Bay State Banner

When you walk up Warren St. in Roxbury to go to the office of Melvin Miller, change is all around you. You can hardly hear yourself think, because bulldozers are flattening out what used to be a city block. The only think you can smell is crushed cement rubble kicked up by the bulldozers.

Inside Mel Miller's office, the bulldozers and cement are shut out, but you don't leave change behind. Miller, publisher and half of the official writing staff of Roxbury's seven-month-old Negro newspaper, the Bay State Banner sits down, puts his feet up on the desk, and begins to talk excitedly about the changes going on in Roxbury. He touches on urban renewal and construction of new buildings, mentions new schools and community centers, and then federal, state, and local relief programs with unintelligible letter codes--Operation Head Start, ABCD, or the BRA. He also talks about things that aren't changing so fast as one would like them to--crime and violence on the streets, unemployment, bad housing, discouraged people. Then into this quick sketch of the condition of Roxbury, Miller fits his own venture, the Banner.

For seven months, until last April 23, the Bay State Banner appeared on the newsstands once a week. Its staff was Negro, as was its predicted readership. Covering local church, community center, school, and urban renewal news almost exclusively, the Banner was read by more than a quarter of Roxbury's Negroes, Miller estimates, and was probably the only paper his readers read with any regularity or thoroughness. The Banner, following, probing, and trying to make intelligible Roxbury's renewal program, also won the support of the community leaders, largely through what Miller calls "our unusual editorial policy." The paper, he explains, permits no editorializing or even screening of opinion in its new coverage. It takes a stand in editorials, but leaves the news page open to any interest that wants to present its case--even groups the Banner has criticized, such as the BRA or the Boston White Citizens Council.

There are other Negro newspapers, Miller explained, but they don't do what the Banner does. They focus almost entirely on entertainment, sports, or else are "100 per cent press release papers." "We're a no nonsense paper," he adds, "for people who really want to know what's going on in the Roxbury community. We want to be a paper for people who live here, not people who drink here," he adds. And the 20,000 readers who acquired the Banner habit in the last seven months seem to indicate Miller's paper is a welcome addition.

Then, on April 23, Miller announced that the Banner would be forced to discontinue publication. In an editorial condemning the "neutrality" of the business world in the racial struggle, he said that without the support and revenue of the downtown Boston merchants, the Banner could not operate at a profit.

Miller had expected some response to his decision, but not the response he got. The reaction in the Roxbury community, he notes with a look of pride, was "incredible." After only seven months of publication--"what a hullaballoo." The telephone began to ring, letters flooded in and a community "Save the Banner" committee was formed. Miller himself sought, and found, support from Harvard students. Even Boston merchants began to have some second thoughts--enough so that after a four week rest, the Banner was back in print on May 21.

Why all this "hullaballoo" over a weekly newspaper in one section of a city 'flooded with newspapers? Miller himself has some very strong convictions about what his paper is trying to do in Roxbury, and journalism is hardly his primary interest. He is a graduate of Harvard and Columbia Law School who never had anything to do with newspapers before. "I went to the library and read some books on publishing, and they seem to have been pretty helpful," he explains. He returned to Roxbury, where he was born, brought up, and is now well-known, not as a publisher but as a man with a mission. Roxbury, as part of Boston, is involved in the largest urban renewal program in the country, he says, but it has no system of communication among those for whom all this renewal is being done. Government money, bulldozers, and new schools are fine, but they are not enough.

"People in Roxbury look around them. What do they see? They see urban renewal, crime and violence, the police and the unemployed, the new community centers, and the parades of acronyms (ABCD, BRA, OEO, etc.), and they are confused." No one explains these programs to them. Crucial meetings and decisions go by while the people they most effect know nothing about them. To the outside world this looks like apathy but, says Miller, "If I didn't believe the theory of Negro apathy was unequivocally wrong, I wouldn't be here. I have no doubt the Negro community will respond to any program it is convinced is beneficial." The problem is reaching them to do the convincing.

Why has he picked Boston as a testing and proving ground for Negro interest, and as a training ground for white liberals? "That's the beautiful thing," says Miller beginning to get excited. Boston is a pivotal city. It has a greater possibility to solve the problem of its Negro population than any other city." In 1940, there were 20,000 Negroes in greater Boston; by 1970, there will be at least 100,000, but even so, the problem is not unsolvable as it is in Harlem."

In greater Boston there will always be pockets of Negro housing, Miller believes, but at least there will be open housing. It is in an area like this, with Negro pockets, that good Negro press representation and coverage is so vitally important, Miller says. If the population is not to slip into the ignorance that brings frustration on the inside, and charges of apathy from the outside, there must be good communication. Boston, with its suburbs, has the money and the plans for urban renewal; it has the interested liberals; and it also has a Negro population of workable size. Miller for one, would not like to see Boston fail to solve the problem of the Negro in the city. The republication of his Bay State Banner starting last Saturday, brings Boston one step closer to that solution.