Carl Anthony

Early life

Carl Anthony was born in a predominantly African American neighborhood in Philadelphia, PA known as Black Bottom. His parents, Lewis Anthony (born William Edwards) and Mildred Anthony (née Cokine), sent Carl and his older brother Lewie to B.B. Comegys, an integrated elementary school in which only about a dozen of the 300 students were African American, rather than the segregated school called Woodrow Wilson, which was only a block away from their home. They later went on to attend Dobbins Vocational School, where Anthony was enrolled in the carpentry and cabinet-making shop. His teachers were impressed by his drawings and suggested that he transfer to the architectural drafting homeroom, where he fostered his interest in architecture.

Education

Anthony graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in 1969. Upon his graduation, he was awarded the William Kinne Fellowship, a grant to enrich students’ education through travel. Anthony visited traditional towns and villages in West Africa, studying the ways in which people utilized their few resources to shape their environments.

Early Career: Architect’s Renewal Committee and UC Berkeley

Anthony began his professional career in the late 1960s at the Architect's Renewal Committee in Harlem, one of the first community design centers in the United States. Upon his return to the United States from West Africa in 1971, he relocated to California and taught at the University of California, Berkeley as an Assistant Professor of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design, later becoming a faculty member of the university’s College of Natural Resources. In 1980 he left UC-Berkeley to work as an architect and urban planner.

Urban Habitat (1989–2000)

Anthony served as President of Earth Island Institute from 1991 to 1998. During this time, in spring 1996, he was an appointed Fellow at the Institute of Politics, housed within the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University. Alongside his colleague Luke Cole at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Anthony founded and published the Race, Poverty, and the Environmental Journal, which was the United States’ first environmental justice periodical. In 1989, Anthony founded Earth Island Institute’s Urban Habitat Program, the mission of which is to combine education with advocacy and coalition building to advance environmental and social justice in low-income communities in the Bay Area, with David Bower and Karl Linn, and he served as the initiative’s Executive Director until 2000. Anthony directed various projects of Urban Habitat:

Ford Foundation (2000–2008)

In 2000, Anthony joined the Ford Foundation. There, he served as Acting Director of the Community and Resource Development Unit. He was also Director of the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative for seven years, and funded the Conversation of Regional Equity, a dialogue between policy analysts and advocates concerning racial justice and sustainability.

Breakthrough Communities (2008–)

In 2008, Anthony co-founded Breakthrough Communities, a project of Earth House Center, an advocacy nonprofit for regional equity and environmental and climate justice and is serving as the co-director. Anthony founded Six Wins, an initiative in the Bay Area addressing the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions.

The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race (2017)

Anthony’s memoir, The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race, provides a new story for communities of color to address regional equity and climate change. The book reviews several strategies for metropolitan development in the late 20th and early 21st century and places these communities’ struggles in the context of human evolution on the planet. Anthony discusses his childhood as an African American in Black Bottom, his role in the Civil Rights Movement, his travels to West Africa, and his endeavors as an architect. He contextualizes the connection between social and environmental justice and the issues that low-income communities of color face.

Written by Anthony

Mention of Anthony’s Work by Others

Boards, Commissions, and Awards