John Frederick Collins (July 20, 1919 – November 23, 1995) was an American lawyer who served as the mayor of Boston from 1960 to 1968. Collins was a lawyer who served in the Massachusetts Legislature from 1947 to 1955. He and his children caught polio during a 1955 outbreak. He was reliant on a wheelchair and crutches the rest of his life. After partially recovering, he ran for mayor in 1959 as an underdog. He successfully portrayed himself as outside corrupt "machine politics" and was elected.
As mayor, Collins is most remembered for a massive urban redevelopment program, which was spearheaded by Edward J. Logue and the Boston Redevelopment Authority and led to a rejuvenation of business in Boston. The city's seafront began changing into the business and tourist-friendly district seen in later decades. His actions were emulated by urban planners around the country, and the campaign was credited by later mayors as ensuring that Boston did not continue shrinking.
Later in his second term, Collins made an unsuccessful run in the Democratic primary of the 1966 United States Senate election in Massachusetts. After leaving politics, he worked as a visiting professor and lecturer.
Early life John Collins was born in Roxbury on July 20, 1919, to an Irish Catholic family.O'Connor, T.H. (1997). Boston Irish: A Political History. New York: Back Bay Books. His father, Frederick "Skeets" Collins, worked as a mechanic for the Boston Elevated Railway. Collins graduated from Roxbury Memorial High School, and in 1941, 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 member of the Knights 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's children recovered and he continued with his campaign despite warnings from his doctors. As a result of the disease, Collins was reliant on 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, Collins ran against Massachusetts Senate President John E. Powers for Mayor of Boston. Collins was widely viewed as the underdog in the race. Powers was supported by Massachusetts U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy. Collins ran on the slogan "stop power politics", and was widely seen as independent of any political machine. Collins's 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's victory to the voters' cynicism and resentment of the city's political elite.
Collins won re-election in 1963, easily defeating City Councilor Gabriel Piemonte. In 1966, a Boston Globe poll showed deep dissatisfaction with the Collins administration's urban renewal policies.
Urban renewal
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's administration focused on downtown redevelopment: Collins brought the urban planner Edward J. Logue (who had been serving as the administrator of the New Haven Redevelopment Agency) to Boston to lead the Boston Redevelopment Authority and Collins's administration supervised the construction of the Prudential Center complex and of Government Center.
When Collins lost his campaign for Massachusetts Attorney General in 1954, only one new private office building had appeared on the city skyline since 1929. One in five of the city's housing units were classified as dilapidated or deteriorating and the city was ranked lowest among major cities in building starts, while the only growing industries in the city were government and universities (leading to a narrowing tax base) and the city already had a higher number of municipal employees per capita than any major city in the United States. Urban renewal would affect 3,223 acres of the city, be highly profitable for the city's business community, and by the 1970s, led to Boston having the fourth-largest central-business-district office space in the United States as well as the highest construction rates. However, the city would lose more dwelling units than it would gain during the 1960s as Collins's budget priorities led to a decrease in city services outside of downtown, particularly parks, playgrounds, and schools in residential neighborhoods, and would often displace poor blacks and whites into neighborhoods with higher rents.
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. In 1963, the city government broke ground on a new city hall and surrounding plaza in Scollay Square. In the same year, Collins and Edward Logue organized a consortium of savings banks, cooperatives, and federal and state savings and loan associations in the city called the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (B-BURG) that would provide $2.5 million in Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured rehabilitation and home-ownership loans at less than 5.25% interest in Washington Park around Dudley Square in Roxbury. From 1968 through 1970, B-BURG would reverse redline census tracts in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan along Blue Hill Avenue.
In the mid-1960s, Carl Ericson, Vice President of the Suffolk Franklin Savings Bank (a B-BURG member institution), began making loans to white professionals in the South End, causing displacement of the decades-old local black population into North Dorchester. In 1964, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized 21 black families in the city's first rent strike, and in 1965, CORE distributed a list of property owners in the city in violation of state and city building codes. In the summer of 1967, FHA Executive Assistant Commissioner Edwin G. Callahan conducted a suitability tour for a 2,000-unit housing rehabilitation program in Roxbury called the Boston Rehabilitation Program (BURP). At a press conference at Freedom House in Roxbury on December 3, 1967, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert C. Weaver announced the $24.5 million program. On March 20, 1968, a $996,000 FHA commitment was made through the Boston Rehabilitation Program (BURP) to the Sanders Associates (a housing development group created by Boston Celtics forward Tom Sanders in response to a search led by local energy business executive Eli Goldston) for the rehabilitation of 83 units in Roxbury after local community activists (including Mel King) criticized BURP for a lack of sufficient community control and racial equity.
Public housing
In May 1962, Boston NAACP President Melnea Cass filed a formal complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination alleging a pattern of discrimination in public housing in the city, citing that the Mission Hill Extension project went from 314 nonwhite families in 1957 to 492 nonwhite families of 572 units in 1961 while the Mission Hill project remained all-white. In the same year, 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. Despite the passage of legislation in 1950 by the 156th Massachusetts General Court prohibiting racial discrimination or segregation in housing, under Public Housing Administration regulations, a public housing authority could designate projects as integrated even if it housed only one nonwhite tenant.
In September 1962, 17 of the 25 public housing developments for families and all 5 elderly-only developments were collectively 99 percent white, while 4 of the 8 remaining family developments were 93 percent nonwhite and the other 4 located in Roxbury, the South End, Jamaica Plain, and Columbia Point were becoming increasingly nonwhite. When the Columbia Point development first opened in 1953, white tenants made up more than 90 percent of the population while black families made up approximately 7 percent, but by the early 1960s, white families started refusing assignment there and the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) reserved developments in South Boston for them instead, while moving black families to Columbia Point. Also in September 1962, the city's federally funded developments were highly segregated, and of the 3,686 state-funded units, only 129 were occupied by whites and two-thirds of nonwhites in state-sponsored units were living in an all-black development adjacent to the all-black Lenox Street Projects.
On November 20, 1962, President Kennedy issued Executive Order 11063 requiring all federal agencies to prevent racial discrimination in federally funded subsidized housing in the United States. On February 28, 1963, Collins met with President Kennedy at the White House. Despite continuing to make efforts to sustain segregation in the city's public housing developments, Collins appointed Ellis Ash, Edward Logue's deputy at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, to be the acting Administrator of the BHA in May 1963 and Ash later noted that though Collins opposed integration he believed it was inevitable. In 1964, all 852 Old Colony Housing Project units had white tenants, only 1 of the 1,010 Mission Hill units had a nonwhite tenant, while the Mission Hill Extension project had 509 nonwhite tenants of 580 units, and 220 of the 1,392 Columbia Point units had nonwhite tenants (or approximately 16 percent).
In 1967, the city government agreed to fully desegregate the Mission Hill and Mission Hill Extension developments, which were still 97 percent white and 98 percent black respectively, while 8 projects in the city as a whole remained more than 95 percent white and 5 others remained 90 percent white and nonwhites made up the majority of the waiting list. Despite Ellis Ash's appointment, the BHA Board Chair retained effective control over tenant assignment until 1968, and BHA Board Chair Edward Hassan (1960–1965), a Collins appointee, also opposed integration. Ash would continue to receive bureaucratic resistance against integration from the Board and BHA departments through at least 1966, as well as from state officials when attempting to desegregate the state's Chapter 200 public housing program in 1964.