Harvard and the Boston Miracle

On a Saturday in 1982 the Harvard Crimson published a story on a student-led march against violent crime in Black neighborhoods organized by a group of Black Christian undergraduates at Harvard in the William J. Seymour Society. This initiative foreshadowed over two decades of work conducted by Black student intellectual activists who were concerned about the growing problem of Black-on-Black violence and what was then becoming known as the Black underclass. At that time an ad hoc coalition of Black churchmen, in collaboration with the Nation of Islam and other grass roots activist began a series of fora to address the issue. These initiatives, reported in both the Boston Globe and the Harvard Crimson were, amusingly, never reported in any of the research which evolved into a cottage industry, on what came to be known as the Boston Miracle. Yet there was a direct connection between the Harvard based initiatives and the subsequent organizing efforts of the late eighties that involved first white mainline Episcopal, Unitarian and United Church of Christ churches, and then the Black churches in the nineties in focusing upon the explosion of violence related to the crack epidemic.

More than one analyst predicted that the violence would only intensify as a demographic surge led to a large group of children entering their teenage years by 2006. In 1996 there were approximately 23,000 teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 in Boston. In 2006 there were close to 30,000. The predicted spike in violent crime has become real, but little preparation had been made to meet the challenge. One important political truth which cannot be overemphasized is that no amount of federal, state or municipal intervention can serve as a substitute for effective parenting and adult supervision in the lives of children. Aggressive, targeted law enforcement is necessary but insufficient.

There is in analytic terms a deeper moral and cultural crisis that overshadows the lives of the poorest children in our most isolated inner city neighborhoods. There are major structural barriers which retard the development of Black inner city communities: joblessness, social isolation, social decay and discrimination. But in addition to all this these communities are in the midst of a kulturekamph of Black-on-Black violence which is a direct result of the political crisis of fatherlessness. At the root of the instability of the Black ghettos is the fact that there is not a functional patrilineal system that governs the communal life by physically maintaining order as occurs in other working class neighborhoods, regardless of race or ethnicity. When the fathers are absent, as a political fact of life in communities, disorder and chaos follow. The lack of male role models perpetuate the problem and leave women and children emotionally and physically vulnerable. For anyone who bothers to walk the unforgiving streets of the poorest black neighborhoods in any mid-sized or large city in the United States, this is obvious.

There is a contest between the forces of disorder and anomie and the forces of order and the rule of law. Since the mid-1970’s the Black community has been in a cultural civil war drawn largely, although not exclusively, along class lines until very recently when the Black middle class was sucked into the fray. The macro-structural socio-economic sources of this conflict were brilliantly documented in William Julius Wilson’s 1978 essay The Declining Significance of Race, which appeared just as the political and geographic isolation of the Black underclass from the middle and upper classes was being institutionalized. This cultural decay now affects almost all social classes but is most damaging in the lives of our poorest children. Here we have a generation of children imprisoned in very poor black neighborhood and left to die. It is clear that in Massachusetts cities like Boston, Brockton and Randolph a generation of very poor and very young Black youth are in violent rebellion against fatherlessness and by large extension law and order. As I as a piece published in the Boston Globe, “this largely unacknowledged crisis is part of a larger international narrative: from Kingston to London from Los Angeles to Chicago, we are witnessing the globalization of ‘thug life’…this phenomenon has emerged as a powerful symbol of the cultural and political decay of Black civil society.”

What then is to be done? First there must be a basic recognition that generally speaking law enforcement will at best contain, as opposed to preventing, violent crime. As violent youthful offenders become younger, violent crime is likely to become more unpredictable and anarchic and therefore more difficult to control. This last point cannot be stressed enough. In other words, when an eleven-year-old child brings a semi-automatic weapon into an elementary school, and Bloods and Crips are recruiting in middle schools we have new challenges that cannot be addressed without leadership from the neighborhoods. Secondly, since there is currently no politically impartial forum sponsored by any state or municipal agency or university that engages the political realities of black youth violence on the ground the larger community must develop independent fora to effectively engage this issue.

For example Paul S. Grogan of the Boston Foundation should, with university and community partners, convene a series of forums to launch a two pronged attack on the rising homicide rates among Black youth: studying the implications of this fact for local public policy and neighborhood action, second, launching a non-partisan citizens’ commission, modeled on the Chicago Crime Commission, to serve civil rights check on the secret data generated by the Boston Regional Intelligence Council which compiles “intelligence” data on alleged high-impact players involved in violent gang activity. This is important because of the potential for the work of the council to violate the civil rights of young people the overwhelming majority of whom will Black and poor. It is crucial that Harvard’s Black intelligentsia no longer permit the usual suspects of the criminal justice industry to control the policy discourse on questions of public safety that so disproportionately affect poor Black people. The Boston Foundation’s current twenty-six million dollar Street Safe initiative, led by Robert Lewis Jr., presents an excellent opportunity for Harvard undergraduates to volunteer in local community-based organizations in the effort to stem violence in the Black community.


Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, III ’83 is co-director of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation and pastor of Boston’s Azusa Christian Community in in the Four Corners section of Dorchester, Massachusetts.