First Black Mayor of Philadelphia (1984–92)
INTERVIEWED BY TELEPHONE, FEBRUARY 25, 2012
What do being the first black mayor of Philadelphia and seeing in your lifetime the first black president of the United States mean to you?
There are two significant events in my life that I thought I would never see. The first is my election as Philadelphia’s first African American mayor in 1983. To be elected mayor of the city where America started added significance beyond significance to this event. As a descendant of a grandfather who was born into slavery, and as a youngster who grew up as a sharecropper, rising to the top of city government in Philadelphia is beyond belief. I thought at that time about all the people who had sacrificed for me to be there. This was a tribute to them as much as it was a victory for me.
The second was twenty-five years later, in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. I recall being on my couch with tears streaming down my face and not able to speak for an hour. His election was a victory for every slave, every sharecropper, everyone who lost their lives in pursuit of freedom. The Obama election gave me renewed hope in this nation, which has meant so much to so many for so long, that at long last there could be a level playing field for all. For me these two events when joined together made me walk a little taller, hold my head a little higher, and be proud to be an American. In a sense some of the stain of slavery had been erased. [That] anyone born in America could be elected to the highest offices in this country was an incredible achievement. Even today tears flow when I think about those two miraculous accomplishments.
Dr. Goode, it is an honor to be able to talk with you about your work and about transracial adoption. What are you currently working on?
I am a senior fellow at Public/Private Ventures [a national nonprofit that researches the effectiveness of policies, programs, and community initiatives, especially as they affect vulnerable communities], where I work on administrative and policy issues for the entire organization. I spend the majority of my time running a program called Amachi, which finds mentors for children of incarcerated parents as well as children impacted by incarceration and now more recently for children who have parents in the military who are deployed.
Why are you so deeply committed to the work you do for Amachi, specifically for children of incarcerated parents?
Throughout my life I have had an interest in working with young people, particularly with children who are at risk. And over the years I have determined that the children in our society who are the most at risk are those who have a parent in prison and those who in some way are impacted by incarceration. For those who have a parent in prison have all of the poverty issues that all other children at risk have; but in addition to those issues, these children also have a parent who is incarcerated, which I believe makes them the most at-risk children in our society. And those who live in communities . . . where there is a high percentage of incarceration likewise are impacted by incarceration in almost to the same degree as a child of an incarcerated parent. We have to continue to work with these children to try to provide them with good role models so that they don’t repeat the crimes committed by their parents.
Has Amachi shown measurable results?
Amachi is approaching its twelfth anniversary. Over the last ten years Amachi, through various programs across the country that it has been directly involved in, has served over 300,000 children. What we know from the research that we have conducted: two-thirds of those children will improve their grades; two-thirds of those children will improve their attendance at school; and two-thirds of those children will improve their behavior in school; and 90 percent of those young people and children will have a better relationship with their peers, with their siblings, and with the adults in their lives. Therefore we have concluded that, based upon a loving, caring adult relationship with a child one hour once a week—two hours twice a month for at least one year—and one year is critical—children will improve in the areas that I have indicated.
What is your hope or ultimate goal for the children who are impacted by the Amachi program?
The ultimate goal is to have them not follow their parents into prison. Based on research that has been done, we know that seven out of ten children with a parent in prison could end up in prison themselves. So the critical issue is, How do we avoid children with a parent in prison from ending up in prison? We believe, again, that involving a loving, caring adult in the life of a child for one hour once a week—two hours twice a month—can improve the child’s grades, can improve the child’s school attendance, can improve the child’s behavior in school, and can improve the child’s relationships with adults, siblings, and peers. We believe that children who have a role model like a Big Brother or Big Sister, who can walk with them, who can guide them, who can direct them, and who can model for them positive attitudes and actions, that these children can end up going on to finishing high school and going on to attend colleges and universities and ultimately avoiding going to prison.
As you know, I was in the foster care system for two years and then was placed with an adoptive family. I certainly understand from my own experiences the importance of having love and stability from which to build. My question is, Have you come across children who are in the foster care system, and what are some of your concerns that you have for this segment of the population?
There are children in foster care who have parents that are incarcerated. Which means that it could be that for these children both parents are incarcerated; and it could be that those children in the foster care system have the same poverty issues that other children at risk have, and have the same issues that children of incarcerated parents have, but in addition to that they are also in foster care, and some of them even in residential homes, which is part of the foster care system. So what we know is that children with a parent in prison and in an impoverished condition are probably, of all the children, the most at risk. We found generally throughout that 10 to 15 percent of all the children we were working with were in the foster care system, whereas a high percentage of the children with a parent in prison lived with another parent or a grandparent or another relative.
Who guided you in your life that helped to nurture in you such a spirit of service?
I think that, as near as I can figure this out, it happened to me when I was about eleven years old, maybe twelve. I was living on a farm. One day near nightfall a hobo—
Hobo?
Yes, we called homeless persons hobos in the South. . . . A hobo came through our sharecropper’s farm in North Carolina. This was a man who was a different race than ours. He was white, and we were black, living on a sharecropping farm. And he came up and knocked on the door. When my mother answered the door, he said to her, “I’m hungry.” My mother invited him in without hesitation. She was fixing dinner for us, and she really took most of our dinner and fed this man all that he could eat. He kept asking for more. And when the man left, I remember being so struck by my mother’s example that I ran into my room and looked under my mattress, where I kept a few coins. I don’t recall how much it was, but I remember running down the path to the road, chasing after this man [and] yelling, “Mr. Hobo! Mr. Hobo!” I took every cent I had, which probably took a year for me to accumulate, and gave it to him and put it in his hand, feeling like I had done something tremendous by doing that. I felt good all over because I was able to share everything that I had with someone who had nothing. I knew that what I had would be replenished but what I gave him probably for a long time would not be replenished. And so ever since that time, I have had a desire to reach out and help others.
The specific issue of working with young people came because my father went to prison when I was fourteen years of age. He stayed in prison, and so our family relocated from the South to Philadelphia. While my father was in prison, the local church—the pastor and his wife—in essence became my mentors and guided me and directed me. Even though my high school counselor was saying to me that I was not college material, my pastor and his wife told me that I could be whatever I wanted to be! And after a year of [my] working in the back of a factory, they took up money in the church and sent me to college after I graduated from high school. So I had someone in my life at an early age who took an interest in me. In a neighborhood where no one had ever gone to college, the pastor and his wife saw to it that I went to college and sent me off to Morgan State University [a historically black college] in Baltimore, Maryland. I earned a bachelor of arts degree at Morgan State in history and political science; a master’s degree in governmental administration at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; and a doctorate of ministry degree at the Palmer Theological Seminary, which is a part of Eastern University in Pennsylvania.
I know a young man who was adopted by a white couple as an infant. When this couple adopted their son, they immediately reached out to me because they knew me. When their son got to be five or six years of age, his parents said to me that they didn’t know where they could take their son to get a haircut. So I walked through with them on how to get their son a haircut as well as talked about other things they could do to begin to give him a black experience. While I think living in this multicultural world is a good experience, there is something about his culture and his background that is essential. Even to this day—this is at least twenty years later—I still communicate with him.
This young man and I make time to have lunch together. It is an opportunity for us to talk and share. Although he is very much respectful of the culture that he grew up in, he also respects the black culture and the fact that he is an African American male living in a multicultural society. There is a desire, or thirst almost, on his part to reach across the racial and cultural boundaries into the African American community to learn as much as he can about that experience.
What is it that should make the black experience valuable and relevant to transracially adoptive families?
Although transracial adoptive children grow up in mostly white homes, their skin color will always define who they are and how they will be treated. We still live in a society where race or the color of one’s skin is a factor in almost everything that happens in our society. It is important that a young person—in this case a young black person—who grows up outside of the African American culture and community recognizes that there is a perception on the part of others in the larger society about one’s skin color. Therefore it is important from the point of view of black adoptees to understand the culture that society believes they are a part of so that they can better appreciate how people are responding to them. Another big piece is the importance of understanding the history of African Americans in this country from slavery to what we are beginning to define as the postracial era.
I think this postracial era that folks talk about is a dream yet unrealized. Also, for transracial adoptive families, their children continue to be judged, treated badly in cases, simply because of the color of their skin. Adoptees of color have also felt the harsh realities of being minimized and seen as invisible because in an unjust way their value does not measure up to their white counterparts’. Do you think that we have progressed into a postracial era? Have we moved forward as a people since the civil rights movement?
We are not there now. We are certainly closer and further along than we were thirty years ago, but we have yet a ways to go. The larger society is not comfortable with blacks in certain roles; although it is increasingly becoming better, it is not yet anywhere near where it needs to be to say that we are living in a postracial era. We are, I guess, what I would define as living “in between times”—between outright segregation and outright racism and this postracial era. In this in-between time some people are beginning to move over, and some people’s views have changed significantly, but there still is a percentage of Americans out there who really don’t believe that blacks and whites are equal, that blacks and whites should have the same opportunities. That is part of our challenge in this society today.
Even with having an African American president overseeing the national and international affairs of this country?
I think that having an African American president has pointed out the fact that we are not in a postracial era. Yes, there were a number of factors that made it possible for Barack Obama to become the first African American president—
What were those factors?
I think that it was a combination of how bad George Bush was, a combination of the candidate he was running against, but for the most part it had to do with the fact that Barack Obama is just an extraordinary man who was at the right place at the right time. The strategic use of technology by his campaign, and the fact that there were people looking forward to finding someone that they could follow, all factored into why Barack Obama was elected. I do think, by the way, that many of the young people who voted for Barack Obama were in fact, and are in fact, living in a “postracial mind-set” in terms of how they operate. But keep in mind that people are living longer. There is an older compilation of people whose grandparents owned slaves that are living today. There are those black people who remember segregation and are not yet all that comfortable with the idea of integration because they have not grown up with that versus a generation today who has grown up with white children going to the same swimming pool with black and brown children and going to the same classroom. I think it is a whole different situation for those blacks, generally speaking, over forty years of age, compared to blacks who are under the age of forty.
So would you say, then, that it is worthwhile for black and bi racial adoptees of today to focus on the African American experience and culture, even though arguably a sizable percentage of their generation is now straddling the postracial line?
I think it is essential today! You cannot appreciate who others are if you cannot appreciate who you are. You cannot have a sense of what this country is all about unless you can appreciate your heritage and your ethnic background. So I do think that it is very, very critical that African Americans who have been adopted into transracial situations have a sense of their background and history, how their ancestors came to this country, and make a connection there too. I think that it makes them more valuable in participating in what is to be a postracial era.
For transracial adoptees like myself, to connect with our ethnic communities can be challenging and intimidating, depending on where we grew up. How can we as young adult adoptees navigate within the black community more effectively?
I strongly recommend that every transracial adoptee get a DNA test through the African heritage groups. There are a lot of them around that can basically connect that person to their ancestry background. That step is terribly important in my view to begin to talk about where does your ancestry come from and begin to read up on that.
That is brilliant. I still need to do that. So we will need to talk about that in more detail soon.
Also I would urge transracial adoptees who are religious to join an African American church or attend an African American church as early as possible. Even if they don’t join one, or even if they may be adopted by a Jewish family, for example, still it is important to go and visit an African American church and get a feel for what is happening there and begin to develop some relationships within that congregation. I would urge them also to begin to look at black fraternities and sororities as they go off to college and consider joining one of them, as well as begin to look at some of the social clubs available at the college or university. Other basic steps that transracial adoptees can take are to become intentional in becoming friends with black folk. A good way to take that a step further is to spend time in the home of a black family—visit them overnight or for a weekend. I think those things will begin to get them activated in learning what it means to be black in America and what it means to be black in an urban setting.