The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
there was only one other African American. This was a time before black studies when the students were all white and didn’t feel a need to study the black experience. There was no context for exploring how what we were learning might relate to the black community. Since none of my questions were being addressed by the university curriculum, I made frequent visits to Michaux’s, the black bookstore in Harlem where I educated myself about the heroic struggles of Africans in the diaspora resisting racist exploitation and oppression and Africans in the homeland freeing themselves and their lands from colonialism.
Through a process of self-education, I came to feel that understanding the role of Africans as the first people—the ancestors of us all—might help to combat and even heal the damage that racism inflicts on the psyche of African Americans. In addition, it seemed that the story of human origins might help us understand our common destiny as the human species. All humans evolved from common ancestors and spent the first 170,000 years of human existence in Africa. Why, then, are people from African and African American communities today routinely looked down upon and even despised?
As I approached graduation at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 1969, my fellow students and I were planning how to use our travel grants to explore the roots of our profession. Of course, everyone was going to Europe and starting in Greece. For them, it was a well-trodden path. It was not so for me. My roots were not in Europe—were they in Africa? I was unsure. Nothing was marked on the map. I had already stepped out of the box to pursue training in architecture and planning. Now that I wanted to study my own roots in this field, I didn’t know where to begin. I understood that what we seek to do in the present is built upon what our ancestors have done in the past, but I seemed to have no past upon which to build.
I was thinking about all this when I came across Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization by the great architectural theorist Lewis Mumford. Originally published in 1924, the book documents the beginning of European settlement patterns in the New World and is one of the first architectural histories ever published. Mumford (1955, 1–10) observed that people who came to the United States from Europe brought their building traditions, which provided them with a frame of reference. As a child, I had found myself in a community, but there was no sense of a shared reference point.
I suppose that everyone wants to go back to the place where their parents or ancestors came from to find their roots. At that time, though, the general feeling was that black people had no roots1 or certainly none that were relevant to the study of architecture or city planning. Instead of going to Europe with my fellow students, I stopped there just long enough to consult their rich libraries for material on African building traditions and then I went on to explore and document those building traditions in West Africa for nine months with my friend and, at that time, partner Jean Doak. There, I faced the question: How can I understand who these people are—people I have met just recently—when I don’t know who I am despite living in my own skin for thirty years? I faced a paradox: Americans saw me first as black; Africans saw me first as American. I went to Africa in search of my own history, but when I got there, I realized that I couldn’t understand the things I was seeing and experiencing because I didn’t understand who I was. I didn’t know what vantage point to use to interpret my experience.
The work in architecture school was built upon the presumption that a usable path forward in pursuing work and projects was informed by one’s history. While my roots appeared shallow, my immediate history as a member of the African American community in an age of white flight and inner-city abandonment made me ask how my professional career could serve my community. I had this question even before I entered architecture school. Throughout my school days, I experienced a growing feeling that something was missing in my studies—something about the needs of the African American community I aspired to serve and the need for support of professionals serving such communities. It seemed obvious that these topics were essential, but there was no context for them. I attended classes at Columbia, up on the hill, looking down on Harlem and seeing people living under devastating conditions. My education provided no explanation as to why and how it got that way. No one asked or talked about what should be done or why services were not being made available to the most vulnerable communities. People seemed to be ignoring what was right under our noses.
By 1976, I had graduated from Columbia University, studied traditional building in West Africa, and moved to Berkeley, California, where I collaborated with some of the most innovative and creative designers and planners in the field. Landscape magazine published my two-part article on the architecture of the big house and the slave quarter in its bicentennial issues. I understood that my ancestors had been enslaved and that somebody had planned the places where they lived, deciding that they would live in minimal quarters distinctly different from the places where their masters resided.2
Whenever I had a chance, I continued reading and thinking about indigenous villages, towns, and cities in Africa; the slave trade3 and the development of colonial cities on the Atlantic coastline; and the racialization of space in North American urban development from 1500 to the present. The future of our urban, suburban, and rural communities depends in part upon our willingness to face this terrible history and consciously make something of it. I was particularly focused on the “landscape of freedom,” which I imagined as the title of a book I wanted to write about the experience of the African American freedmen during and after the Civil War. I had many questions: What happened to my ancestors when they were emancipated? How did they live? What environments did they live in? What ideas shaped how they lived? What external circumstances continued to constrain them?
In my years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, I was eager to share my thoughts and findings with my students and fellow teachers, but the nearly all-white student body and faculty had little or no interest in the historical drama of Africans and African Americans. I decided to leave the university and enter private practice.
A decade later, black studies programs emerged in colleges and universities across the nation, responding at last to the gap in awareness that I and other African American students had experienced.
In the mid-1980s, my friend and mentor Karl Linn, who had moved to California from the East Coast, introduced me to the writing of Catholic priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry.4 Berry’s insistence that humanity needs a new story excited me since I had been feeling that African Americans needed a new story—a story that is more inspiring than the horrors of the Middle Passage, slavery, and pressures of racism that seemed to intensify after emancipation.
Berry (1999) suggested that neither of mainstream culture’s two dominant stories—one centering on the promise of redemption in the afterlife and the other trusting in the power of science and industry—could unify people and inspire them to engage in collective efforts to respond to the serious environmental problems that have resulted from our long practice of massive extractive industry. Berry insisted that we need to reinvent ourselves as a species within the community of life. Identifying ourselves primarily as members of nations, religions, or racial groups had proved to be a sure route to oppression and strife.
Thanks to my third-grade teacher and the assignments and field trips she organized, I had always held a fascination with history and an excitement about—and love of—nature, particularly stars and trees. Looking at the fossilized remains of trilobites and a dinosaur footprint within a short distance from my home gave me a sense of deep time and appreciation for the big story of life on Earth in which we are all connected. I now found this same excitement when I read Thomas Berry.
Deeply inspired by Berry’s writings and his collaborations with evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme and scholar of world religions Mary Evelyn Tucker, I wanted to make their vision relevant to a larger pool