had died.
Mother was the eldest daughter; she attended William Penn High School for Girls, a prestigious, mostly black school. She was artistically gifted, and had a talent for creating sewing patterns and using them to make women’s clothes. At one point, she was hired for a job as a strikebreaker—most likely without knowing it—and as she was bused to a factory, bricks were tossed at her.
Mother was light skinned enough to pass for Jewish or Puerto Rican, but never chose to do so. Two of her sisters, Ede and Ruth, lived with Granny. Her sister Ida was married, and her brother, Carl, died young. Aunt Ede used to tell Mother that she could come back home whenever she wanted, but Mother was very loyal to Dad; I don’t think she ever wanted to leave him.
Mother must have been a great beauty in her youth, but she had lost all her teeth by the time I was born. I thought she was crazy when she painted over the mirrored faceplates on the electric light switches in the house we moved to on Kingsessing Avenue, but, as an adult, I understood that she couldn’t bear to see the change in her features.
Mother loved to draw and paint, and she made our home into a learning center. Once, she placed a lighted candle to project a shadow of my profile and, from this, traced on paper the outline of my features and cut out the image of my silhouette. It was something I treasured. I still have two paintings that she made late in her life.
Another great treasure of mine is a small book written by Mary Jenness, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and published in 1936 titled Twelve Negro Americans. The chapter, “A Negro Cooperative Makes Good,” is about my dad’s groundbreaking efforts to initiate a cooperative economic system for the benefit of low-income African Americans in Philadelphia. It consisted of a farm in Yardley, Pennsylvania, and a cooperative store in West Philadelphia.
Dad was dark skinned, brilliant, and charismatic. His mother had died giving birth to him and his father was unknown. As a young child, he sometimes stayed with his mother’s brother, but other times, he was circulated through a series of orphanages and foster homes. He began to live on his own at the age of twelve.
Dad’s ancestors on his mother’s side included Cherokees and Seminoles who were part of the forced march to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears. Born Lewis Edwards, Dad researched, learned that his father’s name was William Anthony, and renamed himself Lewis Anthony. He moved to Pennsylvania to attend Lincoln University3 and worked his way through by painting and wallpapering the university dorms during the summer. During the school year, he made extra money by writing love letters for his friends. Dad loved to give speeches as well—his college friends called him Mark Anthony. He could read and write in Latin and Greek, which seems amazing to me now, but was probably not as unusual in those days when universities often required students to take Latin and Greek.
He completed his college education at Temple University. After graduating in the late 1920s, he started talking with friends about starting a cooperative store. Like many of his peers, he had held a string of odd jobs for which he was overqualified—clerk, factory hand, butler, laundry sorter, and apartment manager, to name a few. Then, while working at a coffee shop owned by Finnish immigrants, he heard them talking enthusiastically about the cooperative movement.4 Inspired, Dad organized a group of friends for a year’s study of cooperative economics, focusing on the principles worked out in 1844 by a group of weavers in Rochdale, England.
One of the co-op members, a tailor, offered the back room of his shop as a meeting place. Soon after, the co-op became a small store, which then quickly took over the entire shop. Dad was invited to give talks about the cooperative, and he became well known and well liked. Eventually, the co-op teamed up with some older folks who had savings to invest, allowing for merchandise expansion and a move to a more densely populated neighborhood. Dad served as co-op manager and sometimes slept behind the counter to save money for rent. Unemployed co-op members were happy to help with maintenance, bookkeeping, and deliveries.
During the Depression, Dad was offered the use of a farm near Philadelphia and received a grant from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to buy farm equipment and fix up residence quarters for five families with farming experience. Dad and the five families were collective owners of the farm and grew produce for the co-op; others were co-op members who had access to the produce at low costs. During the time before my parents were married, Dad would bring food from the co-op and leave it on Granny’s doorstep so Mother and her family would have something to eat. For a time after their marriage, my parents lived on a co-op farm outside of Philadelphia.
Dad loved to tell the story of how he got together with Mother. One night, he explained, he had read a passage from the Bible that seemed to suggest that the next woman he met would be the “one.” It wasn’t clear if Mother was the very next woman he met or if he had had to do some winnowing before she emerged as the one he would marry. It was clear, though, that they shared a strong spiritual bond. Although they didn’t seem to belong to any particular denomination or congregation, they shared a moral and ethical focus that they passed on to Lewie and me.
Mother and Dad devoted themselves to us. They had great dreams for us and made sure we had a rich early childhood.
Our family had always been city folk. Granny, born in 1868, moved to Philadelphia in the decades after the Civil War. Dad arrived in Philadelphia around 1920 when he began to study at Lincoln University.
Dad loved to tell us about the tricks he had learned to get by when times were hard. I’ll never forget watching him pull one of those tricks: During the years after World War II, when our family had little money, Dad bought a couple of receipt pads at the stationery store around the corner and had the stationer print the words “Lewis E. Anthony, Grocer” across the top. Then, we drove down to the Italian wharf in South Philadelphia in his red Ford panel truck and bought wholesale. He could buy cases of canned food at one third of what it would have cost if we had bought it at the local A&P grocery store. When there was no money to pay for utilities, my dad would crawl to a position at roof level and delicately connect the house to the electric power line.
In 1944, when I was five years old, we were finally able to purchase a home in a better neighborhood and leave the Black Bottom, which, I realized later, had been a place of shame. The Black Bottom was an area filled with run-down buildings and lots of concrete with no trees. Nevertheless, I prided myself on knowing my way around and enjoyed shopping and doing errands with my parents. Later, while I was in college in New York, urban renewal policies mostly demolished the Black Bottom.
Our new home in West Philadelphia was a beautiful three-story, semidetached Victorian house built in the 1880s with ten rooms and a small front yard. Steps led up to a front porch that overlooked the sidewalk. The neighbors with whom we shared a wall were another black family with lots of kids. Our relationship with the neighbors had ups and downs, but, for the most part, we were friends. The neighborhood was one of Philadelphia’s first streetcar suburbs, but even before the installation of electric railways in the 1890s, a horse-drawn trolley service had made it an ideal location for the large homes of wealthy families and the professional elite who worked in downtown Philadelphia. Gradually, the mansions were torn down and the lots divided and developed as housing for the expanding middle class. By the time we moved in, only a few of the mansions remained.
We were one of the first black families on our block, but white families had already begun their flight to the suburbs. Blacks were migrating from the South into the inner-city neighborhoods of Northern cities, taking advantage of jobs created by the US involvement in World War II; and middle-class whites were leaving for “better” neighborhoods in the suburbs. The
