Institute, the organization whose board I had joined, was made up of white environmentalists. It was hard work to invent a new framework for lifting up the voices of people of color within that movement.
The answer that emerged during long and deep conversations with Karl Linn was the Urban Habitat Program. We developed the program within Earth Island Institute, modeling it after the community design centers (CDCs) of the 1960s and the advocacy planning work promoted by architect-lawyer Paul Davidoff. But while CDCs had been serving neighborhoods, we positioned the Urban Habitat Program at the center of San Francisco’s entire metropolitan region to mobilize people in many neighborhoods. My work with Earth Island Institute and the Urban Habitat Program spawned my next twenty-five years of projects with the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative at the Ford Foundation followed by Breakthrough Communities with its focus on promoting sustainability and justice in US metropolitan regions. These projects are the first steps in building a worldwide movement organized around a new story of unified effort to heal communities harmed by racial injustice so that they can participate in repairing our damaged ecosystems and social networks.
As an architect and urban planner, I was seeking to construct a usable story based on an accurate picture of the past. I was looking for evidence that all the suffering of my people meant something, that African Americans and our African ancestors played an important role in shaping the modern world—in particular, the cities and towns in which we live. I felt inspired and empowered as I considered the development of the African American community against the backdrop of the unfolding universe and the evolution of life on planet Earth.
The new planetary narrative emerging in our time suggests new ways to think about race and new strategies and directions for thinking about, planning, designing, building, and living in cities. Placing our contemporary issues in this larger context encourages a deeper regard for the miracle of life, gratitude for the diverse species with whom we share the planet, and appreciation for the gifts of air, water, and sunlight that we have long taken for granted. Everything that we do or aim to do should be grounded in and governed by our relationship with the Earth, the cosmos, and the diversity of human and other forms of life with which we coinhabit this precious planet.
I hope that this book will inspire readers to reflect on their own stories and to share them—whether by telling them to one or many friends and family members or by writing and sharing them online or in print. Deeply respectful and compassionate listening to one another is essential to establish a foundation of trust and a sense of our common humanity.
Although this book includes notes and references, it is not intended primarily as an academic work. Some of the notes contain interesting side stories and details that expand meaning and deepen understanding. The references and additional resources are there to encourage further study and guide readers to interesting and accessible sources. I intend the book to appeal to readers of all skin colors, to young and old, to both environmental and social justice activists, and to those of a spiritual or a scientific bent. I want it to be accessible to thoughtful high school dropouts and, at the same time, engaging for serious students and scholars of history, science, and human meaning. It will take all of us to meet the challenge of re-envisioning and revising our social, economic, and environmental systems—a major effort that Thomas Berry referred to as the Great Work of our time.
THE YEAR OF 1963 was significant for the civil rights movement. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested and jailed for protesting segregation and had written his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” All over the world, people’s eyes were fixed on their television screens as Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor directed firefighters and police to use fire hoses and police dogs against African American children who were peacefully seeking to integrate Kelly Ingram Park. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech were the most high-profile events, but there was local organizing and education going on all over, including in New York City, where I was working with the Harlem Education Project (HEP). Nevertheless, several activists took time off from their organizing, boycotts, and protests in New York to join my brother, Lewie, in taking youth from HEP on a five-hundred-mile journey to Acadia National Park in Maine to see a full eclipse of the sun.
Lewie was sixteen months older than me. Growing up, we were about the same size, so people often thought we were twins. But I knew better. He could always run faster and fight harder than me. He had a way with girls I couldn’t even imagine having. He could 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
