Community builders

Picture a place where black people lived like one expansive family in a community different and apart from the larger, all-white world around them. Here they raised children, thrived as entrepreneurs, worshiped and socialized together, in relationships that coursed from one generation to the next.

Until now, contemporary Medford history has said little about the small, self-contained culture that blossomed between High Street and Mystic River Road, the proverbial ``other side of the tracks."

But over the past two years, a group has worked to correct this omission. Using oral histories, period photographs, and archival research, they have managed to reach back through time to communicate pieces of this story while there are still enough people living to tell it.

Their work, titled ``The West Medford Remembrance Project," will be on exhibit next week at the Medford Public Library, where it will remain until it moves to a permanent home in the West Medford Community Center, expected to be built and completed next year.

``It's quite a remarkable history, with many details that are virtually unknown outside West Medford and even to the newcomers who are moving in today," said Rosalind Shaw, associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University.

Shaw incorporated aspects of the project into an undergraduate course at the university, and her students assisted with interviews and research.

Much of the spirit and urgency of the project sprang from an impromptu chat between friends who had gathered for a neighborly chat in Wallace Kountze's living room in 2004. Over coffee and cake, the conversation turned from current events to reminiscences.

``We went from street to street, house to house, calling out names of who lived where and what they did," said Kountze, who has lived his entire life in West Medford. ``Our recollections took us back to the 1930s. What a wide and wonderful group of people!"

Sadly, they also ticked off the names of friends who had passed away.

``It dawned on us that there were fewer of us left who knew what it was like, the names and faces," said Dorothy Elizabeth Tucker, another member of the chat group that day. ``We wondered what would happen to these memories and history after we've gone to meet our maker. It would be lost."

Concern led to action. Soon after the meeting, Kountze, Tucker and others formed a committee that recruited Shaw and Jay Griffin, president of the Medford Historical Society, to help organize and focus their next steps. Both Shaw and Griffin had done research projects involving West Medford in previous years and had a standing relationship with its leaders. Others -- among them Mark Auslander, an anthropology professor at Brandeis University -- came on board as the project progressed.

The group settled on the 1900s as a time frame and came up with a list of 22 residents, some of them deceased, from a much larger pool of candidates.

Janice Works, a committee member, said she and others had a difficult time deciding who would make the list. ``So many people made a contribution," she said. ``The neighborhood has a wonderful spirit. People who might not have two nickels to rub together, but they'd give you the shirt off their back if you asked them."

Students from Shaw's classes interviewed friends and relatives of the 22 and, in some cases, the nominees themselves.

In telling their stories, the project focuses on the ordinary people who helped West Medford evolve into the oldest black middle-class community in New England.

By the early 1900s, blacks were moving to Medford from the South, though some did migrate from Canada or northern New England and the West Indies. Segregated housing practices largely clustered black families in a few streets between High Street and the Mystic River to the south.

They found jobs as gardeners or domestics, carriage drivers and teamsters. Some worked in Boston hotels. But with time, opportunities opened up in other vocations, and some ventured into business for themselves.

Clarence Rhone started a furniture-moving company with his brother Herbert in 1922. Upon seeing their vans passing by, residents would shout, ``There Goes Rhone!"

Elizabeth Oliver Newton opened one of the first businesses run by a black woman, La Newton School of Beauty and Culture in 1949 on Jerome Street. Two of her students, Faucenia Booker and Evelyn Tyner, opened a shop of their own on Harvard Avenue in 1957. Their stories are told in the exhibit and also highlighted in a short DVD.

Booker died this year. Tyner, her partner, lives in Lexington.

``We were both determined women," Tyner said. Both she and Booker learned the hairdressing trade at La Newton School.

``We enjoyed doing hair, and we knew we'd have the customers, " Tyner said. ``A lot of black women lived not only in Medford but all over, Cambridge, Winchester, Woburn. "

Booker ``wasn't intimidated in the least" about starting a business, Tyner said. ``Her attitude was, `Why not?' "

Along with day-to-day concerns, West Medford's black community endured the challenges roiling America's black community as a whole.

Education, for instance, became a leading concern. Medford schools were racially imbalanced and run almost exclusively by white administrators.

Shirley Kountze became the first African-American principal of a Medford public school in 1975. ``There was de facto segregation due to housing," said Kountze, speaking of a time prior to when she became principal at the Hervey and Hillside schools. ``We had one school where all the black kids were enrolled, the Hervey."

Kountze is now retired and lives in Andover. Medford schools achieved desegregation through busing in the late 1960s and also created magnet schools to attract students from across the city.

The exhibit includes names and faces of those who made contributions to youths outside the classroom, as well.

The late Walter Isaacs appears in a photo, surrounded by members of a boys' baseball team. Born in 1909, he moved from Cambridge to West Medford with his wife, Alice Willis.

A factory worker, Isaacs helped build the West Medford Community Center, in addition to coaching youth baseball, tennis, and bowling teams.

``Walter Isaacs was a mentor and an encourager for young people," said Wallace Kountze. ``He taught us how to win and lose gracefully, and he pushed kids to do well in school. Every child had potential in his eyes. He steered many away from trouble and on the right path."

Along with the exhibit, there is a digital walking tour developed by Auslander and some of his students at Brandeis. The tour can be accessed at www.brandeis.edu/go/westmedford. The exhibit is at www.medfordhistorical.org/remembrance.php.

A more permanent home for the entire exhibit will exist inside the new community center, which is to be built on Arlington Street, replacing the old center that was torn down in 2002.

Robert Penta, a Medford city councilor, said that work could begin as early as this fall.

``This exhbit is a source of pride," he said. ``The community center is a fitting place for it."