Frieda Garcia is a longtime activist and community organizer in the South End and Roxbury areas of Boston, Massachusetts. She served as Executive Director of the United South End Settlement for 20 years [1] and was one of the founding members of La Alianza Hispana. [2]
Frieda Garcia was born in the Dominican Republic. She moved with her family to New York when she was eight years old. [3] In 1965 when she was in her early thirties, Garcia moved to Boston. [2] She is married to Massachusetts state representative Byron Rushing. [4]
Garcia holds a BA from the New School of Social Research. [5] Garcia was awarded an honorary degree from Wheelock College in 2002 [6] and an honorary degree from Salem State University in 2017. [7]
In 1965, Frieda Garcia moved to Boston [8] where she began working with the Roxbury Multi-Service Center. [2] At the time, the center was run by Hubie Jones, a prominent community organizer in Boston. [9] Jones, who served as a mentor for Garcia, later encouraged her to help Ana Maria Rodriguez co-found La Alianza Hispana in 1969. [2] [10] Garcia served as the first director of La Alianza Hispana where she worked to provide a number of services to Spanish-speaking residents of Boston. [3] Beginning in 1975, Garcia also served on the judicial nominating committee for Governor Michael Dukakis for four years. [3]
By 1978, Garcia had become the director of consultation and education at the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center. [11] [12] During her time there, Garcia was responsible for founding the first anti-rape program at the center as well as sending psychologists to schools during the Boston busing crisis to help students attending affected schools. [3]
In 1981, Garcia began serving on the board of directors of the Boston Foundation [4] and also became the executive director of United South End Settlements where she served for 20 years, creating programs for children, supporting affordable housing, and advocating for literacy and job training. [2] During her time with USES, Garcia also started the first open-access computer center in the city of Boston to provide these services. [4] In 1981, Garcia also co-chaired a march by the South End Ad Hoc Committee Against Crime to protest cuts in police protection in South End neighborhoods. [13]
In 1996, Garcia started a committee to advocate for a statue of Harriet Tubman to be built in Harriet Tubman Park, citing the fact that there were no statues dedicated to women on public property; in 1998, The Harriet Tubman Memorial Committee received funding to create this memorial. [14] Garcia has continued to advocate for upkeep and revitalization of Harriet Tubman Park, successfully raising funds in 2017 to install a solar powered irrigation system as well as to replace and supplement existing plants in the park. [15]
Garcia received the Harriet Tubman Community Achievement Award from United South End Settlements in 2012 for carrying on the legacy of Harriet Tubman. [1]
In 2013 the Frieda Garcia Children's Park at Clarendon and Stanhope streets in Boston's South End was named after her. [8]
A year later, in 2014, a mural depicting Garcia was dedicated at the Rosie's Place offices at 47 Thorndike Street. [4] A portrait of Garcia also hangs in the South End House on Rutland Street which is part of United South End Settlements, and is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail. [16]
Garcia is one of 69 civil rights and social justice leaders honored in the 1965 Freedom Plaza located beneath The Embrace statue on the Boston Common and unveiled in January 2023. [17]
Wheelock College was a private college in Boston, Massachusetts, United States from 1888 to 2018. The college was founded in 1888 as the Miss Wheelock's Kindergarten Training School and was merged into Boston University as part of the university's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development in 2018.
Jovita Fontánez is the first Hispanic woman to serve as head of the Boston Election Commission and the first Hispanic woman elected to the Electoral College of Massachusetts. In 2014, she was honored for her contributions to the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños archive at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Kate Clifford Larson is an American historian and Harriet Tubman scholar. Her 2003 biography of Harriet Tubman, Bound for the Promised Land was one of the first non-juvenile Tubman biographies published in six decades. Larson is the consultant for the Harriet Tubman Special Resource Study of the National Park Service and serves on the advisory board of the Historic Context on the Underground Railroad in Delaware, Underground Railroad Coalition of Delaware.
Melnea Agnes Cass was an American community and civil rights activist. She was deeply involved in many community projects and volunteer groups in the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston and helped found the Boston local of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. She was active in the fight to desegregate Boston public schools, as a board member and as president of the Boston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a young woman, Cass also assisted women with voter registration after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She was affectionately known as the "First Lady of Roxbury."
Byron Rushing is an American politician who represented the Ninth Suffolk district in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1983 to 2019. He represented the South End neighborhood of Boston. A Democrat, he was first elected in 1982, before losing his 2018 bid for reelection to Jon Santiago in the Democratic primary.
Roxbury Community College (RCC) is a public community college in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. RCC offers associate degrees in arts, and sciences, as well as certificates. RCC has transfer agreements with Curry College, Northeastern University, Emerson College, Lesley University, and other four-year schools. RCC credits transfer to all public colleges and universities in Massachusetts through the MassTransfer Program.
Elma Ina Lewis was an American arts educator and the founder of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts. She was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Fellows Grant, in 1981, and received a Presidential Medal for the Arts by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. She is also an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Jackie Jenkins-Scott was the 13th president of Wheelock College as well as its first African-American president. She is currently the founder and president of JJS Advising, a consulting company that specializes in leadership development as well as organizational and corporate strategy.
Muriel Sutherland Snowden was the founder and co-director of Freedom House, a community improvement center in Roxbury, Massachusetts. She is, together with her husband Otto P. Snowden, a major figure in Boston history and activism.
Whittier Street Health Center is a Federally Qualified Health Center that provides primary care and support services to primarily low-income, racially and ethnically diverse populations mostly from the Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and the South End neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts.
The United South End Settlements (USES) consist of four settlement houses, founded as part of the Settlement movement to provide services such as daycare, education, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor, and a children's museum dating back to 1891. With their slogan of "neighbors helping neighbors since 1891", the United South End Settlements continues to serve Boston's South End and Lower Roxbury community today. USES has grown and evolved over time to remain relevant to the South End.
La Alianza Hispana is a social service agency founded in 1969 by residents of Roxbury/ North Dorchester to support Boston's Hispanic population. La Alianza advocates for equal access to services and public resources for the Hispanic Community by combating the effects of discrimination, poverty and challenges of migration.
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, or DSNI, is a nonprofit, community-run organization based in Roxbury, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1984 by residents of the Dudley Street Neighborhood, along with members of the Riley Foundation, as an effort to rebuild the poverty-stricken community surrounding then-Dudley Square. It is known as the first and only community-run grassroots organization to gain "the power of eminent domain" by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, meaning the community controls its own development and the use of the land. Today, 35 board of directors help to govern the more than 3,000 active members of DSNI. The board of directors are elected by locals every two years, and must represent the community's four major ethnic groups: African American, Cape Verdean, Latino and White, as well as the local youth, businesses, nonprofits, churches and CDC's that support the initiative.
Wilhelmina Marguerita Crosson was an educator and school administrator known for her innovative teaching methods. One of the first African-American female schoolteachers in Boston, she developed the city's first remedial reading program in 1935, and was an early advocate of black history education.
The Boston Women's Heritage Trail is a series of walking tours in Boston, Massachusetts, leading past sites important to Boston women's history. The tours wind through several neighborhoods, including the Back Bay and Beacon Hill, commemorating women such as Abigail Adams, Amelia Earhart, and Phillis Wheatley. The guidebook includes seven walks and introduces more than 200 Boston women.
Lucy Miller Mitchell was an early childhood education specialist and community activist from Boston who was instrumental in getting the state to regulate day care centers. She is credited with modernizing the day care system in Massachusetts.
Until 1950, African Americans were a small but historically important minority in Boston, where the population was majority white. Since then, Boston's demographics have changed due to factors such as immigration, white flight, and gentrification. According to census information for 2010–2014, an estimated 180,657 people in Boston are Black/African American, either alone or in combination with another race. Despite being in the minority, and despite having faced housing, educational, and other discrimination, African Americans in Boston have made significant contributions in the arts, politics, and business since colonial times.
Ellen Swepson Jackson was an American educator and activist. She is best known for founding Operation Exodus, a program that bused students from overcrowded, predominantly black Boston schools to less crowded, predominantly white schools in the 1960s. The program paved the way for the desegregation of Boston's public schools.
Fern Cunningham was an American sculptor. One of her best known works is the Harriet Tubman Memorial, which was the first statue honoring a woman on city-owned land in Boston.
Robert L. Fortes was an American community leader and politician. He was born and raised in Connecticut and moved to Boston in 1965, where he became a leader in the city's black community. He served two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and was associate executive director of the United South End Settlements.
· The Frieda Garcia papers are located in the Northeastern University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections Department, Boston, MA.