When I met Bill do Carmo, I was struck by the paleness of his eyes. He looked like a seer or an oracle — a face out of Shakespeare or Moby Dick. Immediately, he was saying things that connected the fight for rent control to centuries of activism in the same neighborhood.
“New Bedford has a very deep history of the civil rights activities, you know, going back to Frederick Douglass’ time,” do Carmo said to open the interview, the only time I ever recorded him.
Like Douglass, Bill’s family worked the New Bedford waterfront. He said his Cape Verdean grandfather was kidnapped into the whaling trade at 11 years old after wandering onto a ship out of curiosity as it docked on the island of Brava. Decades later, Bill said his grandpa would still sing the island’s folk songs after long days working as a fisherman and a factory worker. Bill and his grandparents lived part of the year together on a farm in nearby Dartmouth, where they grew or raised most of what they ate. Bill said his grandmother kept a parrot on her shoulder at all times. His relatives there told stories of traveling all over the world.
“I have an uncle that was captain of six whaling ships,” do Carmo said to me at the rally, scratching the surface of an epic family history I would come to know later. “He’s buried here in St. John’s Cemetery.”
During Bill’s childhood in the 1940s, the city of New Bedford began the massive urban renewal campaign that destroyed much of the old waterfront. His memories of swimming in the Acushnet River before it became a Superfund site, or riding streetcar lines that have since been ripped up, conjure a New Bedford that is hard to imagine today. Bill’s childhood home was later demolished to make way for Route 18 and the Gomes Elementary School, leaving behind just a tree from the yard, which he said is still growing.
After becoming a construction manager and the president of the NAACP, Bill helped redirect the urban renewal movement to rebuild parts of New Bedford that were abandoned or burned down during protests over racism and police brutality in the early 1970s.
“We accomplished a great deal,” do Carmo told me. “We built a lot of housing. We built schools.”
More than anyone I’ve met, Bill’s life and stories connected the dots that make New Bedford feel magic to me – linking whalers to Black Panthers and offshore wind developers, all of whom he encountered in New Bedford in their own time.
Bill kept up his activism until the end, fighting to preserve affordable housing at a time when the wind industry and a new train to Boston seem to be ushering the seaport into its next era.
“They’re going to be bringing a lot of people from out of town here that are going to displace people that are already here,” Bill said at the rally.
An obituary shared by the Saunders-Dwyer Home for Funerals said do Carmo is survived by five children, eight grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. He will be buried at the Rural Cemetery in New Bedford.
