The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
this, I needed to fill in the two large gaps I had encountered in their narrative: I had found hardly any mention of cities or people of color. I felt a strong desire to correct these significant oversights and to help craft a new story that could include those elements. I hope this book will make an initial contribution and will encourage others to add their own stories. We all need to embrace and understand our own histories and identities, and we all want to feel understood by others. Since most people today live in cities and analysts predict that the majority of residents in the United States will be people of color by 2044 (US Census Bureau 2015), efforts to expand the new story seem particularly relevant.
My search for threads in the new story found me reaching back to the very origins of the universe and then coming through humanity’s origins in Africa—the emergence there of agriculture, nomadic herding, and city building that developed into a variety of thriving cultures until they started to unravel with the incursions of Portuguese fortune hunters, known in the old story as explorers. The story developed as I studied the slave trade, the plantation era, the gradual undermining and reversal of black rights after the Emancipation Proclamation, and the betrayals of the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws in the South, resulting in waves of black migration to the cities of the North, where the new arrivals were exploited by greedy real estate speculators and thwarted by racist policies that kept them in ghettos and denied them loans to make necessary repairs and improvements to their property.
Finally, I studied the unfolding experiences of my father, an orphan from birth and a self-made man with many achievements; my mother and her accomplished and cultured family; and my own experience, growing up alongside my brother in racially defined black neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
Our African ancestors were uprooted from their lands, transported many thousands of miles, and forced to work without remuneration for the benefit of others. Still, the majority survived and found ways to retain their dignity and humanity. Many lived truly heroic lives. Many of their descendants now live in cities where they suffer from lack of opportunities to develop their potential.
At every juncture in my life, I realized that something big was missing. The university was supposed to prepare students to step into their roles, but there were no institutions to prepare and train people of color for a role in shaping vibrant communities. Working in the civil rights movement, I had developed unique and valuable skills, such as participatory planning, but I soon noted that while many of these skills had been developed by African Americans for use in African American communities, they were being used primarily by white people.
I felt myself being split in two. My professional architect self, with specialized knowledge, spatial intelligence, and passion for designing and planning the physical world, seemed restricted to white spaces while my civil rights and community advocate self seemed to be valued only among people of color. These two parts of me lived in separate worlds, which was painful and confusing. I found myself in a crisis. I left my architectural firm and gave up the practice of conventional urban planning. I began to search for a larger vision that could contain my whole being.
When I became active in the environmental justice movement, I sought to support the development of environmental leadership in low-income communities of color. I was prompted by my intense thinking on what the future holds for people of color. Again, the threat of being split in two loomed: Earth Island Institute, the organization whose board I had joined, was made up of white environmentalists. It was hard work to invent a new framework for lifting up the voices of people of color within that movement.
The answer that emerged during long and deep conversations with Karl Linn was the Urban Habitat Program. We developed the program within Earth Island Institute, modeling it after the community design centers (CDCs) of the 1960s and the advocacy planning work promoted by architect-lawyer Paul Davidoff. But while CDCs had been serving neighborhoods, we positioned the Urban Habitat Program at the center of San Francisco’s entire metropolitan region to mobilize people in many neighborhoods. My work with Earth Island Institute and the Urban Habitat Program spawned my next twenty-five years of projects with the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative at the Ford Foundation followed by Breakthrough Communities with its focus on promoting sustainability and justice in US metropolitan regions. These projects are the first steps in building a worldwide movement organized around a new story of unified effort to heal communities harmed by racial injustice so that they can participate in repairing our damaged ecosystems and social networks.
As an architect and urban planner, I was seeking to construct a usable story based on an accurate picture of the past. I was looking for evidence that all the suffering of my people meant something, that African Americans and our African ancestors played an important role in shaping the modern world—in particular, the cities and towns in which we live. I felt inspired and empowered as I considered the development of the African American community against the backdrop of the unfolding universe and the evolution of life on planet Earth.
The new planetary narrative emerging in our time suggests new ways to think about race and new strategies and directions for thinking about, planning, designing, building, and living in cities. Placing our contemporary issues in this larger context encourages a deeper regard for the miracle of life, gratitude for the diverse species with whom we share the planet, and appreciation for the gifts of air, water, and sunlight that we have long taken for granted. Everything that we do or aim to do should be grounded in and governed by our relationship with the Earth, the cosmos, and the diversity of human and other forms of life with which we coinhabit this precious planet.
I hope that this book will inspire readers to reflect on their own stories and to share them—whether by telling them to one or many friends and family members or by writing and sharing them online or in print. Deeply respectful and compassionate listening to one another is essential to establish a foundation of trust and a sense of our common humanity.
Although this book includes notes and references, it is not intended primarily as an academic work. Some of the notes contain interesting side stories and details that expand meaning and deepen understanding. The references and additional resources are there to encourage further study and guide readers to interesting and accessible sources. I intend the book to appeal to readers of all skin colors, to young and old, to both environmental and social justice activists, and to those of a spiritual or a scientific bent. I want it to be accessible to thoughtful high school dropouts and, at the same time, engaging for serious students and scholars of history, science, and human meaning. It will take all of us to meet the challenge of re-envisioning and revising our social, economic, and environmental systems—a major effort that Thomas Berry referred to as the Great Work of our time.
THE YEAR OF 1963 was significant for the civil rights movement. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested and jailed for protesting segregation and had written his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” All over the world, people’s eyes were fixed on their television screens as Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor directed firefighters and police to use fire hoses and police dogs against African American children who were peacefully seeking to integrate Kelly Ingram Park. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech were the most high-profile events, but there was local organizing and education going on all over, including in New York City, where I was working with the Harlem Education Project (HEP). Nevertheless, several activists took time off from their organizing, boycotts, and protests in New York to join my brother, Lewie, in taking youth from HEP on a five-hundred-mile journey to Acadia National Park in Maine to see a full eclipse of the sun.
Lewie was sixteen months older than me. Growing up, we were about the same size, so people often thought we were twins. But I knew better. He could always run faster and fight harder than me. He had a way with girls