For a man whose influence is quietly, if widely, felt in this city, Sokoni Karanja cuts a dramatic figure. His graying hair bulges out beneath his kufi, a small African-style hat, and his colorful dashikis, stand out in both the dark-panelled Loop boardrooms and South Side streetcorners that he frequents.
But it is what he says-and does-in a thoughtful, determined and discreetly diplomatic fashion about rebuilding the devastated historical heart of Chicago’s African-American community that wins him most attention. Two years ago it also won him $364,000 over five years as a recipient of what has come to be known as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.”
Karanja, 54, who lives in a rehabbed home in the Gap neighborhood, works nearby as director of the Centers for New Horizons, a “human and community development network” built around 14 day care and family assistance centers that give a focus to often disjointed social programs. “We put the family at the center of everything we do,” Karanja explained. “We help people achieve self-reliance by melding social programs together.”
That effort over nearly a quarter-century laid the groundwork for the key role he played during three years of grass-roots community planning meetings starting in 1990 that resulted in the vision of restoring “Bronzeville.” This fabled Black Metropolis, as it was called in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s study of black life in Chicago, was centered around 35th and State Streets in the 1920s and 1930s, a neighborhood now known as Grand Boulevard.
Today much of it is a wasteland: Demolition has leveled vast swaths of once-solid housing, the population has plummeted to less than one-third its 1950 level, few businesses remain, and 56 percent of the population has incomes below the poverty level. It is now most famous for the grim, crime-ridden row of Chicago Housing Authority high rises, such as Stateway Gardens, that stretch down the western boundary of the neighborhood (roughly from 22nd to 47th Streets and from the Dan Ryan to Cottage Grove Avenue). Decisions by local authorities in the 1950s and ’60s–especially concentrating poor blacks in that housing to avoid residential integration and then neglecting their care–devastated the area.
Yet more than a half century ago it was a thriving black community, home to emerging leaders in business (such as Anthony Overton, cosmetics manufacturer and publisher of the Chicago Bee newspaper), politics (U.S Rep. Ralph Metcalfe), sports (Jesse Owens) and entertainment (Scott Joplin).
The revival plan includes restoration of historic buildings (the Bee building is being converted into a Chicago Public Library branch), construction of new and rehabbed single-family housing, partial demolition and reform of public housing high rise buildings, and encouragement of local business, such as tourism oriented to black history and music and an “Africa in Chicago” ethnic marketplace. The plan aims to attract middle-class residents (and not only blacks) as well as to train existing neighborhood residents and link them to jobs in the nearby Loop and McCormick place or in more distant suburbs.
Yet in line with Karanja’s belief that redevelopment will only work if there is a comprehensive attack on community problems, there are also plans for parks and recreation, school reforms (such as small “charter” public schools), special training for young men, and creation of a “critical mass” of local residents who refuse to tolerate the crime that now overwhelms them.
It seems an impossible dream, given the current crime, poverty and physical decay, but the neighborhood’s proximity to the Loop gives it a natural advantage. And much work is already underway: initiatives that Karanja helped to launch have reduced crime and improved life in the low-rise Ida B. Wells housing project, rehabbed about 70 houses (with plans for 132 more new and rehab units), and greatly improved school performance of a pilot group of kids promised a college education if they graduate from high school and on the first of every month there’s a “vigil against violence,” with the reading of the names of homicide victims.
With federal approval of the city’s Empowerment Zone application, which includes the Black Metropolis area, Karanja’s vision will get a boost with new federal funds, incentives for employers to hire residents, and local flexibility in using public dollars. Depending on what happens to the crime bill that passed Congress last year, but House Republicans have rewritten, there could be needed funds for community policing and crime prevention.
Now Karanja’s principal concern is that the Bronzevile revival “remains `bottoms up’ and doesn’t get turned over to the city,” he said. “We’re in partnership, but we can’t allow the city to take it over. That’s what happened to the poverty program , and it became a political program rather than a program that changed the lives of people. City officials don’t quite know how to share power, and we’re having to teach them that.” The current controversy concerns the makeup of a board that will oversee the empowerment zone. While other empowerment zone cities, like Philadelphia, have encouraged community residents to elect a board, Chicago city authorities are fighting to maintain control.
“You have to help people develop themselves, to take responsibility for renovation of their community,” he said, from his modest office replete with reminders of African history and culture. “If you don’t start there, you’ll fail.”
Rooted in Kansas
Karanja’s contemporary vision for Chicago is a synthesis drawn from his formal education–including a Ph.D. in urban planning and economics from Brandeis University and master’s degrees from three other universities–and a quarter-century working on the gritty front lines of community building. Yet it is rooted in the experiences he had growing up, as Lathan Johnson, in Topeka, Kan.
Karanja’s father was a skilled packinghouse worker, whose union job and thrift permitted him to pay cash for his home. When his father became sick, dying when Karanja was 19, his mother got a job as a nurse. The Johnson family lived in a segregated area called “Tennessee Town,” which Karanja describes fondly as “a community where doctors, lawyers and all occupations lived.” He attended an all-black grade school across the street from his home, which he remembers as a “positive experience.”
In junior high school, Karanja, with three white and two black friends, picketed and eventually integrated a local movie theater, after the owner tried to force the black and white kids to sit in different areas. But in the following years, Karanja had a complicated relationship with the civil rights movement. He was less concerned about living with whites than about being denied opportunities, he said. Yet by the time he was in his 20s, he also concluded that he could only find his place in society as “part of my group,” not simply as an individual.
As a student at Washburn College in Topeka, he played football and developed an interest in psychology, after giving up his earlier dream of becoming a doctor. There he also became an admirer of Malcolm X, who persuaded him “that our obligations were to our people and that we couldn’t run away from that,” he said. “This business of seeking an integrated solution was one that took us away from our strength.”
After a brief sojourn at the University of Denver, Karanja headed to Atlanta University to be closer to the civil rights movement. Yet when he got there he kept his distance from most organizations and protests. At the time he rejected Martin Luther King’s principled non-violence–though he now says it was “the only way to work”–as well as calls for armed struggle, but he identified with the black power movement.
In 1964 he moved to Cincinnati, where he continued his academic inquiry into “how to build communities” and also served as a forceful black power leader in a community organization. In 1967, Karanja managed to persuade some armed protesters not to fight with the police, but then got arrested himself–for loitering–and “sort of was run out of town.”
He took refuge at Brandeis, where in the spring of 1968 he once again was embroiled in protests. He joined with a group of black students who took over the campus computer and switchboard building to demand more black faculty and black student aid. Yet soon after, inspired by the writings of African political leader Julius Nyere, he headed off to Tanzania. It was an experience that changed his life–and his name.
Transforming experience
As he traveled about, helping to build schools, learning Swahili and gathering material for his dissertation, he spent several weeks in a small village where an old woman, referring to him as a “long-lost brother,” called him Sokoni Karanja, which he says means “person from across the sea with knowledge.”
The Africa visit “was a transforming experience,” he recalled. “I began to look at myself in different ways. One of the things that impressed me about Nyere was his commitment to both community and living the salutary life, the same as with Malcolm. If you’re going to build something in the African-American community, you’ve got to build something different in your personal life. I had a lot to straighten out. I may have come from Kansas, but I was a long way from that.”
With some reluctance, Karanja returned to the United States in 1971 and a fellowship at the Adlai Stevenson Institute on the University of Chicago campus. There he met his second wife, Ayana, an anthropologist who now directs Loyola’s African-American studies program. He also encountered Frank Sever (they had met in Cincinnati), who working for Chicago Commons, the venerable charity and social work organization.
At the time Sever was negotiating with the state and city over operation of proposed day care centers near CHA property. He asked Karanja if he would be interested in setting up the centers as a way of “getting some institutions built” in the community. Karanja agreed, and after three years supervision, Centers for New Horizons was on its own, with a program that stressed pride in African and black American history and culture, values of self-determination and cooperation, and care for the family and community, not just the individual child.
Over the years Karanja developed strong ties with downtown charitable foundations and civic groups, who have embraced his notions of community building, without losing respect in the neighborhood–though some community leaders skeptically eye any partnership with the city. Rebecca Riley, who oversees Chicago community grants at the MacArthur Foundation, calls him a “civic conscience. . ., a quite elegant person, well-spoken, articulate and politic.” David Flax-Hatch, who runs a South Side loan fund organized by Partners in Community Development, a church-based group, describes Karanja as “a man of integrity who is a visionary and has worked long and hard in the neighborhood.” Among activists he has a reputation as a quiet catalyst, someone who gets things done without demanding recognition.
“I view myself as a contributing voice,” he says. “I’m not necessarily a leader. I don’t need to be.”
Despite his efforts, Karanja acknowledges, the community has greatly deteriorated. He blames demoralization following Mayor Harold Washington’s death in 1987, a time when crack also became a serious problem. But like University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, he traces community social decline, including the rise of single-parent families and welfare dependency, to the lack of decent jobs that permit men to support a family.
“Guys have not been able to find jobs to take on that responsibility,” he said, and young single mothers are ill-prepared to socialize their children for school or work.
Karanja retains hope when nearly everyone else has written off such neighborhoods. “It’s easy to give up, given our experience,” he said, “but we’ve never before had as many development corporations, never had as many human service organizations working together. We’re creating what I hope will be a great community. Physically we’ve been better off. Now it looks desolate, but the people have a vision and a sense of commitment and direction. That’s my reason for optimism.”
With his focus on family, his critique of welfare dependency, and his emphasis on self-reliance, Karanja might seem a distant cousin to the ascendant conservatives. But he has actually helped people move from welfare to work, and he knows it often takes several years, five or six jobs, and a lot of support–such as child care–for the transition to succeed. Though he’s not opposed to putting people to work as an alternative to welfare, he asks, “Where are they going to work? If there’s going to be a work requirement, let’s create some real jobs and create our community out of those real job situations.”
Karanja adamantly rejects the idea that a predominately black community is not viable. Skeptics argue that inner city economic development is hopeless or that the pathology of the ghetto is a result of continued residential segregation that concentrates the poor. But Karanja has a vision, however romanticized, of a functioning black urban community–a Topeka of his youth, Bronzeville of the 1920s–that he believes can be resurrected over a period of decades out of the ruin that is now the ghetto.
For someone with his credentials, it would be easy to get a comfortable corporate or foundation job and leave the ghetto, but he steadfastly resists that temptation. Instead he is using his MacArthur grant to further his life work. Besides implementing the overall development plan, he hopes during the next few years to start a new school, create a leadership institute for young people, and write a book about his experiences fighting on poverty’s front line.
“Given the way racism works, residential segregation is a major factor,” he admits. “It makes our work harder. You can create a viable mechanism that is all black, but it requires decent stores, factories, parks, recreation areas, schools–mostly decent schools. This neighborhood has the highest concentration of poverty in the United States, and it was created on purpose. If we can do it here, we can do it any place.”
