Massachusetts Council of Churches

(Laughter) So, so we go out to find a place where they're tearing down some buildings. The only building--they're, they're not tearing down any houses on that particular day. They're tearing down a gasoline station. So we go to the gasoline station and, and we walk onto the site and we--and, and the workers just go berserk, right. They start yelling at us and start throwing things at us, and we tell 'em we have to close the whole thing down. We're, of course, nonviolent, and the police come. The police call up the urban renewal authority. The, the, the director and two or three other people of, of, of the urban renewal authority are in Washington [D.C.] because they went to the March on Washington (laughter) and so no one can get--so they--so the whole--so they tell the workers to go home and we have our big success. We close down (laughter)--and so we get all of this publicity and we have a big meeting inside CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]. There, there were a lot of people in the chapter who were mad at us. They think we didn't go about it in the right way. We didn't have enough discussion about doing this demonstration. And now we're sort of stuck 'cause we're now in the--we made the chapter be anti-urban renewal, right, and how are we gonna do all of this with just a bunch of volunteers? And when the school starts, they won't have the volunteers, right 'cause everybody will be in school. And they say--they, they turn to me and they say, "Why don't you stay instead of going down to Louisiana? Why don't you stay here, right, and you spend your year here working for us? And also, you have this big advantage, is that you won't be an outside agitator which was a big thing then, right, always accusing all the civil rights groups of being outside agitators. You're from Syracuse [New York]." So, I said okay and I spent a year working, running the chapter in Syracuse.$$Right. I see.$$I was their twenty-five dollars a week staff person.$$For the record, we should indicate what CORE stands for.$$CORE is the Congress of Racial Equality (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) Right.$$--which is an early civil rights organization--$$Back in the '40s [1940s].$$--I mean, which began in the '40s [1940s]--$$Yeah, yeah.$$--in the North based on Gandhian [Mahatma Gandhi] principles. And, and actually the word congress, they took because that's the word that Gandhi used for his political organization [Indian National Congress] was--in India was the--was a--was the congress. And that--and so--and this was the Congress of Racial Equal- Equality.$Now, on a--on a day to day basis, I have to spend a lot of time with the issues that relate directly to my constituency [from the 9th Suffolk District]. Now, sometimes those issues are very interesting issues and sometime--you know, and sometimes they're--and, and apply to other people and sometimes those issues just apply to the South End [Boston, Massachusetts] and, and, and everybody else would glaze over as I talk about the fact that we have flooding problems or that a good deal of the South End is built on filled in land and we're--and we're having problems with foundations of buildings and who should be responsible for that, but I get involved in that a lot. But on the other hand, as I said earlier, I'm very concerned that we have as good housing for poor and working class people as possible in, in, in our community. Now, I want that housing, a lot of that housing, to be in my district. But when I work for improving housing for poor and working class people, when I work for a, a housing trust fund set up by the state so there'll be money available for developing that kind of housing, I, of course, not just doing work for my own constituents, I'm doing work for that whole class of people throughout the state that need--that needs that. That has drawn me, though into what I consider one of the real disgraces of the United States and the--and cities in the United States, and that is homelessness. I mean, you and I can remember when there was no such word as homeless. We could--you can--I can remember when almost everybody had some place to live. We--our--we complained about the, the conditions with which we lived in but we usually didn't complain that they didn't have a roof at all, and that is something that has only happened in the past twenty years. And we don't--and we seem to be just--buy into it, taking it for granted, assuming it's gonna be with us forever, so we set the--we--so the issue becomes, we set up shelters and we try to make sure we have enough beds available for everyone who wants to come in off the street, right, but we're not saying, no. There was a time when this didn't exist and it doesn't need to exist now. So I've been spending a lot of time trying to reframe the question around homelessness and to move it from how to we take care of people who--in shelters and how do we have decent family shelters, get 'em out of--out of hotels and motels and into some kind of shelter where they can get some services when, when, when--but to move it away from that conversation which is an important conversation to the conversation of how do we end homelessness? How do we supply enough housing so that nobody has to be homeless, right? And I find that there are not a lot of people thinking that way. And so I've been working with people here and in other parts, in other states in the country, Wisconsin, Minnesota, who are coming up with working plans, really business plans on how to end homelessness. So I have legislation to establish a commission to come up with a working plan to end homelessness in Massachusetts, a plan that has benchmarks like any business plan, had--will know how much it would cost to do this, how long it would take, spending this amount of money to have this accomplished, and that's one of the things that I've been spending a lot of time on--$$Okay.$$--most recently.$$I'm gonna follow that initiative. I wanna watch it.$$That's good.