Philadelphia - Contradictions

I don't have any great pictures for this post. One picture is too blurry, and the others were taken from the bus. Still, I hope they will help with the thoughts.

For our first full day in Philadelphia we started with taking the bus tour once around, and then went to Independence National Historic Park.

Some of my political awareness would certainly have contributed to the thoughts that I had, but there were things that kept coming up. Here we were, in the city where so much had been planned concerning freedom, liberty, and equality, and there were still so many signs of that not having been achieved.

I believe I had just read of the PUSH bombing shortly before our trip, so when we went by Dirty Frank's, but of all the famous Franks Frank Rizzo was not allowed, well, I had some thoughts about Philadelphia policing.

Our tour guide for Independence Hall was a Black man. He was fantastic, by the way, getting introductions going by having people say where they were from and where to visit there, which got people thinking and feeling enthusiastic.

He did not talk much about some of the more obvious weak points of the Revolution, but still, it was there. I suppose you could ignore it if you wanted to.

There were also some things we saw on the bus tour that reinforced this. One was the Chinese Friendship Gate.

Here is a connection I had never made. Chinatowns were not just places where the Chinese lived because they settled in groups for social support, or even because of strict laws about where they could live. Because the laws were set up so woman could not come and families could not come, there were not the comforts of a happy family life. This led to the areas also becoming concentrations of vice, with gambling, drugs, and prostitution.

This could be convenient in two ways, because other people could go there to participate in the vice, and it would certainly make it easy to look at the people who lived there as low life deviants. Actually that characterization should be unnecessary, because it was already decided that the Chinese were undesirables except for their labor, so they could work here, but not build lives here.

There was also a statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish military engineer and leader who fought in the Revolution, and whom they tried to reward with slaves. He refused in disgust, and left funds in his will to buy freedom for Jefferson's slaves, but the terms of the will were not honored exactly. The funds did end up establishing an institute for African Americans.

There is also a Holocaust memorial.

This was the first Holocaust memorial in North America, and it was chosen to go to Philadelphia because of Philadelphia's legacy of religious tolerance.

It is not that far from a church that had spaces that had been windows before, but were now filled in with masonry. It was a Catholic church, and the windows had been smashed often enough that they gave up. This apparently done by the nativists known as Know-Nothings.

There is a lot of good history in Philadelphia, but just like the rest of the world, there is still a long way to go.