Michael Patrick MacDonald Beyond the Bio     

 

Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities 1500 San Remo Avenue | Suite 249

Coral Gables, FL 33146 www.fundersnetwork.org

March 2014

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Introduction  

Michael Patrick MacDonald has a tale straight out of Hollywood. It’s a tale of drugs, gangsters, mob hits,

and the enormous toll poverty exacts from the human spirit. It’s also a tale of resiliency, courage, and the

power of family and community. MacDonald’s tale may read like fiction, but it played out on the streets of

Boston, and the loss of life and community were real.

MacDonald’s bestselling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, details his childhood growing up in

the Old Colony housing project in South Boston. His community was primarily made up of Irish-Catholic

families, most headed by single mothers, living in shabby, cockroach-infested apartment buildings. During

MacDonald’s childhood, South Boston had the unlikely distinction of having the largest concentration of

whites living in poverty in the nation.

The tragedies that MacDonald and his family experienced in Southie were significant. He lost his brother,

Davey, to suicide. His brother Frankie, a talented boxer who was a four-time Golden Gloves champion, was

shot to death while participating in an armored-car heist. Another brother, Kevin, was found hanging

outside his prison cell—it’s not certain if he committed suicide or was murdered. His sister, Kathy, was

pushed off a roof in a fight over drugs and is irreparably brain-damaged. His youngest brother, Stevie, was

wrongly framed for murder and served time in juvenile lock-up until his conviction was finally overturned.

MacDonald also watched racial violence break out over forced busing. Started to integrate

schools, busing in Boston was forced primarily on poor Irish-Catholic and black neighborhoods with little

regard for cultural differences and little community input. At approximately the same time, gangster James

“Whitey” Bulger, who topped the FBI’s Most Wanted List for years, was taking control of Southie, flooding

the streets with drugs and coercing Southie’s young people, many of whom had dropped out of school as a

result of desegregation busing, into criminal activity. The result was a harrowing number of deaths from

drugs and violence—street violence, domestic violence, and mob hits. Many of the dead are listed in All

Souls because they were friends and neighbors of MacDonald and his siblings.

And yet, despite all the problems of Southie, the place where MacDonald lost four of his ten siblings, he still

calls it “the best place in the world.”

“People ask me about All Souls and the whole notion of that it’s the best place in the world and isn’t that

ironic because it looks to most like the worst place in the world,” MacDonald says. “But I really meant that

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and I mean it to this day. It was, and still is to me, the best place in the world in spite of the worst tragedies

we experienced. The reason for that is because one of the most important things to me is community and

connectedness and my need to be engaged in community and be connected to the people around me. I got

that from Southie and I’ve never experienced it anywhere else like I did there.”

The Geography of Southie  

Southie was a hard place for the people outside of it to grasp; it was in a major American city and it was

predominately white, which usually signals a certain level of affluence and personal agency in conventional

wisdom, but its residents had little control over their destiny, little power, and were often ruthlessly

exploited by members of their own community.

“There were two Southies really,” MacDonald says, “the lower end of Southie, which holds three large

housing projects, and City Point. We thought the people in City Point were rich, but basically they were

working class. And the thing about City Point is that you did have a lot of politicians who are from there or

living there and they had a lot of power in the city of Boston and the state. And that went hand-in-hand

with corruption and the manipulation of Southie—playing residents of South Boston against the poor black

and Latino populations across town. Whitey Bulger’s brother, Billy, who was the Massachusetts State Senate

president, and Louise Day Hicks and Jimmy Kelly, who both got a lot of attention from the busing riots and

manipulated a lot of the pain in that period and prospered from that pain, lived in City Point.”

“A lot of Southie was silenced by the dangerousness of certain people,” MacDonald continues, “meaning

gangsters and politicians who knew each other very well and were related. So there was a silencing and even

a feeling of powerlessness among the good people of South Boston who wanted to speak up about certain

things. However, in the lower end of Southie, where I grew up and which held the highest concentration of

white poverty, there was real powerlessness of every kind. People had absolutely no connection to power.”

Despite being a part of the city of Boston, MacDonald says Southie was isolated. “You can see in the book,

beginning with the Reagan years, a deterioration happening and poor communities like mine—black or

white—becoming more and more adrift and cut-off with the increase of privatization and deregulation, and

the loss of manufacturing jobs.”

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Southie’s powerlessness is something that often surprises people. Noel Ignatiev, a radical scholar who has

advanced the concept of white privilege (the theory that people who are perceived as having white skin gain

admission to certain neighborhoods, schools, and jobs that people of color do not), attended one of

MacDonald’s readings. “One of the things he said from the audience,” MacDonald says, “was that before he

read All Souls he didn’t know there was such a thing as white people with absolutely no connection to

power. He assumed that all whites, even poor whites, have some connection to power.”

The ability of white people to move around as they more or less please and only live around those whom

they wish to live around, even if they are poor, is one that MacDonald challenges and which he feels is

ultimately harmful to coalition-building. “Only a person who’s never been in a situation like Southie would

assume such a thing. It doesn’t have any kind of class analysis to it. I, personally, can wrap my head around

the concept of white privilege—I know that if I’m on a plane coming back from Jamaica and most of the

plane doesn’t look like me and there’s a seat in first class, they’ll come to me. And it’s important that I

recognize that, acknowledge that, and question that. However, if I were to go to my mother, or any of the

countless poor white people I’ve worked with over the years who spent their lives visiting mental hospitals

and prisons and morgues, and told them they needed to start by acknowledging their white skin privilege,

well, they are going to tell me to go screw myself. Basically, that’s what they’ll say. And then they’ll go to the

right, politically. It’s not a good tactic.”

Instead, MacDonald believes there is common ground that transcends geography, race, and class. “I think

the place to start when you want to build coalitions is empathy. Start with where people can connect to their

own pain and in that case, poor whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, have an awful lot of the same kind of pain in

terms of violence and the drug trade and epidemics. But even people from middle-class and wealthier

backgrounds have a place to connect to their empathy.”

The Legacy of Whitey Bulger

James “Whitey” Bulger’s effect on South Boston during MacDonald’s childhood was devastating. “The

testimony of human suffering that you and your associates inflicted on others was at times agonizing to hear

and painful to watch,” U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper told Bulger at his sentencing hearing on

November 14, 2013. “The scope, the callousness, the depravity of your crimes, are almost unfathomable.”

MacDonald attended Bulger’s trial each day and one of his concerns was about the limited narrative

presented, one which effectively erased hundreds of lives lost when Bulger aggressively moved drugs into

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Southie with the tacit approval from many of those officially in power. Bulger addicted almost an entire

generation for his own profit, a legacy that lives on today.

“The Whitey Bulger trial really promoted the idea that one bad guy killed 19 people,” MacDonald says,

“when it was a much larger conspiracy that involved people at all levels of law enforcement and when it was

more than 19 direct hits; it was hundreds upon hundreds of young deaths in our neighborhood from the

drug trade. I would leave that trial, which was intentionally very limited, and I would go back to South

Boston, back to the Old Colony Housing Project—it’s very diverse now—and the white kids there are a

mess. Their arms were just covered in black and blue track marks. And these were the children and

grandchildren of the people I wrote about in All Souls. These kids were not around in those days, so what

you are seeing is definitely trauma passed down.”

MacDonald is at work to change the conversation around drug use and the poor. “When people ask me why

heroin,” he says, citing the rising heroin epidemic occurring nationwide but which is hitting Southie

particularly hard, “I say because it works. It really works. It’s a pain killer. It’s important to make the

conversation about killing pain. And poor people have a lot of pain and the poor die disproportionately as a

result of using pain killers. My youngest brothers, who lived in Southie until they were 13 and 14, which is

the age when things usually turned really bad in our neighborhood, all of the best friends they ran the streets

with are dead or in jail.”

A Tale of Two Neighborhoods

South Boston is rapidly gentrifying, which is damaging in and of itself. As trendy restaurants rub shoulders

with housing projects, newer residents moving into South Boston and “bringing the neighborhood up”

possess an obliviousness to those already there.

“Coming from my background,” MacDonald says, “I’m always offended by conversations among more

cosmopolitan people about bringing the neighborhood up. It’s just so presumptuous that more white people

and more socio-economically safe people bring the neighborhood up, when in fact, I’ve seen it increase

crime when people don’t know each other and don’t want to know each other.”

“South Boston is about 50 percent gentrified,” he says. “It’s really now the tale of two neighborhoods. In

spite of gentrification, it still has some of the highest death rates from opiates. You would think

gentrification would bring down the stats for overdoses and admissions to hospitals for opiates but it hasn’t.

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But what’s worse than the $3,000 a month micro-units going up on Broadway in Southie is that the people

who are moving in often don’t know each other or want to know each other and don’t care that five people

overdosed and died on that street in August. They’ll put on blinders and they probably consider themselves

progressives—I consider myself a progressive by the way—and it bothers me that people who consider

themselves progressive would not be conscious of what’s going on around them and who’s poor and who’s

dying.”

One of the unintended consequences of gentrification is that it is further isolating an already isolated

population and eroding the community that previously existed. “The young people in the projects—whether

in Southie or any of Boston’s gentrifying neighborhoods—are kind of trapped in place,” MacDonald says.

“The new businesses opening, they’re not hiring from the projects.”

One of the biggest changes coming to Southie is a personal one. St. Augustine’s Catholic Church,

MacDonald’s childhood church, is being converted into luxury apartments. “If you grew up poor,” he says,

“you can never really go home because every place you associate with childhood is now a luxury condo—

the place where you lived, where you went to school, to church—everything is a luxury condo where

someone really wealthy is now living. And that’s kind of traumatic. My brothers were all buried out of St.

Augustine’s and I can’t imagine who would want to live in such a place because of the intensity of emotion

that happened there. But good luck to them because I couldn’t do it.”

Finding Voice through Writing

A longtime community organizer MacDonald spent more than 10 years working with diverse Boston

communities to combat violence and crime. He was instrumental in beginning the first gun buyback

programs in Boston and founded the South Boston Vigil Group, which works with survivor families and

young people in Boston’s anti-violence movement. MacDonald is now pursuing a different way to deal with

the violence and isolation Southie and communities like it can represent. He followed All Souls with Easter

Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion, about which Publishers Weekly said, “[MacDonald] continues to

courageously break Southie's silence in this tale of a journey that is as inspiring as it is haunting.” Easter

Rising details MacDonald’s life after Southie and the effects of his upbringing on adult life.

“I think being exposed to death at an early age makes you very aware of your own mortality and that has its

own problems,” he says. “You can become a hypochondriac and have PTSD (post-traumatic stress

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disorder) but it’s also a good thing when it makes me very aware we’re only here for so long and we have to

do something. But I’m still always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

MacDonald still calls Southie “the best place in the world,” but most of his family has moved on. Many of

them, including his mother, now live in Colorado. His brother Stevie, who served time for a murder he

didn’t commit, is finishing his Ph.D in Dublin, Ireland.

When MacDonald is offered an opportunity, such as when he was invited to The Rockefeller Foundation’s

Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy, he makes sure to share his experiences with his family. Following his

residency at the Bellagio Center, he invited his mother and his niece, Maria (his sister Kathy’s daughter

whom his mother raised), to join him in Europe.

“I don’t want to experience good things in the world alone,” he says. “It’s kind of an Irish-Catholic guilt

thing that you’re not really allowed to experience something good without giving back. Shame and guilt

aren’t necessarily bad things all the time. If I’m well-fed, I should definitely be concerned about someone

who’s not.”

Today, MacDonald is a fulltime writer and professor at Northeastern University, where he is Author in

Residence, teaching classes in non-fiction writing and social justice with an emphasis on race and class. He’s

developed a community-based curriculum focused on life writing called “Transforming Trauma and Finding

Voice through Writing.” He uses the curriculum at Crittenden’s Women’s Union, which helps women

transition out of poverty, and will soon be expanding it to other organizations. “It’s worked really

tremendously and the women have written just incredible stories. It helps others do what writing All Souls

did for me.”

He calls himself broke but not poor. “I say broke because I’m not stuck. I have social and cultural capital. I

pass, is how I put it, so even if I’m broke, I’ll be okay.” Unexpectedly, All Souls has helped MacDonald in

another way, especially in light of Southie’s changing demographics. “I’m really glad I wrote All Souls,” he

says, “because the book is the one place that allows me to go home again.”

--By Amy Rutledge Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities