History of the United South End Settlements and the Harriet Tubman House

Early Settlement Houses and Boston

Over the course of the 19th century, cities grew and industrialized rapidly. Migrants, drawn by the industry and opportunity in urban hubs, often moved into cramped tenement houses sequestered in immigrant neighborhoods. The settlement house movement was a social reform movement that started in England in the 1880s, and later spread to the United States. A direct reaction to the period's industrial boom and subsequent population growth and harsh urban living conditions for newly-arriving immigrants, settlement houses aimed to address the perceived failures of organized charity work. Whereas traditional charities offered assistance by directly distributing money and goods, settlement houses aimed to bring society's affluent and poor together, and emphasized education, housing, healthcare, childcare, and cultural assimilation. Wealthy and middle-class volunteers known as settlement workers would reside for a time alongside their low-income neighbors with the aim of providing resources and education. Although they were altruistic in their aims and served communities in real ways, the settlement house movement of the 19th century rested upon a scaffolding of racist, classist, and nativist ideals.

At the same time that the settlement house movement was taking hold in England, Boston grew rapidly in the late 19th century, and with that growth came an influx of new arrivals, drawn by the promise of economic opportunity and security. From 1820 to 1880, Boston’s population grew more than eightfold, and the 1880 Census documented more than 114,000 immigrants, or nearly a third of the city’s population.[1] Immigrants from Europe, Asia, the West Indies, and Black migrants from the American South settled alongside one another in densely-populated tenements in Boston’s South End.

Settlement houses came to Boston’s South End in 1891 with the establishment of Andover House, later renamed South End House, by Rev. Dr. William J. Tucker, a Professor at Andover Theological Seminary. Other settlement houses soon followed suit in the South End, including the Lincoln House in 1892, Hale House in 1895, Harriet Tubman House in 1904, and Ellis Memorial & Eldridge House in 1910.

Like most philanthropic reform organizations of the time, settlement houses were typically racially segregated, serving primarily white immigrants, while offering minimal or segregated services to Black residents. Similarly, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was also segregated; the Black arm of this social reform organization was known as the Harriet Tubman branch of the WCTU, and some sources have referred to its members as the Harriet Tubman Crusaders. In 1904, under the leadership of Julia O. Henson, Cornelia Robinson, Annie W. Young, Fannie R. Contine, Jestina A. Johnson, Sylvia Fern, and Hibernia Waddell, the Harriet Tubman Crusaders founded the Harriet Tubman House at 25 Holyoke Street. Both the founding group and the organization were named for Harriet Tubman, the famed abolitionist and activist, and a close friend of Henson.[2] A friend of founder Julia O. Henson, Harriet Tubman was named Honorary President of the Harriet Tubman House in 1909, four years before her death.[3] The Harriet Tubman House served as a residence for single Black women who emigrated to Boston from the American South, seeking work or education. In 1909, Henson donated her home at 27 Holyoke Street to serve as the group’s headquarters, and in 1920, the Harriet Tubman House opened a new residence at this address. The founders of the Harriet Tubman House considered the organization first and foremost a home and support network for Black women, and may not have initially self-described as a settlement house. The organization, like other early settlement houses, focused on improving housing and public health, as well as community programs including daycares, summer camps, and a variety of recreation activities.[4] Later, the Harriet Tubman House came to be considered a settlement house, and would align itself with similar organizations in the neighborhood as part of a larger effort to pool resources and expand services.

The Harriet Tubman House served as Boston’s only autonomous space created and run for and by Black women until after World War I.[5] The Negro Motorist Green Book listed the Harriet Tubman House as one of few safe lodging places for Black travelers in the Boston area. Published by Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem-based mailman, this annual guidebook ran from 1936 to 1966 with the purpose of helping Black travelers road trip safely during the Jim Crow era by listing state-by-state services and locations that were friendly to African Americans. As The Green Book grew in popularity with each subsequent publication, its editors expanded its listings; the Harriet Tubman House appeared in nearly every edition until its final publication in 1966.

Urban Renewal and the Formation United South End Settlements

In 1950, five neighborhood settlement houses (South End, Lincoln, Hale, Harriet Tubman, Ellis Memorial and Eldridge House) and the Children’s Art Centre joined to become the Federation of South End Settlements, in order to share and better utilize funding and other resources.[7] Soon after, the City of Boston began its massive and controversial urban renewal project. Established by the American Housing Act of 1949, urban renewal was a federally funded program in which local governments seized and demolished public and private properties for the purpose of renovating or replacing housing or public works considered ‘blighted’ or substandard.[8] The program was designed to revitalize industry, de-densify overcrowded neighborhoods, modernize infrastructure projects, and raise land values in urban areas. However, urban renewal had disproportionate consequences for low-income, minority communities; these dense and diverse neighborhoods were most often targeted for demolition by white city planners as urban ‘blight.’ In the decades following the Housing Act of 1949, in the name of “providing a decent home and living environment for every American family,” hundreds of thousands of families were displaced across the United States, while their tight-knit communities were demolished to make way for highways, modernist apartment blocks, or industrial centers.[9] While the federal program was supposed to compensate displaced people or provide logistical assistance in their relocation, this support was frequently late in coming or never arrived at all. Often, local urban renewal administrators never compensated displaced families for the fair market value for seized properties, robbing them of generational wealth.[10]

In Boston, the South End was one of the main areas identified for urban renewal. The first area slated for redevelopment in the South End was the New York Streets neighborhood. Home to some 2500 people, most of whom were working-class immigrants, the New York Streets neighborhood was a close-knit and ethnically diverse community; it was also among the city’s poorest. The New York Streets Project, which began in 1955, included the razing of large parts of the South End, including Hale House, in order to make way for new industrial developments.[11] By 1957, the Federation of South End Settlements realized that social service agencies would be vital in coping with the damage and displacement caused by urban renewal. Therefore, the federation chose to make urban renewal a focus of its long range planning. Steps towards these long range plans began with the hiring of Van Ness Bates, who produced reports on the South End neighborhood and proposals for improvement.​ These reports and neighborhood improvement proposals proved integral as urban renewal became a part of everyday thinking for those in the Federation.[12]

In 1960, in order to facilitate the increasingly centralized work of the organizations in the Federation, South End House, Lincoln House, Hale House, Harriet Tubman House and the Children’s Art Centre were incorporated into the United South End Settlements (USES). Ellis Memorial and Eldridge House, which had been members of the Federation, opted out and continued to serve the South End as a separate organization. Under this new organization, USES continued to provide services to the neighborhood and a central hub for community engagement. Urban renewal efforts in the South End did not end with the New York Streets Project. In 1959, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) proposed plans to raze the Castle Square area, and to relocate 644 families and individuals out of the area. Community challenges to the BRA’s Castle Square plans, facilitated by USES’ organizing and community meetings, ultimately led to a doubling of the amount of area within the project dedicated to low-cost housing. However, poor communication within the BRA meant that the amount of new affordable housing provided by the city would not suffice to house the hundreds of people displaced by the Castle Square Project. In 1962, USES contracted with the BRA to help meet this shortfall: supported by hundreds of neighborhood volunteers, USES relocated 90 percent of Castle Square residents to safe, standard housing, assisting many in the purchase of their first homes.[15] As well as leading community advocacy, USES developed long-range plans for developing the area, secured a federal grant to develop more effective ways to provide low-income housing, and by 1966 was handling all relocation efforts necessitated by South End urban renewal.

In 1965 the BRA adopted the South End Urban Renewal Plan targeting an area known as Parcel 19 for demolition, bounded by West Newton Street, Upton Street, Tremont Street, and Shawmut Avenue. USES represented the concerns of residents in the early stages of planning, though the South End Urban Renewal Plan was ultimately not attentive to their interests.[16] Redevelopment plans for Parcel 19, which sat in the heart of the South End’s Puerto Rican community, threatened to raze the existing housing and displace the area's residents without any plans for their relocation.[17] The approval of this plan galvanized community opposition to urban renewal. Organizations such as Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, Inc. (Puerto Rican Tenants in Action) and Community Alliance for a Unified South End (CAUSE) led efforts to assert community control over the urban renewal process. USES remained intimately involved in organization against the BRA’s plans, and along with other organizations and residents managed to secure greater community control over the development of sites in the South End. By the early 1970s public support for urban renewal was waning and in 1974, President Gerald Ford signed the Housing and Community Development Act, which phased out federal urban renewal funding. Urban renewal proved to be a catalyst for community engagement in the South End, with USES playing a fundamental role in mitigating the mass displacement it caused.

A New Harriet Tubman House

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s United South End Settlements’ programs were run out of a variety of locations in the South End, including the Children’s Art Centre and the South End House, fondly known by its address as 48 Rutland. In 1970, the BRA Board amended the South End Urban Renewal Plan to permit USES to develop a community center to serve the needs of residents in Lower Roxbury and the South End. Four years later, USES acquired 566 Columbus Avenue (Urban Renewal Parcel 17) from the BRA by deed for $35,000; the deed contained a land use restriction stating that the property was to be used only for a community facility by USES and any successors.[18] To this day, many community members view this property transfer as an effort by the BRA to repair the ongoing damage and trauma to the community wrought by urban renewal. To design a modern community center and base of operations, USES contracted with Donald Stull, one of the few Black architects operating in the US at the time. The new Harriet Tubman House opened its doors in 1975. In addition to its role as USES headquarters, the building was designed to function as a community center, art gallery, and office space for the Harriet Tubman Resource Center. In later years, under the leadership of then-executive director Frieda Garcia, USES also rented office space to community nonprofits as a means of mitigating building maintenance costs while supporting local organizations. These groups helped Boston residents secure affordable housing, receive healthcare, earn their GEDs, develop career skills, access childcare, and cultivate community.

The story of the Harriet Tubman House is a complex and layered one: founded by Black women as an autonomous support space for Black women, the organization grew and evolved over the 20th century to expand services as part of a larger community nonprofit. The building at 566 Columbus rested upon decades of the South End’s Black history, and was a beloved community space. The Harriet Tubman House was a hub of activity, through which USES offered exercise programs, hot meals, childcare, concerts, computer classes, exhibits, and more. But by the turn of the 21st century, the loss of funding sources and the continued gentrification of the neighborhood meant that the organization was struggling to survive. The sale and demolition of the building meant many things at once: for many community members, it marked the loss of a memory-infused landmark; for the organization, it meant survival and continued service to the neighborhood. In documenting the history of the Harriet Tubman House and USES, this project strives to offer testimony of the trauma of displacement, the power of community action and resilience, and the meaning of place in the South End.

References