10 - Becoming Resident Managers: A Bureaucratic Quagmire

Summary

Mr. Vince Lane [then director of CHA] came…. for a community meeting that we [Wentworth Gardens Residents United for Survival] had called together because of the problems we was having in our community…. Mr. Lane went to Miss Driver and said, “Miss Driver, I want you to go into RMC.” And Miss Driver was our LAC President at the time, and she said, “No, I do not want to be bothered with no RMC….” After the meeting was over … Miss Amey said, “Miss Harris, what can we do? Can we do it?” I said, “We can do it.” I say, “Miss Driver, is it okay? She said, “If you all wanna' be bothered with it, go ahead.” And so we went into our training. We started to going downtown to get [negotiate] our contract … for the RMC. And we went to meetings…. We worked to nine, ten, eleven o'clock at night. But Miss Driver is right there with us. She did come. She said she would help us if that's what we wanted to do…. When we finished that contract, she sent it to Washington. The day she [Miss Driver] died was the day … they [CHA] came over … to tell us that we was accepted as a RMC…. That was sad, you know. Miss Driver had died and she never knew that we finished it; that we was accepted…. We thought we could manage ourselves better than CHA. Our objective was to make Wentworth a safe and decent place to live.

Mrs. Beatrice Harris