Mandela, Massachusetts
Mandela was a proposed city that would have been formed as a result of some districts seceding from Boston, Massachusetts.

The districts, including parts of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and the South End, were populated mainly by African-Americans and Latinos, and the movement was driven by Black community leaders. The name was inspired by Nelson and Winnie Mandela, popular South African anti-Apartheid activists.

The proposal was defeated in 1986 and again in 1988.

Background and impetus 
Activists gathered in the summer of 1984 to discuss remedies to the imbalance of power they perceived between communities within the greater city of Boston, as it had expanded through annexations in the 19th century. Leaders spoke of the relationship between Black residents and City Hall as that of a "colony," in an era when apartheid in the Republic of South Africa, notions of community control were under discussion, and a decade after the upheavals created in Boston by efforts at school desegregation and busing.

Referenda in 1986
The proposal to create Mandela sought to carve out a new, 12-square-mile city in the heart of Boston, which would comprise about 22 percent of Boston's 600,000 population, including most of its black residents.

The Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project (GRIP) were the sponsors of the Mandela initiative; the co-leaders of the GRIP campaign were journalist and filmmaker Andrew Philemon Jones and architect Curtis Davis. Mel King was also a proponent, and ran in 1983 as mayoral candidate against then city council member, Raymond Flynn.

Other community-based organizations in Boston doing work around local Black and Brown residents' land control included the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) and Greater Roxbury Neighborhood Authority (GRNA).  

Jones said that Black neighborhoods had ''a colonial relationship with the city of Boston'' because they were not given adequate public funds. Opponents, including some of Boston's black ministers, Roxbury state representative Thomas Finneran and Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, claimed the new municipality would undermine gains and create a community with annual deficit of $135 million.

A non-binding referendum question about succession appeared on the ballot in 1986, on November 4. Nearly 50,000 people voted in the referendum. The proposal failed, with 73 percent voting against it. The measure did not win in any precinct, and fared worst in the predominantly Black neighborhoods.

1988 referendum and beyond 
The plan was put back on the ballot in 1988, when it was also defeated. In 1989, Jones proposed a longer-range commission that would study the impacts of turning a neighborhood into an independent city.

In 2017, Epicenter Community held a panel discussion about the movement.

Referendum results

See also 
 Timeline of Boston history 
 History of African Americans in Boston
 Black nationalism
 Urban secession

Further reading 
  (substantial and comprehensive article with extensive bibliography).

 Hogen-Esch, Tom. "Recapturing Suburbia: Urban Secession and the Politics of Growth in Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle." Ph.D. diss. University of Southern California, 2002 (especially chapter 7, "The Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project," pages 229–285).

References

External links 
 1986 news broadcast footage from WGBH about the proposal
 Greater Roxbury incorporation project: A new municipality. from Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts records, Special Collections, Northeastern University Library  

Neighborhoods in Boston
African and Black nationalism in the United States
Proposed populated places in the United States
Ethnic enclaves