Massachusetts News

August 2--When Doug Hall first arrived in Boston in 1964, he found a city in turmoil. He saw "riots, social unrest, chaos. It was a sort of pot boiling over." 

Rather than flee the city, he embraced it. A student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary at the time, he began working with the Emmanuel Gospel Center and he never left. He and his wife, Judy, have stayed and worked and seen a remarkable turnaround in the city in the past 35 years. Their work encompasses all areas of the city and several different cultures and language groups. Besides his role with the Emmanuel Gospel Center, which involves social and religious work in all areas of the city, Hall teaches in the Urban Ministries program for his alma mater, Gordon-Conwell. 

He senses that there is an air of optimism in the city. He says that there is a continuing spiritual, economic and social growth which comes from the people taking control of change in their own neighborhoods. 

MassNews asked Hall to share some of his thoughts on where the city has been and where it's headed. 

Hall: When we came here in '64, we couldn't meet an elderly person who hadn't been mugged at least two or three times in the streets. That's not true at all today. I think the Christian community has had a big impact on that kind of issue. Our own history of that goes back to 1972 when we had a very significant event. There was a riot occurring. We had had large Christian meetings in the area where the riot was now occurring. And people demanded-- militant people demanded -- that we have a meeting in the middle of the riot at night with all the police gone. And it was under curfew. You couldn't go out at night. The mayor and the superintendent of police gave permission to hold an open air meeting and to take the police out of the area. One of the militants, as soon as the police set up the stage, wanted to tear it down, even before the meetings started. One of the Spanish Pentecostal clergymen, who had helped to get all the kids who had done the looting to have orange T-shirts and be the security patrol for the meeting, challenged an adult militant to fight it out personally. If the militant won they could take the stage down. If he won then it could stay up. The militant, basically, got to the edge of the crowd where they were supposed to fight and said, "I can't hit a man of God." The clergyman said, "The stage will stay up." 

MassNews: And that stopped the riot? 

Hall: We had worked for days on that meeting. It was the event that stopped that '72 riot. At that point Christians realized that they could have a significant impact on the unrest. Since then there have been a number of Christians who have been significantly involved in producing change in our city. But, that was one of the earliest events that proved to be extremely significant. The Chief of Police was reported to have been at the meeting in plain clothes and saying, "This meeting was a miracle and this riot's over." And it was. People went home with little triangular flags that said "peace" on them in Spanish. 

The city has changed dramatically with regard to crime and the development of communities and so forth. It's rather interesting that Christianity probably grew the most rapidly that it ever has in the history of the city, as far as the number of new churches that were started, during this period of dramatic social turnaround. The growth of Christianity and the renewal of the city paralleled each other. Few people have written or commented about that, but it's certainly true. 

MassNews: Has Christianity had an impact on the development of the city? 

Hall: Christians in the city became very involved in a lot of the community organization work that literally changed the neighborhoods physically, such as this neighborhood. 

Now churches have taken a real interest. Some churches, like those in the Hispanic community have gone through periods when dozens of their pastors were former drug addicts and gang leaders. That had enormous impact on social and drug culture. Some of the churches will have 50 percent of their people who have been involved in drugs and alcohol and social unrest. 

They've made a very significant impact on the city broadly. Both from changing the lives of the people who became involved in the church and the church's direct involvement in the community organizations, they've helped to change the nature of their communities with new housing and so forth. 

Churches have always had huge amounts of social ministry. People are now realizing that not to work with the church is a fatal mistake as far as the city goes. When you have something that's that effective, you don't want to completely ignore it. 

Christians have become a very low-cost way of producing dramatic social change. We're involved right now in a lot of educational things because education is a huge problem in our city right now. There's generally a lot of working together of Christians in this city. 

MassNews: Why did you stay in Boston in 1964? 

Hall: We could see that everything was in ferment. Issues that should have been dealt with ten or fifteen years earlier were becoming problems. It confirmed in our hearts that someone needed to work in the city for the long term; seeing the trends, seeing how to deal with these major problems before they become acute problems. 

Also, the church, from the standpoint of the city, was not being effective in dealing with the needs and wasn't heavily involved except that some were becoming sort of social agencies in the city. I think that usually when Christianity loses its vitality it does poor Christian work and poor social work. 

Mass News: What about other agencies that could have -- or should have -- been dealing with the issues? 

Hall: In that era, there began to be a focus on community organization work. There should have been a lot more community organization work done prior to the mid '60s. But, at least it started then. And eventually it began to make a difference in our city. 

When you change a place it has to change from the inside out. Too much stuff was coming from the outside in. There were some people who wanted to bring in social change and better housing and such, but it was all motivated from outside the city. What you needed was the internal dynamics of the city producing change. That's what wasn't happening. It wasn't like nobody was doing anything, but they were doing it from outside the city too often. 

MassNews: I understand that the Gospel Center does a lot of work with the Haitian community. In the last couple of days there have been newspaper accounts of the continuing plight of Haitians on their home island. How is the Haitian community in Boston faring? 

Hall: A member of our staff, Soliny Vedrine, networks with Haitian Diaspora all the way from Paris, France to Miami, Florida and all the way to Ontario, Canada and the Caribbean -- wherever the Haitian Diaspora has gone. 

I also have a student who is writing his Doctor of Ministry thesis on Haiti right now. His paper is suggesting that the situation of the literacy and the poor, ever staying poor, is a perpetual problem that seems to feed on itself. Of course, you have with that the brain drain, of many, many highly competent Haitians moving from their country. 

On the other hand, there is a lot of social lift that's occurring among Haitians here. Soliny Vedrine's church, for example, a Haitian church, is one of the first new Haitian church buildings that were built in the greater Boston area. Many of the people who populate the church are former "almost boat people" and there's been a lot of social lift and they're doing much better. But there are still pockets of need. People do network back and forth to their country and try to be of significant help to their own people. 

MassNews: So, you would say that overall, Haitians in Boston are significantly better off, socially and economically than they were before they left their island. 

Hall: Oh yes, you'd have to say that. 

MassNews: Is there any significant number of Haitians coming here and getting educated and going back to stay? 

Hall: There's an interest always in going back. In fact, there's a taxi driver who went back and started a church. Then he started a school and built a clinic almost all on his own salary. He has to come back here to make the money to feed the programs he's developing there. But many of them stay here. 

MassNews: The Haitian community is one of the newer ethnic groups in Boston. Has the Haitian community been around long enough to make an impact on the culture at large? 

Hall: Boston may be about the fourth largest Haitian city outside of Port-au-Prince. It probably has the largest Haitian church population, in number of churches, in any city. 

It's always the more affluent people who join the general population easily. The poorest stay in their ethnic enclaves longer. The Haitian community is still the dominant community for these immigrants, although many of the young people become very influenced by African-American culture. African-American culture has an enormous impact on youth in general in our country. Particularly youth of color will be affected by that. 

The next generation -- and they only have two or three generations -- tends to be joining the wider American culture, as usually occurs with the rest of our cultures. Sometimes by the third generation people are trying to rediscover their roots. 

Cities are very good at maintaining ethnic systems. Usually better than small towns or suburban areas. So ethnic groups tend to have larger populations in cities. Once they move out of cities, they tend to, maybe, commute back to their church, but there is a tendency for them to be less ethnically centralized. 

MassNews: Do you work with the entire city or just a few neighborhoods? 

Hall: We have 25 people on staff and we work with all areas of the city. 

MassNews: From that perspective, then, taking into account the entire city, how do you perceive the general mood of the city? 

Hall: I think one of the significant things that have happened in this city is that the people of the city have begun to take into their own hands the change. So the motivation is coming from city people themselves rather than people from outside the city trying to do things in the city. So there is a feeling that people from the city can change their environment. When you have social life like you have in the city you have enormous amounts of people that come in to take advantage of that and make their bucks -- and who really don't have any concern for the city. They just try to line their pockets. People have come and try to take advantage of the prosperity of the situation -- which they didn't help to create originally. 

There is an optimism, certainly, in the city. I think the thing is that, one, we build for long-term change and not short-term and two, that the motivation for change comes from the city itself and not from outside groups. Any city has an enormous impact on the region around it in dozens of ways. 

If things operate properly, the health and vitality of a city can have an enormous impact on the health of a region. Most of the social problems hit cities before they hit the outlying areas and how well these problems are dealt with in the city will determine how well they're dealt with in other areas. 

The city will export anything that's inside of it -- good or bad. And it exports it very efficiently. It pays a region to have a healthy city. When some 200 churches were planted in Boston, those 200 churches planted, almost automatically, about 600 churches in the region simultaneously, without a big, planned effort. It just sort of happened. 

The same can happen with negative things like drugs and crime and gangs in the city -- they'll export that. 

MassNews: What would you think is the single greatest change in the city over the time you've been here? 

Hall: I have trouble with that question. Any kind of change is produced by multitudes of things that help to produce change. The city is a very complicated environment and rarely does any one thing do anything either positive or negative. It's a series of very complicated relationships that produce change. 

You have a city which some historians believe to be the second oldest industrial center in the world. And according to, I think it was Newsweek, about six months ago, it was indicated that something like 3,500 new high-tech companies were established in the Boston area in a very short period of time. So economically, the city is a very old industrial center, but it's still one of the top industrial centers of the world. That's very unusual; for a city to maintain that kind of economic and industrial development for such a long period of time of 200 years or so. Christianity has had this dramatic growth process in the city at the same time as it was having its most dramatic economic development and had very significant impacts on the city. It's what we've called "a quiet revival." 

It's quiet in the sense that nobody knew that Christianity had grown at all. And the reason they didn't know it grew at all is because it affects such a complex number of people, languages, cultures, and denominations that it was hard for anyone to even know it was happening. 

MassNews: As we consider outside forces, it has been reported that real estate is selling for unprecedented prices all over the city, including Roxbury. Do you think that this can drive some people deeper into the city, because they can't afford homes in their own neighborhoods? 

Hall: That's what they've called for decades "gentrification." This is a historic city and it has a lot of historic buildings. We had to do our work before the gentrification process had developed significantly here, because there are certain things you couldn't have done after that, like developing this whole neighborhood [known as Parcel 19] as a potential place for low income housing. 

Once the gentrification process goes full steam ahead, it does produce dislocation and there is a tendency for street populations to increase because the jump between the street and first level of housing gets to be so high. 
The poor tend to be less mature on investments anyway. They tend to sell their housing at the wrong time and other people make lots of money on their houses. In the '60s it was said that the African-American community owned some of the best real estate in the country. They owned the downtown area stock. And they should have used that as a leverage point. Too often that wasn't the case. Some of the holdings in Boston could have been used to their advantage better had people been more organized. 

MassNews: There is a lot of development going on in the city right now, including the new convention center for which the mayor and governor just broke ground the other day. How do such developments affect the average city dweller? 

Hall: The city is an unbelievable place. Major conventions occur in the middle of it and nobody knows it happened. That's the nature of a city. It's especially true when they take place in big convention centers. All of this changes the character of a city. One of the trends we notice is that people come to a city for a convention or something and really never interact with the city. They're in an isolated environment from the rest of the city, so the city never really knows they're here and they never really know what the city's about.  The more you have a city that is primarily populated by strangers the less of a community it becomes. For instance when Congress [an annual conference of Christians, sponsored by Vision New England which brings more than 10,000 people into the city for several days] has their major event in Boston we have tours so that people can be taken around the city to see what it's all about. They usually discover a city they had no idea existed. More of that type of thing needs to happen. When we do a tour we introduce them to the common, everyday people; to the huge diversity of the city. We take them to a Haitian church and we have lunch and they meet people. It's an important thing to realize that a city is people. And this city has just a huge variety of people. 

Of course, our tours focus on Christianity, and Christianity is an extremely diverse population. Seventy-five percent of the Christians in this city are probably what would normally be called ethnic. Only about 25 percent would be Americans of European background. 

MassNews: As we approach the new century and millennium, what are the prospects for the city, its inhabitants and the region? 

Hall: We're entering into a period of rapid change. You won't have much time in between changes to anticipate them and to know where things are going. People need to be in a constantly learning mode as to what's really happening. We can't sort of drift into things as we normally do. 

That kind of environment means that we can easily be counter-productive in all sorts of things, so we have to be learning at a higher level or our most sincere efforts will be counterproductive in this kind of environment. 

Now we see a sort of logical thing of "if you do that, this will occur." It won't be like that any more. There are good signs that people are learning how to learn how social reality works. Nothing grows exponentially all the time. Everything peaks. Whether that peak is a peak that symbolizes a leveling-off that sets you up for a new level of growth or if it's an actual peak that signals a long-term decline process; this is the huge question. 

People have to anticipate issues long before they happen and begin dealing with them. Once a big system like an economy or a whole city begins a decline process it's very difficult to turn that process around. We need prophetic people. We need them in the church and we need them in industry and we need them in politics.