John F. Collins
John Frederick Collins was the Mayor of Boston, Massachusetts from January 4, 1960 to January 1, 1968 whose property tax assessor's office redlined the city and under whose tenure the Boston Housing Authority actively segregated its public housing developments. Collins also opposed the University of Massachusetts Boston locating its campus permanently in Park Square or elsewhere in Downtown Boston, having the Boston Redevelopment Authority propose locating the campus permanently at the former Columbia Point landfill closed in 1963 instead. His Associated Press obituary noted that the urban renewal policies Collins implemented in Boston were emulated across the United States. In 2004, nine years after his death, the city government commissioned a mural of Collins on the exterior of Boston City Hall adjacent to Government Center station and dedicated City Hall Plaza to him as well.
Early life
John Collins was born in Roxbury, Boston on July 20, 1919 to an Irish-Catholic family. His father, Frederick "Skeets" Collins, worked as a mechanic for the Boston Elevated Railway. Collins graduated from Roxbury Memorial High School, a public school in Boston, and in 1941 he graduated from Suffolk University Law School. He served a tour in the Army Counterintelligence Corps during World War II, rising in rank from private to captain. He was a Knight of Columbus.In 1946, Collins married Mary Patricia Cunniff, a legal secretary, who Collins had met through his work as an attorney. She would later campaign for Collins when he was incapacitated by polio. The couple had four children.
Early political career
In 1947, Collins was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, representing Jamaica Plain, and, in 1950, to the Massachusetts State Senate. Collins spent two terms as senator and then ran unsuccessfully for state attorney general in 1954, losing to George Fingold. While campaigning for a seat on the City Council in 1955, Collins and his children contracted polio. Collins' children recovered and he continued with his campaign despite warnings from his doctors. As a result of the disease, Collins was forced to use a wheelchair or crutches for the rest of his life. He was elected to the Council and the following year was appointed Register of Probate for Suffolk County.Mayor of Boston
In 1959, he ran against Massachusetts Senate President John E. Powers for Mayor of Boston. Collins was widely viewed as the underdog in the race. Collins ran on the slogan "stop power politics", and was widely seen as independent of any political machine. Collins' victory in the 1959 mayoral election was considered the biggest upset in city politics in decades. Boston University political scientist Murray Levin wrote a book on the race, titled The Alienated Voter: Politics in Boston, which attributed Collins' victory to the voters' cynicism and resentment of the city's political elite.Collins inherited a city in fiscal distress. Property taxes in Boston were twice as high as in New York or Chicago, even as the city's tax base was declining. Collins established a close relationship with a group of local business leaders known as the Vault, cut taxes in five of his eight years in office and imposed budget cuts on city government. Collins' administration focused on downtown redevelopment: Collins brought the urban planner Edward J. Logue to Boston to lead the Boston Redevelopment Authority and Collins' administration supervised the construction of the Prudential Center complex and of Government Center.
However, in March 1965, an investigative study of property tax assessment practices published by the National Tax Association of 13,769 properties sold within the City of Boston from January 1, 1960 to March 31, 1964 found that the assessed values in the neighborhood of Roxbury in 1962 were at 68 percent of market values while the assessed values in West Roxbury were at 41 percent of market values, and the researchers could not find a nonracial explanation for the difference. Also under Collins' tenure as Mayor, the Boston Housing Authority segregated the public housing developments in the city as well, moving black families into the development at Columbia Point while reserving developments in South Boston for white families who started refusing assignment to the Columbia Point project by the early 1960s. In 1962, upon receipt of a lawsuit filed by a civil rights group, the West Broadway Housing Development was desegregated after having been designated by the city for white-only occupancy since 1941. In the same year, the Mission Hill project had 1,024 families, while the Mission Hill Extension project across the street had 580 families, and in 1967, when the city government agreed to desegregate the developments, the projects were still 97 percent white and 98 percent black respectively.
In August 1965, Collins publicly requested that University of Massachusetts Boston Chancellor John W. Ryan not consider a permanent campus at its current site in Park Square or elsewhere in Downtown Boston but a suburban campus or one located in an underdeveloped section of Roxbury, while University of Massachusetts President John W. Lederle insisted on a campus inside the city limits of Boston. In May 1966, following organized opposition from residents, Collins spoke with Chancellor Ryan and a proposal to locate the UMass Boston campus near Highland Park was cancelled. In 1967, the Boston Redevelopment Authority proposed locating the campus permanently at the former Columbia Point landfill closed in 1963. In response, in November 1967, 1,500 faculty and students organized a rally on Boston Common demanding a location in Copley Square, and before his resignation as UMass Boston Chancellor in February 1968, Ryan proposed a 15-acre campus over the Massachusetts Turnpike and south of where the proposed John Hancock Tower was to be built which the Boston Redevelopment Authority rejected.
On February 28, 1963, Collins met with President John F. Kennedy at the White House. Kennedy had supported John Powers during the 1959 mayoral election. Collins won re-election in 1963, easily defeating City Councilor Gabriel Piemonte. However, Collins' budget priorities led to a decrease in city services, particularly in residential neighborhoods outside of downtown. As a result, Collins became unpopular among city residents. In 1966, Collins ran for the United States Senate seat being vacated by the retiring former Senate Republican Conference Whip Leverett Saltonstall, but lost in the primary to former Massachusetts Governor Endicott Peabody. Despite receiving 42 percent of the vote statewide, Collins lost 21 out of Boston's 22 wards. Weakened politically, Collins declined to seek reelection in 1967 and was succeeded by Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth Kevin White.
Retirement and legacy
After leaving office in 1968, Collins held visiting and consulting professorships at MIT for 13 years.In the early 1970s, Collins drifted away from the Democratic Party. He chaired the group Massachusetts Democrats and Independents for Nixon and, in 1972, attacked Democrats for "their crazy policies of social engineering and abortion." Collins was considered for the position of Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon administration.
In December 1968, the UMass Boston board of trustees voted 12 to 4 to accept the Columbia Point proposal. In April 1969, the Students for a Democratic Society rallied more than a hundred students protesting the decision to move the university campus to Columbia Point, denouncing the institution as "a 'pawn' masking the Boston Redevelopment Authority's plan to remove poor people from Columbia Point" and that "the university is planning a prestigious dormitory school with high tuition which students from low- and moderate-income families–whom the university was designed to serve–will not be able to attend." In January 1974, the university moved to the current Columbia Point campus. In 1977, the Massachusetts General Court formed a special legislative committee led by Amherst College President John William Ward that found that the Columbia Point campus buildings were negligently constructed.
In July 2006, UMass Boston Chancellor Michael F. Collins ordered the immediate and permanent closure of the parking garage underneath the main campus, causing a loss of 1,500 parking spaces and requiring the university to begin developing a 25-year plan to renew the campus the following October, which was ultimately proposed by Chancellor J. Keith Motley and approved by the UMass Boston board of trustees in December 2007. In April 2017, Chancellor Motley resigned amidst a $30 million structural operating budget deficit caused by the construction costs of the renewal plan, which required the university to begin cutting courses required for graduation during the upcoming summer and fall semesters as well as other academic spending. In 1963, when UMass System President John W. Lederle endorsed expanding the system to Boston before the state legislature, there were 12,000 freshman applications to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with only 2,600 slots, yet the majority of the applicants lived in the Greater Boston area. In the late 1960s, UMass Boston reportedly had the largest population of Vietnam War veterans than any university in the United States, and the largest population of African American students of all universities in Massachusetts. As of April 2018, the UMass Boston campus remained the sole majority-minority campus in the UMass system.