Saundra Graham has represented her neighborhood on the city council and at the state house—and in its day-to-day, decade-to-decade struggle against Harvard.

Riverside is a traditionally Irish and black neighborhood that sweeps along the Charles River from Harvard Square to Central Square. Some of Harvard’s tallest building projects of the last 50 years were constructed here.

The residents here, who cope with the noise of undergraduate dorms and see Harvard’s presence whenever they look up, vehemently lash out against Harvard as an invader.

“Harvard has been preying on Riverside since the late ’40s and ’50s,” Graham says.

Graham began advocating against Harvard in the 1960s, as a response to the construction of Peabody Terrace. Currently she co-chairs the Riverside Study Committee, a group of neighborhood residents, city planning officials and a Harvard representative.

Like committees in the other neighborhood, this one meets about once a month to discuss a longer-term plan for the neighborhood.

But the Riverside meetings often turn testy—especially when the topic moves to Harvard’s plans for an art museum on the Mahoney’s site.

At the meeting this winter when O’Leary sang his song, Graham chastised a city consultant who offered several scenarios for how the Mahoney’s land could be used.

The consultant had suggested three approaches to accommodate both Harvard and neighborhood needs—each one a combination of Harvard buildings and open park space.

But Graham said that wasn’t enough and demanded that he return at a future meeting with a fourth option for residents to consider—all parks and no Harvard.

The fight has only intensified since the winter, when Harvard announced that it had secretly negotiated the purchase of a 120-unit housing development in the neighborhood adjacent to Riverside.

“It just brings you right back to the 1970’s,” she says.

That decade saw the peak of Graham’s visibility as a neighborhood activist. Despite all the years she represented their neighborhood in City Hall and on Beacon Hill, what residents are quickest to say about Graham is that she once took over a Harvard Commencement.

In the spring of 1970, Graham and other Riverside residents wrote a letter to the Harvard Corporation to request a meeting with the University’s highest governing board. But they received no reply.

So when the Corporation came to Cambridge for graduation exercises, the activists marched to campus to demand a meeting.