The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
do math problems that I didn’t know how to do. I remember once when I was in second grade, he punched me because I didn’t know how to do long division. For the most part, though, he looked after me when we were out in the world together and did what he could to soften the situation when our dad treated me harshly.
Lewie had done coursework at Drexel Institute of Technology and Haverford College, but had not completed his degree. Still, he managed by age of twenty-five to finagle his way into a job as an assistant to Dr. Martin Schwarzschild, a famous astrophysicist, a professor at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and a protégé of Albert Einstein. They were studying the evolution of the sun and the birth and death of stars.
Lewie came up to New York from time to time, and we enjoyed long conversations while walking. We would walk for hours—sometimes from the Lower East Side to Harlem and back. For some time, I urged Lewie to join me in New York, but he was not much interested in moving nor in the civil rights movement in general. Finally, when he learned that we had organized the tutoring program bringing students from colleges and universities throughout the region to help young people in Harlem with their studies, he agreed to come; he loved to share what he was learning about the sunspots, stars, planets, and galaxies with anyone who would listen.
As a special activity, Lewie decided to organize the field trip to Maine so kids from Harlem could view the rare and amazing phenomenon of a total solar eclipse. A total eclipse occurs when the moon passes between sun and earth, completely blocking the sun. About six times per century, a total eclipse of the sun is visible in rare locations within the United States. Lewie filled vehicles with young teenagers and adult chaperones. One was a young Stokely Carmichael,1 who was working with HEP. On July 20, 1963, the caravan with fifty mixed-race youth from Harlem arrived at Maine’s Acadia National Park after a five-hundred-mile journey. Lewie felt this would be a powerful and unforgettable experience for them. It may have been memorable as well for the New Englanders who noticed the uncommon caravan along its way.2
As the silhouette of the moon began to edge across the face of the sun, members of the caravan had been forewarned to look away. If you look directly at the sun during an eclipse, you will damage your eyes. The young explorers hastily mounted several homemade pinhole cameras and crude homemade filtering devices (made of exposed photographic film) to watch the remarkable event. As the eclipse began, the temperature at Acadia National Park quickly dropped by twenty to thirty degrees. The wind began to howl; the flowers in the fields closed; and the birds abruptly stopped singing. Waves of alternating shadows and light passed across the land. Then, it became “night.” Stars twinkled brilliantly in the sky. A ring of fire surrounded the black disk of the moon as it passed directly over the face of the sun.
Soon, the eclipse was over. The wind ceased; the flowers opened, turning back to face the sun; and birdsong resumed.
When I was in elementary school, I skipped second grade. Because Lewie and I were so close in age, it was together that we entered the third-grade classroom of Mrs. Aikens—the teacher who would open up the world to me, inciting in me an awe and wonder many of the youth of the Harlem Education Program must have felt as they watched the moon pass over the sun with Lewie.
Every Monday afternoon, Mrs. Aikens held a science class. One of our first assignments was to collect one sample leaf from as many different trees as we could find. Each new leaf we identified was an occasion for great enthusiasm. The next step was to go out into the city and learn to identify the trees by their bark. Throughout my life, I have been able to identify many of those trees—catalpa, walnut, ash, and poplar.
Mrs. Aikens also took us to the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute’s Science Museum and taught us about the formation of the Earth’s surface. We learned how Earth’s evolution created each of the three kinds of rock—sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic—and how some contained fossils that could give us information about creatures that lived millions of years ago. She also taught us the names of the constellations and asked us to go out and look at the sky in the middle of the night to find various stars and constellations. We learned to name all the different kinds of clouds in the sky and to recognize the approach of a storm.
She told us about the dinosaurs that once roamed the hills and valleys where we lived. She took us to places where we observed the fossil record in the rocks. We learned to distinguish between tyrannosaurus and brontosaurus, as well as other types of dinosaurs. From that time on, I have been fascinated by my physical and historical surroundings.
Throughout much of my life, as I searched and reflected on past experiences, a central question remained unanswered: Where did I fit in the scheme of things? The topic came up for me over and over as I approached early professional projects and faced the fact that few African Americans practiced in my field or were considered worthy of acknowledgement. Something had gone off track in my mission to improve living conditions for people of color in their urban environments. If this was important work for my community, where was everybody? Where, I often asked myself, do we belong in the planning of the cities we share? Gradually, I came to realize that people of color do show up at planning meetings and protests when their families and community members are exposed to life-threatening impacts of pollution. But what about those of us who don’t live across the street from a toxic waste dump?
When I began reading Thomas Berry, the Catholic priest and cultural historian to whose writing Karl Linn had introduced me, I often flashed back to third grade and the feelings of gratitude, awe, wonder, and curiosity that I experienced in Mrs. Aikens’s science class.
Sometime in the 1980s, Berry began a long collaboration with astrophysicist and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme to coauthor The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. This was Berry’s vision of a new story for our times based on scientific discovery. The story recounts our origins in the context of the dramatic birth and development of the universe and invites us to see ourselves in a profoundly new way (Swimme and Berry 1992, 241–61).
I grabbed a copy as soon as it hit the shelves. While reading it, I became energized. I could tell that the universe story had something I was missing—something, in fact, that nearly all Westernized people are missing: a sense of belonging to a vast and complex web of life and experience and an invitation to participate in its continuous unfolding. Yet, for all the awe-inspiring, encouraging, and sobering elements of the story, the perspective on human history was that of the dominant, Eurocentric culture. I felt disappointed when I found not a single word about the transatlantic slave trade and the essential role of slave labor in creating our modern scientific and technological culture. This perspective ignores the embarrassing fact that the unprecedented wealth of the societies we live in was built on the foundation of bondage and forced labor of African captives—the profits made from slavery funded the industrial revolution, the development of destructive technologies, and the extraction and burning of hydrocarbons. From the outset, slavery went absolutely hand in hand with the reckless plundering of ecosystems in the New World. The exploitation of the people and environments of the New World and human beings stolen from Africa created tremendous wealth that was the foundation of the financial power that now runs the world. People of color, particularly Africans, whose forced labors undergirded a great deal of the infrastructure of the contemporary developed world, have neither been fully enfranchised into its freedoms and comforts nor received the rewards of their labor. They have traditionally been consigned to the devastated environments left behind from exploitation and extraction processes that had, meanwhile, made others wealthy.
The absence of a narrative in which people of color are recognized for their contributions to society is dangerous because it leaves unquestioned the dominance of white people on the planet today, thus tacitly endorsing the notion of white superiority. People of color receive no credit for being an essential, although coerced, part of the development of the modern world. The technological progress that Swimme and Berry (1992) both celebrate and lament rests on the skill, labor, and courage of people of color, as well as their ingenuity and grit in surviving