career could serve my community. I had this question even before I entered architecture school. Throughout my school days, I experienced a growing feeling that something was missing in my studies—something about the needs of the African American community I aspired to serve and the need for support of professionals serving such communities. It seemed obvious that these topics were essential, but there was no context for them. I attended classes at Columbia, up on the hill, looking down on Harlem and seeing people living under devastating conditions. My education provided no explanation as to why and how it got that way. No one asked or talked about what should be done or why services were not being made available to the most vulnerable communities. People seemed to be ignoring what was right under our noses.
By 1976, I had graduated from Columbia University, studied traditional building in West Africa, and moved to Berkeley, California, where I collaborated with some of the most innovative and creative designers and planners in the field. Landscape magazine published my two-part article on the architecture of the big house and the slave quarter in its bicentennial issues. I understood that my ancestors had been enslaved and that somebody had planned the places where they lived, deciding that they would live in minimal quarters distinctly different from the places where their masters resided.2
Whenever I had a chance, I continued reading and thinking about indigenous villages, towns, and cities in Africa; the slave trade3 and the development of colonial cities on the Atlantic coastline; and the racialization of space in North American urban development from 1500 to the present. The future of our urban, suburban, and rural communities depends in part upon our willingness to face this terrible history and consciously make something of it. I was particularly focused on the “landscape of freedom,” which I imagined as the title of a book I wanted to write about the experience of the African American freedmen during and after the Civil War. I had many questions: What happened to my ancestors when they were emancipated? How did they live? What environments did they live in? What ideas shaped how they lived? What external circumstances continued to constrain them?
In my years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, I was eager to share my thoughts and findings with my students and fellow teachers, but the nearly all-white student body and faculty had little or no interest in the historical drama of Africans and African Americans. I decided to leave the university and enter private practice.
A decade later, black studies programs emerged in colleges and universities across the nation, responding at last to the gap in awareness that I and other African American students had experienced.
In the mid-1980s, my friend and mentor Karl Linn, who had moved to California from the East Coast, introduced me to the writing of Catholic priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry.4 Berry’s insistence that humanity needs a new story excited me since I had been feeling that African Americans needed a new story—a story that is more inspiring than the horrors of the Middle Passage, slavery, and pressures of racism that seemed to intensify after emancipation.
Berry (1999) suggested that neither of mainstream culture’s two dominant stories—one centering on the promise of redemption in the afterlife and the other trusting in the power of science and industry—could unify people and inspire them to engage in collective efforts to respond to the serious environmental problems that have resulted from our long practice of massive extractive industry. Berry insisted that we need to reinvent ourselves as a species within the community of life. Identifying ourselves primarily as members of nations, religions, or racial groups had proved to be a sure route to oppression and strife.
Thanks to my third-grade teacher and the assignments and field trips she organized, I had always held a fascination with history and an excitement about—and love of—nature, particularly stars and trees. Looking at the fossilized remains of trilobites and a dinosaur footprint within a short distance from my home gave me a sense of deep time and appreciation for the big story of life on Earth in which we are all connected. I now found this same excitement when I read Thomas Berry.
Deeply inspired by Berry’s writings and his collaborations with evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme and scholar of world religions Mary Evelyn Tucker, I wanted to make their vision relevant to a larger pool of readers. In order to do 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
