by Christopher R. Rogers

An ongoing revision. This piece was originally revised from a 2022 AERA Conference presentation that sought to explore “new paradigms” in the context of post-pandemic K-12 civic education. First conceived as a B-side to my dissertation study “Storying a Black Village Poetics of Landscape & Literacies in West Philadelphia”, it was important for me to honor the many folks which I’d spent immersed in study and in community throughout the unfinished pandemic. With that in mind, I hope to maintain that feeling of writing with a place and folks of where I am still often found on a good day. There’s a variety of citation practices that vary between the formal and vernacular. It represents an ongoing conversation amidst a primary audience of Black Philadelphians about the everyday spaces we can make into a provisional form of home with the hope that we can be together soon. I reserve the right to keep on revising it.

Photographer Koren Martin created, not captured, this image of West Philly youth getting some fresh air with their teachers in Malcolm X Park during October 2020, the same month that this park exploded with protest and righteous rage after the Philadelphia Police Department murder of Walter Wallace Jr. For Koren, created reinforces her anti-colonial stance against all forms of “capture”, or that anyone can overdetermine an extractive single story upon an image and what it may (re)present in its fullness. These moments stand open, run fugitive. This image, and Koren’s overall photographic practice, must be understood as a collaborative affair, a something-to-be-produced-in-relationship-with, created to be shared, created to invite further storying that is irreducible to a transactional accounting of its author and its participants. Miss Gwendolyn Brooks demands that we are suppose to go on with our extensions, our own uniquely personal understandings. It’s crafted to explore a moment in dialogue with its primary communities that invites multiplicity in its readings, that anticipates a “what is to come”, a “what ought to be…”, a way of seeing what’s already in front of us imaginatively toward embodying alternative futures. As much as it’s up front about what we always already see, it’s also a subversive statement of how we see, what our imaginations notice, and what’s made possible for us within that witnessing. It’s intention is not to be extractive, it’s additive. It’s embedded — better yet rooted. It’s answerable. Its collaborative creation speaks of only one way of showcasing a reality…only one inexhaustive means of inviting those from within our community to “take a look around.” Undoubtedly, her image-making praxis signifies an interior North Star for what all good Black storying does and is.

Its register resides in the quotidian experience of Black social life, what Campt (2016, 2021) described as a “practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life.” This same quotidian register was explored by the academic research of Esther Ohito (2020) who helped coin the term “fugitive literacies” to honor the gifts of the Black youth they served: the means by which Black folks engage creative uses of reading and composing as strategic tools for the curricular and pedagogic refusal of the hegemony of whiteness and anti-Blackness. To imagine new paradigms for civic education (And we must ask “new to who…”), I hope to share a quick story of what I witness from within this image, of what invites and resonates with me towards a hopeful vision of how we may claim possibility for thriving Black urban futures even in, or justly because of, these incredulous times we find ourselves in.

What’s being storied here between these Black women educators and the curious collective of Black youth they are gathering for study in Malcolm X Park?

Where I wanna begin: It has to be the story of how Malcolm X Park became Malcolm X Park. It’s a story that needs to be told more. You see, Malcolm X Park wasn’t what the City of Philadelphia declared this enclave between Pine and Larchwood, 52nd & 51st, in West Philadelphia. City maps pronounce Black Oak Park, but the surviving presence of oldheads who walked these streets in the early 90’s remind us of its reclamation as a grassroots project of communal Black self-determination, extending a relationship from within a very much so still alive Black Radical Tradition as it exists in the 215. Malcolm X Park was reclaimed and revitalized by the Black-led organizing of the Malcolm X Park Memorial Park Committee to reshape the imprint of Black social life in West Philly. There’s a documentary on this. You gotta run Scribe some bread tho.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore might teach us that the renaming and re-dedication spoke against the confluence of purposeful abandonment organized by elites, where the Reaganomic dismantling of Cold-War-era welfare state capacities gave way to a respondent rise in Philadelphia’s illicit survival economies. In my voice, we talking that the Man’s policing-the-planet intensification of trap economics during the Cocaine 80s caused us more undue scratchin’ and surviving. All the while, the afterlife of Rizzo’s “law and order” PPD, even with a Goode-as-new Black overseer, sought to violently enclose our community’s most vulnerable alleging that it was their survival practices and their consistent practicing of this surviving that set the crisis into existence. This was the prime season for the blossoming of broken-windows policing, where even Black folks with knowledge of self were not fully excused from internalizing the antagonism against those of us whose refusal of scripted, quiet demise was cast as world-ending disorder.

In following the work of J.T. Roane, we must contend with the contradictions lurking within the Black self-determination politics of the Malcolm X Park Memorial Committee which just might have foreclosed another already existing worldmaking project underway, one whose careless repercussions still haunts Black Philadelphia politics to this day.

Their op-ed description from the 93′ Westside Weekly of Black Oak Park as the “cesspool, drug den, and hangout for the homeless” should make us question the class character makeup of whose exactly determining whose Black space is deserving of our resources and care. You can surface a potential thread informing the motivation for Black Oak Park’s transformation as furthering a Black respectability politic that still exists in the pretexts of who can hold rank within a “people united”, what might be translated as today’s Parker prison of “One Philly.” Cathy Cohen terms the offense as secondary marginalization — the denial of community recognition and resources to those labeled deviant in Black communities by its own organizations, institutions, and leaders. Through Roane’s critical approach of Black queer urbanism, we may dare to draw more attention to the silences (and everpresent silencing) of the doubly dispossessed and marginal, queering the Black Oak / Malcolm X Park archive to invent what otherwise infrastructures of connection, vitality and Black aliveness that might (re)establish the liberatory horizon of the unconditional value of all life. We’ve known the rivers of this place before. We must protect and defend ALL life, said John Africa.

Yet, our unfinished beautiful experiments to live up to a truer material sense of us all returns this story to the present conditions. As we navigate 2024 under the newly elected stop-and-frisk hands of Philadelphia’s first Black woman mayor, our inability of deeply reckoning with these enclosing interior forces underwriting our unevenly-shared disposability haunts us. And by proxy, our contemporary municipal movements for ever being able to realize a just city. I’m not here to report the news. I’m simply sticking with the truths and implications of this still very much so unfolding story. As recently covered by Sterling Johnson:

Mayor Cherelle Parker’s 100-day report reveals plans to arrest houseless people for drugs, sex work, and other “criminal acts.” The operation started in April and will be carried out in five phases: the first phase starting with a warning, the second and third phases planning for a heavy police presence to “secure” the neighborhood, and the fourth phase seeing police return the neighborhood to the “rightful owners of the community and its residents.”

Yes, the Malcolm X Park Memorial Committee may have never intended to invite police power to create a safe, clean, green Malcolm X Park, yet there remains the synonymous slippery slope logics of whose lives are centered and whose lives are placed at the edge of survival. I’m sure my elders are just as “F*** Frank Rizzo” as the rest of us. I’m sure my elders still remember the horrifying smell of the West Philadelphia air on May 13, 1985. I’m sure we shouldn’t hold anybody down to the measure of what they did out of a sense of desperation and all the other things I may have just learned last year. Despite that our struggles in practice may never live up to the visionary politics which guide our actions, critical reflection must remind us of the serious challenge to realize and remove the police in our heads and hearts, too, to rehearse for a world where we all shall live with care and dignity in the by and by.

M.E. O’Brien’s junkie communism may offer us an expansive vision to remix and groove from that eschews past and present disposability: an organizing praxis that engages the painful, traumatized, and self-destructive parts of people with care, taking seriously the possibility of transformation and healing, without a narrow, preset judgment about where people have to be now, or where they are headed. Informed by Black Panther Party and Young Lords organizing, a junkie communist approach understands that “class society will require a practice of healing, a reclamation of the universal dignity of human life, and a means of building solidarity and love across these fractures within the working class.”

Some days, we may feel this undercommoning impulse with the organizing of the Really Free Market, and on the low, West Philly nights under the still broken street lights may surface the sort of illegible socialities and disavowals which have persisted through, under, and against the park’s “coherent”-framed rebrand.

If it’s truly the afterschool special of Malcolm X Park as an exceeding tribute to our shining black prince — the archive notes that yes our people can sadly often grasp toward royalty as metaphor of a life well lived, leaving uninterrogated the underlying assumptions of Empire. I should also offer that I might be confused, projecting our collective hang-ups out in the public square from ones I haven’t resolved inside the first interior work of my own curious Black manhood. I could just be playing with words.

Once victorious with the city, the leaders of the Malcolm X Park Organizing Committee eventually lost the battle for control to the upstart The Friends of Malcolm X Park Association (Shout out to Mr. Greg!). “We didn’t give way, we were moved out of the way.” For decades into this present moment, the Friends of the X have continued to serve this Philadelphia public park along with support of the 52nd St. Business Association (Hey Ms. Shirley!). It remains to this day a site of Black working-class community leisure (or if you care to to coffeeshop intellectualize it as “Black study”) where card and chess games, boomboxes and brown bags, pamphlets and protest signs, strollers and stragglers, bikes and blunt rolls abound. It is also now the site of a renewed Juneteenth celebration, or as BLM Philly calls it #Jawnteenth, where pedagogies of Black joy, Black pride, Black presence are uplifted, where strategies of self-and-collective determination are championed and debated between the folk playing on stage and our play cousins on the park benches.

This is a Malcolm X Park that represents the burgeoning, teeming freedom dreams of Black Philadelphia. There’s rupture to racial capitalism’s onslaught found here, a constant contestation signaled in the everyday practices taking place, quite literally at times. We gon’ speak. We might be asking you to move. It might not be nice if you not from round here; it will always be sincere.

We must not lose sight that we are always already talking about fully alive Black people. We must honor our infinite capacity for contradiction and transformation. Yes, its apparent some of us do fail, for valid reasons, at stepping up to the plate of our best selves like the rest of y’all, down too tired again to swing for beyond the fences. Our personhood remains complex and our struggles with one another don’t diminish but enrich us. We gotta learn to cherish our differences and celebrate the fact that everybody plays the fool sometimes.

With that in mind, let us soul train back to the scene of Black teachers and Black youth in the X:

As they take a look around, what stories are the youth noticing embodied in the cultural and intellectual activities of Malcolm X Park that exists beyond what is being articulated and prescribed for them? Whose presence, claims of belonging are being articulated, welcomed, reciprocated?

As the increasing forces of gentrification and displacement continue to impact West Philadelphia, sponsored by corporate institutions such as my own chosen alma mater Penn, there’s the constant refrain of “they”, a collective force of Black subjection, will be coming for their park back. As in Look y’all, here they come. They, whose intent remains on scraping away the legacies of Black presence within this area, continuing the settler colonial cycle a la the erasure of the Lenni-Lenape peoples and their stewardship of this land for centuries. It’s the underside of the violent history marked by the human trafficker William Penn who arrived here by colonial decree to assume this place “Penn-sylvania.” No cap. The common wind rumors floating up and down 52nd St. have claimed that these new neighbors (best defined by their property relation as “new Philadelphia”) want to rename Malcolm X Park to “Columbus Park.” Or maybe it was Hamilton Park. Whatever colonizer today fits their fantasy.

But back to the main thing, us. I read that maybe what is happening here amongst these educators and this group of young scholars is a reminder. A reminder for these Black youth standing on their feet in this park, in all of its triumphs and faults and unfinished reckonings, this park stands as a symbol of their inheritance of Black struggle to survive in West Philadelphia. That this place is something that is kept, not by anything resembling the coldness of the “state” but more so the more intimate collection of diverse, familiar, co-conspirating individuals who found it home, who actively make it home. Even as the philly soul subtext may beg “whose home you really mean tho bruh?”

The multidimensionality of Black presence challenges us to attune ourselves to that, existing on those lower, minor frequencies. It was Luther’s late stage Negro spiritual that reminded me, a song you just might here blasting from the boombox under the central canopy of Malcolm X Park:

A house is not a home when there’s no one there to hold you tight. We’re not meant to live alone, turn this house into a home.

We must turn this park into a plot. A gathering plot. Still and all, it’s not that this inheritance of our beautiful Black struggle to make real room for living can ever ensure permanence, but rather that the sacred transfer of our illegitimate knowledge welcomes a new generation to embrace and renew this active tradition of making tradition, of recognizing that we lay claim to a sovereignty of the imagination forged through the institutions we create, we sustain, we make anew. Walled in on all sides, we remember that our ancestors showed us how to build up. This is our power, our praxis which exceeds and undoes the boundaries of Western knowledge to enclose it, to lay it bare, to make it still. We invent ways to MOVE and echo our ancestors that it ain’t no stopping us now.

So just maybe the story of what’s happening in this image, in this park, in this city, is that these Black women educators are realizing that we can’t love on our babies under the duress of the carceral bells and border walls of the school building occupying this terrain of further failed promises, especially in the tumult of this unending pandemic. We have to bring you otherwise outside, for just a moment, avail you of the Black outdoors. It is something precious and liberating that stands to be witnessed. It is an abiding presence that must be felt and internalized. And while you are here, you might just get a second to take your mask off, smell the freedom and tinge of cannabis in the close distance and bask in this glorious sociality as your birthright. Not really ever claiming to own the land itself, but definitively the struggle of creating Black space to be all you can be, in your waywardness and your constraints, a striving, rebellious refusal of the dominant terms of urban life set out for us. It’s to remember those precious lives even we, to our error, may have once called for you to forget, because coming into clearsightedness requires we learn they too deserve a home within our midst to be held and be loved. A Philly soulful Malcolm X Park choir rehearsal that nightly belts out “Somebody loves you baby” under the still broken street lights.

Malcolm X Park as an assemblage made manifest by a Black counterpublic praxis, by a community of us who willingly put themselves on the line to care for it as a site of Black leisure, agency, and against-the-grain deviance. Even if what we do is wrong, our actions will still mark Black presencing, Black personhood, Black aliveness in a city too comfortable, too oriented toward, too dependent upon our disposability. It’s a cold winter and they still snatching our dishes out the kitchen.

We are, because its our duty to be doing so, storying with our descendant generation(s) that Malcolm X Park should be properly framed as a contested site of Black fugitivity anchored to a justice-oriented pursuit of a world that has yet to fully come into being — a Black world of ultimate justice that is never promised and perpetually threatened yet nonetheless remains available for us to claim and consistently practice otherwise from a system that requires our deprivation and death.

Notes on Contributor

Christopher R. Rogers, Ph.D., is a Philadelphia-based cultural organizer and educator hailing from Chester, PA with more than a decade of local experience in supporting radical arts, culture, and community-building. He’s currently a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized National Historic Landmark rowhome that Dr. Carter G. Woodson once dubbed the “center of Black intellectual life in Philadelphia.” He has previously served in key roles with National Black Lives Matter at School, Cops Off Campus Coalition, Philadelphia Student Union, Paul Robeson House & Museum, and more.