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