I’d spent the previous year working on a book about the Sixers that focused on Hinkie and his polarizing team-building strategy, which involved assembling a losing squad in the short term to get big wins in the future. Hinkie’s data-driven devotion to tanking had given Philadelphia a shot at greatness, and raised all sorts of interesting questions about team building in professional sports.

But the strategy—known as “the Process”—had taken a toll on the team, including Hinkie himself. We’d spoken a couple times on the phone, but we’d never met. He had declined, on multiple occasions, to be interviewed for my book. “I don’t have any interest or willingness to quote-unquote shape a legacy,” he told me in an early phone call.

Hinkie was hired by the Sixers in May 2013. He was just 36 years old and, unlike the majority of his peers, his on-court career had ended after high school. But he had an MBA from Stanford, and experience in management and private equity. He thought and spoke like a finance guy, so it wasn’t a coincidence that the private equity billionaires who had purchased the Sixers in 2011 took a liking to him. He represented a fresh hope.

The Sixers had once been home to NBA greats like Wilt Chamberlain, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Charles Barkley and Allen Iverson. But the franchise had spent much of the decade before Hinkie’s arrival trapped in NBA purgatory. They were not good enough to compete for a championship but not bad enough to scoop up the high draft picks which the league, in an effort to promote parity, hands to its worst performing teams. The Sixers were mired in mediocrity on the court, and it was hurting their bottom line. They ranked in the league’s bottom-third of attendance in 2009, 2010, and 2011, despite playing in the country’s fifth-largest metro area.

Hinkie saw a way out: He’d build a team to lose. He wasn’t the first to employ such a strategy, but, as one NBA general manager told me, “he went further than anyone else.” To Hinkie, the math was simple. He knew that five teams had combined to win 20 of the previous 23 NBA titles, and that these teams had monopolized the titles because they each had multiple stars on their rosters—Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal of the Lakers, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James of the Miami Heat. He also knew that, typically, star players spent the majority of their careers playing for the teams that had originally drafted them and that these types of players were typically selected early in the draft.

If the best chance to win a championship was by acquiring a superstar, and if the best chance to acquire a superstar was by landing a high draft pick, then, Hinkie’s thinking went, the Sixers’ best chance at succeeding would involve acquiring as many high draft picks as possible. Since the worst teams get the highest drafts, Hinkie believed it would pay to be bad for multiple years.

Few leaders in the history of sports have ever so willingly and aggressively sacrificed the present in order to chase a better future. Less than two months into the job Hinkie traded his team’s best player, All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday, for a pair of draft picks. A year later, Hinkie dealt Michael Carter-Williams, the reigning Rookie of the Year, for yet another future pick. He also used the Sixers’ two first round picks on a pair of players who wouldn’t suit up for two more seasons: a University of Kansas center named Joel Embiid, who had recently suffered a fractured foot; and a Croatian forward named Dario Saric, whose deal with a Turkish team would keep him overseas for at least two more seasons.

Hinkie didn’t stop there. Veterans were shipped out. Salary cap space was left unused, infuriating the players’ union. Hinkie never instructed his coaches to lose games; given the roster he handed them, he hardly needed to. Two years into Hinkie’s tenure, the Sixers had amassed a war chest of draft picks unlike anything the league had ever seen.

But this zero-sum, McKinsey-like approach blinded Hinkie to the subtler aspects of the job. The Process triggered all sorts of anger, from all sorts of parties. Some fans viewed Hinkie as a scam artist running a dirty game of three-card monte, a man in violation of professional sports’ Golden Rule: You play to win the game. NBA commissioner Adam Silver was furious that one of the league’s 30 teams was so willing to damage the NBA brand. Sixers business executives and opposing owners were irked about being forced to sell a subpar product to fans.

“It’s not complicated,” Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry told me. “No one likes coming to see a horrible team.”

Hinkie’s biggest misstep, though, might have been writing off the complexities of his players. He left the vital work of relationship-building and player development to others. He rarely attended team practices, believing it was important to build a wall between himself and the coaching staff since they had conflicting priorities (Hinkie didn’t want to win games, and the coaches did). A culture of accountability was never created. Embiid, whose 13-year-old brother was tragically killed during his rookie year, would blow off rehab sessions and ignore medical advice. Another young draft pick, Nerlens Noel, who had grown up in an environment surrounded by adults trying to leverage his talents into their own rewards, would often show up late for practices and team flights.

Then there was Jahlil Okafor, a player out of Duke University who Hinkie selected for the Sixers using the third pick in the 2015 draft. Okafor was a prized prospect. He was massive—nearly 6-foot-11 and about 275 pounds—with huge hands, deft feet, a soft touch, and a full arsenal of post moves. But he had internal demons that he’d yet to confront.

One day, when he was 9 years old, Okafor was sitting in his living room watching BET when his mother started coughing. Okafor laughed. He thought she was joking. She gasped for air. Okafor laughed again. His mother kept wheezing, each breath more labored and painful than the one before. Finally, Okafor realized something was wrong, but his call to 911 was too late. One of his mother’s lungs had collapsed, and she died in the hospital that night.

Okafor was crushed. “Even now,” he would tell a reporter while in high school, “I still have to think, ‘What if I could have known right off the bat that she wasn’t playing? She would still be here.’” But it wasn’t until he entered the NBA that his emotions manifested themselves in dangerous ways. During his rookie year, he began frequenting bars. One night a stranger in a parked car pulled a gun on him; another evening, someone filmed Okafor stumbling around streets, cursing out onlookers. TMZ aired the footage the next day.

The story embarrassed the league and served as the final straw for Sixers ownership, who soon brought in Jerry Colangelo, a longtime basketball executive, to work above Hinkie and right the ship. The Sixers offered Hinkie the opportunity to stay on as an executive. He declined—and then surprised his bosses by submitting an elaborate 13-page resignation letter, with subsections paying homage to famous investors like Charlie Munger that cemented his reputation as both an eccentric and an ideologue. “What Sam did, the principles he showed, the loyalty to those principles, it takes a really special person,” one of his friends from within the NBA once told me.

And yet, despite the missteps, the Process basically worked. The Sixers, now nearly seven years since Hinkie’s hiring, find themselves near the top of the NBA. All those losses and high draft picks netted two young superstars, the aforementioned Embiid and Ben Simmons, and the team has become a playoff mainstay. This season, before the COVID-19 NBA shutdown, the Sixers led the league in attendance. Forbes recently valued the franchise at $2 billion, about four times its purchase price in 2011.

To many, Hinkie’s unwavering pursuit of efficiency is something worthy of both praise and emulation, the kind of thing that gets held up in classrooms and boardrooms as an ideal. These days, Hinkie spends his time in Silicon Valley, teaching at Stanford and raising millions of dollars for his venture capital firm.

But there’s one more lesson to take from the Process, one that Hinkie’s acolytes often miss.

Hunting and exploiting market inefficiencies may be sound business, no matter what field, and especially in a cutthroat multi-billion-dollar world like the NBA. And the Sixers, thanks to Hinkie’s work, are no doubt positioned better than they were before.

But when you stop looking at things in black and white—asking simplistically, Are we better than we were before?—and instead consider the full-color range of reactions the approach triggered, the truth that Hinkie’s calculations all missed reveals itself: People aren’t widgets. They’re complicated and irrational and emotional. They have egos. They have pasts. They’re unpredictable. They can surprise. They can disappoint. Not only is treating them like assets amoral; it’s also bad business.

That Hinkie inherited a middling team and turned it into a contender will always be part of his legacy. So will the fact that his mishandling of people led to his tenure, and the Process, being cut short.

The post Building an NBA Team to Lose appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The grand building, with its elaborate stonework, also provided a fitting home for a man two local journalists called “the cop who would be king,” Frank Rizzo, who occupied the mayor’s office from 1972 to 1980.

Few figures have ever loomed as large over a time and place as Frank Rizzo did over Philadelphia. Like the statue of Penn high atop City Hall, Rizzo cast a long shadow—figuratively and literally. “Big Frank” stood 6 foot, 2 inches tall, and towered over most contemporaries. More important, he was the quintessential “backlash” politician of the late 20th century, an emblem of urban, white ethnic populist conservatism.

Rizzo opposed public housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, and other liberal programs he deemed “unfair advantages” for people of color. He had a combative style and a penchant for divisive and offensive comments. And he defied partisan politics; Rizzo was a Democrat when he campaigned for Republican Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972.

Rizzo’s controversy-stoking positions and personality attracted a significant base of support in white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphia. But he and his Philadelphia supporters were more than products of a specific time and place. They were harbingers of a broader shift in American politics—blue-collar conservatism—that remains a potent political force today.

Rizzo and his brand of blue-collar politics developed at a critical point in modern U.S. history. He owed his rise to the most powerful social movement of his era: the push for African-American civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s. Protests against segregation roiled northern cities like Philadelphia every bit as much as their Southern counterparts—and spurred the rise of a conservative response that proved just as transformative as the civil rights movement it opposed. In Philadelphia, this response grew out of a white, working- and middle-class effort to safeguard “neighborhood” and white ethnic institutions and traditions. As civil rights activists sought to integrate neighborhoods, schools, and work sites, white Philadelphians—many first- and second-generation Americans of European ancestry—fought back, treating African-American advances as a zero-sum game they were losing.

As civil rights protests intensified, blue-collar white ethnics joined a nationwide clamor for “law and order.” Rizzo personified “law and order” and promised to restore it in Philadelphia.

Born in 1920 to Italian immigrants, Rizzo had grown up in a row house in a heavily Italian-American section of South Philadelphia. Blue-collar, white ethnic Philadelphians liked that Rizzo was no “egghead,” as they put it. He had dropped out of high school and followed his father’s footsteps into the Philadelphia Police Department. Starting out as a beat cop, he later earned promotions—and a reputation for taking on vice and illegal gambling, and for leading raids on hot spots favored by gay people.

Fellow officers loved him, calling him “a cop’s cop” or “Cisco Kid,” after a popular television cowboy. He rapidly rose through the ranks of the police department, to deputy commissioner in 1963, acting commissioner in 1966, and, finally, police commissioner in 1967.

As Philadelphia’s top cop, Rizzo was fond of saying that the way to treat criminals was “scappo il capo,” an Italian phrase he translated as “crack their heads.” Critics, especially African-Americans, argued that his aggressive policing and “Gestapo tactics” went too far. In 1970, to choose just one example, he ordered police raids on Black Panther Party headquarters throughout the city, allowing police to conduct strip searches in full view of the media. But Rizzo’s admirers never wavered in their support for the controversial police commissioner, and enthusiastically backed him when he resigned his position to run for mayor as the “toughest cop in America” in 1971. When he won, he became the first former police commissioner elected mayor of a U.S. city, and he quickly placed his supporters’ concerns atop his agenda.

Responding to demands for neighborhood sanctity during his campaign, Rizzo promised he wouldn’t allow new public housing in any neighborhood that didn’t want it. In office, he followed through, fighting the construction of several planned public housing projects and either killing them entirely or delaying their completion for years. Rizzo was also a vocal opponent of “busing”—a widespread euphemism for opposition to school desegregation—and he personally intervened to stop state-mandated public school integration efforts. The city halted all student transfer plans in favor of something called “voluntary desegregation.” As a result, Philadelphia’s public school system became one of the most segregated in the nation. It remains so today.

These controversial policies made Rizzo incredibly popular with his base, which supported him through scandals and political fights. Charges of misappropriating public funds and using the police as a personal spy ring, along with frequent public gaffes, made Rizzo a target among liberals in his own Democratic Party. Rizzo survived a primary challenger in 1975 and coasted to his second term in the mayor’s office, but he was enraged by his liberal critics and promised retaliation, telling reporters that he would “make Attila the Hun look like a f****t” when dealing with his political enemies. The comment became one of the most famous of his entire career—an incendiary statement typical of his aggressive masculinity.

None of the controversies around Rizzo ever jeopardized the support he received from white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphians. They applauded his inflammatory remarks as the mayor “speaking his mind” and “telling it as it is.” They cheered his opposition to public housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, and other liberal programs they perceived as “unfair.” These voters helped Rizzo overcome a recall drive in 1976. They even supported his 1978 campaign to change the city charter to allow him to run for a third, consecutive term as mayor—an effort that only fell apart after the mayor told an audience to “vote white” for charter change, mobilizing a new anti-Rizzo coalition.

Rizzo served out his remaining two years in City Hall before being termed out. But he made several more attempts to regain the mayor’s office, first as a Democrat in 1983, and then as a Republican in 1987. He lost both of those races to W. Wilson Goode, who helped pull together the anti-Rizzo coalition and Philadelphia’s first African-American mayor. Rizzo ran his final mayoral race as a Republican in 1991, but he died after suffering a heart attack on the campaign trail.

Rizzo came to exemplify a larger movement of white working- and middle-class Americans away from liberal politics. In Richard Nixon’s America, for example, Rizzo was a key part of the president’s efforts to wrest white, blue-collar voters away from the Democratic Party. While Nixon employed the famed “Southern strategy” to attract white voters in the South, he similarly considered Rizzo essential to his “urban strategy.”

Racism and resentment fed Rizzo’s political appeal and usefulness to Nixon, but there was also a positive, affirmative aspect to his supporters’ enthusiasm, based on a cultural identity built on shared values of hard work, sacrifice, toughness, pride, and tradition. Rizzo’s backers saw a bit of themselves in an immigrants’ son who had dropped out of high school and worked his way up to the highest position in the city. He often played up his humble ethnic roots, especially as he grew wealthy. As one supporter said when Rizzo ran for mayor in 1971, “He’s one of us. Rizzo came up the hard way.”

There is another way to understand this support. Working- and middle-class whites of the time were engaged in a newly emergent form of identity politics—which amounted to white racial identity politics, cloaked in the language of class pride. Rizzo’s supporters used class identity and class-based rhetoric to avoid accusations of racism. When white neighborhood activists in South Philadelphia fought the construction of the Whitman Park public housing project that Rizzo halted in 1973, they never publicly mentioned race. Rather, they argued that public housing tenants would not take the same pride in their homes as homeowners.

Similarly, Philadelphia’s building and construction unions, which also backed Rizzo, vehemently opposed the U.S. Department of Labor’s so-called Philadelphia Plan, which guaranteed equal opportunity hiring on federally backed construction projects in the Philadelphia area. But they avoided explicitly racial arguments, contending instead, that new policy of affirmative action threatened hard-won labor and seniority rights.

These white identity politics, combined with the politics of relatability in Rizzo’s “one of us” populism, transferred easily to the national stage. Ronald Reagan was especially adept at making appeals to blue-collar whites. In the 1980s, the press dubbed the white working- and middle-class voters who responded to Reagan’s appeals blue-collar values “Reagan Democrats.” But back in 1970s Philadelphia, these same voters had already been “Rizzocrats.”

The post When Philadelphia’s Foul-Mouthed Cop-Turned-Mayor Invented White Identity Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That changed in 2002, when Independence National Historical Park was undergoing renovations, and a freelance historian named Edward Lawler Jr. published an article about the house and its residents—including nine enslaved people Washington had brought with him from Virginia. An intense dispute broke out about how to tell the story of the people who lived and worked in the house. National Park leadership said it would confuse visitors to tell the story of slavery a stone’s throw from the new Liberty Bell Center, with its emphasis on freedom. Local citizens groups, including one called the Avenging The Ancestors Coalition, historians, and city officials disagreed, and fought back.

Many people in the Philadelphia area were surprised by the discovery. They mistakenly believed that slavery had always been illegal in Pennsylvania, and that the state’s large Quaker population had always been abolitionists. In fact, slavery was commonplace in Pennsylvania during the colonial period, and until the 1770s Quakers, who were among its wealthiest citizens, were also among its largest slave owners.

I, too, was taken aback. How was it possible that I had no awareness that slavery had been widespread throughout the American North? I had attended public schools in New York, a state in which 12 percent of the population—about 20,000 people—were enslaved on the eve of the American Revolution. I was a professor, and had read widely on race in the U.S., teaching courses such as “Race and Ethnicity” and “Ethnic and Racial Conflict.” I had recently written a book examining cultural conflicts in which material interests take a back seat to symbolic gestures of identity formation, including the Confederate flag controversies in three Southern states, the headscarf battle in France, and language conflicts in Quebec and Spain.

This new conflict, only a short distance from my home, looked similar to me. It was also part of a larger puzzle about why slavery in the North almost completely disappeared from collective memory, virtually invisible in its museums, monuments, memorials, school curricula, public discourse, or historical sites until recently. Most of the people who spoke of slavery here were some historians and Southern white heritage groups who viewed it as evidence of Northern hypocrisy. The dispute over how to tell the story of the first president’s house became the full focus of my research. I wanted to understand why we had forgotten this part of our history—and I discovered I wasn’t alone. In recent decades, many Americans in the North, black and white, have begun to rediscover the history of the slavery that once was common in the region.

Despite the widespread belief that slavery in the United States was almost exclusively a Southern phenomenon, the institution existed in all the early colonies and first states. Slavery first arrived in New York in 1626, in Massachusetts in the late 1630s, and in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1645. Before 1700 there was no colony where it was absent. Tens of thousands of enslaved people in the North lived and worked on small farms or in towns and cities, where they were skilled craftsmen, laborers and domestic workers. On large farms in the Hudson River Valley, the Narragansett region in Rhode Island, and eastern Long Island, enslaved people grew food crops and raised animals that were traded to islands in the Caribbean to feed the enslaved people there who grew and processed sugarcane on large plantations. Between the late 17th and early 19th centuries, Northerners from Rhode Island, New York, and Boston were the largest North American slave traders, and the wealth they earned produced the country’s early elite and funded the region’s first industries and universities.

Slavery ended very gradually in the American North, tapering off after the Revolution and only fully disappearing in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment. Northern gradual abolition laws typically freed the children of enslaved women born after the laws’ passage but only after those children had worked for their owners for between 21 and 28 years. Once out of bondage, free blacks in the North were hardly equal citizens. Few could vote. Whites often refused to work with them in factories, and many of the formerly enslaved lacked the skills for jobs in the emerging industrial economy. They suffered from discrimination and racist violence, and frequently had little choice but to accept long-term indentures from their former owners. In many cases, their lives often hardly changed from when they were enslaved.

In my earlier academic work, I had studied collective memories, arguing that they are built and transmitted through three elements: narratives people tell about the past; ritual expressions and enactments of these stories through public holidays, monuments, and culture including movies, literature, and music; and public and commemorative landscapes that range from simple historical markers to elaborate memorials and historical sites. When it came to the history of slavery in the North, all three of these were almost completely invisible until recently.

There is no single reason why the collective forgetting took place. Likely explanations include attrition of memory, where people with direct memories of Northern slavery died without passing the stories along; the modification or destruction of sites once associated with slavery, like President’s House; and the reframing of narratives about the past in ways that omit elements that made people and communities embarrassed or uncomfortable.

It is hard, too, to pinpoint the moments when the collective forgetting took place in different communities. In many places in New England, there was an explicit effort to downplay slavery’s significance. Political leaders and authors often argued that the enslaved in the North were always few in number, and that they were not treated harshly. Sometimes their existence was erased. In Little Compton, Rhode Island, for example, mid-19th century town officials who recopied town records sanitized and omitted evidence of slavery. After the Civil War, Northern politicians continued to emphasize slavery as a Southern institution—rarely, if ever, acknowledging its earlier existence in the North as well.

Similarly, there’s no single best explanation for why and how Northerners like me “rediscovered” slavery in their past. In a kind of snowball process, discoveries about the past in one place have motivated people in other places to examine their own local histories, turning up evidence of once forgotten people and communities.

Until very recently, for example, no one knew about the 18th-century African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, located outside the city walls at the time, which is estimated to contain the remains of 15,000-20,000 enslaved and free people. It was discovered in the early 1990s, during the mandatory archaeological excavation prior to construction of a new federal General Services Administration building. The area had been actively developed and redeveloped since the early 1800s, so archaeologists assumed they would turn up little of historical significance. But soon after they began, the dig found intact human remains; archaeologists removed those of 419 people for further study.

The black community in New York, alarmed by the way the remains were handled, demanded that further excavation end so that “the ancestors could rest in peace,” and asked that a team of African-American archaeologists take over the project. After a battle that included threats from the Congress to end funding for the GSA building, they got their wish, and forensic archaeologists from Howard University spent more than a decade analyzing the remains. They discovered that the enslaved New Yorkers probably came from West Africa, and noted the large number of infants and small children buried at the site. They documented damage to the bones and muscles of adults who had clearly eaten poorly, and worked very hard, during their short lives.

In 2003 a cortege bearing the remains of the 419 people returned to New York from Howard, stopping for ceremonies at African-American churches in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York. The remains of the deceased were carefully reinterred on the memorial site, and in 2006 President George W. Bush declared the site a national monument. Today it is filled with art, and incorporates a magnificent memorial and a National Park Service Visitor Center that recounts the story of slavery in New York. It took the GSA, the National Park Service, community activists, and the city almost 15 years to decide how to memorialize the site.

The process of rebuilding a collective memory of slavery in Northern states through commemorative landscapes has continued throughout the Northeast. Old homes where enslaved people lived and worked, such as the century Royall House in Medford, Massachusetts, and Cliveden in Philadelphia have been transformed into public historical sites that now recount the story of past enslavement. Abandoned and overgrown burying grounds where enslaved people—and later free blacks—were buried were also restored. The slave market that operated on Wall Street in New York is now commemorated with a historical marker, as is one in Philadelphia

When it came to the site of the President’s House in Philadelphia, the House of Representatives directed the Park Service to find a suitable way to commemorate the enslaved members of Washington’s household in 2003. However, the process produced raucous public meetings, prolonged fundraising efforts, a competition for site designs, an archaeological excavation, and intense disputes about the content of the information panels to be placed on the site, which finally opened to the public in 2010. The conflict showed how unresolved Americans remain about the darker elements of our past—especially when past heroes, such as Washington, peer out of the shadows.

The post Can the North Acknowledge Its Own Role in American Slavery? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From the earliest days of the republic to the present, politicians have sought to limit the ability of non-whites to vote. What has changed is the nature of suppression—either the addition of regulations, or the deregulation of parts of the process—as well as the degree to which would-be vote suppressors reveal their intentions.

The American problem with voter suppression started with a void in the original Constitution, which did not include a right to vote. This omission allowed states to suppress the votes of non-whites by various means.

In the antebellum period, the pattern of suppression was deregulatory and explicit, as Americans pursued the ideal of a “white man’s republic.” States expanded the franchise for white males by eliminating property and tax-paying qualifications for voting, while at the same time explicitly excluding women, Native Americans, and African Americans.

In 1800, only five of 16 states mandated white-only voting. By 1860, 28 of 33 states, comprising about 97 percent of the nation’s free black population, had adopted such racially restrictive suffrage. In 1860, no state imposed property qualifications for voting and only a half-dozen had tax-paying requirements. As the winners in this new political order, white men shaped the nation’s laws and policies without regard to women or minorities.

This shift in voting rights did not occur without challenge. In Pennsylvania, in 1835, William Fogg, an African American whom election officials had turned away from the polls, filed America’s first voting rights lawsuit.

In the suit, Fogg v. Hobbs, he charged that election officials had violated the state’s color-blind constitution—“all men are born equally free and independent”—by barring him from voting just because he looked black. Fogg contended that he qualified as a legal voter under Article III, Section I of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1790, which granted voting rights irrespective of race to “every freeman of the age of twenty-one years, having resided in the State two years next before the election, and within that time paid a State or county tax.”

Fogg won his case in a lower court, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the state’s appeal in 1837 by writing black people out of American democracy. The court ignored the state constitution and found that “no coloured race was party to our social compact,” and that there was no basis on which “to raise this depressed race to the level of the white one.”

The court did hold out hope for future generations, albeit in a perverse way, by noting that a black man’s “blood, however, may become so diluted in successive descents to lose its distinctive character; and, then, both policy and justice require that previous disabilities should cease.”

This idea of excluding blacks from the “social compact” reemerged when Pennsylvania adopted a new constitution in a convention that began on May 2, 1837, and lasted until February of the following year. This 10-month deliberation took three times longer than the convention that drafted the nation’s constitution in Philadelphia in 1789, and its delegates played on the common prejudice that African Americans lacked the moral and mental fitness needed for suffrage. They charged that unscrupulous men of wealth would buy the black vote and corrupt elections with voter fraud. They raised the specter of blacks flooding into states not just to vote, but also to hold public office. A whites-only suffrage, they argued, would preserve the integrity, independence, and virtue of the vote.

Delegate Benjamin Martin, a Democrat from Philadelphia County, spoke for the majority at the Pennsylvania convention when he said, “It is altogether futile and useless to pursue the experiment of making the African and Indian equal to the white citizen.” Perhaps thinking about the Fogg suit, Martin continued that voting rights would ill-serve blacks, because an aroused public would turn them away from the polls, thus “holding out expectations to them which could never be realized.” He warned of attracting African Americans to the state. Look to Philadelphia, he said, where blacks congregate “from all the southern States, and have so corrupted each other, that they are now in a situation far worse than the bondage from which they have escaped. It is impossible to walk through Cedar ward, in a clear warm evening, for the black population.”

African Americans countered such claims and protested “white-only” suffrage by issuing “The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens Threatened with Disenfranchisement to the People of Pennsylvania.” The appeal asked why the new state constitution denied “that all men are born equally free by making political rights depend on the skin in which a man is born? Or to divide what our fathers bled to unite, to wit, TAXATION and REPRESENTATION.”

The appeal said that the freedom of all depended on the freedom of the least powerful and that “when you have taken from an individual his right to vote, you have made the government, in regard to him, a mere despotism, and you have taken a step toward making it a despotism for all.”

Such appeals proved unavailing in Pennsylvania and across America. Without a guarantee of the vote in the U.S. Constitution or any federal voting rights laws, the disenfranchised black people of Pennsylvania and other states had no recourse to any authority higher than their discriminatory state constitutions and hostile state courts.

This represented a serious retreat for the country. In the 18th century, African Americans who met other qualifications could vote in most states of the new republic. But by the mid-19th century, those suffrage rights had been lost.

The Civil War changed that. After the war, African American men regained the right to vote—only to lose those rights within decades, after Reconstruction. The Fifteenth Amendment did pass in 1870, but it did not explicitly grant voting rights to minorities, it only prohibited the states from denying the right to vote based on race, color, or condition of previous servitude. After Reconstruction, states evaded the Amendment with seemingly race-neutral laws such as literacy tests and poll taxes.

It would not be until 1965 that African Americans and other racial minorities regained the vote with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

But in the 2010s, our current decade, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a piece of the Voting Rights Act. And struggles for full access to the ballot continue, with states restricting voting opportunities through measures such as photo voter ID laws, voter purges, felon disenfranchisement, polling place closings, and gerrymandered legislative districts. Although the players and the issues in voting rights may change over time, today’s arguments would seem familiar to those involved in the antebellum fights over voting. And the stakes are very much the same: Who has the right to vote in America and who benefits from exclusion?

The post Suppressing Voting Rights Is as Old as the Republic—But the Tactics Keep Changing  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As I grew up, like most Philadelphians, I accepted as normal the run-down condition of my city, a once burgeoning industrial metropolis exploding with promise. The boom years, between the Civil War and World War II, define most of Philadelphia architecturally. Solidly constructed, the edifices erected in this period projected a bright optimism of a maturing civilization, a creative urbanity that played a role in shaping the nation culturally and intellectually.

It took a period of exposure to Europe in 1990, while working as a roadie on a 50-city tour with the punk band Shudder to Think, to open my eyes to the real tragedy of Philadelphia’s chronic 20th-century decline. In Europe you can feel the pride and dignity expressed in the preserved architectural history. It was a revelation to see that previous heydays can be preserved, can remain clearly legible, still thought-provoking and energizing. In Europe I came into contact with not only marvelous buildings saved by the prevailing culture but also historic buildings being saved and renewed by youth subculture.

Most impressive to me was the Reitschule, a massive old riding academy built in 1897 in central Bern, Switzerland. Its provocative late Victorian style reminded me of home. This once vacant hulk was taken over by youths in the 1980s, who transformed the 19th-century complex into an autonomous culture center providing a bevy of cultural and human services—theaters, large-scale sculpture, music, nightlife, housing, printing, darkroom, café, meeting center, you name it. All arranged through a consensus building procedure traditionally understood as anarchy. I found that punk can be viewed as a bulwark movement against commercialism in defense of culture.

Returning to Philadelphia in 1991, I felt a mounting sense of mourning and frustration at the desperate state of so many historic buildings across the city. Pride of place has always been something I’ve shared with my fellow Philadelphians, but it became mingled with a sense of shame at the realization that America’s fatalism in the face of urban decay was an aberration among prosperous nations. The great architectural dilemma of our times is the impossibility of assessing civic value in business terms. There is no bottom line assigned to real estate’s civic, social, and historic worth.

In the early ‘90s I set out to photograph Philadelphia’s buildings as an exercise in understanding this chronic decline and its impact on our shared heritage. At that time, the plague of neglect was beginning to consume Center City, the third largest downtown in the country. My framing of subjects was in a portrait style and I aimed to capture a sense of interiority, allowing stones to speak. Most of the buildings I managed to capture were caught at a pivotal point. One could still clearly see the promise they once expressed, and the possibility of rekindling it.

In my 2014 book of these photographs, City Abandoned, Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia, I collected stories that leant testimony to my subject’s history and plight. More than a third of the 92 public buildings in the book have been demolished. Almost half have found a new purpose. The rest remain vacant and in limbo.

The individual portraits add up to a collective failure of historic stewardship. Our city’s leadership has been burdened and its pride beaten down by decades of urban neglect and racial segregation. In the second half of the 20th century, when city cores across the country were being hollowed out, Philadelphia’s leaders feared they could not place any obstacles in the way of business development. Because of this legacy, Philadelphia, for all intents and purposes, continues to be without a functioning historic preservation code. The one in effect today has been crafted like Swiss cheese, notable mostly for its gaps. The city has neglected to survey and designate hundreds of historic landmarks from its more than two centuries of progress. Even when a building is fortunate to be recognized by a designation, it is no guarantee of survival.

The case of the Boyd Theater is a recent and salient example. Philadelphia’s last art deco movie palace in a city that once hosted dozens, the Boyd was a designated historic landmark. When owners threatened to demolish it, the public staged numerous protests and flooded every public hearing in defense of this important architectural masterpiece. The battle continued for years with a succession of determined owners. But in the end the city and the state did not rise to the theater’s defense as lawyers argued it had no potential for reuse—though many other American cities have preserved art deco theaters as public-private ventures. The theater was demolished last year.

Buildings, particularly historic ones, can form profound emotive connections. They represent perhaps our closest and most meaningful bond to the material world. These are shared connections for family, neighbors, and community. When the Sears, Roebuck Co. Clock Tower was imploded in Northeast Philadelphia in 1994, tears were shed by hundreds, as if a loved one had just died. People rushed the site to claim souvenirs once the smoke and dust had cleared, trying to retain a piece of the monument and what it had symbolized in their lives and for the neighborhood. This officially undesignated but universally recognized landmark was now groomed for a new strip mall development contributing to the geography of nowhere.

Regardless, Philadelphians have remained proud of this town and that pride is growing as it draws fresh recruits. The high water mark of urban decline was reached in the mid-1990s. Turnaround was in the air in the early 2000s, when savvy developers like Tony Goldman—who had helped breathe life back into SoHo in Manhattan and Miami’s South Beach—staked out his claim in one of the more badly deteriorated sections of Center City, 13th Street. Goldman was one of those rare developers who could identify walkable, architecturally rich districts that were undervalued and plagued by poor quality of life.

This summer, local developer Eric Blumenfeld, a disciple of Goldman, is unveiling one of the more remarkable architectural comebacks: the Divine Lorraine, a former 1894 luxury apartment house which became one of the earliest integrated first-class hotels in the nation in 1948. This distinct landmark has finally been renovated with apartments and retail, after sitting vacant for some 16 years after a stint as the home to Father Divine’s International Peace Mission Movement.

Thirteenth Street was the first area in the city to go from tenderloin to très chic, with boutiques and some of the city’s most popular restaurants and bars. North Broad Street is clearly next with the opening of the Divine Lorraine. Philadelphia`s popularity has surged in the past 15 years, to an almost unfathomable degree to long-time residents. It is partly this city’s charm and status as a birthplace to our republic that draws newcomers here. But it is more than that.

Despite the ravages it has withstood, Philadelphia continues to pull in more and more people who crave the feeling of being somewhere authentic. Somewhere with a memory.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post A Punk Rock Tour Across Europe Gave Me Hope for Philly’s Revival appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.