Keeping the powers at bay

Nowadays Rogers is retired but still focuses his time on building the community, working with the garden, the schools, on the board at the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and he plays music at the church. As Marty was letting me into the building he was joking with a boy who had just gotten back from school, and as we walked to the firehouse and the garden we passed maybe several people who Rogers knew on a first name basis, he is a key member of the community. There was less of a sense nowadays that the city was out to get them anymore. Marty was upbeat and excited about the closeness of the community and the community was clearly very united. The garden hosts events on Easter, Halloween, after school clubs and more. Rogers praised the characters and the energy of the people that drove him to stay active. The churches hold town meetings.

Today, it seems as though the community had won. Not too long ago, they were constantly being abused by the power of the city, not getting enough funding attention, and taking advantage of its lack of resources. Now it's as if the Rogers and the Community have reached the other side of the fight, and have balanced the powers between the community and the city. Still there are threats to the neighborhood, as the goal of the city is to make the most money it can, and the best way to do that in the eyes of many, is continue to marginalize the poor to make space for the wealthy. Rumors and signs of gentrification slowly creep up towards the South Bronx, but Rogers and the plethora of organizations are keeping their eyes out. He explained how he was speaking at a gentrification conference and presented his representation of how the community fosters its strength. His octagonal diagram (Figure 1) lists the most important factors in keeping the community in tact, with faith/belief at the base of it all.

To look at how the South Bronx has changed over time, it is not enough to just look at the objective facts attached to its past. Data, key events, and facts show the big picture in a way that lays out what has objectively happened over time, and with this, we can sometimes understand how it happened. But what it does not show is the roots and character of the community. To look at where change came from specifically, and how the community was able to accomplish it, digging into the personal experiences of the ones who have lived through that change is crucial to connecting results with a narrative, and a moral lesson; the lesson that with faith and perseverance, real differences can be made.

The Bronx is an example of how communities can learn from their disadvantages. A paper from Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Burning down and Rising Up talks of the way the borough has been misrepresented and attached with its status in the worst of its time. They write that the Bronx took its situation and stood up to it, which resulted in the birth of hip-hop, "Now these kids from the city's most horrendous ruins had created a masterpiece that looked the negative in the face and lived with it, and still dreamt of coming through." Rogers and the community accomplished change by not listening to those who said city hall couldn't be beat. They beat city hall because they were tired of the city beating them. The South Bronx went from being a disorganized, marginalized community to becoming a force to reckon with that the city could not cross. If it weren't for the Burning down, the people wouldn't have learned to rise up.

“They said ‘You can’t fight City Hall’ we said, ‘yes you can, now you might get your ass kicked but you gotta fight...”