if there were a deep and unbridgeable gulf between environmentalism and social justice. Environmentalists revere and respect the natural world as a foundation for the life of future generations while social justice advocates are committed to equal opportunities for those who live in the present. When the first Earth Day happened in 1970, it was profoundly disassociated from the civil rights movement. It centered on protecting and restoring nature without acknowledging people’s need for social and economic justice. The environment and people are interrelated. Both demand our attention and respect. African Americans and other peoples who have labored in our cities and countryside, like all other humans, have not only a responsibility to care for planet Earth but also the right to share in its bounty.
It is clear that industrial growth is destroying life on Earth. We need a platform for all people to come together and decide to reduce our negative impact on the global biosphere. We cannot just say, “All we want is our fair share.” Nor can we say, “Save the planet by any means necessary,” and call the rest “collateral damage.” We are all in this together, and true sustainability must include social justice along with environmental protection.
Marginalized communities—subjugated economically and racially—have firsthand experience of what it means to build sustainability in the face of hardship. This cultural and individual resilience is a resource for leadership. We need to acknowledge the leadership emerging out of the social and environmental justice movements and work to dismantle the obstacles to leadership faced by people of color. The knowledge they can bring to our planning and environmental professions is invaluable.
I am fortunate to have played many roles in my life, but my most deeply embedded identity is as the survivor of seven-and-a-half decades of growing up and living in racially constrained environments—first in Philadelphia, then in New York, for a summer in London, and, finally, on the West Coast in South Berkeley. Throughout my life and work, I have been seeking answers to questions about racial inequities that have troubled me since childhood and searching for ideas and disciplines to integrate the various dimensions of my personal and professional experience.
A class field trip to see the Better Philadelphia Exposition when I was eight years old filled me with a strong desire to become an architect and urban planner. During the following years, as I looked forward to those studies, fundamental questions were forming in my consciousness: Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my connection to the communities I am encountering? In a more external frame of mind I wondered: Why do white families move out of our neighborhood as soon as families like mine move in and why do my neighborhood and my home become more run-down every year? When I looked at the conditions surrounding me as a child, I did not realize that my city and I were not alone—these patterns of segregation and neighborhood disinvestment were prevailing throughout the country in the years of my childhood.
While I was at Columbia University in the early 1960s, I joined the emerging civil rights movement. Suddenly, I found myself in a series of struggles in which my peers were defining an agenda for a new generation. We were confronting the assumptions of the status quo and demanding the right to vote, to interstate bus travel, to be seated and served in restaurants, and to decent jobs. I wondered how architecture, the field that I was embarking upon, could respond to these demands.
I became a lifelong advocate for civil and human rights for African Americans and other communities of color in the United States. As a founding member of the Northern Student Movement, I learned a lot about community organizing, particularly how to build mutual trust and respect among the diverse groups in the community. Eventually, I found a niche for my architecture skills in the civil rights movement by coordinating the participatory planning and construction of an outdoor community space—the Harlem Neighborhood Commons.
I reflected on my situation as a college student: the people in Harlem are black and so am I. Out of three hundred architecture students at Columbia University, 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
