Читать книгу The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race - Carl C. Anthony - Страница 16
ОглавлениеIN SEPTEMBER OF 1960, I traveled from Philadelphia to New York City on the Greyhound bus. As it snaked down into the earth toward the Holland Tunnel that would take us under the Hudson River, I looked across the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey and saw the New York City skyline in the distance. I wondered what my future role would be as an architect, helping to shape the human landscape. The multistoried buildings, resting on the granite base, offered outward evidence of the complex and dynamic organizational structure of the city. At that time, I didn’t suspect that the Hudson River itself, the industrial landscape, and the geological foundation of the city, visible in the tunnel entrance, would become inspirations to me as I sought an undergirding for my future work as an architect.
My awareness of cities intensified after I moved to New York. When I arrived, I was impressed by the dramatic skyline. I soon learned that the city was shaped by not only commerce, but also the inexorable forces of nature. I learned, for instance, that while Wall Street and Midtown are built on solid stone bedrock, the area in between is not so secure. That is why the high buildings are most densely clustered in the midtown area.
The Hudson and East Rivers cut sharp currents on the west and east sides of Manhattan. The landscape just west of the Hudson is dominated by a high rock escarpment that stretches up from the river. I was impressed by this huge vertical ledge about forty stories high—the New Jersey Palisades. It seems to balance the mass of skyscrapers to the east on Manhattan.
Up around Columbia University, the natural world takes on racial meanings. The district of Harlem is on the flatlands while the university is high on the hill. In 1961, to learn more about myself, I began to make many journeys from Columbia to Harlem. These journeys would take me across the campus, down the hillside of Morningside Park, past the tenements, and through flatland streets littered with broken bottles. People eyed me with curiosity or didn’t notice me at all. A transect of Manhattan geography across 116th Street tells the whole story: the campus on a high rocky outcrop—a citadel of learning and place of the highest European aspirations with stately buildings modeled on Roman and neoclassical examples—turns inward, away from the city. Walking east from the campus on 116th Street, you come to a cliff overlooking a vista of the flatlands below: Harlem, land of the blacks. Harlem’s location in relation to Columbia’s campus reminded me of the location of my birthplace—Black Bottom, Philadelphia—in relation to more privileged neighborhoods nearby.
I began visiting Harlem out of curiosity. I knew that I was related to the black people in Harlem, but that knowledge was not grounded in a shared culture, like that which many people get from going to church every Sunday. My parents were religious, but we never went to church. It was going to take time and effort for me to build a visceral sense of my African heritage.
This was a lonely time for me. I was away from Philadelphia, away from family and friends, and, during my classes at Columbia, away from black people. My first residence was a flat in Greenwich Village that I shared with a high school friend from Philadelphia. Later, I shared a basement with no kitchen on East Fourth Street in the Lower East Side with another friend, John Churchville. The neighborhood had been occupied primarily by Jewish immigrants. I complied when asked to turn the lights on and off at the small synagogue next door on the Sabbath, when faithful Jews were bound to refrain from work.
I got a job working in the bookbinding department in the Butler Library at Columbia University and went to school at night. I was majoring in philosophy. I was encouraged by a letter from Lewis Mumford in which he wrote that my working days and going to school at night reminded him of his own educational journey.
Joining the Civil Rights Movement
With the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, and the sit-ins and freedom rides of the early 1960s, the civil rights movement focused on racial integration and voting rights in the rural South and in its small towns and cities. In the later 1960s, the emphasis would shift to the idea of black power and building community leadership with increasing attention to civil rights issues in Northern and Western cities.
In April of 1962, John told me about a civil rights conference at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, just north of Manhattan. John and I both went. The event was sponsored by the newly formed Northern Student Movement (NSM). It was an amazing experience: a predominantly white women’s campus inviting young African American men and women to not only talk about race but also do something about it. It was a wonderful introduction for me to the effectiveness of direct action and the power of social movements. During the conference, I became a committed participant in the civil rights movement and have been engaged in struggles for racial justice ever since.
It was exciting to meet the students who had started the sit-ins in the South and meet and listen to keynote talks by two elders of the movement: Leon Sullivan and Bayard Rustin. I was fortunate to form a friendship with Bayard Rustin, with whom I met regularly for guidance and encouragement during my years in New York.
Conferring with others, Peter Countryman, who had founded NSM at Yale, conceived a tutorial project for Philadelphia for the summer of 1962. Many students, black and white, participated in tutoring black children in Philadelphia. Later, we decided to form a Harlem chapter of the NSM, calling it the Harlem Education Project (HEP). Our main focus would be tutoring youth. We were fortunate that Kathy Rogers, one of the founding members of the NSM, knew how to get funding.
Leon Sullivan was the other keynote speaker. His niece, Joan Cannady (later Countryman), was the graduating class president at Sarah Lawrence. Leon, a Baptist minister in Philadelphia, conducted what he called “selective patronage” campaigns with other ministers to pressure companies to stop refusing to hire qualified black workers in other than menial jobs. The members of a church, a neighborhood, and other groups would get the details at church or at a meeting, and then the whole group would boycott the company’s products—standard items in the lunch pails of black workers—and reward the company with preferential purchasing when it started hiring black workers.
I was impressed by this sophisticated form of direct action and proud that it had been happening in my home town of Philadelphia. I decided to organize a campaign in Manhattan to pressure the Sealtest Milk Company to start hiring black deliverers. Later, I learned that campaigns like this had been going on in New York since the 1930s. I learned and grew from the experience. When I approached a prominent black church to ask members to participate in the campaign, they took the longest time to confer with one another about whether to let me address the congregation. Finally, they let me know that it wouldn’t be appropriate since congregants might be uncomfortable with the fact that I had a beard—my fashion sense at the time, such as it was, was informed by the beatnik era. I went home, shaved, trimmed my hair, and put on a jacket and tie, and then I went back to enter my request again. It was good practice for me, but, gradually, I realized that I was more interested in working on community design projects. Eventually, we passed the campaign on to the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality.
During one of my usual walks from Columbia through Harlem, I made my way east through the beautiful greenery and labyrinthine paths of Morningside Park with a sense of foreboding. I quickly became aware that the park was empty. Yet, I felt I was being watched while trespassing on unoccupied territory. I feared crossing an unnamed boundary that demanded a response from me. I experienced the curious state of double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois (1903, 8) had described in The Souls of Black Folks:
One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being tossed asunder.
At the bottom of the hill, the path through the park emptied out onto flatland streets. I would hurry east on 116th Street, turning left at Lenox Avenue.1 Along the way, I passed clumps of African American men, idle on the street and often engaged in animated argument. Passing by, I would nod my head in recognition, acknowledging that even though I was a student at Columbia, I was down with the hood. Inside, I felt superior to these men, but I also felt ashamed about feeling superior. I continued to ask myself why there weren’t more black students at Columbia University.
Then, perhaps a block and a half away, as I approached 125th Street, a voice was coming through a loud speaker, echoing off the walls. “There’s no such thing as a Negro. You’re a black man!” It was the voice of Malcolm X. By the end of 1963, I had heard him speak many times; I would recognize his voice anywhere.
As a member of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm had changed his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X. He believed that the last name Little was given to his ancestors by a white slave owner after they were captured, chained, and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Since Malcolm did not know the names of his African ancestors, he simply chose the name X.
James Baldwin, too, had written of being forced to recognize that he was a person of unknown ancestry torn from his African roots. I took this shared experience of African Americans being cut off from our African heritage as a point of departure in my professional education. Much later, I understood it as a step in a journey that began with the emergence of Homo sapiens as the last surviving species of upright walking hominids (Oppenheimer 2003, 39).
As I approached the intersection of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, I saw that the street had been closed off. A large temporary platform had been erected in the middle of the street. Six or seven men were seated on the platform with an American flag. Sometimes, there was a woman. “We’re not Americans,” Malcolm proclaimed. “We’re Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here from Africa against our will.”
The five hundred people in the mostly black audience roared. Surrounding them were two hundred and fifty white policemen, who, I imagined, were wondering if they would get home that night. I could see the fear in their eyes, and I was frightened too.
Corresponding with James Baldwin
In 1962, I decided to drop out of the School of General Studies at Columbia for a semester to work for the civil rights movement in Harlem. Bayard Rustin gave me James Baldwin’s address, and I sent him a note inviting him to an event I was organizing to support the selective patronage campaign to pressure the Sealtest Milk Company. He responded fifteen months later, apologizing for the delayed response and expressing his support for our project and a willingness to stay in touch. We exchanged a few letters, and, much later, in the late 1970s, when I was living in Berkeley, California, I was his host for a month while he was a visiting scholar in the African American Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley.2
Baldwin’s fierce critical intelligence and taut prose moved me as he focused on issues of identity and place, describing how language, music, painting, and architecture are cut from the same cloth—a cloth that feels somehow not rightfully his:
I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. . . I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. (Baldwin 1955, 10)
I realized that if I wanted to be a great architect, or even a mediocre one, I needed to find a way to integrate all these perspectives into my work and being. It wouldn’t be enough to master building in a technical sense. I would have to master the ethos of our time, which, it was increasingly clear to me, needed to include black people.
Baldwin’s Letter to His Nephew
In the autobiographic statement in Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin (1955, 10) writes about being forced to recognize himself as a kind of “bastard of the West.” The icons of European and American culture did not contain his history nor provide a reflection of himself. And, yet, there was no other heritage he could hope to use.
Consider the message that the conventional mainstream story of our time sends to young African Americans trapped in the inner city. As Baldwin wrote to his fourteen-year-old nephew in 1963 on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation:
The heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were thus expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. . . .
. . . Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear. . . .
. . . The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history that they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.3
This text settled deep within and has stayed with me throughout the rest of my life. The power of Baldwin’s clear and amazingly compassionate perspective guided and animated my efforts then and now. It is an underpinning for my purpose in writing about what I call the “hidden narrative of race.” It became clear to me that all people, not only African Americans, need to understand the largely unacknowledged story of black people—a story that stretches back to the beginning of time and includes the achievements of African cultures and civilizations over millennia.
My Involvement in Civil Rights Struggles
By the early 1960s, both law and social custom had relegated black people to a separate and inferior legal status, especially blacks living in Southern and border states. Denied the right to vote and barred from public facilities, our people were subjected to routine insults and deadly violence by whites—private citizens as well as public officials. We could not expect justice from the courts.
African American protests against these conditions were at long last very much in the news, and the prominence of these struggles affected me deeply. I experienced an emerging sense of empowerment. Suddenly, I felt that I could expect to be treated as a whole person. Though most public attention focused on the Southern states, I was all too aware of the inequities in the cities of the North.
As I became personally engaged in the emerging civil rights movement, I sought to synthesize two streams of learning: from what I was gleaning from my classes at school and from my growing involvement in civil rights activism.
Cultural and Political Inspirations
During the time that I was immersing myself in Mumford’s books, I was also discovering a new generation of African American writers. During the early 1960s, I came in contact with a vibrant, emerging African American literary tradition influenced by the civil rights movement. Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Harold Cruse, LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), and especially James Baldwin were the most prominent. I was inspired by these writers and felt that they would influence my practice of architecture in the same way that the transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, affected the architects and builders of the twentieth century as Lewis Mumford described in The Golden Day.
Jones published The Blues People: Negro Music in White America in 1963, which describes the reinvention of American music—spirituals, blues, jazz, and bebop—out of the harsh conditions of the rural South and life in the coldwater flats, nightclubs, and speakeasies in the industrial cities, like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. I was fascinated by this and recognized it as part of the hidden history I was struggling to discover and revive.
Civil rights news was on the front page of every newspaper around that time. We were living in exciting times. I pondered how, as an architect, I could contribute to this explosion of creativity. This was in the background of my thoughts and dreams throughout the sixties while I was studying architecture at Columbia and trying to connect city planning to the struggle for human rights and social justice. Most of the political action of the national civil rights movement was still focused on the South, but many of the most prominent people in the movement were in and out of New York on a regular basis. As a student activist, I got to meet many of them.
Given the anger and frustration I saw every day in Harlem, I figured that the arc of the movement would soon swing to the North, and I wanted to be ready. The NSM, in which I was active, had been raising money and arranging speaking engagements for students from the South. Besides boycotts of companies who refused to hire African American employees, activists organized rent strikes against unscrupulous landlords in Harlem who milked their properties for profits without concern for tenants’ rights.
At some point, I discovered the West End Bar on Broadway near 114th Street where beer, food, and lively conversation drew a constant stream of students and faculty. I went there after classes almost every day to listen, learn, and exchange ideas. Further up toward the Bronx on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue was Lewis Michaux’s African National Memorial Bookstore. This Harlem institution was a hotbed of information regarding all things African and African American. I went there often to soak up the rich expressions of black culture and be fortified by the way they challenged the dominant culture. The store was crowded with people, books, pamphlets, flyers, and framed portraits (photos and paintings) of African American luminaries. The front exterior wall was papered with large signs: “The House of Common Sense,” “Home of Proper Propaganda,” “World History Book Outlet on Two Billion African and Non-White Peoples,” “Repatriation Headquarters Back to Africa Movement,”4 and smaller signs promoting particular books or causes.
At Michaux’s bookstore, I encountered a great number of particularly formative works, including 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro by the highly successful self-taught Jamaican American historian Joel Augustus Rogers. Another eye-opener was The Mis-Education of the Negro by historian Carter Woodson. Woodson (1933) gave many examples of how black students are taught to distrust their abilities and discount their value. Taught with a curriculum designed for whites that black students find neither relevant nor useful, they end up with only a superficial knowledge and a strong sense of inferiority. Maybe this was why, even though it was sometimes hard to separate Rogers’s (1934) rhetorical bravado from historical fact, his books moved me so. Woodson’s (1933) points resonated deeply with me as I was still being mis-educated in many of the ways he described.
My miseducation was also reduced by another book: Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy by Professor George G. M. James. James (1954) takes readers through a detailed process of reviewing known facts about ancient Greek history and shows that many traditional stories about Greeks as originators of philosophy, art, and the sciences are impossible and likely derived from Egyptian learning and culture, which, therefore, provided the basis for the achievements of Western civilization. Whether or how the knowledge was stolen, though, is a question that seemed less pressing to me than coming to terms with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade.
Much later, in 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership by Harold Cruse gave me a lot to think about. Cruse laid out analysis of the activism that had taken place in the 1930s and how it had laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1960s. While reading the book, I reflected on how little we remember about the successful boycotts they organized and the flowering of artistic expression they shared. Many of his observations gave me clues to better understand things about our communities and our struggles that were not being documented and, thus, would be lost to history.5
Learning about Ancient African History
It must have been at Michaux’s bookstore that I came across the writing of self-educated British journalist Basil Davidson who, in 1951, began decades of research and writing aimed at correcting prevailing racist misconceptions about Africa and its history. After centuries of misinformation, people tended to think of Africa as an uncivilized land with no history prior to contact with Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century. This assumption bolstered the idea that people of African origin were inferior to people with European ancestry and that they were less intelligent, less cultured, and even less human. European invaders used this blatant fabrication as their excuse for enslaving African people, colonizing their lands, and exploiting their natural resources.
The Davidson book that I first encountered was The Lost Cities of Africa. I was fascinated by the way he wove together observations and accounts by explorers, scientists, merchants, soldiers, and kings and combined them with archeological evidence and climate history to trace the development of the ancient kingdoms and empires of sub-Saharan Africa.6 Where firm evidence could not be found, Davidson (1970) speculated about what might be reasonable to believe. For example, during the millennia between five and ten thousand years ago, when, according to scientists, the Sahara was a green and fertile land, there are faint traces of humans who were planting fields and raising animals. One can only wonder about cities buried beneath those sands.
The idea that ancient Africans had developed cities was a radical new concept for me. I spent hours and days rereading Davidson and trying to come to terms with the facts and possibilities he was presenting. At that time, the academic discipline of history was based exclusively on Eurocentric perspectives. Greece was considered to be the fountainhead of civilization. There seemed to be a consensus among my professors and fellow students that any scholarship centered on the African experience was not worth studying. My participation in anything Afrocentric would have made me academically suspect, and I wasn’t ready to go out on that limb. I kept my thoughts and interests to myself and continued reading and thinking about these new ideas throughout my years at Columbia.
In 1961, Dad suffered a brain hemorrhage at the age of 59. He was in a coma for four days before Mother finally called her sister, Ede. She thought he was sleeping and would eventually wake up. He was taken to the hospital and remained in the coma for a few days before he died. We were all able to be there with him, and that felt good. Lewie and I had both had some reconciliation with him before his death, but I wish there had been more. The memorial service at the funeral home was not as well attended as I expected, and only a handful of friends came to the graveside.
Lewie and I had to sell the several properties our dad had purchased as there was no way we could keep up the mortgages. We just broke even on the deals so there was no money left for Mother. She lived in Philadelphia with Ede for a few months after Dad died. She was in good health, but she was lonely. I was in my first year at Columbia, and Lewie was working at Princeton. We rented a house that was halfway between Princeton and Columbia, and Mother moved in with us. We decided that would be the easiest way to deal with our new situation. The arrangement lasted for about a year. I was very comfortable living with Lewie and Mother, but commuting was stressful. I worked as a night janitor at Columbia and was taking four courses during the days. For several days in a row, I would work all night, sleep on a couch on campus for a few hours, and then go straight to my classes without returning to New Jersey. The travel and switching between train and subway was tiring and time consuming. Eventually, Mother moved back to Philadelphia, and I moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
I met Jean Doak briefly during my trip with John in the early spring of 1962 to the then all-white Connecticut College for Women,7 where we had been invited to talk about life as an African American man in the United States. I described a world the students had not known. Afterward, I exchanged letters with Joanne, Jean’s friend. I described the planned Sealtest Milk Company boycott and our need for staff. Wanting to work on the boycott, Jean took the bus from New Jersey to New York early that summer and found us in the basement on East Fourth Street beyond Avenue C. The absence of a kitchen and the night visits by rats were a shock to her. An Antioch student who was doing her three-month work requirement and living near us invited Jean to share her apartment. She did not find a role in the boycott and instead got a nine-to-five job to save money for the next year at college. Later that summer, we were raising funds to start up HEP, the civil rights group that I had cofounded with several other students as part of NSM. Jean ended up working at HEP and abandoned her plan to return to college.
Jean was quiet and reserved. She didn’t talk a lot. In that way, she reminded me of my mother, whose calm demeanor was a counterpoint to my father’s dominant personality. I thought Jean just needed to be drawn out, and I liked being able to do that. I liked that she was a rebel even though she was shy. I liked that she challenged conventions. She didn’t want to get married. She didn’t want to change her name. I admired her spirit of independence. It made me feel good to be connected with someone who was also rebelling. Although I was very active in the public arena, I was actually a loner deeper down. Being with Jean helped me feel less isolated.
Beside civil rights work, Jean and I shared an interest in drawing. After hearing so much from me related to architecture, she began to consider it as a possible career. We had interests in common and were both reluctant to be alone, so the transition to being together was easy. We became a couple toward summer’s end.
Jean had a broader sense of geographic entitlement than I did despite her insistence that she had not traveled much. My territory consisted of the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, and uptown near Columbia in Harlem and Morningside Heights. In these neighborhoods, I felt more or less welcome. I could go other places, but, in those situations, I often felt like an interloper.
I did not trust that the whole continent belonged to me as Jean and other white people I knew seemed to feel. I was wary of wandering too far from a black neighborhood. I felt that most of Manhattan, to say nothing of the suburbs, was hostile territory.
Joining the Community Design Movement
In 1962, I was among the early adopters of the community design movement, a social movement that sought to link architecture and urban and community planning with civil rights. This involved finding a site, engaging nearby residents in the planning process, and designing a shared space where youth, families, and seniors could come together to celebrate community life. My model was the neighborhood commons projects that Karl Linn was orchestrating in collaboration with neighborhood residents, volunteer teams, students, and volunteer professionals. The idea behind commons was to foster the development of a new kind of extended family living based not on blood but on friendship, mutual aid, and intergenerational support. This work is documented and illustrated in Karl’s 2007 book, Building Commons and Community.
Karl was a champion of people’s access to commons at a time when the concept of commons was lost on most Americans. In our modern society, most land-use decisions are privatized, which tends to privilege people with more money and resources and marginalize everyone else. In most indigenous, traditional, or rural societies, people have a direct capacity to come together and decide what is needed for the common good—a grazing field for sheep or cattle, a pump for water, a market space, and so on. Most people believe that air and water are common assets, but these beliefs are being challenged by neoliberal economic theorists and corporate interests.8
Creating a Neighborhood Commons in Harlem
With my parallel interests in urban planning and the civil rights movement, I went to work for the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem, which aided community groups. I involved myself in a practical project that would improve the neighborhood by surveying all the vacant land in Harlem. This was our first community design project. We surveyed 150 blocks of central and west Harlem. In collaboration with Karl Linn and members of HEP, I selected a site at 148th Street and Bradhurst Avenue to build a neighborhood commons. It took an enormous effort to clear the lot of trash, rats, mattresses, and broken appliances. A neighbor borrowed from his workplace an earth-moving vehicle, which saved us days of unpleasant work. In the summer of 1963, we moved our HEP storefront into a building adjacent to the site.
The two vacant lots formed an entrance to the commons, which included all the backyards in the city block bounded by 147th and 148th Streets, Bradhurst Avenue, and Eighth Avenue. With volunteer architects, we developed a plan for the site, cleared out the backyards, and implemented the first phase of the project: the building of a large barbecue pit. Several big community celebrations were held in the commons, and the tutoring program continued in one of the basements. Children also met their tutors at various churches.
Lewie moved into an apartment on the block and operated a basement laboratory that engaged local kids in 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.
