The HistoryMakers

Chuck Turner has been a community organizer and civil rights activist in Boston, Massachusetts since 1966. Referred to as one of the best-known agitators in the city, he was elected to the Boston City Council in 1999. Turner was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1941. He was raised by an aunt, Mamie K. Faulkner, and a grandmother, Laura Troy Knight. His grandfather, Doctor Charles Henry Turner, was a pioneering animal behavior biologist, while his father, Darwin Turner, was a pharmacist.

Turner graduated from Harvard University in 1963 with his B.A. degree in government. He then spent a year in Washington, DC, reporting for The Afro-American Newspaper. He then moved north, first to New York, then to Hartford, where he joined the influential civil rights group, the Northern Student Movement.

In 1966, he returned to the Boston area, joining the South End Neighborhood Action Program (SNAP) where he worked to help the community and he worked with families who were losing their homes to gentrification. Turner formed a community action group which pressured local government to provide trash clean-up in black neighborhoods and he led demonstrations which highlighted how inadequately city inspectors enforced building codes in public housing for the poor.

A former leader of the United Community Construction Workers and one-time chair of the Boston Jobs Coalition, Turner spent several years crusading against job discrimination in the city. He campaigned for increased hiring of blacks on city construction jobs. In 1991, unsatisfied with the mayor's enforcement of fair employment practices, Turner led a four-hour sit-in at the mayor's office which resulted in a number of key concessions being made.

He has also used his activism strategies and leadership skills to spearhead other community efforts. He played a leading role in a successful campaign to prevent the city from building a highway through predominantly black neighborhoods. Turner has also chaired the Southwest Corridor Land Development Corporation.

As a Boston city council member, Turner has continued his defense of civil and human rights. He authored an ordinance protecting transgendered people from discrimination. He successfully led an effort to protect the affirmative action guidelines of Massachusetts when Governor Mitt Romney sought to change them. And, as chairman of the Education Committee, he has rallied against educational inequality in the Boston public schools.

Turner was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on March 25, 2005.