My first memory of Roger Montgomery was when I was a graduate student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. I took his class on Community Development. Roger was well-known at the time as being a critic of the infamous federal “Urban Renewal” program that had displaced so many low-income minorities from inner-city neighborhoods during the 1960s that it had been informally renamed the “Negro Removal Program.” Roger had provided expert faculty support to a movement to block urban renewal in the west Berkeley flatlands, and had helped to stop a substantial degree of displacement that would otherwise have occurred. Roger was a passionate political progressive, and he brought his passions into his classroom teaching in a way that I greatly admired. I particularly remember him drawing a picture on the blackboard of the widely heralded urban renewal in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, home to the University of Chicago, and I was struck by the way a policy activist like Roger could think in such distinctly visual images.
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