The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
science and technology projects and experiments. They were building things I didn’t quite understand from parts donated by computer companies, probably data processing systems. He was impressed with their ingenuity when he discovered that some of the kids were raising pigeons on the roofs of their buildings and training them to carry messages.
Through my apprenticeship with Karl in Philadelphia, I had learned about traditions of participatory design. This approach to professional services emphasized engaging all the stakeholders in the design of a building project. I thought that this would be the right approach for planning and developing community space in inner-city communities.
By late 1963, I had two years of experience under my belt working in the Harlem civil rights movement. Through this experience, I had gained some understanding of the history of African American people and our struggles for identity and inclusion in the mainstream of American life.
In the summer of 1962, a casual relationship I had been in ended, which opened the way for deepening my connection with Jean. She had rented an apartment on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village—sharing the cost with her father who came to Manhattan about once a month. He stopped coming after he chanced to meet me there. Up to his dying day, he refused to meet me or even discuss my existence. After that, Jean and I shared the apartment until a cheaper space became available.
Jean was committed to civil rights, and a lot of the things we did together were in the context of the movement. That gave our relationship a foundation. We were on the same wavelength in challenging the dominant culture’s restrictions on African Americans and interracial relationships.
She gradually developed an interest in architecture. In 1964, I completed my requirements at Columbia in the College of General Studies and arranged to enter the graduate program in architecture. She started to apply to the Cooper Union, but was not admitted until the fall of 1966.9
Jean longed to travel, especially outside the United States. Being with her broadened my horizons. In October and November of 1963, we pooled our savings and traveled by bus to Mexico City accompanied by a fifty-pound bag of books I was reading. We continued on to San Miguel de Allende, a charming small town between Mexico City and Guadalajara. Emerging from a long bus ride, having just entered Mexico, the absence of the white antagonism toward blacks was palpable. We had been forced off the bus and challenged by a burly Texas Ranger a while before we had crossed the border.
In the end of the 1964–65 school year, Jean read an article in the New York Times about two recent architecture graduates who were building fanciful vacation homes near a hamlet in Vermont. They wanted workers, and Jean suggested we go up there and stay for the summer. I went along with the plan. They hired me, introduced Jean to a summer employer, and our Vermont summer commenced. We brought Mother up to the rambling farmhouse we rented. The place had long been uncared for. We had to run a new water line to the house from a new spring. At the construction site, young men were playing around with dynamite to create sites for houses. There were not a lot of drawings; they seemed to be creating the rooms as they went along. At best, the scene could be described as “white men at play.”
Looking back, I realize that Jean and I were living in a kind of bubble. Being in an interracial relationship was quite unusual at the time. Jean always felt tense when we were together in white Midtown Manhattan. Jean’s parents were bitterly separated and neither was in favor of our relationship nor accepted me as a family member. I tried not to take it personally, but I think the nonacceptance positioned me in a kind of perpetual limbo.
In retrospect, my expectations seem hopelessly idealistic and naïve. I had imagined that Jean’s parents would be not only accepting of me but also accomplished to the degree that they would be mentors to me as I was moving into the world. To my chagrin, her mother was irritated and her father was tight-lipped and in denial about our relationship. Reluctantly, Jean’s mother let me stay the night as we departed for Mexico. Her father had left the family a year before we met and never entered the picture again after that chance encounter at Jean’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place. There was nothing in their splintered family that I could grab onto, and I felt cut off from the sense of nourishment that I had imagined would come from having an alternate set of parents to help me navigate the world.
Mother and my aunts accepted Jean warily. Lewie was somewhat distant with her.
Jean had a married older sister. She and her husband visited New York in 1964 in part to convince us to separate. The husband wanted to talk me out of the relationship. I was impressed by the fact that he was older than me and decided I’d try to be nice, but the situation seemed odd. He took me to a bar and tried to explain why it would be a good thing if I didn’t see Jean anymore. He had the attitude of an older relative cautioning me about the choices I was making. “This is a tough road,” he advised. “You have to think about your children. They would have a hard time.” I stuffed down my immediate reaction, which was, “Of course, my children are going to have a hard time. They’ll have a hard time, like I did, just being in the world. So, what?” He was saying that it would be hard for my kids if they were not white, but I wasn’t going to be having white kids in any case. So, he didn’t have a compelling argument.
More troubling for me than the disapproval from Jean’s relatives was the ambivalence with which many African American women perceived us. This put a cloud on our relationship. The general feeling among many black women was that there were only so many men who had not been damaged by the horrible system of racism and to see the handful of ones who were potential partners go off and get involved with white women felt like a slap in the face. It wasn’t meant to be like that, but I could understand how it felt.10
The year of 1963 was a landmark year for the civil rights movement, and I was glad to be active in it. That spring, the world watched Birmingham, Alabama, on television as Sheriff Bull Connor directed his police to turn high-pressure fire hoses on and mount police dogs against African American children attempting to integrate Kelly Ingram Park. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for participating in a nonviolent protest and wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Medgar Evers, the outspoken field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was assassinated.
On August 28, 1963, President John F. Kennedy watched on television at the White House as 250,000 people gathered on the Washington Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where they heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. On Sunday, September 15, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed, killing four young girls. These events marked a turning point in the struggle for civil rights and contributed to the support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In November of 1963, President Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas.
By 1964, I had completed the liberal arts requirements for entry into the professional program in architecture at Columbia University. When I went back to my classes that January, I was reminded how much I hated being the only black person in my class; I was surrounded again by white people who seemed determined to avoid talking about race. It seemed there were no black students, no black faculty, and no subject matter addressing the racial divide in our society that condemned blacks to live in horrible conditions in segregated neighborhoods.
I was disturbed by the reality that when I was around white folks, they seldom talked about race; whereas, when I was with black folks, we talked about it all the time. The situations we faced every day were shaped and determined by race, so racial issues weighed heavily on our minds. We needed to share our observations and experiences to better understand how we were navigating the challenging terrain. I wanted to write a book about this—one that could be assigned reading for everyone.