My mother, Mrs. Bernice Elaine Boyd — may she rest with the ancestors — raised eight children in Philadelphia on a principle most institutions have yet to learn. She made our clothes. She sourced food from local farmers. Our hair and skin care came from inside the household, mixed by her hands from natural sources. Our traditions were our curriculum. Our family gatherings were celebrated performances. Growing up inside that world, I felt genuinely wealthy — not in a child’s naïve way, but in the way you feel when nothing important is missing.

Then I reached the age where the world outside the house began to speak louder than the world within it. I attended a multicultural school and started measuring myself against what I saw others wearing, carrying, consuming. The veil lifted — and what I saw underneath it derailed my cultural values. Our row homes were aging. There were no name-brand cereals, no new sneakers, no gift-giving holidays. I went to my mother, a social worker for the city of Philadelphia, and asked her directly: Are we poor?

She didn’t answer right away. She asked me why I thought so. I listed my evidence — the things we didn’t have. She cut me off before I finished and said something I have carried for the rest of my life:

“Poverty is not the lack of money. It is the lack of access to resources.”

Then she laid it out plainly. If your community has a well with fresh spring water, do you need money for a soda? If your neighbors build your house, do you need a mortgage? If food grows in the backyards of every row home on the block, do you need to buy fast food? She was describing an ecosystem — one rooted in African-centered identity, mutual provision, and self-determination. She was not being frugal. She was being sovereign.

I didn’t fully hear her then. I spent years chasing shiny objects until she passed in 2001. Now I hear her loudly and clearly. And I hear her most clearly when I walk down Germantown Avenue.

Proximity Without Partnership

There are places in this country where enormous cultural wealth and profound economic need exist within the same zip code, sometimes within the same block. Germantown, Pennsylvania — a neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia — is one of those places. Walk along Germantown Avenue and you will find more than twenty historic museums, cultural landmarks, and educational sites recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service. You will pass Cliveden, a Georgian estate now operated as a house museum interpreting over two centuries of American history. You will pass the Johnson House, a National Historic Landmark and one of Philadelphia’s last surviving Underground Railroad stations, still open for public tours. You will walk through a living archive of American history — and much of that history is Black history.

The people who live around these institutions are also, in substantial part, Black. Germantown is approximately 70 percent African American. East Germantown is roughly 84 percent. Together, they are part of a neighborhood corridor that researchers have described as the fourth-largest predominantly Black urban area in the United States. And yet, by nearly every economic measure, these residents exist at a distance from the prosperity that surrounds them. The median household income in Germantown falls approximately 46 percent below the national average. Some pockets within the neighborhood report household incomes as low as $9,478 a year. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have documented a twenty-year life expectancy gap between poor, predominantly Black Philadelphia neighborhoods and nearby affluent, predominantly white ones — a disparity they trace directly to structural racism and the concentrated withdrawal of investment.

This is not a story about institutional failure. It is a story about an unrealized relationship. And the argument of this essay is that closing the gap between Germantown’s cultural institutions and its Black community is the most direct and practical path available to transform the material conditions of a community that has waited long enough.

What My Mother Already Knew

Bernice Boyd’s definition of poverty — the lack of access to resources, not the absence of money — did not come from a policy paper. But it aligns precisely with the most rigorous tradition of African-centered scholarship.

Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, Temple University’s foundational theorist of Afrocentricity and one of Philadelphia’s most consequential Black scholars, has argued since 1980 that African people must be understood as the agents of their own history — subjects, not objects, of the cultural and intellectual record. His framework, the Afrocentric Idea, holds that the reclamation of cultural identity is inseparable from political and economic agency. A community that sees itself clearly, names itself correctly, and builds institutions that reflect its own values does not need to ask permission to thrive. In The Precarious Center or When Will the African Narrative Hold? (UWP, 2021), Asante challenges institutions to reckon with how African narratives remain marginalized even when physically present in cultural spaces — a tension at the very heart of Germantown’s story. In Revolutionary Pedagogy: Primer for Teachers of Black Children (UWP, 2023), he extends this argument into the classroom, insisting that education rooted in African identity is not supplemental but foundational.

Dr. Nah Dove, scholar of Africology at Temple University, deepens this framework in two essential works published by UWP. In The Afrocentric School: A Blueprint (UWP, 2021), Dove offers a practical and philosophical roadmap for centering African knowledge systems in education, drawing on over 5,000 years of cultural tradition. Her argument — that teaching from an African-centered perspective is an act of cultural sovereignty — speaks directly to what the MKA Institute is designed to embody in Germantown. In Being Human Being: Transforming the Race Discourse (UWP, 2021), co-authored with Dr. Asante, Dove and Asante use findings from the Human Genome Project to dismantle the myth of race and return readers to the ancient African principle of Ma’at — a vision of humanity that prioritizes communal wholeness over division. Both works ground this essay’s central argument: that cultural institutions which serve Black communities must do so from the inside out, not from a distance.

Dr. Amos N. Wilson, in his posthumously published Blueprint for Black Power (1998), went further. Wilson argued that true power for African-descended people is not a matter of proximity to wealth but of ownership and control over critical resources — property, institutions, and the narratives that shape how a community sees itself. He identified Black think tanks, media, schools, and community institutions as potentially the most powerful instruments of self-determination available. Not charity. Not access programs. Ownership. Wilson saw the gap between Black communities and the institutions nominally serving them not as a flaw to be patched but as a structural condition to be directly confronted through the building of African-centered alternatives.

Marimba Ani, the anthropologist and African Studies scholar whose Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1994) examines the relationship between African spirituality and political organizing, offers the cultural dimension of the same argument. For African people, Ani writes, spirit and matter are not separate. What a community builds, how it gathers, what it remembers and celebrates — these are not recreational activities. They are the infrastructure of survival. My mother built that infrastructure every day with eight children, a kitchen, natural ingredients, and a philosophy she never called by name but practiced without exception.

The Ubuntu philosophy — the Southern African principle Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, “I am because we are” — encodes the same wisdom. Ubuntu philosophers, including scholars like Mogobe Ramose at the University of South Africa, have long argued that human being is constituted through relationship and communal resource-sharing, not through individual accumulation. Communal land ownership, collective labor, and the sharing of resources are not signs of underdevelopment in African thought. They are the architecture of genuine wealth. The same architecture my mother built inside a Philadelphia row home.

The Institutions Already Carry the Pieces

What makes Germantown’s situation extraordinary — and why it deserves to be at the center of this national conversation — is that the physical proximity is already there. The institutions are not in another part of the city. They are on the same avenue, in the same zip codes, within walking distance of communities that need exactly what those institutions carry: intellectual resources, employment, economic circulation, networks, and the dignifying power of being seen and reflected in the stories a culture chooses to tell.

In 2025, researchers at the USC Price School of Public Policy published findings in the Journal of Economic Geography confirming that lower-income and less-educated neighborhoods are consistently farther — in both distance and effective travel time — from cultural institutions that generate social mobility. Access to museums, universities, and performing arts venues, they found, is one of the key structural drivers of economic advancement. Germantown’s residents already have the geography. What remains underdeveloped is the intentional pathway connecting that institutional wealth to the community standing beside it.

The Historic Germantown consortium brings together more than twenty historic houses, museums, and cultural destinations working collaboratively to preserve what it calls “some of Philadelphia’s prized historical assets.” These sites include the Johnson House — whose history of sheltering freedom-seeking Africans is a story of Black courage and self-determination as much as it is a story of Quaker benevolence — and Cliveden, which has actively expanded its interpretation in recent years to center the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people who labored on its grounds. The consortium has publicly committed to inclusion, acknowledged the rifts caused by racism and disinvestment, and stated its intention to be accountable to the communities it serves. These are not institutions turning their backs. They are institutions in the early stages of a real reckoning.

Temple University, which anchors the broader North Philadelphia corridor connected to Germantown’s economic sphere, generates $11.1 billion in statewide economic impact and sustains nearly 48,000 jobs across the greater Philadelphia region. Temple has publicly committed to becoming Philadelphia’s premier anchor institution, articulating a vision in which scholarship, civic engagement, and community impact converge. Its Lenfest North Philadelphia Workforce Initiative already offers career readiness programs for local residents — a foundation that, scaled with intention toward Germantown’s specific zip codes and demographics, could dramatically shift employment outcomes.

Philadelphia’s broader cultural sector received $42.5 million in federal funds between 2020 and 2024. The city has directed tens of millions more through local budget allocations to cultural institutions. The philanthropic infrastructure is present. The institutional will is beginning to form. What the moment requires is the deliberate act of connection — the building of a bridge where only a gap currently exists.

The Space Between Is Sacred Ground

Here is what becomes possible when the gap is treated not as a wound but as an opportunity.

Employment becomes the most immediate bridge. Every institution in this corridor represents an employer whose hiring pipelines, if intentionally directed toward Germantown residents, could transform household incomes across the neighborhood. This is not a radical ask. It is a matter of setting explicit targets for hiring from the 19144 and 19138 zip codes, measuring progress publicly, and creating paid apprenticeship pathways that introduce young Germantown residents to careers in preservation, education, the arts, and nonprofit management.

Procurement is the second bridge. Anchor institutions in Philadelphia collectively spend billions of dollars annually on goods, services, and contractors. Research documented by The Plug, a Black-owned economic development media outlet, shows that the model for connecting Black-owned businesses to anchor institution contracts already exists through organizations like PACT — the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies. Businesses in Germantown’s Black community are waiting to be part of that pipeline. The infrastructure to connect them needs to be sustained and expanded.

Cultural co-ownership is the third and most durable bridge. When residents of a community have genuine governance roles inside the institutions that interpret their history — when they sit on boards, shape programming, and participate in curatorial decisions — the relationship between institution and neighborhood shifts from passive to active. Wilson called this controlling the narrative. Asante called it Afrocentric agency. My mother called it knowing the difference between who you are and what someone else sold you on.

The MKA Institute and the Living Continuation

This is the vision that the MKA Institute for Afrocentric Studies, currently under development in Germantown, is built to embody. An institution whose intellectual production, cultural programming, and community engagement flow in the same direction — toward the people who have always been at the center of the history being studied. Not a museum. Not a monument. A think tank. A living organism of African-centered knowledge that connects the global African intellectual tradition to the daily realities of a Black community in Northwest Philadelphia.

Bernice Boyd ran a version of this institution inside a row home. She had no endowment, no grant funding, no board of directors. She had a philosophy, a household, and eight children and a husband to whom she gave the most valuable thing an institution can give: a framework for understanding who you are, where your wealth actually lives, and what you owe the people around you.

The MKA Institute carries that same charge at a larger scale — connecting the scholarship of Asante, Wilson, Dove, Ani, and the broader Afrocentric intellectual tradition to the workforce development needs, cultural programming gaps, and community governance deficits that define Germantown today. Not as an outside intervention, but as an indigenous anchor — one that belongs to the community because it was built by and for the community. In the words of Dr. Dove in The Afrocentric School, the goal is not integration into existing frameworks but the construction of new ones rooted in African cultural sovereignty.

Carter G. Woodson wrote in The Mis-Education of the Negro that a people educated away from their own cultural foundations will always find themselves serving someone else’s interests. Germantown has the institutions. It has the history. It has the community. What the moment calls for is the intentional act of alignment — bringing those three things into relationship with each other in a way that produces not just understanding, but ownership.

The gap between Germantown’s cultural institutions and its Black community is not a failure. It is the most important unfinished work on this block. And the people who live here have already proven, generation after generation, that they know how to finish what they start.

My mother knew it. Now so do I.

Karim Boyd is the Business Agent for IATSE Local 8’s Hotel & Install Division in Philadelphia, chair of the Local 8 DEIA Committee, and Board member and lead for the department of technology at the MKA Institute for Afrocentric Studies in Germantown, Philadelphia. He leads the “Beyond the C-Wrench” stagehand mentorship program and serves as a consultant to the executive director of the “No Longer Bound” dance team.

Sources and References

African-Centered Scholarship

Asante, Molefi Kete. The Precarious Center or When Will the African Narrative Hold? Universal Write Publications, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-942774-20-4

Asante, Molefi Kete. Revolutionary Pedagogy: Primer for Teachers of Black Children, Second Edition. Universal Write Publications, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-942774-14-3

Asante, Molefi Kete. African Pyramids of Knowledge. Universal Write Publications. ISBN: 978-1-942774-25-9

Asante, Molefi Kete. “The Afrocentric Idea in Education.” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Spring 1991): 170–180.

Dove, Nah. The Afrocentric School: A Blueprint. Universal Write Publications, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-942774-05-1

Asante, Molefi Kete, and Nah Dove. Being Human Being: Transforming the Race Discourse. Universal Write Publications, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-942774-24-2

Wilson, Amos N. Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century. Afrikan World InfoSystems, 1998.

Ani, Marimba. Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora. Nkonimfo Publications, 1994.

Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

Ramose, Mogobe B. “The Philosophy of Ubuntu and Ubuntu as a Philosophy.” In African Philosophy: An Introduction. Juta & Co., 2002.

Community and Economic Data

U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey — Germantown and East Germantown demographic and income data (via Point2Homes and BestNeighborhood.org, 2023)

Pew Charitable Trusts. Philadelphia 2026: State of the City. April 2026. https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2026/04/philadelphia-2026

IGNITE Study on Concentrated Investment in Black Neighborhoods. University of Pennsylvania. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05541653. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05541653

Eisenlohr, Andrew, and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. “The geography of cultural capital.” Journal of Economic Geography (2025). DOI: 10.1093/jeg/lbaf040. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbaf040

McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility. “Location, Location, Location: The Impact of Place on Racial Equity.” February 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com

Urban Institute. “Causes and Consequences of Separate and Unequal Neighborhoods.” January 2024. https://www.urban.org

Philadelphia-Specific Sources

The Plug. “Philadelphia’s Anchor Institutions Spend Billions Every Year.” February 2023. https://tpinsights.com

Temple University. “Temple’s Economic Impact in Pennsylvania is More Than $11 Billion.” Temple Now, March 2026. https://now.temple.edu

Temple University Strategic Plan. “Establish Temple as Philadelphia’s Premier Anchor Institution.” https://plan.temple.edu

Young, David W. “Historic Germantown: New Knowledge in a Very Old Neighborhood.” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org

Historic Germantown Consortium. https://historicgermantownpa.org

Johnson House Historic Site. https://www.johnsonhouse.org

WHYY. “Grants Will Help Philadelphians Visit the City’s Museums for Reduced Rates in 2026.” March 2026. https://whyy.org

Wikipedia. “Germantown, Philadelphia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germantown,_Philadelphia