Anna DeFronzo and the Maverick Street Mothers
Massachusetts
East Boston in the late nineteen sixties was a neighborhood under siege. Logan Airport was expanding, and the communities closest to the runways, places like Maverick Street, faced demolition and displacement. Anna DeFronzo, born in nineteen oh seven, became one of the most powerful voices pushing back.
She led the group that became known as the Maverick Street Mothers, working-class women who staged a sit-in on Maverick Street on September twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-eight, to keep dump trucks hauling fill for the airport expansion off their street. After about a week of protests, the Port Authority agreed to reroute the trucks. DeFronzo died in nineteen ninety-eight at ninety-one years old.
Her plaque here marks a woman who proved that a neighborhood that organizes is a neighborhood that survives.
