Locating a Black Planning Tradition and Spatializing Black Nationalism

This dissertation explores the Black planning tradition and how Muslims, particularly those in Black nationalist organizations, utilize newspapers and land to critique urban planning practice and offer alternative models of planned organization and development.

The first essay discusses the Nation of Islam’s use of the press as an instrument to develop critiques of Black life in the United States and present viable alternatives. Political artists in the Nation of Islam were key in the organization’s reach, supporting the Nation of Islam in building a national network of distribution sites and a committed membership, which helped the organization to grow and claim membership of over 200,000. By focusing on the Nation’s midcentury publication Muhammad Speaks and its use of political cartoons, this article explores art as a means to reorient Black geographic thought and political action. Overall, this essay suggests that the Muslim-organized Black press of the 1960s and 1970s played an important role as a counterpublic institution, providing space for Black communities to share experiences and connect their local political struggles to global anticolonial liberation movements.

The second essay explores the Nation of Islam’s model of counterpublic economic development in the pre-Civil Rights Act United States, and the geographies produced by such efforts. Using a novel approach of analyzing advertisements in Muhammad Speaks newspaper and mapping these businesses across the United States, I contextualize the Nation’s theologically oriented economic development mission by spatializing the organization beyond the mosque. The paper argues that the work of the Nation of Islam can be considered a kind of religious governance that hovers between religious congregation and sovereign state.

The third essay interrogates the history of a single parcel of land, 35-37 Intervale Street in Roxbury, Boston Massachusetts, through archived letters, photos, financial records, maps, planning documents, ephemera, and secondary texts. The essay traces the use history of the building from English Christians to Polish Jews to African American Muslims and focuses on its role as a hub of Jewish and Muslim communal life. It also contextualizes the endeavors of Jewish Zionist fundraising and Muslim nationalist fundraising, positioning religious nationalist movements as central to the wider story of Boston urban planning history. The article provides insights into the complex and layered histories of urban development and religious organizing in Boston to understand the diversity of actors involved in simultaneously shaping the local built environment and global religious nationalist movements toward self-determination.

Rose Winer-Chan

Thesis Advisors: John Fernandez, Lawrence Susskind