The Fence - Dick Lehr [5]
The Coxes occupied a home that reflected the full arc of Roxbury’s social and ethnic history—from the original Puritan settlers to Irish, Jewish, and then African American. The land was originally owned by the Reverend Thomas Weld, who, along with his brothers, emigrated from England in the 1630s and came to own hundreds and hundreds of acres of land in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Reverend Weld became the first minister of the First Church in Roxbury in 1632, and the entire Brahmin family became deeply embedded in the state’s history; in modern times, they included the actress Tuesday Weld and the state’s sixty-eighth governor, William F. Weld, who served from 1991 to 1997.
In 1852, Samuel Weld built the large double Italianate on Winthrop Street. Its main entrance—located on the side—had gabled door hoods and an oriel, or bay window, above it. The large pine front door opened to a spacious entry featuring high ceilings and an elliptical staircase curling upward to the second floor. It was the kind of splashy, grand entrance showing off the owners’ standing and wherewithal.
For the remainder of the century and into the 1900s, the house was owned by Charles D. Swain. Swain was a rich man, a prominent merchant who owned one of the largest stores in the bustling and fast-growing Dudley Square nearby. The Swains and later owners of 60 Winthrop Street were insulated from any development by abutters when an order of Carmelite nuns moved next door in the 1890s. The order built a monastery and enclosed the grounds behind a brick wall fifteen feet tall.
The house changed hands, just as the neighborhood did, with the Yankees giving way to the Irish at the turn of the century. In 1914, when he began serving his first term as mayor, the legendary and charismatic James Michael Curley lived one street over on Mount Pleasant Avenue. By the 1920s, the Irish were moving out of Roxbury, replaced by Jews, and during World War II the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan—a three-square-mile area—became home to ninety thousand Jews. Blue Hill Avenue, observed the historian Thomas H. O’Connor, was “often derisively dubbed ‘Jew Hill Avenue’ by members of other ethnic groups.” Following the war, the Jews migrated south into the suburbs, and Roxbury became a black neighborhood.
Many blacks moving to Boston filled the housing projects sprouting up all over Roxbury during the postwar building boom. Owning a home was less typical—and put Mike’s parents squarely in an emerging black middle class. The climb up the economic ladder was nothing less than hard-earned. Mike’s father was known for his work ethic; he went to work as a boy, ending his formal education after the sixth grade. In Boston, he was the first black to own a landscaping business, D. E. Cox Landscaping. He also eventually owned florist stands, one in Dudley Square and one downtown. He was a heavy-smoking man, lean and small, known for his quietness and long hours on the job. In time, Mike’s mother went to work at Raytheon, where she was a wire sorter at the defense technology company in Waltham for nearly three decades. One neighbor said Bertha and David Cox “worked very, very hard to make a better life for their kids.”
When Mike was born he was truly the baby of the family. The three sisters, Cora, Lillian, and Barbara, all born in Tennessee, were in their mid-to-late teens. His brother David was fourteen, and Ricky