understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.3
This text settled deep within and has stayed with me throughout the rest of my life. The power of Baldwin’s clear and amazingly compassionate perspective guided and animated my efforts then and now. It is an underpinning for my purpose in writing about what I call the “hidden narrative of race.” It became clear to me that all people, not only African Americans, need to understand the largely unacknowledged story of black people—a story that stretches back to the beginning of time and includes the achievements of African cultures and civilizations over millennia.
My Involvement in Civil Rights Struggles
By the early 1960s, both law and social custom had relegated black people to a separate and inferior legal status, especially blacks living in Southern and border states. Denied the right to vote and barred from public facilities, our people were subjected to routine insults and deadly violence by whites—private citizens as well as public officials. We could not expect justice from the courts.
African American protests against these conditions were at long last very much in the news, and the prominence of these struggles affected me deeply. I experienced an emerging sense of empowerment. Suddenly, I felt that I could expect to be treated as a whole person. Though most public attention focused on the Southern states, I was all too aware of the inequities in the cities of the North.
As I became personally engaged in the emerging civil rights movement, I sought to synthesize two streams of learning: from what I was gleaning from my classes at school and from my growing involvement in civil rights activism.
Cultural and Political Inspirations
During the time that I was immersing myself in Mumford’s books, I was also discovering a new generation of African American writers. During the early 1960s, I came in contact with a vibrant, emerging African American literary tradition influenced by the civil rights movement. Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Harold Cruse, LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), and especially James Baldwin were the most prominent. I was inspired by these writers and felt that they would influence my practice of architecture in the same way that the transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, affected the architects and builders of the twentieth century as Lewis Mumford described in The Golden Day.
Jones published The Blues People: Negro Music in White America in 1963, which describes the reinvention of American music—spirituals, blues, jazz, and bebop—out of the harsh conditions of the rural South and life in the coldwater flats, nightclubs, and speakeasies in the industrial cities, like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. I was fascinated by this and recognized it as part of the hidden history I was struggling to discover and revive.
Civil rights news was on the front page of every newspaper around that time. We were living in exciting times. I pondered how, as an architect, I could contribute to this explosion of creativity. This was in the background of my thoughts and dreams throughout the sixties while I was studying architecture at Columbia and trying to connect city planning to the struggle for human rights and social justice. Most of the political action of the national civil rights movement was still focused on the South, but many of the most prominent people in the movement were in and out of New York on a regular basis. As a student activist, I got to meet many of them.
Given the anger and frustration I saw every day in Harlem, I figured that the arc of the movement would soon swing to the North, and I wanted to be ready. The NSM, in which I was active, had been raising money and arranging speaking engagements for students from the South. Besides boycotts of companies who refused to hire African American employees, activists organized rent strikes against unscrupulous landlords in Harlem who milked their properties for profits without concern for tenants’ rights.
At some point, I discovered the West End Bar on Broadway near 114th Street where beer, food, and lively conversation drew a constant stream of students and faculty. I went there after classes almost every day to listen, learn, and exchange ideas. Further up toward the Bronx on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue was Lewis Michaux’s African National Memorial Bookstore. This Harlem institution was a hotbed of information regarding all things African and African American. I went there often to soak up the rich expressions of black culture and be fortified by the way they challenged the dominant culture. The store was crowded with people, books, pamphlets, flyers, and framed portraits (photos and paintings) of African American luminaries. The front exterior wall was papered with large signs: “The House of Common Sense,” “Home of Proper Propaganda,” “World History Book Outlet on Two Billion African and Non-White Peoples,” “Repatriation Headquarters Back to Africa Movement,”4 and smaller signs promoting particular books or causes.
At Michaux’s bookstore, I encountered a great number of particularly formative works, including 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro by the highly successful self-taught Jamaican American historian Joel Augustus Rogers. Another eye-opener was The Mis-Education of the Negro by historian Carter Woodson. Woodson (1933) gave many examples of how black students are taught to distrust their abilities and discount their value. Taught with a curriculum designed for whites that black students find neither relevant nor useful, they end up with only a superficial knowledge and a strong sense of inferiority. Maybe this was why, even though it was sometimes hard to separate Rogers’s (1934) rhetorical bravado from historical fact, his books moved me so. Woodson’s (1933) points resonated deeply with me as I was still being mis-educated in many of the ways he described.
My miseducation was also reduced by another book: Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy by Professor George G. M. James. James (1954) takes readers through a detailed process of reviewing known facts about ancient Greek history and shows that many traditional stories about Greeks as originators of philosophy, art, and the sciences are impossible and likely derived from Egyptian learning and culture, which, therefore, provided the basis for the achievements of Western civilization. Whether or how the knowledge was stolen, though, is a question that seemed less pressing to me than coming to terms with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade.
Much later, in 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership by Harold Cruse gave me a lot to think about. Cruse laid out analysis of the activism that had taken place in the 1930s and how it had laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1960s. While reading the book, I reflected on how little we remember about the successful boycotts they organized and the flowering of artistic expression they shared. Many of his observations gave me clues to better understand things about our communities and our struggles that were not being documented and, thus, would be lost to history.5
Learning about Ancient African History
It must have been at Michaux’s bookstore that I came across the writing of self-educated British journalist Basil Davidson who, in 1951, began decades of research and writing aimed at correcting prevailing racist misconceptions about Africa and its history. After centuries of misinformation, people tended to think of Africa as an uncivilized land with no history prior to contact with Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century. This assumption bolstered the idea that people of African origin were inferior to people with European ancestry and that they were less intelligent, less cultured, and even less human. European invaders used this blatant fabrication as their excuse for enslaving African people, colonizing their lands, and exploiting their natural resources.
The Davidson book that I first encountered was The Lost Cities of Africa. I was fascinated by the way he wove together observations and accounts by explorers, scientists, merchants, soldiers, and kings