Founded in 1983, Better Family Life is a community development organization initially focused on the promotion of art and cultural events such as the annual Kwanzaa expo, Black Family Week, Black Dance USA, and Unity Ball. Today, the multi-million-dollar Better Family Life Cultural, Educational and Business Center is headquartered in the refurbished Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School at 5415 Page Blvd. BFL now provides services that include crime prevention, neighborhood beautification, workforce, affordable housing, employment, family health and asset development.
Later this year, the founder and CEO of BFL, Malik Ahmed, plans to retire. His parting gift to the world is his new book, From the Projects to the Pyramids: In Search of a Better Family Life. In the style of a griot, Ahmed shares a fascinating personal journey soulfully crafted to inspire anyone, especially young people, in search of a meaningful and purpose-driven life.
Like Claude Brown’s 1965 autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land, Ahmed delivers a colorful depiction of life in New York’s Harlem neighborhood. Born in 1951, Ahmed’s story picks up where Brown’s novel after the 1940s and 1950s ended. The “search” for a better family that Ahmed suggests in his subtitle is more like noted observations of his natural surroundings. In Harlem, for example, there were a plethora of adults like Ahmed’s parents, Tony and Clara Thomas, who taught their kids what he describes in the book as the “three essentials in life”: love of family, search for meaning and the desire to positively impact the lives of Black people.
Sociologists tend to define concentrated areas of Black and poor by levels of crime, poverty or unemployment. By homing in on one common denominator in Central Harlem’s neighborhoods, Ahmed offers a different perspective. Be it the working-class residents of the Abraham Lincoln Housing Projects (where the Thomas family lived) or the middle-class tenants of the Lennox Terrace or Riverton Apartments, strong Black families made life bearable, enjoyable and adventurous.
The author wrote of a blessing of sorts for kids like him who wallowed “in delusions of beloved inner-city neighborhoods” without knowing how the larger society diagnosed, despised or oppressed them. Not knowing gave the Thomas Family the ability to create their own dynamics.
One powerful example was when Ahmed’s oldest brother, Omar, returned from the United States Air Force in 1958. Omar was stationed in Morocco, in North Africa. Armed with that experience and his acceptance of Islam, Omar impacted the family’s political, social and spiritual worldview. As a member of the Nation of Islam and friend of Malcolm X, Omar exposed the Thomas family to vistas of self-discovery, self-love, the Civil Rights Movement and traditional African culture and heritage.
In the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ahmed uses his unique observations to take the reader back to a time when Black love and Black pride exploded within the renaissance that was Harlem circa 1950s and ‘60s. It was a time and place where icons like Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Ella Baker, Ruth Brown, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington casually strode Harlem streets while engaging neighborhood adults and youth in conversations.
“I was lucky to be born in the midst of political, social and, most important, cultural agitation,” Ahmed told me. “What made Harlem so unique was this new alternative thinking in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, where there was this burst of Black power, love and energy. We saw Black people dismantling years of segregation, years of overt racism, self-hatred, and challenging the police to treat us like human beings.”
At first glance, I thought Ahmed’s title, “From the Projects to the Pyramids,” was a story of personal evolution and enlightenment. Ahmed corrected me, explaining the title’s philosophical and spiritual relevance.
“The pyramid is the highest point of any civilization, just the fact that it has the unique history that it does. It’s the oldest monument in the world, and it’s still standing. It’s buried with treasures on top of treasures,” Ahmed said.
“It’s the same thing every Black child has within their capacity. How did we go from being enslaved to creating a Frederick Douglas, a Malcolm X, a Barack Obama or a Jay-Z, who was slinging drugs and now is almost a billionaire because of his creative genius? That’s the range Black people have. We have the capacity to go to the very top of any endeavor that we choose and put our time, energy and focus into.”
Ahmed’s book provides the skeleton, flesh, and DNA of the Better Family Life we know today. From the author’s accidental entrée into activism as a pre-teenager in 1962 to his three-year stint in the West African country of Mali as a Peace Corps volunteer, to his journey to the Egyptian pyramids, readers will come to clearly identify the multitudinous layers that led to today’s multi-million-dollar nonprofit corporation that serves more than 50,000 people annually.
“The whole thing about Better Family Life is that it’s universal,” Ahmed said. “It’s about our humanity and articulating a new vision of that. My thinking is that the whole world needs a better family life.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is The St. Louis American’s inaugural Deaconess Fellow.