The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
the motive for white flight to the suburbs that led to diminished services and opportunities for people like my family who were confined to the inner cities, I had the impression that he was sympathetic to our plight. His assertion that cities be surrounded by greenbelts and provide easy access from residences to work, shopping, and recreation made a lot of sense to me.
Coming of Age in a Segregated City
As I approached adulthood and my awareness broadened, I realized that despite the inspiring, idealistic projections conveyed in the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, I had, in fact, grown up in a segregated city that offered little hope for my future. The Redevelopment Agency, the bureaucratic entity inspired by the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, became the chief public entity responsible for destroying the African American neighborhoods of North Philadelphia.6 William Penn’s vision of a “greene country towne,” with its generous housing sites and its streets named after trees, was fading like a figment of the imagination. Despite the vitality of city life, the city itself was under stress. It was losing population as more and more people moved to the suburbs. The city was being abandoned.
Yet, there was hope on the horizon. The fierce honesty of Jimmy Baldwin’s prose had planted a seed in me: the possibility that one could tell the truth about race in America without ignoring the complexity of human relations and interactions. My encounters with Karl Linn and Lewis Mumford helped to expand my understanding of my chosen career. I was moving away from architectural drafting as a purely technical and vocational skill and toward an appreciation of the potential for social reform in architecture, urban planning, and city building.
Karl Linn’s creation of Melon Commons and other projects fostered my hope that leadership by architects and city planners was not a pipe dream. Lewis Mumford’s writing gave me an insight that, by articulating utopian schemes and drawing upon the power of the imagination, architects, urban planners, and designers might contribute to changing the face of our cities and regions. The idea that I could work with others and begin to transform the legacy of racism into a vibrant expression of democracy inspired me.
Gradually, I pieced together the remnants of my secondary education. In 1960, I was accepted as a night school student at Columbia University School of General Studies in New York City. My plan was to complete my liberal arts studies and then enter Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to earn a professional degree in architecture.
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1960, I traveled from Philadelphia to New York City on the Greyhound bus. As it snaked down into the earth toward the Holland Tunnel that would take us under the Hudson River, I looked across the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey and saw the New York City skyline in the distance. I wondered what my future role would be as an architect, helping to shape the human landscape. The multistoried buildings, resting on the granite base, offered outward evidence of the complex and dynamic organizational structure of the city. At that time, I didn’t suspect that the Hudson River itself, the industrial landscape, and the geological foundation of the city, visible in the tunnel entrance, would become inspirations to me as I sought an undergirding for my future work as an architect.
My awareness of cities intensified after I moved to New York. When I arrived, I was impressed by the dramatic skyline. I soon learned that the city was shaped by not only commerce, but also the inexorable forces of nature. I learned, for instance, that while Wall Street and Midtown are built on solid stone bedrock, the area in between is not so secure. That is why the high buildings are most densely clustered in the midtown area.
The Hudson and East Rivers cut sharp currents on the west and east sides of Manhattan. The landscape just west of the Hudson is dominated by a high rock escarpment that stretches up from the river. I was impressed by this huge vertical ledge about forty stories high—the New Jersey Palisades. It seems to balance the mass of skyscrapers to the east on Manhattan.
Up around Columbia University, the natural world takes on racial meanings. The district of Harlem is on the flatlands while the university is high on the hill. In 1961, to learn more about myself, I began to make many journeys from Columbia to Harlem. These journeys would take me across the campus, down the hillside of Morningside Park, past the tenements, and through flatland streets littered with broken bottles. People eyed me with curiosity or didn’t notice me at all. A transect of Manhattan geography across 116th Street tells the whole story: the campus on a high rocky outcrop—a citadel of learning and place of the highest European aspirations with stately buildings modeled on Roman and neoclassical examples—turns inward, away from the city. Walking east from the campus on 116th Street, you come to a cliff overlooking a vista of the flatlands below: Harlem, land of the blacks. Harlem’s location in relation to Columbia’s campus reminded me of the location of my birthplace—Black Bottom, Philadelphia—in relation to more privileged neighborhoods nearby.
I began visiting Harlem out of curiosity. I knew that I was related to the black people in Harlem, but that knowledge was not grounded in a shared culture, like that which many people get from going to church every Sunday. My parents were religious, but we never went to church. It was going to take time and effort for me to build a visceral sense of my African heritage.
This was a lonely time for me. I was away from Philadelphia, away from family and friends, and, during my classes at Columbia, away from black people. My first residence was a flat in Greenwich Village that I shared with a high school friend from Philadelphia. Later, I shared a basement with no kitchen on East Fourth Street in the Lower East Side with another friend, John Churchville. The neighborhood had been occupied primarily by Jewish immigrants. I complied when asked to turn the lights on and off at the small synagogue next door on the Sabbath, when faithful Jews were bound to refrain from work.
I got a job working in the bookbinding department in the Butler Library at Columbia University and went to school at night. I was majoring in philosophy. I was encouraged by a letter from Lewis Mumford in which he wrote that my working days and going to school at night reminded him of his own educational journey.
Joining the Civil Rights Movement
With the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, and the sit-ins and freedom rides of the early 1960s, the civil rights movement focused on racial integration and voting rights in the rural South and in its small towns and cities. In the later 1960s, the emphasis would shift to the idea of black power and building community leadership with increasing attention to civil rights issues in Northern and Western cities.
In April of 1962, John told me about a civil rights conference at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, just north of Manhattan. John and I both went. The event was sponsored by the newly formed Northern Student Movement (NSM). It was an amazing experience: a predominantly white women’s campus inviting young African American men and women to not only talk about race but also do something about it. It was a wonderful introduction for me to the effectiveness of direct action and the power of social movements. During the conference, I became a committed participant in the civil rights movement and have been engaged in struggles for racial justice ever since.
It was exciting to meet the students who had started the sit-ins in the South and meet and listen to keynote talks by two elders of the movement: Leon Sullivan and Bayard Rustin. I was fortunate to form a friendship with Bayard Rustin, with whom I met regularly for guidance and encouragement during my years in New York.
Conferring with others, Peter Countryman, who had founded NSM at Yale, conceived a tutorial project for Philadelphia for the summer of 1962. Many students, black and white, participated in tutoring black children in Philadelphia.