250 Years! All the World's a Stage

Preamble. I was 19 the year of the nation’s bicentennial, 1976. My college roommate and I slept under a grizzly bear hide in a Winnebago owned by Timberjack Joe, a trapper and trader who lived along the Wind River at the edge of the small town of Dubois, Wyoming. Dubois is just outside a Shoshone and Arapahoe Indian reservation and Timberjack had some lovely beaded deerskin dresses Bonnie and I planned to wear on the wagon trip east. Our wagons were slated to meet in the center of the country with a caravan of wagons from the Southwest. We would arrive at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia for the 4th of July. It was after we heard that native Americans had shot rifles at the southwest contingent that we realized the emotional pain this celebration was engendering in what remained of the race we had all but eradicated in order to begin our country. The few survivors on bleak reservations today are a testament to our ongoing genocide, still insidiously overlooked. These native Americans by all accounts had a sensitive and keen understanding of the place humans inhabit in this world, a sensitivity superior to ours. Their destruction is a tremendous loss to civilization. 

                                Monument to Shakespeare in front of the Free Library of Philadelphia

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

This post is a celebration of our collective 250th birthday. On July 4, 1776, we formally declared our intention to become an independent nation. This is a vignette of only one city in our large and diverse nation: Philadelphia. It is the city where certain statesmen sat down and put in writing a framework for the new nation. And this is a sketch about how this city has evolved, the influences which brought us to the point where we can say: this is who we are today. 

Other cities and places across the country will have their own stories.

We are a nation of immigrants and hence, have no ancient traditions which might bind us together. Or any common belief system. 

In fact, we pride ourselves on NOT being subjected to a certain religion. It is important to us that everyone has the choice to believe whatever they want about the nature of reality.  One can choose any religion, or none. In fact, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and equal rights are our linchpin. While there are other “rights” enumerated in both the Bill of Rights and in constitutional amendments (documents which set forth our governing framework), some are presently heatedly disputed, so I will simply refer to the ones no one questions. The rights that unify us.  We value our liberty, equal treatment, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression- our right to say what we please, make our own art, change our minds if we want and dress how we please with few qualifications. 

For us it is more of a story about how we keep these freedoms intact as we integrate.

We are young. We have many mistakes to make before we figure things out. Too, we are 342 million people living across nearly four million square miles. We have many ethnicities and many socioeconomic classes, even many genders. We are heavily criticized right now by others globally, many of whom live in small, more homogeneous countries and cannot have any notion of the considerations so many variables pose. Despite all of our differences, we remain a democracy. I am not going to pretend that it is not under attack right now from within. Honestly, I’ve been out of the country the past eight months and did not want to return. The slide to imperialism and autocracy scares outsiders who have almost as much reason to fear it as we do. The entire globe is connected and we are being watched closely. We know how we appear and we know who we do not want to be. And that’s not nothing. 

Even in the face of the failure of our Attorney General to vigorously prosecute a treasonous attack on January 6 for political reasons alone, we remain a democracy. We had one civil war over 150 years ago between the northern and southern states over slavery and commerce and weathered it, with slavery being abolished. One point for the U.S.! Yes, racism does still exist, even apart from that between blacks and whites, and we are still working on eliminating it in its many insidious forms. Our other big problems are violence, especially gun violence, both inside and outside the government, corruption of our government and courts, the affordability of health care, poverty, drug use, chronic stress, and a profound disagreement over women’s rights to control their own bodies. We have outgrown both our political and economic systems; neither envisioned the developments we have experienced. It is a different world than 1776. And we seem to have a mental block about changing or even tweaking the frameworks. Kind of weird because the guys who drafted the Constitution weren’t that rigid. They trashed the first one, The Articles of Confederation, after only eleven years and rewrote the whole thing. I’m simplifying issues here, but only to keep the narrative moving along. We’re also still working pretty hard to diminish the inclination of our “founding fathers” (that expression says a lot right there) to have white men control our trajectory, which has underpinned and undermined so much of our development. Not saying all white guys are horrible, just a lot of the older ones, who are still wielding inordinate power and who just seem to not be dying.

Still, we remain a democracy. Clearly, we have to make some dramatic changes soon so that it remains a democracy. If nothing else though, we have the common goal of keeping our basic rights intact. Take a look around the world and consider a moment. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equal rights and individual liberty. These are huge protections and we are justly proud to be Americans this Fourth of July.

So let’s take a look at Philadelphia now. Where we started 250 years ago, and where we are today. 

(What a terrible moniker: it makes one feel like the real party is going to be the Quincentennial.)

Being chosen as one of the North American cities to host the World Cup games has been a blessing. Fans from other countries can see firsthand how cool the USA still is in many ways. Too, it underscores how much we do love and respect each other. The rivalries are humorous, with fanbases laughingly trying to outshout each other in the venues set up in cities all across the country to watch the games together. In Philly, it’s called Fanfest. It’s in Lemon Hill Park, a spacious and beautiful park, one block from where I am staying. Last night Mexico and Ecuador played. It was a jolly crowd. The venue hosts fans during the matches and as the approaching finals mean fewer games, entertainment is provided in the evenings until the final game.

This is before the games started, in front of the Art Museum.

One of the highlights for me during the first game I was watching on a large screen with a crowd at Lemon Hill Park was overhearing a Mexican immigrant behind me talking with his buddy about the other games. “What?” he asked, dismayed. “You’re rooting for England the week of the Fourth? That’s CRAZY!” 

It made me particularly happy because I am keenly aware that a lot of the problems people have with immigrants moving to their respective countries is the lack of cultural sensitivity and rude disruption. Waiting in a queue to board a bus in Westport, Ireland, I was pushed aside by a loud immigrant who shoved her way to the front of the line, pulling in her friends, much to the disgruntlement of the polite locals who were queued according to custom and patiently waiting their turns in the cold rain. They had come to expect this behavior from this group of immigrants. When you travel you note the contrasts, the acceptability of different social practices. Shouting into telephones all night long on buses and trains, a common practice in India would not be tolerated in Germany. Of course the answer is better education and acclimation requirements. Not being homogeneous, the US in theory should be inherently more tolerant of differences, but we too, have our troubles with groups failing to get along. Hearing this young man’s appreciation of our history, I was struck by how circumspect he was. He surpassed the thoughtfulness of most Americans I know with his observation. And I was warmed by this integration. He understood and appreciated the country that had welcomed him… until ICE shows up in the dead of night and quietly drags him away.

So let me tell you now about Philly. Yep, there’s the Philly cheesesteak, a sandwich with steak and cheese and peppers and onions on a roll, first made by a hungry hot dog vendor in the 1930s, burned out on hot dogs. It took off and has evolved into a source of fierce civic pride and endless debate over who makes the best.

And of course, we’ve got the Eagles.

We’ve got style.

Renegades with homegrown style. But it’s the diversity of interests and viewpoints that make the different areas of the city entertaining, destinations for fabrics, tattoo parlors, fusion cooking, (the Michelin guide presently lists 33 restaurants and I had the best pizza I’ve ever had at Pizzeria Bedia last night in Fishtown, not even on the list), night clubs covering every musical genre, including a celebrated hip hop scene and social dance clubs open every night, history and cultural offerings, nature spaces, truly, something for everyone. I can’t give a shout out to all of the wonders here because I don’t know them. I only learned about the hip hop scene when I saw Jill Scott perform on the 4th and I only learned about the social dance scene because I’m taking dance classes at Walker Ballroom Dance studio, which incidentally has the best instructors I’ve ever come across and a beautiful studio on Spring Garden and 19th Street. I didn’t know until I heard the Red Tailed Rounders at Porchfest that there is a thriving bluegrass scene. The lesson in this is to ask around if there is a scene you’d like to join.

Over one and a half million people live here. About 39% are black, 33% white or non-Hispanic, 16% Hispanic or Latino, 8% are Asian and the remainder are multiracial or other races. While in the past it was more of a tradesman town and retains much of that character in the down-to-earth practical communications between people, it is considered a largely “eds and meds” town, with twenty major hospitals and health systems, many world-renowned and around thirty institutions of higher education, including some very well-respected universities. The median income is around $62,000. Fifty-two percent of the 700,000 housing units citywide are owner-occupied. A whopping twenty-one percent of residents live below poverty level. And as awful as this is, it’s better than it’s been in decades. Unemployment is between four and five percent, around the national average rate. About seventeen percent of Philadelphians use public transportation as their primary commute method, one of the highest percentages in the US. Child care typically costs from $1,200 - $1,700 per month for full-time infant care, or roughly $55 - $80 per day depending on the provider and neighborhood. That’s what AI says anyway, but I’ve heard anecdotal figures much higher.

The Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers flow through the city, the Delaware being the gateway to a bay emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. In 1776, Philadelphia was the largest port and commercial center in British North America, with a population of 40,000. After London, it was the largest English-speaking city in the world. Even then, it was remarkably diverse with large communities of English, Germans, Scots-Irish, Welsh, Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, Jews, free Black residents, and enslaved Africans. Despite the legal risks, Philadelphia, which, battling federal laws and courts had tried in fits and starts to abolish slavery and to keep those capturing them out, was a vital operational hub for the Underground Railroad helping escaping slaves on their way to Canada before slavery was finally abolished in 1865 after the Civil War.

An aside. In the accusatory looks we feel we receive and the self-loathing of many US Caucasians for what our countrymen did and in some cases, our ancestors, it sometimes feel that this evil was unique to us. The reality is that slavery has existed in nearly every part of the world and across thousands of years. It was practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, the Islamic world, Africa, Europe and the Americas. People became enslaved through war, piracy, debt, punishment for crimes, kidnapping and birth into enslaved families. Ours was a particularly brutal form in that it was chattel slavery and deeply integrated into a large commercial economy. Slavery is still practiced in insidious forms like forced labor, including forced child labor, forced marriage, debt bondage and human trafficking. But no country today recognizes slavery as legal. The abolition took place over 250 years beginning in 1772 in England and the last country to formally abolish slavery was Mauritania in 1981. Although a number of current prominent word leaders are a sorry indicator of humanity's spiritual evolution, the history of slavery shows a more promising trajectory.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the more active political figures at the time and one who has maintained a position of respect for his many contributions to our society. In fact, I went to a Benjamin Franklin look-alike contest the other evening. Silly stuff, but it does hint that we are not simply a nation of stupid thugs as one might reasonably infer from the global news coverage. I mean, check out the young women with their kites, which Ben utilized to draw electricity from lightning. He's respected  as one of the few founders who didn’t own slaves. He had a decent sense of hypocrisy in this area, realizing that one is not equal if in bondage, though his views toward a woman's place in society were not necessarily deeply admirable.

And so, the city has grown and retained a good deal of its foundation based on brotherly love. Not to say that it hasn’t gone through some rough patches of high rates of homicide, but the crimes now primarily involve thefts, especially of the contents of autos, which are a nuisance for sure. Don’t leave anything in your car if you’re not ready to have your window smashed in. These crimes are offshoots of poverty, so the resolution will probably come through considering the bigger picture. 

Today, the city is even more diverse. Over the years ethnic neighborhoods have defined the tone of fun to be had in accordance with their cultural customs. A patchwork indeed. Here’s a snippet of what’s gone down.

• The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) founded the city in 1682. Their emphasis on religious tolerance, education, and civic responsibility still shapes many of Philadelphia's institutions.

• The English and Welsh were among the earliest settlers, followed by significant German communities who established churches, farms, and skilled trades.

• The Irish became one of the largest immigrant groups during the mid-1800s, especially after the Great Famine. They profoundly influenced city politics, policing, construction, labor unions, and the Catholic Church. They host a huge St. Patrick’s Day parade here, trad music sessions in the pubs, step dancing schools, pipe bands and county societies that preserve links to ancestors’ home counties in Ireland. I’ve become rather fond of The Black Taxi, a local pub with a happy vibe. 

• The Italian community has flourished since the late nineteenth century. Their influence remains visible in South Philadelphia neighborhoods, with outdoor bocce leagues, pre-wedding Romeo-type serenatas, and festivals like the Italian Market Festival with its greased-pole climbing competition, unique food traditions like the Feast of Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, and family-owned businesses. Like many Philadelphians, families head “down the shore” over the hot summer.

• The Jewish population built thriving neighborhoods, especially in North and West Philadelphia before many later moved to the suburbs. Their contributions to medicine, law, education, commerce, and the arts have been immense.

• The African American community has been central since colonial times. Philadelphia had one of the nation's largest free Black populations before the Civil War, and the Great Migration of the twentieth century transformed the city's music (adding gospel and jazz). politics, churches, literature, and civil rights leadership. Perhaps the city's most distinctive African-derived tradition is the ODUNDE Festival celebrating the Yoruba culture with music, dance, crafts and food. It’s one of the largest African cultural festivals in North America. Community pride is beautifully illustrated in these two murals situated next to each other on North 29th Street  and Montgomery Avenue. 

                                

The first mural celebrates contributions of African Americans to world history and culture. The surrounding panels on this second mural were painted by local students. Instead of only depicting heroes from history, this mural incorporates the faces and voices of local young people. They become part of the same quilt as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, and the others. History is something we continue to stitch together.

• The Puerto Rican community, which grew rapidly after World War II, today forms one of the city’s largest Latino populations. North Philadelphia is a hub of Puerto Rican culture, hosting the Puerto Rican Day parade and holding neighborhood festivals where people dance to salsa, bomba and plena music for dancing, while the mouth-watering smells of traditional dishes fill the air.

• More recent Mexican, Dominican, Guatemalan, and other Latin American communities continue to reshape neighborhoods and local businesses.

• The Chinese community established one of the oldest Chinatowns in the eastern United States. It has expanded to include people from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. The community can be counted upon to host the beloved Autumn Festival and a colorful lunar new year celebration that includes the lion dance.

• Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees arrived after the Vietnam War and contribute to a vibrant Southeast Asian presence.

• The Korean community has established churches, businesses, and commercial corridors, particularly in Olney and nearby suburbs.

• Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese communities have grown substantially over the past few decades, bringing temples, mosques, restaurants, grocery stores, Diwali  and Holi celebrations and professional networks.

• Middle Eastern communities—including Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, and others—have established churches, mosques, and businesses across the region.

• Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, and other Eastern European communities built distinctive churches, social clubs, and cultural organizations. They regularly hold church and folk festivals.

• Smaller but longstanding Greek, Armenian, and Portuguese communities also contribute to the city's religious and culinary landscape. Nearly every Greek Orthodox parish hosts an annual festival featuring traditional dancing, homemade pastries, church tours and live music.

Many of these communities historically occupied identifiable neighborhoods. As immigration patterns shifted, those neighborhoods often evolved rather than disappearing entirely. Today you can still recognize many of these cultural centers:

• South Philadelphia — Italian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Cambodian.

• Chinatown (Center City) — Chinese and broader East Asian communities.

• North Philadelphia — Puerto Rican and Dominican communities.

• West Philadelphia — historically African American, with growing African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian populations.

• Northeast Philadelphia — one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the city, home to Russian, Ukrainian, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Korean, and many others.

Complementing the local ethnic festivals, the City of Philadelphia hosts the famous and infamous Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day. While unique, it is a synthesis of influences from English masquerade customs, Irish music, Italian neighborhood clubs, African American performance traditions, German brass-band culture, and presents over a century of local creativity.

                                                                   Recent St. Patrick's Day parade participant.

Back to 1776.

Philadelphia began as a city of skilled artisans, merchants, mariners and professionals.   Tradesman. The talent represented was pretty impressive. The building trade supported carpenters, joiners, cabinetmakers, brickmakers, masons, stonecutters, plasterers, painters, glaziers, roofers, and plumbers. Too, there were metalworkers: blacksmiths, silversmiths, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, pewterers, gunsmiths, tool makers and nail makers. There were clock and watch makers. Shoemaking was big, and the market supported tailors, weavers and dyers, milliners and hatters, bootmakers, leatherworkers, saddler and harness makers. Since few raised their own food, the food trade flourished. Present day Lancaster Avenue was the first road in the US which would be absorbed by US Route 30, the Lincoln Highway came straight into town from the farms around  Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and down to the port. Culinary trades included butchers and bakers, cheesemakers and brewers and distillers, and confectioners. Beer and cider were everyday beverages because the quality of the water was unreliable and despite the establishment of a public water department at the turn of the nineteenth century, the water quality of the two rivers here, the Delaware and the Schuylkill  would become even worse once manufacturing took hold. Back to 1776, there were tradesmen devoted to transportation, including wagon makers and teamsters, to shipmaking and the maritime trade, as well as to luxury goods like watches and clocks. There were candlemakers and wig makers and organ builders. Too, professional occupations thrived. The city supported physicians, lawyers, surveyors, apothecaries, clergymen, and auctioneers, and as the economy grew and more money was printed, bankers. And of course printers.

When William Penn founded Philadelphia in 1682, there were no factories. Nearly everything was handmade in small shops. With the advent of steam engines in the 1860s, the character of the city changed. Philadelphia had the Delaware River for shipping, nearby coal supplies, iron ore, banks willing to finance business, an educated workforce, briefly canals and later, railroads. Factories began replacing the small shops and Philadelphia soon became one of America’s great industrial cities with textile mills, iron foundries, machine shops, shipbuilding and later locomotive works. The skyline filled with smokestacks and thousands of immigrants arrived to work in the factories. Walt Whitman, the founder of American Poetry, is known best for his masterpiece Song of Myself, written at this time. His writings celebrated the individual, democracy, nature, and the rich diversity of life contributing to a shared psyche, the shared humanity of all people.  In his later years he would regularly take the Camden Ferry, sometimes more than once in a day, across the Delaware to Philadelphia, an elder’s reverie to human connectedness.       

From 1920-1950, nearly 45% of Philadelphia’s workforce was engaged in manufacturing. During WWII the city became an enormous arsenal and the Naval Shipyard employed tens of thousand building and repairing warships.

Manufacturing declined after WWII for a number of reasons. One was that owners found they could subvert mandatory union wages by moving their operations to southern states where workers would accept lower wages. Likewise, many products could be made more cheaply in Asia and Latin America. Automation in factories also resulted in the loss of jobs. Manufacturing had largely disappeared by the 1990s, though Philadelphia still produces pharmaceuticals, medical devices, specialty foods, chemicals, aerospace components, precision instruments and advanced materials.

As traditional neighborhood identities weakened with the decline of heavy industry, particularly those where an entire neighborhood was suddenly unemployed due to a factory closure, sports teams became one of the strongest shared identities across the entire metropolitan area. The "Big Four”: the Philadelphia Eagles, Philadelphia Phillies, Philadelphia 76ers, and Philadelphia Flyers, dominate conversation. It is estimated that around 70% of the city are sports fans. This sports fandom cuts across age, class, politics, and neighborhood lines. And even when the Phillies, Flyers, or Sixers are successful, the Eagles tend to occupy the largest share of attention. The team routinely ranks among the NFL's most engaged and loyal fan bases. 

Philadelphia has around 100 cultural institutions including museums, historic houses, and museum-like institutions, a fair number of opulent theater venues like the Miller Theater, as well as profoundly beautiful churches like the Saints Peter and Paul Basilica, and is home to a symphony orchestra widely regarded as one of the best in the world. In fact, the phrase “The Philadelphia Sound” became legendary among orchestras for its rich, luxurious string tone. In the 1940s and 1950s, Philly had one of the richest jazz scenes in America. John Coltrane (mural below) moved here with his mother in the 1940s when he was a teenager. He immersed himself in it almost immediately. He studied at the Granoff School of Music and the Ornstein School, worked odd jobs, and spent countless hours listening, practicing, and jamming in basement sessions in neighborhood row houses with local musicians, an astonishing number of them jazz giants. He was known for blowing his horn day and night. Listen. They say you can still hear his music in the ethers, the ambience that is Philly.

If you've walked along Broad Street, you've probably passed the magnificent Academy of Music. Opened in 1857, The Academy of Music along Broad Street is the oldest grand opera house in the United States still used for its original purpose. Before New York's Met became dominant, some of the world's greatest singers appeared here. The building was constructed specifically with opera in mind, and even today it remains the principal home of opera in Philadelphia. Opera Philadelphia is recognized today as one of the more innovative opera companies, commissioning and premiering new works rather than relying solely on familiar classics. The theater scene too is innovative. But Philly is a short train ride to New York City and Broadway, so there's that.

Many of the homes, thousands in fact street after street, block after block are brick row houses, their architectural influences representing the period in which they were built. There’s been a widespread movement toward renovation and gentrification and generally in taking pride in one’s neighborhood, but I’m not going to represent that they are all in stellar condition. There are blocks and blocks of rundown tenements with garbage everywhere you look, on the porches in the front yards, on the streets. There are neighborhoods you just don’t want to be in after dark and a few, like the infamous Kensington district,  you don’t want to be in during the day either. Philadelphia is a city of varying complexions. One block with freshly painted architectural details to rival San Francisco’s Victorian painted ladies and the next with broken sidewalks and broken glass. Throughout all of it, there's an awesome window-box culture and it is absolutely lovely to walk the city streets in Spring and Summer.

Philly has festivals that don’t necessarily run along ethnic lines, but are more neighborhood-focused. It’s not uncommon to see streets blocked off with a few nabbed orange cones and people dancing and eating. One such festival is Porchfest in West Philly which spreads across an entire district. Where are the police? None in sight.

In some places in the US you can feel the cops are trigger-happy. And you can understand their defensiveness in certain situations. But in others? I got pulled over in a small town in Pennsylvania once by a young trigger-happy cop. I was driving a station wagon and had three small kids buckled in their seats. Somewhere between the time I’d last been pulled over and that day, unknown to me, the rules had changed and you were no longer supposed to get out of the car. When I did, the officer pulled a gun on me, shouting fiercely “Get back in the car!” Let me clarify that I am not physically intimidating. I am under five feet tall, hover around 100 pounds and was wearing a sun dress. And he had pulled me over for a burned out tail light. When I questioned his knee jerk reaction, he said, "You could have been carrying a gun!" A little common sense was in order here. I am always wary of people carrying guns. 

It’s not that there have not been problems in Philadelphia and awareness of the possibility of an incendiary encounter is important to teach your children. But more frequent here are people grumbling that the cops don’t do much. I think they just focus on the serious issues. I have on numerous occasions seen them overlook those smoking pot on the streets. Good thing as enforcement would be a full time job here and to what avail? It’s probably a good thing people with time on their hands are just chilling. Taking it all down a notch. I’ve often thought that rather than dropping bombs in the Middle East we should just drop kilos and kilos of marijuana, enough so that nobody could make a black market out of selling it. Let people just chill out a minute and think about what they really want out of their brief lives. Fanaticism or love? Have you ever seen the video of the US Army experiment where a regiment was dosed with LSD or psilocybin, something hallucinogenic, and the General ends up sitting in the tree whistling to the birds? That’s a world I’d prefer living in.

And frankly, I feel better with the cops clustered around chatting here and there, especially downtown where there are a lot of homeless. The mentally ill do not have a predictable moral code to reign in their behavior. An inordinate number of people here shout arguments and other neuroses into the air here. Really loudly. It’s like a mini New York City in that regard. City folk know not to feed into and they ignore them. A lot of pedestrians wear headphones and don’t seem to hear them at all. Yes, Benjamin Franklin might have viewed this as overtly antisocial behavior, but there are other ways to view it and hey, in accordance with the Declaration of Independence living in your own happy place is your right. It's so prevalent now that it just is what it is. What surprises me about this ubiquitous behavior is that more people aren’t jamming out to their music. Mine often puts a bounce in my step. 

What I have been most struck by here is how many people are trying. How many neighborhoods self-police, sweeping their sidewalks and picking up the trash. How many building permits are posted signaling ongoing renovations. Logistically it’s a difficult city to accomplish routine street sweeping if it did have the budget due to the narrow streets and crowded parking situations. It's a city with a pretty tight budget, so cleaning the debris from the rivers does not happen as frequently as one might wish.

While there is a definite Walt Whitman/Bruce Springsteen Jersey vibe, Camden is just across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Philadelphia is more than working class. It's a city of fusion culinary delights and often amusing incongruities. I walk the streets all day long. In neighborhood after neighborhood I hear the hilarious brusqueness of those I mentally log as “big mamas." These are the black women with the brassy demeanor and loud tough talk, sprinkled with as many profanities as substantive words.  “Shut up bitch, dat ain’t gonna happen. Girrrrl, ain’t nobody gettin’ past me wif dat shit.” That sort of language.

I'm going somewhere with this. The largest religion in Philly is Christianity, ticking in at about 60% of the population, with over half of those being Roman Catholics. Another thirty percent of the population are unaffiliated. The smaller religions are Jewish, Hinduism, Buddhism and Muslim. I found it odd that Philadelphia has such a visible African American Muslim community. What was the draw? What's the appeal in the strict dress code of dark gowns and covered hair, of fading into the background? What exactly drew these brassy and brazen girls to embrace the word of Muhammad? Well... the Nation of Islam in the US was formed by one Elijah Muhammad, born in Georgia in 1897 as Elijah Robert Poole. Under his leadership (1933-1975) the group promoted black empowerment, contending that white people were a race of "devils” created by an evil black scientist named Yakub. This began to attract followers in northern cities as it gave a disenfranchised group an alternative to a society that often excluded them, as well as a sense of dignity and identity. In fact, Philadelphia became one of the movement’s strongest centers. Malcolm X frequently spoke here and the number of local mosques grew rapidly. One local estimate reports there are presently 82 mosques here. Malcolm X advocated self-respect and discipline, education and family stability and refraining from drugs and alcohol. Initially, his discourse differed markedly from the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. who was all about effectuating change through nonviolent means. In his earlier years, Malcolm X was best known for his proclamation that black people should secure their rights “by any means necessary.” In 1964 he became disillusioned with the leadership of the Nation of Islam and left it. In 1975, Elijah Muhammed, the founder, died and was replaced by his son who carried a toned-down message, moving the religion into the more mainstream Sunni Islam, with thousands of African American Muslims in Philadelphia making the transition. Malcolm X toned down his violent rhetoric as well in his later years. He made the Haj pilgrimage and saw a lot of different ethnicities, including Caucasians who felt the same way he did about the sacredness of the Islamic religion and conceded that perhaps all whites were not Yakub's devil-spawn. The black Muslim community still retains Malcolm X’s views on racial equality, education, self-determination and building community. At the same time, immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Palestine, Egypt, West Africa and the Horn of Africa were settling in the city and suburbs, adding new mosques, their spin on the Islamic religion and their own traditions. 

Destroying the system need not involve violence.  The first step is clearly identifying what we don't want. I rode the trolley this morning from Richmond and Cumberland Streets up Girard Avenue to 24th and College. Two others were waiting at the bus stop. Prompted by a sidewalk hazard between us and the ensuing discussion of Philly's limited budget, they complained about the mayor allegedly absconding with $14 million, money that was designated for low-income housing there. I'd heard this complaint of her corruption several times already. The man told me that he was 76 and kicked a 50 year heroin addiction. He nodded to the neighborhood behind us, saying, "There is a new drug on the streets killing them." "What's it called?"  I asked.  She answered, "We don't know." And he clarified, "It's so so new it doesn't have a name." The bus was packed with people going all over the place, the Phillies game, the World Cup game, (someone shouted that the bus wasn't going to stop at the casino, but nobody hopped off), just all sorts of places and it was alive with conversations. A good twenty percent were physically handicapped in some respect and required careful maneuvering to get on and off the seats. Everybody looked like they lived below poverty level. And yet, there was not bitterness, but kindness. People were on the same page when it came to social injustice.