"When Carmen Storms, 69, looks down at the trees of Melnea Cass Boulevard from her eighth-floor apartment, she thinks of her father, Alvin — twice driven from his home during Boston's urban renewal boom of the 1950s and '60s, when the city used eminent domain to raze the homes and businesses of Black families.
The only time Storms saw him cry was during the family's second move, forced out in the name of a highway that never happened. The planned inner belt was stopped by the community it displaced. As a consolation prize, the city of Boston turned the land into a suburban-like boulevard, named it after a local civil rights icon — Melnea Cass — and lined it with 600 trees.
Today, those trees are a lonely green smirk across Roxbury, where past injustices still haunt and heat the historic and political core of Boston's Black community. The neighborhood, where more than 80% of residents are people of color, is one of Boston's "heat islands" — made hotter by too much asphalt and too few trees."
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