McCray House

Our final stop moves long beyond the temporal and spatial bounds of the colonial settlement. The tour’s historical frameworks are sharpened by analyzing the eastern portion of town, where Longmeadow becomes visibly newer. The population doubled in the two decades following World War II, coinciding with the rapid growth of African Americans in Springfield. This development reflects nationwide trends in the 1950s, in which middle-class whites left cities for suburbs in a phenomenon called “white flight.” The aesthetic sensibilities of much of Longmeadow — looping cul-de-sacs, smaller lots, and clearly delineated residential zoning — are products of this period. Rows of similar houses differ from the older homes on the green, if only for the fact that their driveways and garages were integrated into the original construction. At the end of Williams Street, Longmeadow High School was built in 1955 and remodeled in 2013. Just past the high school is Captain Road, the route that writer, activist, and New York City first lady Chirlane McCray took home from school.

Katharine Clarissa Eileen worked at an electronics factory, and her husband Robert McCray was an inventory clerk for a military base. They moved from Springfield to Longmeadow in the early 1960s, settling in at 121 Captain Road and becoming one of two Black families in town. Chirlane McCray was the oldest of their three daughters, and her adolescence in Longmeadow was marked by the experience of racism. Journalists from both New York City and Greater Springfield recorded many details of this story during the first mayoral campaign of McCray’s husband, Bill de Blasio. “Instead of the animosity, it became just sort of being ignored,” she told the Springfield Republican. “I wasn’t chased home, there wasn’t overt name-calling. It was much more genteel.” McCray turned to writing for both refuge and power: poetry for herself and prose for the school newspaper. She faced bullying from her peers and challenged it in print, publishing essays that were met with even more hostility. However, the New York Times notes carefully that “her greatest fury… was reserved for the adults who let her down: the white construction workers who spit at her as she rode a bike in town, the parents who excluded her from boy-girl mixers, and the instructors who allowed students to mock her with racial epithets.”

McCray studied at Wellesley College and moved to New York, where she worked for Essence Magazine and stunned readers with the essay “I Am a Lesbian.” She moved into political communications and activism, becoming one of de Blasio’s most important political advisors. Today, 2% of students at the Longmeadow Public Schools are Black, along with two of their 425 employees. In the summer of 2020, an Instagram account called @bipocinlongmeadow began to share anonymous stories from students of color. One of the earliest posts said the following. “I’ve been a part of the METCO Program since kindergarten, it's a program that allows students from Springfield to receive education in Longmeadow. Whenever my bus arrived … everyone stared at us like we were aliens. I would sometimes cover my face.” 

The social isolation of people like McCray and the unnamed METCO student mirrors their temporal isolation as people of color of Longmeadow. Longmeadow’s white settlers and residents have long imposed isolation — a social, cultural, and narrative vacuum — on perceived outsiders. They uprooted the Native inhabitants of the Masacksic, and claimed the very name and history of the land as their own. They imported enslaved Black people and kept them in marginal, closely-watched spaces. In each case, both community and historical continuity were almost impossible to maintain. In the centuries since, the pattern appears similar. Those who have infringed on Longmeadow’s “remarkably homogeneous community” have faced profound alienation and disempowerment. In 2000, Chirlane McCray published the following poem about growing up in Longmeadow. Going down Captain Road, consider how many times McCray — like thousands of other Black, Indigenous and people of color — had to walk this path alone.

I used to think

I can’t be a poet

because a poem is being everything you can be

in one moment,

speaking with lightning protest

unveiling a fiery intellect

or letting the words drift feather-soft

into the ears of strangers

who will suddenly understand

my beautiful and tortured soul.

But, I’ve spent my life as a Black girl

a nappy-headed, no-haired,

fat-lipped,

big-bottomed Black girl

and the poem will surely come out wrong

like me.

And, I don’t want everyone looking at me.

If I could be a cream-colored lovely

with gypsy curls,

someone’s pecan dream and sweet sensation,

I’d be

poetry in motion

without saying a word

and wouldn’t have to make sense if I did.

If I were beautiful, I could be angry and cute

instead of an evil, pouting mammy bitch

a nigger woman, passed over

conquested and passed over,

a nigger woman

to do it to in the bushes.

My mother tells me

I used to run home crying

that I wanted to be light like my sisters.

She shook her head and told me

there was nothing wrong with my color.

She didn’t tell me I was pretty

(so my head wouldn’t swell up).

Black girls cannot afford to

have illusions of grandeur,

not ass-kicking, too-loud-laughing,

mean and loose Black girls.

And even though in Afrika

I was mistaken for someone’s fine sister or cousin

or neighbor down the way,

even though I swore

never again to walk with my head down,

ashamed,

never to care

that those people who celebrate

the popular brand of beauty

don’t see me,

it still matters.

Looking for a job, it matters.

Standing next to my lover

when someone light gets that

“she ain’t nothin come home with me” expression

it matters.

But it’s not so bad now.

I can laugh about it,

trade stories and write poems

about all those put-downs,

my rage and hiding.

I’m through waiting for minds to change,

the 60’s didn’t put me on a throne

and as many years as I’ve been

Black like ebony

Black like the night

I have seen in the mirror

and the eyes of my sisters

that pretty is the woman in darkness

who flowers with loving.

Barbaro, Michael. “Once Alienated, and Now a Force in Her Husband’s Bid for Mayor.” 

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/nyregion/once-alienated-and-now-a-force-in-her-husbands-bid-for-mayor.html?_r=0

Barry, Stephanie. “Springfield-Longmeadow native Chirlane McCray poised to ascend to first 

lady of New York City.”

https://www.masslive.com/news/2013/11/springfieldlongmeadow_native_c.html

“Chronology of Longmeadow.” Longmeadow Historical Society. 

https://www.longmeadowhistoricalsociety.org/timeline.htm

Colvin, Jill. “Bill de Blasio Says This Poem Made Him Fall in Love With Chirlane.” The 

Observer. October 9 2013.https://observer.com/2013/10/bill-de-blasio-says-this-poem-made-him-fall-in-love-with-chirlane/

McCray, Chirlane. “Chirlane McCray Reflects On The Enduring Legacy of ESSENCE.” Essence 

Magazine. June 30, 2020. https://www.essence.com/lifestyle/chirlane-mccray-essence-50th-anniversary/

McCray, Chirlaine. “I Used to Think” in Home girls : a Black feminist anthology ed. Barbara 

Smith. Acls Humanities E-book. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

U.S. Census Bureau. Population, 1940-1960. 

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census.html