Bulldozers, Busing, and Boycotts: Urban Renewal and the Integrationist Project

This essay uses the history of a single urban renewal project, the residential Washington Park project in Roxbury, Boston, to illuminate the multiple ways in which ideas about race and strategies for improving black life helped shape the postwar urban landscape. Focusing on the development and disintegration of black support for renewal, it shows how contrasting ideals of integration and community control helped shape community response to renewal and, indirectly, the production of the built environment itself.