The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 20 September 2024
by Nikil Saval
The late June Jordan was a poet, author and activist whose work on race, immigration and justice was influential throughout her life and after her death in 2002. After dramatic race riots in American cities in 1964 (most particularly those in New York City and Harlem), she worked with idiosyncratic architectural intellectual Buckmister Fuller to imagine a physical transformation of Harlem that could provide its residents with a more healthy and more just urban environment. Their work was called "Skyrise for Harlem" and was published as a short piece in Esquire in April of 1965. Esquire's editors, however, exposed their own biases by changing the title to reflect the slum-clearance rage of the day as well as removing significant reference to June Jordan's contribution to the work, citing only Bucky Fuller, who was something of a celebrity at the time. These moves quite dramatically reduced the potentially hopeful impact that Jordan's work might have had, and acted as a stark reminder of the injustices of the time, much of which is still extant today. Since that time, "Skyrise for Harlem" had largely become an interesting footnote in American urban design history, as well as in the fight for racial justice in American cities. To be sure, with Bucky involved, the resulting vision was utopian, with its massive residential towers built ten stories above the untouched urban landscape below. The vision was essentially impractical, would have been vastly expensive and monolithic. It was a time of megastructures in the sky, and the plan reflected optimism in concrete. And as quixotic as all that seems, it was also a vital starting point for what might have become a critical early discussion of the role urban environments play in racial justice.
This particular slim volume, which gets its title from Chester Himes's novel of the same name, is a printed version of a lecture given by Nikil Saval, just on the verge of his election to the state senate of Pennsylvania. The occasion was the Fall Open House Lecture at the Harvard School of Design in 2020. The book is illustrated with the slides Saval used in his presentation, and it ends with a few of the questions he fielded from his audience. The result is a concise overview of June Jordan's dalliance with Buckminster Fullerism and the brutal racism and misogyny (misogynoir?) of the market. If their vision had been taken more seriously than the dismissive snark of Esquire's title, if Bucky and Jordan had been more seen by urban design professionals, perhaps some forward motion of justice and livability could have been accomplished. The end result, however, was a curiosity, a footnote in urban planning history, and yet another object lesson in structural prejudice to boot. Happily, June Jordan had other axes to grind, and with more success in the impact of her voice. Bucky had by then already been assured of his place in design history. This little book helps us to see Jordan's accomplishment. But, even in 2024, the struggle for racial justice in urban environments remains just as vivid a battle as it was in the 1960s.