Silencing William Worthy

I awoke early looked out upon my graveyard of birds in the front yard and checked my email. The first item to catch my eye sent me into a depression that lasted about as long as it took to finish some Corn Flakes and peaches. Why does It seem you always have to fight in this life, which for some unexplained reason is populated by a clear majority of greedy, and mean-spirited people, who for some unknown reason are also often physically ugly? The reason for my depression is the apparent disappearance from library shelves all over Boston, from Amazon.com and from just about anywhere, a book entitled The Rape Of Our Neighborhoods written by William Worthy and published by William Morrow in 1976. The sub-title of the book is "And how communities are resisting takeovers by colleges, hospitals, churches, businesses and public agencies." The book is a field guide for common citizens to go to war with institutions trying to take the soil out from under them. Boston's multitude of tax free, land grabbing universities, hospitals and public agencies of course hated the book. After all, it was about them, and how they can turn a good neighborhood into a living hell and switch it right back into a peaceful new campus all within a span of three or four years. Of course none of this would even be known to me were it not for the fact that Bill Worthy and I are close friends, that Bill has spent his life fighting the good fight, and that Bill is in the process of leaving this life in a Boston nursing home.

Bill and I had been thrown together by a Dean of College at UMass, who probably figured, "Hell, they're both leftists, they'll probably enjoy doing a class together." This was how Bill and I came to teach what was probably the first critical journalism course at a state university in the U.S. Noam Chomsky helped us a bit with it, and I shared correspondence with Ben Bagdakian, who was ailing on the West Coast. But Bill and I taught the course we wanted to teach.

Before I go any farther I should probably tell you that William Worthy is one of the top five or so best journalists in American history. He was hired by CBS back in the forties as one of it's first "Negro" reporters. But Bill was not really excited about broadcasting. He was more of a print news guy. So when Mao invited him to China, he went. When the Soviet Union invited him, he went. When a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro invited him to a revolution in Cuba, he went. Bill went everywhere, Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, and usually at some danger to himself. Once he even went to Cuba without a passport and the U.S. Secretary of State said he couldn't come back. Bill and William Kunstler took the Secretary of State to court, all the way up to the Supreme Court, and won.

It was a landmark decision making it a "right" for journalists to travel. You would think with that decision and all of Bill's coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, his many interviews with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his excellent foreign reporting, he might be considered for a Pulitzer Prize. But no, Bill is an African American journalist, with (at that time) a column in The Baltimore Afro-American. I guess they thought this black guy with the Nieman Fellowship just wasn't the right color. That had been the history at the Pulitzer, anyway. It was just another white guys club.

He went back to the Supreme Court years later when the CIA confiscated his papers at Logan Airport on his return from Iran. He won that case too. Another landmark decision in favor of journalists. Once, before Bill won his first Supreme Court case he was sitting in Havana barred for entry to the U.S., and well-known folk singer Phil Ochs wrote a song for him called "Free Bill Worthy." Bill never thought much of the song over the past 30 years, but the Christmas before last I brought him to our home in Pocasset. When hearing the song on disk, he began to sing "Free Bill Worthy." All we could do was sing along.

But back to his book The Rape of Our Neighborhoods It was written from direct experience Bill had with the Columbia Hospital in New York City while he was writing for the Village Voice back in the early '60. Put simply, Columbia was trying to get rid of an entire building of rent-controlled apartments so they could build a lab on the site. Bill organized the tenants, (Bill was a tenant there himself) became their spokeman for the press and printed a small weekly newspaper about their fight against the hospital, a fight they won. So The Rape of our Neighborhoods was a manual on how to win fights against large institutions. It was a weapon for protecting the rights of the common man against the large law firms that have the money to litigate forever until they get their own way. It was the only book out there of its kind - a book telling you how to protect yourselves against the entrenched interests, especially of the college and universities, who are infamous for buying land and taking it off the market to use later, sometimes decades later.

Is it any wonder that you can not find this book at college and university libraries? Aren't they the ones complaining about the right wing penchant to censor? Well, what about William Worthy and his book? Surely you received it back in 1976 from William Morrow and Co. What did you do when it got a little frayed around the edges? Did you re-order it? Of course you didn't.

The Rape of Our Neighborhoods is needed now more than it ever was. Look at what Harvard University did to the town of Allston recently, breaking its promise to build a campus that would have provided jobs to the depressed area. Instead. all they have are empty lots now. Harvard bought the land a long time ago. Harvard, who pays no taxes on anything, Harvard who could care less about Allston except about the deal they got on some cheap land they are preparing to put right back into their land bank. Meanwhile Allston continues to be abused by Harvard.

This is where Bill's book would come in handy. If Harvard had lived up to its promises it could have meant almost $800 million in revenue for Allston every three years. Now it means zilch. Boston University, MIT, Tufts, they are all land robber barons, purchasing land from the city and private entities, land where tax-paying businesses could be built or mixed income housing. Instead we get grassy open fields of broken beer and whiskey bottles and usually an increase in crime where these university-owned, but tax-free properties can be found.

This sorry situation where landlords don't have to pay taxes on their land, while a city goes broke, where absentee landlords, like all universities, use our cities like they are university property, while they go home to Weston or Lexington will continue long after William Worthy is dead and gone.

But his book should live on. The Rape of Our Neighborhoods. It really should. It is all you need to stage a battle against Harvard or B.U. if they decide they might like to purchase the building you are currently living in. People like William Worthy used to write books with which you could arm yourself with knowledge. You still can. Just insist that your library get the book. And insist that they keep it.