The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
and Jasmine
IN 1991, FRESH OUT of law school, I arrived in San Francisco to work with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. The police beating of Rodney King had enraged our nation, and I immersed myself in the subsequent movement to end police brutality. I was working to free people from systemic forms of oppression, but I had rarely given deep consideration to the environmental impacts of pollution and climate change on vulnerable communities until I was introduced to the work of Carl Anthony.
Carl had been linking issues of environmental justice to the work of civil rights since the 1980s. His formation of the Urban Habitat Program in 1989 was a critical development for the environmental justice movement internationally. His leadership, locally and nationally, set the stage for so many of us who were seeking integral solutions to the multiple issues facing our communities. The organization Green For All, my book The Green Collar Economy, and so much of my work since drew inspiration from the seminal work of Carl Anthony.
Carl Anthony has always been ahead of the curve—a rare leader who possesses both vision and insight. Throughout his tremendous career, Carl has drawn links between disciplines, communities, cultures, and social movements. He is capable of seeing the trail before it has been cleared. The bridges he built between the environmental and racial justice movements over the past forty years are the very bedrock upon which these movements—now connected—stand today.
The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race offers us a rarely seen atlas of the social movements of our times. It offers a way forward for the changemakers of generations to come. Carl Anthony brings his expertise and love for architecture and urban planning—and his passion for the earth and the grandeur of the cosmos—to the conversation of racial justice and community advocacy and healing. Carl grew up in a redlined section of Philadelphia and watched his city crumble during white flight. These experiences powerfully inform his reflections on the journey of black people in America. Carl’s depiction of his journey to Africa in 1970 to study architecture and culture and to search for answers about his roots is important not only for black Americans, but for all people seeking to grasp the depth and complexity of the realities we face today.
Through his multifaceted expertise, Carl Anthony has influenced many sectors—academia, philanthropy, nonprofit, business, and government. He has generously helped emerging leaders find their own voices and their own greatness. Carl’s life is a model for what it means to be unafraid and to follow the path of one’s own heart regardless of the tide. He set out to study that which has compelled him, and then has strategically uplifted and linked these various subjects through his life’s work.
It is times like these when we need most to draw on the strength and wisdom of our elders. Carl honors the many teachers and leaders who guided his thinking throughout his journey. As people who hope to make things a little bit better for others, it is helpful to remember that we stand upon strong shoulders. Carl Anthony’s book joins the literary canon of titles that illuminate the black American experience. It is also a fierce and compassionate call to action.
Carl Anthony is an unsung modern-day hero—an early adopter and creator of new paradigms. He has walked a path less chosen, and we are all better for it. Carl has written a remarkable book that lets us see into his personal journey and his life’s work and offers us an impressive map of the social movements of our times.
Van Jones, Oakland, California. Spring 2017
IT WAS CARL ANTHONY who first brought me to the historic African burial ground in New York City. The year was 2001. The Ford Foundation had selected Carl to direct the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative (SMCI) in North America, a bold program to create opportunity for disadvantaged communities. Building on our previous collaboration in the San Francisco Bay Area, Carl had invited me to join his New York team to design and implement the strategic planning, peer learning, and leadership development for this program. On the day of the SMCI dedication ceremony, Carl recommended we first visit the African burial ground site, sink our roots in, and invite the ancestors to guide us. I never suspected the life-changing impact this visit would have on the core of my being and on our work together for the next two decades.
The African burial site was discovered in 1991 as excavation began for the General Services Administration building in the lower part of Manhattan. The requisite anthropologists had been on site according to city policy, but they too were unprepared for what they found: not pottery shards or mere glass remnants, but bones—human bones. These bones were unearthed twenty-five feet below the surface, orderly and well preserved.
As they called in additional experts, what was revealed over the coming months included not only one intact skeleton of an African American slave inside the remains of a coffin, but another and another, gradually unearthing hundreds of graves. The moist wet clay and earth composition had assisted in their preservation. Silver pendants, military buttons, and burial objects helped reconstitute the origins. Carbon dating set the year at about 1700 and an average death age at thirty-seven. African American community leaders and other concerned allies came forward to halt the destruction of this remarkable site. Although 419 bodies were initially located, as many as 20,000 free Africans and African slaves are estimated to have been buried in the 6.6-acre site.
The more I discovered, the more stunned, grief-stricken, and outraged I became by the hidden history. One quarter of early New Amsterdam had been African. Slaves had built the wall of Wall Street in 1653 to protect the Dutch from the indigenous Lenape tribe, which the Dutch settlers had nearly annihilated only days after the Pipe of Peace (or Hoboken) agreement. Yet, while enslaved Africans had borne the arduous work of building a European-style city, including its protective wall, they were excluded from the burial grounds in churchyards within the city limits. The free blacks and African slaves died segregated from the very city that was built on the backs of their stolen labor.
Experiencing all this with Carl added a further transformative dimension. We exchanged insights for our own lives and for the collaborative work ahead. The segregation, fragmentation, and spatial apartheid embedded in the land-use patterns of our twenty-first-century metropolitan regions took on deeper meaning as we uncovered this history of African slaves, buried and forgotten for centuries. Why had we not learned of this before?
Before leaving, we poured an offering of water onto the sacred ground—an expression of honor and gratitude for the many lives and history revealed here. Our journey back into the history of this place continued in our own bones as we reentered the churning sidewalks of Lower Manhattan. We rejoined present time, but we were changed. We left this place with resolve to restore our broken world.
Carl Anthony and I have witnessed this regenerative process over the years—with groups in our multiracial leadership development work, with organizations undergoing culture change, and with communities struggling to undertake regional equity organizing and coalition building. I have also seen this same integration occur with individuals in my practice as a psychologist. This transformative and liberatory process occurs in people who integrate their internal psychological parts, but it is equally thrilling to experience a similar revitalization in communities where a segregated neighborhood is reconnected to the streams of opportunity in their metropolitan region. Carl’s book reveals that this is a continuum—our broken relationships and uncertain attachment to our own mothers and fathers, and to our extended families, create a pattern that makes it difficult to care for ourselves and for one another, and for this world we share. When individuals undergo trauma therapy and discover an inner secret, a healing can often occur, something like a numb limb that begins to wake up. There is pain at first, as the blood starts to recirculate, but the subsequent benefit it brings is usually calculated to outweigh the pain. The ability to resume using the limb and the utility it brings are obvious; however, this is not always so evident in the case of race. Carl’s book