How urban gardening brought communities together to tackle an array of social issues.
Since relocating from rural Vermont, I have taken physical and emotional refuge in Boston’s community gardens. Their lush greenness in the spring and summer months provides a cool and peaceful contrast to the city’s hot concrete and pavement. Sometimes I sit on a blanket near a garden to daydream or read. The families and individuals tending the gardens remind me of my late father, who was at his happiest when outside on his knees weeding and growing food. On occasion, the gardens and their generous keepers have provided me with excess produce or herbs in exchange for an hour of assistance tending the plots.
I feel lucky to live in an urban area with so many community gardens to enjoy — nearly 200 scattered about the city. In those gardens, approximately 18,000 Boston individuals and families grow food for themselves and their communities. Combined, the nearby cities of Cambridge and Somerville and the town of Brookline also have dozens of community gardens and hundreds of individual plots in which residents grow vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers.
Having organized community gardens for four years in Western Massachusetts, I understand the logistical challenges and resources needed to establish even the smallest of community plots. I imagined that in Boston — given the density of its population — it must have been challenging to find available land. I decided to do a little digging in the library to get a better understanding of the history of community gardens in Boston. That way, I could pay more informed homage to my refuge’s lineage.
It turns out that the first seeds of Boston’s Community Gardens were sown in the 1960s, with the reclamation of empty land by activists as interested in racial justice as they were in growing food. It’s a story that, in our current unsettling political and environmental times, has deepened my belief in the healing powers of the Earth and cooperative action — while simultaneously highlighting the need for more gardens.
Gardens were a hot topic nationwide in the first half of the 20th century, and by 1944, an estimated 40 percent of food grown in the U.S. had been planted in a civilian-run garden. These so-called “Victory Gardens” of WWI and WWII America were the result of U.S. government advocacy encouraging civilians to “sow the seeds of victory” by planting vegetables to increase food production. Suburban and urban gardeners pitched in together to grow food in community and individual lots.
I feel lucky to live in an urban area with so many community gardens to enjoy — nearly 200 scattered about the city. In those gardens, approximately 18,000 Boston individuals and families grow food for themselves and their communities.
Having learned about the proliferation of Victory Gardens while in high school, I assumed that Boston’s Community Gardens were a relic from that era. But it turns out that soon after the Second World War, the federal government cut funding for Victory Gardens, and cities like Boston became more concerned with city growth than with growing food.
Miraculously, Fenway’s Victory Gardens (renamed Richard D. Parker Memorial Victory Gardens in 1979) managed to survive, but as a whole, the agricultural sector in Massachusetts found itself in decline leading up to the early ‘70s. Many mainstream politicians and state leaders thought that Massachusetts — particularly urban Massachusetts — should concentrate on its tech industries and educational institutions rather than on food production. But not everyone felt this way. One advocate for Massachusetts food production was Mel King, a Black state legislator from Boston’s South End.
King was a community organizer known for his work on affordable housing and working-class issues. In the late ‘60s, he founded the Community Assembly for a United South End (CAUSE) to organize residents of the South End (a mostly Black neighborhood) to make their voices heard amidst urban planning and renewal. In 1983, he ran as the first Black candidate for Boston mayor. Though he lost, he’s remembered for coining the term “Rainbow Coalition,” which he used to describe diverse ethnic and minority groups united around a progressive cause. Rev. Jesse Jackson kept the term alive in his 1984 presidential campaign.
Representative King’s mayoral campaign notably eased racial tensions in Boston, but earlier, when King was elected to the House of Representatives in 1973, underlying racial discord and violence defined Boston politics and culture. Between the years 1974 and 1976, there were over forty riots related to the 1974 Morgan v. Hennigan state court case, which ordered the busing of Black students to better integrate the city’s public schools and ensure racial balance. A decade after the National Civil Rights Movement, white Boston adults threw rocks and violently shouted and spat at school buses carrying Black children.
Amidst this racial turmoil, King successfully sponsored the Massachusetts Gardening and Farm Act of 1974, allowing gardeners to use vacant public land at no cost. Despite the fact that two-thirds of Boston’s vacant parcels were privately held and not suitable for gardens, the legislation gave public recognition to the wastefulness of unused urban lots and, importantly, activated various community garden groups across the city.
King’s support of urban agriculture surprised many. It was an unusual focus for politicians at the time, especially Black politicians. According to Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for New Economics (who organized for King at the time), “Folks couldn’t understand at first why he was so passionate about agriculture to the point where one of his colleagues did ask him that on the floor of the legislature, and they asked him, ‘Mel, why are you so interested in agriculture?’ And Mel’s response was, ‘Because I eat.’”
King’s bill alone couldn’t make gardens, but fortunately, around the same time that King started to become involved at a legislative level, other community activists in the city had their “boots on the ground.” One such activist was Charlotte Kahn, a young, white resident of the South End who grew up on a Black college campus and was heavily involved in the racial justice movement. As the story goes, Kahn watched as the young Black children of her neighborhood — the same children who took delight in her small garden — were verbally harassed and bullied while boarding buses for school. At first, she did what many of us might do: she cried. But then she pulled herself together and decided to convert an empty lot in the neighborhood into a garden for the children. Kahn wanted a garden because it was “in opposition to what was going on in Boston at the time” and “was an expression of what is best in people.”
Because urban gardens are visible to neighbors and passersby, they often elicit curiosity, social interaction, and connections. I like to think that’s what happened in the case of Charlotte Kahn and another garden-building group from Roxbury. Ed Cooper, former president of the NAACP, who headed the Roxbury gardening group, joined forces with Kahn and started to build a coalition of gardeners and activists that they named the South End Garden Project.
The various small groups of gardeners and community members that eventually made up the coalition were of different races and demographics, but they shared the goal of providing nutritious food to low-income communities. They also shared a tenacity and willingness to bend rules when needed. Greg Watson recalls that efforts by community gardeners in the ‘70s “showed the whole ‘Rainbow Coalition’ mentality in terms of embracing everyone and creating the most diverse network of people possible to solve problems.” Case in point: the “earth-moving” day in June of 1976.
In the summer of 1976, Kahn and Cooper and various other interested parties had just started their garden-building efforts in the South End. They were low on resources, but they had a vision of where the gardens might be placed. But they needed fresh soil to replace the existing soil, which was full of lead and debris. With the help of an aide, King had found a donor who provided 2,000 cubic yards of topsoil. (A loaded, full-size pick-up truck holds just under 2 cubic yards.) The problem was that the topsoil was located twenty-five miles out of Boston in the city of Worcester, and King had neither the labor nor the vehicles needed to get it into the city and unloaded. He called an impromptu meeting of the coalition, and the members got to work. Charlotte Kahn attacked a long list of phone numbers and eventually reached the National Guard (U.S Army 642nd Battalion), and persuaded them to pick up the soil and deliver it for free. The garden organizers provided coffee to the guardsmen and reimbursed them for tolls. Meanwhile, Mark Anderson, a former farmer and now working for a Salvation Army-run drug rehab clinic, spent the evening with his team making the guardsmen a spaghetti and meatballs dinner.
Though June is a bit late to start a garden, by the end of the summer, the gardeners had used the topsoil to establish six highly productive vegetable gardens, including Lenox Kendall Garden, where Charlotte Kahn had stood watching the neighborhood children board the bus months earlier.
“You probably couldn’t do that today, says Greg Watson, who remembers the day fondly. “Today, if you tried to do that, we would get all the negative headlines about the abuse of the military, whatever. There were a bunch of reasons why you couldn’t do it today.”
After laying down roots and a layer of topsoil, Boston’s urban community gardening movement began bringing people together to work side by side with their hands in good dirt. Kahn described the gardens as having “more diversity than anywhere in the country,” with gardeners from “rural areas in the South, Puerto Rico, the other Caribbean islands, China, and the Middle East” all working together.
It turns out that the first seeds of Boston’s Community Gardens were sown in the 1960s, with the reclamation of empty land by activists as interested in racial justice as they were in growing food. It … has deepened my belief in the healing powers of the Earth and cooperative action — while simultaneously highlighting the need for more gardens.
Over time, King’s and Kahn’s “Rainbow Coalition” from the South End Garden Project grew into the Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG) Coalition. By 1979, BUG was receiving Community Development Block Grant funding through the federal government and had opened a total of thirty-eight garden sites. With money and momentum, BUG began to expand beyond gardening and into the social and economic issues of neighborhoods, addressing such concerns as urban food access, land use, affordable housing, desegregation, and other economic issues. Nowadays, this would be called an intersectional approach, but back then it was a trailblazing one.
Though there are various intersectional green-minded organizations today, BUG was truly a first of its kind. Until it merged with Southwest Corridor Community Farm in 1990, BUG was a city-wide umbrella organization for all garden and growing-related neighborhood activities. But even as the organization grew, its founders, staff, and members never lost their grassroots approach, or their mission rooted in providing an antidote to racial violence and mistreatment.
Sadly, using city land to grow plants doesn’t always align with urban capitalistic values, and in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, community gardens faced difficulties with property rights and ownership. The period saw multiple mergers and splits among garden-adjacent organizations, but eventually, organizers created land trusts to secure garden land for permanent use, and the community gardens of the South End joined larger efforts to protect community open spaces. In the mid-nineties, Boston Natural Areas Fund (BNAF) purchased and secured garden land from the city and absorbed Southwest Corridor Community Farm and Boston Urban Growers in the process. In the early 2000s, BNAF merged with the Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN), which is now an affiliate of The Trustees of Reservations, the nation’s oldest land trust.
Since the ‘70s, the South End has been gentrified and is now one of the most expensive communities in Boston. But the South End community gardens, now permanently protected public places, still grow food. Their establishment paved the way for other city gardens that continue to nourish present-day Bostonians. In Roxbury and Dorchester, the food produced through urban agriculture has been vital to addressing food insecurity for individuals and families, especially in Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities.
The Western Massachusetts community garden organizing group at which I spent four years as a volunteer referred to its lead organizer as “The High Priestess.” In the Raider Waite Tarot Card Deck, the High Priestess is the card of divine knowledge and the keeper of life’s secrets. It is through this lens — the lens that sees those who organize these gardens as having deep wisdom — that I look back on the early years of Boston’s Community Gardens when organizers innovatively and bravely declared that gardening was not just a means of survival, but also a way to build a better world.
Mel King once said, “When we first started urban gardening, I thought it would be pretty easy. Boy did I have a rude awakening.” To me, Boston’s community gardens represent the hope that Mother Nature and humans can have a peaceful and productive relationship despite the concrete density of the urban environment, but in the years to come, we’ll have our work cut out for us as urban areas continue to expand to accommodate a continually growing human population. The work will be worth it, though, since, as my research taught me, community gardens are about more than just growing vegetables; they’re about feeding the hungry and bringing communities together across economic and racial dividing lines to work together for a common goal.
To find a community garden or urban farm in your neighborhood, check this site out.
