Mass. movement stops eviction

They began arriving at the two-family home at 26 Semont Street in working-class Dorchester shortly after sunrise on a freezing Jan. 23. Anticipating a constable’s early morning knock to evict Melanie Griffiths-Evans, tenants and homeowners—many themselves facing eviction and foreclosure—converged from the surrounding neighborhoods, determined that she would not face it alone.

WW photos: Maureen Skehan

Tenant’s rights activists from City Life/Vida Urbana, who had put out the call, organized a blockade and produced experienced legal back-up. Activists quickly turned the front porch into a staging area, hanging banners, stapling a house-size “Stop Foreclosures and Evictions” sign to the eaves and railings, setting up information and refreshment tables, and calling up a speak-out.

Team Unity City Councilors Chuck Turner and Sam Yoon; unionists from SEIU, Boston school bus drivers Local 8751 and UNITE/HERE Local 26; anti-war activists from Dorchester People for Peace and the Troops Out Now Coalition; allies from the Community Church of Boston, the Women’s Fightback Network, and the International Action Center—all announced to a multitude of cameras and reporters that they would physically block the foreclosure and eviction plans of the bank that morning, and would take arrests to enforce their resolve.

Griffiths-Evans stood on the porch of her home with her three children at her side and thrilled her supporters, whose numbers now were spilling out into the street, telling them: “We are going to take back our home and take back this city. It’s not just about me. We are going to continue this fight.”

Turner spoke forcefully to the eviction blockaders and urged that people’s action also be directed at the offices of foreclosing banks. “An injury to one is an injury to all,” he shouted from the front steps of the home emblazoned with City Life/Vida Urbana’s “Eviction-free zone” and “People before profits” placards. “We are here today to fight economic exploitation,” explained Turner, “and to stand up for the tenants today and tomorrow. We need to take it to the banks, and tell people not to deal with those banks.”

Claudette Desmond and her partner Shameeka Bolware, themselves tenants facing eviction from a home in foreclosure, carried signs demanding, “Emergency moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, now!” After spending two years in a shelter, they moved into an apartment in Roxbury last year, only to have to have the “owner” and Deutsche Bank announce their decision to foreclose. The couple had to pay for heat, at hundreds of dollars per month, even though they were initially told that heat was included.

Holding a Troops Out Now Coalition sign demanding, “Foreclose the war and predator banks, not workers’ homes! Housing is a right!” Steelworkers Local 8751 Vice President Steve Gillis brought union solidarity to the stage, declaring this struggle a “union fight”: “This is a war that our members and workers across the city are fighting every day. This picket line will not be moved!”

City Life/Vida Urbana organizer Cheryl Lawrence informed the crowd that hundreds of families in Boston had been foreclosed and evicted in recent months, as banks and their agents forcibly empty houses of owners and renters for resale to speculators and at auctions. She cited the fact that over 1,500 families face foreclosure and eviction in coming weeks. She fired up the crowd with chants of “When we fight, we win!” and she and several other women led the pickets in several impromptu verses of the civil rights anthem, “We will not be moved!”

U.S. Bank and its mortgage-lending partner OCWEN had refused to accept rent payments from the Griffiths-Evans family and had given 48 hours notice for all owners and tenants to be evacuated. But when their constable showed up at 9:00 p.m. to read the legal orders, he was surrounded by the spirited crowd of African-American, Latin@, white, young and elder blockaders, who listened in bold silence to his proclamations, as TV cameras rolled.

He then looked around, apparently thought better of it, got in his car, and left. When City Life/Vida Urbana organizer Steve Meacham announced that City Councilor Sam Yoon had just negotiated by phone with bank reps to call off the evictions that day, the crowd erupted in cheers and chants of “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (“The people united will never be defeated!”)

“They blinked in the face of our action,” Lawrence said of the banks. She called on the crowd to stay vigilant and be prepared to come back at a moment’s notice. Meacham announced another blockade action on Jan. 28, and vowed that resistance will continue and grow.