), manufacturers of a banana milk product that Hugh had recently patented (image 5). Moving to an East Side street just off the Common was confirmation of the family’s success.
Following the incident at the Sanitarium, they moved right back to Malden. Baby Charles, born under such duress, died in upstate New York in 1987, leaving behind several children and grandchildren.
WARNING: some of the images in this series are racist in nature and may be disturbing to see.
Before a disastrous fire in 1937, Melrose’s City Hall had a full third story that featured one of the largest auditoriums in the city. The third image, taken from the collections of Historic New England, is almost certainly an interior photo of that space. In that hall, Melrosians heard countless concerts and lectures, watched the first motion pictures played in the city, and even played the first organized game of basketball in city history.
For a period of about fifty years after the hall’s opening in 1874, minstrel shows were by far the most popular entertainments shown there. These minstrel shows were local theater productions, created by and for Melrose’s white people, often featuring some of the town’s most prominent citizens. The annual Melrose Athletic Club minstrel show was the biggest of the year, and was the primary community fundraiser for school sports. Members of the chamber of commerce and city government often took part; in the sixth image, you can see the Melrose Board of Aldermen were part of the show. In the seventh image you see a ladies’ minstrel show put on by the Unitarian Church; the star player on that evening was Annie Louise Barrett, wife of sitting Congressman and Melrose resident William Emerson Barrett.
Minstrel shows helped white people in Melrose to consolidate their racial identity while defusing their anxieties over the presence of other races through hate-filled humor. Their popularity a century ago is not one of the prouder chapters in Melrose history—but it nonetheless remains an indelible part of our past.
They came down from Canada, returning to the country their parents had escaped, believing it had been transformed.
They sailed up from the Caribbean, hoping for something better than the exhausting heat and hard labor of the sugar plantations. Above all, they ran from the South, from the war-ravaged land that had traded the slave patrol and the overseer’s whip for the Ku Klux Klan and the heavy hand of Jim Crow. They were Melrose’s second black community, and unlike the enslaved community that preceded them, they came here voluntarily.
For a period of about a half-century following the Civil War, that community slowly grew, taking up residence in almost every neighborhood in the city, before experiencing an abrupt and marked decline. How that community managed to integrate into the city’s neighborhoods over a century ago should give people hope for a desegregated future; how those gains were so quickly lost should be a stark reminder of the enduring power and persistence of white supremacy in our community.
Post-Civil War Melrose was a world transformed. Almost no one could remember a time when enslaved people walked the streets here. Living in a whirlwind of technological and social change, a child raised in Victorian Melrose would have felt as far removed from the age of slavery as a child does today. In 1845, the railroad had come to Melrose, and every year after the train brought new families into this new town, which had finally incorporated as an independent place in 1850. In 1850, the population was 1,200; by 1900 it was over 12,000, almost all of them first-generation Melrosians. Ancient farms were broken up and parceled out for suburban developments, and the sound of house construction competed with the noise from scattered small factories. For the first time, many men, and some few women, commuted to Boston for work on a daily basis. Melrosians were investing in real estate, infrastructure, technology, and a plethora of small businesses both at home and in Boston. They were creating the suburb that we know today, living a lifestyle that had more in common with 2021 than 1841.
Black people stood among the many migrant groups who moved to Melrose in those years to join in building that prosperity. After culling through the census data from 1850 to 1940 (the most recent publicly available census), for the first time a picture of that migration has begun to take form. In 1850, the Black population of Melrose consisted of five individuals. By 1910, at the community’s height, there were 124 Black people living in Melrose, comprising about .75 percent of the city’s population. Such numbers may seem tiny, but placed in context they are significant. In that same year of 1910, the Black population of Lynn made up .8 percent of the city; in Salem it was .4 percent, in Somerville .3 percent, and even in Boston, long the center of the community, it was only 2 percent. Unlike later in the 20th century, when Black and white populations became sharply segregated, a century ago they were much more evenly dispersed. The commuter suburb was an entirely new phenomenon, and the idea that such spaces should be exclusively white domains had not yet taken hold. The belief that the presence of a single Black family could depreciate the value of a neighborhood was something that later generations would invent. The story of Melrose in these years testifies to that broad pattern.
Black families during these years found a particular welcome in the largely Irish Catholic area between Maple and West Wyoming, then known as Cork City. In the 1970s, Boston Irish Catholics would become infamous for their refusal to desegregate their schools; in the 1870s, Irish neighborhoods were the most racially integrated in Boston, and interracial marriage most frequently took place between Black people and Irish immigrants. That same cultural affinity was clearly at play in Cork City. In the early 1890s, you could say hello to Susan Ellis, up from Virginia, a single mother raising her two young daughters at 85 Baxter St.; turning left on Cutter and right on Sanford, you could doff your hat to Wesley Furlong at number 47, proud veteran of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment; taking another left, there was the Hester family at 39 Tappan, immigrants from North Carolina; at 97 Cleveland you could receive a “magnetic healing” from Eleanor Wright, an Afro-Cuban immigrant, and two doors down at 101 Cleveland St., Moses Mitchell would talk your ear off about politics.
Moses Mitchell was, like Furlong, a veteran of the Civil War, having served in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment, the only Black cavalry unit from Massachusetts formed during the war. He had fought at the Siege of Petersburg, and this experience became an important part of his identity, as his headstone at Wyoming Cemetery is inscribed “5th Mass. Vol. Cav. Comrade at Rest.” Since he worked as a stonemason, he might have carved the stone himself. Mitchell was himself a Northerner, having been born in Marshfield, but the experience of freeing his brethren in the South had clearly inspired him to assert his own right to participate in government. Mitchell was an active member of the Democratic Party, an unusual affiliation at a time when the Republican Party commanded near universal loyalty from Black voters. He was elected the party’s Committee Member for Melrose at least twice, in 1882 and 1884. In 1884 he addressed the party’s nominating convention. The Boston Globe reported: “A black man, Mr. M. P. Mitchell of Melrose, a member of the district committee, called the delegates to order at 2:20 o’clock, greeted with applause as he took the chair. He pleaded for harmony and wisdom in the deliberations before them…. He denounced the recent record of the Republican party and its tendencies in monopoly…. When he declared that “the honest people of the Sixth District will put down both Henry Cabot Lodge and his purse,” the air was rent with shouts.” In 1884, it was possible for a Black Melrose man like Mitchell to be elected by his white neighbors to act as their sole representative in party politics, and to receive acclaim for his oratory and leadership. That possibility has not been realized since.
Black people were not just moving into Cork City. A number of Black families would make their homes in the emerging Protestant neighborhood centered around the Melrose Common, particularly on the upper reaches of Laurel Street and its surrounds. In the 1910s, you would have found William and Mary Harvey, from Virginia and North Carolina, raising their family at 185 Laurel, and next door at 183 Laurel was the Smith family, with parents Samuel and Anna from Virginia and Mississippi; around the corner at 416 Grove were George and Mary Sampson, raising their eight children, and next door at 418 was the Joseph family, with father George hailing from the West Indies. While these families lived in close proximity, there is little evidence of the later practice of blockbusting in the neighborhood, as other East Side Black families during these years found homes further down Laurel, on Beech Avenue (then known as Folsom Street), on Waverly Avenue, and what became Slayton Road. The East Side in the first decade of the twentieth century was arguably more open to homeownership by Black residents than it was to Catholics.
A large number of Black residents also found homes along Main Street and its surrounding courts and alleys (long since demolished for parking) especially single people and couples looking to rent apartments. Thus, for example, we find Mary Ransom, by profession a “matron” living above 545 Main St. (the Affairs to Remember building), along with her young relative Violet, who worked as a governess. A block up Main from Ransom’s address, between the Methodist Church and East Emerson, stood the Black enclave of Ingalls Court. Nowadays this address is occupied by an office building, but from 1900 to 1920 it was home to four residences that were exclusively populated by Black immigrants from the South, making it the only all-Black residential street in Melrose’s history. Like many of Melrose’s Black newcomers, the people of Ingalls Court were laborers, performing grueling, unskilled work. But the Melrose housing market had enough range that they could afford to rent homes just off of Main Street, perhaps hoping to save up enough money to one day join the Black homeowners in Cork City or the East Side. For those who could not afford the rent on Main Street, there was always the area around Swains Pond, which was a veritable no-man’s land at the time, home to a number of squatter residences, some of them Black.
There were some Melrose neighborhoods which were beyond the financial capabilities of Black homeowners in turn-of-the-century Melrose, but some Black men and women made their homes there as domestic servants, placing Black people in every corner of the city. In the census of 1870, three young Black migrants fleeing post-war Virginia could take in views of Ell Pond while enjoying the new-found feeling of being compensated for their work: Lettie Miles, who worked for A.V. Lynde at 39 Lake Avenue, Violet Jarvis, who worked for George Emerson at 17-19 Lake Avenue, and Martha James, who worked for Mary Livermore at 21 W Emerson Street. Emerson and Livermore had been abolitionists before the war, and their hiring of Black labor may have been an extension of their pre-war commitment to improving Black lives. Melrose was quickly becoming a city of big, rambling Queen Anne houses that required constant care and maintenance, and Black people filled many of those roles, particularly in homes on and just off of Franklin Street in the Highlands, and on both East and West Emerson Streets.
Thanks to the box marked “race” on U.S. Census forms, Black residence in the city is easy to track; Black business ownership has proven more elusive to discover, especially given the ephemeral nature of most small businesses. Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest that there was at least some Black participation in the Melrose small business community. After living at 94 Rowe St. for over 20 years, around 1930 George Birmingham rented space for an upholstery shop next to the YMCA building at 4 East Foster St. when he was in his late 70s. In 1910, William Honsucle, a migrant from South Carolina living at 511 Main St. (long since demolished, now Starbucks) who usually worked as a janitor, opened up a short-lived restaurant in his home. In 1900, Virginia Jefferson ran a boarding house at 34 Essex St. with three young tenants who, like her, were migrants from Virginia. Further research may well uncover more such examples.
None of this racial integration would have been possible were it not for white tolerance of Black presence in the city—but the nature of this “tolerance” should in no way be overstated. At that time, the most popular entertainment in Melrose by far was minstrelsy. Every year, the Melrose Athletic Club’s biggest fundraiser was their annual minstrel show, which featured members of the Board of Aldermen and other respected locals caking their faces with black paint and singing and dancing in an outrageously demeaning caricature of Black people. The minstrel tradition was a uniting bond for white people across the city. In 1899, perhaps in a nod to the suffrage movement, the highly progressive Unitarian Church of Melrose presented an all-woman minstrel show. In 1906, perhaps to cast off the stereotype of the Irish drunkard, the St. Mary’s Catholic Temperance Society mounted a minstrel show at City Hall. Whether an Italian saying a Novena at St. Mary’s, a Jew reciting the Torah at the Hebrew School on Grove Street, or an old Yankee attending Sunday School at the Methodist Church, most white people in the city could put aside their significant differences to feel a shared superiority over the Black families of Melrose.
And yet, unlike in future decades, Black people were willingly accorded a place in the community. Perhaps nothing bears up that fact better than a series of advertisements taken out in the Boston newspapers in the late 1890s by the white real estate agent Minnie Farnsworth, who lived at 60 Upham Street. In 1897, for example, she sponsored this ad in the Boston Herald:
“GOOD PLACE FOR COLORED FOLKS—$20 cash and $20 monthly buys a 2-story house. 8 rooms and attic. Spot pond water, water closet, furnace, cemented cellar, over 6000 ft. land, fruit, henhouse, &c.; nice location and neighborhood. 5 minutes to depot; price $2300. FARNSWORTH. 634 Main St., opp. Methodist Church, Melrose; houses to rent.”
Over a century ago, at least one real estate agent in Melrose was not trying to keep Black people out; she was trying to convince them to move in. In this jostling, dizzying world around the year 1900, many Melrosians imagined this suburb not as a lily-white place isolated from the wider tapestry of American life, but as an integral part of that warp and weft, with Black people making up some of those binding strands.
Casting back to this period in Melrose’s Black history, I think of the photograph of Robert Gould Shaw Furlong, Melrose High Class of 1905, in his football uniform with his teammates, staring out at us across the divide of a century. As the only Black boy on the team, he clearly stands out. Yet he was part of the team. He knew other Black children in his own neighborhood and elsewhere in the city; sometimes their parents rented their homes, but just as often they owned them. His father was highly respected by Black and white people alike around town. Around the corner had lived Moses Mitchell, now departed, but well remembered as the head of the town’s Democrats. On Main Street he could pass by Black people working in the commercial district’s businesses, and in a few cases owning them. With the local real estate market wide open, there was every sign that more Black people would continue to move into the city. Despite the constant insult of the minstrel shows, the future of Black Melrose seemed bright.
As we shall see in our next installment, the power of white supremacy proved stronger—at least for a time.
The author invites readers to visit the social media pages of the Melrose Historical Commission, including Facebook and Instagram, where they can find supplementary images and text related to this story. They can also explore an interactive map of people of color in Melrose history during this period at https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1VhzZB6I89NacVwdUYGQc6kzb3PMSjcej&usp=sharing.
