The title for this site was inspired, at least in part, on a segment from an interview between reknown psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark and writer James Baldwin, which you can watch in its entirety below.

At around 14 minutes, Baldwin recalls a conversation with a Black teenager during the filming of the documentary ‘Take This Hammer‘ about the demolition of the boy’s home as part of an urban renewal project in San Francisco.

A boy last week, he was 16 in San Francisco told me on television, thank God we got him to talk. Maybe somebody else ought to listen. He said, ‘I got no country, I’ve got no flag.’ Man he’s only 16 years old. And I couldn’t say you do. [silence] I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging, as almost all northern cities now are engaged in, something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out. Gettin-, it means negro removal; that is what it means. And the federal government is accom- is, is, is an accomplice to this fact. Now this, we’re talking about human beings: there’s not such a thing as a monolithic wall, or you know, some abstraction called a “Negro Problem.” These are Negro boys and girls who at 16 and 17 don’t believe the country means anything that it says and don’t feel they have any place here. On the basis of the performance of the entire country… “

Clark: “But now James”

Baldwin: No, am I exaggerating?

Clark: “No, I certainly cannot say that you’re exaggerating…”

The conversation steers away from this to other topics, but the point Baldwin makes is a clear indictment of America’s policy on urban renewal – which, from 60 years into the future, could indeed be seen as a tactical campaign to remove African Americans from some of the most central, and valuable, locations of our nation’s largest cities. It is an era that has tainted many discussions around urban planning between African American communities and the municipal governments that are supposed to serve them. It is also somewhat propethic that this conversation frames San Francisco in the backdrop, which, as of today, has lost 60% of its African American population from its high in 1970.

On this site, I hope to share some insights on the friction between such communities and their wider cities but also a vision where processes of land use and redevelopment actually serve them and not just displace them. Urban renewal, as a necessity to align the needs of current generations of city residents with the plans of previous generations of planners and elected officials, is something desperately needed in every major city in the United States. But, in a society that is hostile to African Americans organizing themselves into levels of autonomy, this is a challenge. To defer once more the words of Baldwin,

“One has got to force somehow, from Washington, a moral commitment. Not to the Negro people. But to the life of this country. It doesn’t matter any longer.”

I hope to come back to what a part of this moral commitment look like for our cities and African American communities within them in 2023. Watch this space.