Transition Magazine, June 2025
Safeguarding the urban histories and futures of Black people amid the forces of hypergentrification and anti-Blackness demands attunement to the social meaning of place. This struggle depends on building broad solidarities. The work of anti-gentrification at the neighborhood level focuses on redressing patterns of displacement and alienation, structured by the differentials of race, gender, and class that drive the property market. St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church, a historic African-Caribbean meeting house in Cambr idge, Massachusetts, is located midway along the “tech innovation corridor” between Harvard and MIT. The church also sits at the heart of one of Cambridge’s historically redlined districts, where a sizeable Black community has long dwelled and flourished, despite battling the forces of civic exclusion, financial segregation, coercive indebtment, and the carceral state. This same redlined neighborhood area has been flipped, today, into a locale of prestigious housing stock for the affluent and upwardly mobile—one of the most expensive places to buy a home in the country. For these reasons, St. Augustine’s is at the center of the anti-gentrification struggle today.
