photography by Albert Yee
by Constance Garcia-Barrio
My great-grandmother used to examine a man’s hands for the truth of his life: Were they soft, hard, clean, scarred, manicured? In much the same way, streets and their curbside characters hold the unvarnished truth of a city. Do cobblestones bespeak the streets’ past? What cultural groups hold festivals on the streets and why? Do people rush to help when someone falls on the sidewalk? What do the cardboard signs of homeless persons say? What stories do plaques on public benches tell weary pedestrians of people dead and still beloved? Do curbside characters preach about sin or lift the hearts of passersby with a Bach creation for flute? From the volunteers who plant sidewalk trees to vendors who sell ethnic treats from trucks, the streets and their curbside characters make up the contradictory truths of the city. This column will look at some of them.
Curbside characters like Judi Bernstein-Baker may pop up at your door with passion, know-how, and inspiration. If you see Bernstein-Baker, 74, chewing mint gum and doing the hip-replacement strut—it takes a strutter to know one—don’t let it lull you into seeing her as another tame elder. Bernstein-Baker, social worker, lawyer and grandmother, is continuing her lifetime practice of taking her passion to the pavement.
Bernstein-Baker’s latest push involved hitting the streets to ask some of her Mt. Airy neighbors to consider voting for independent candidates for City Council in the November election.
“It’s important for the city to have a vibrant government, and that requires councilpeople who look at issues independently rather than through a partisan lens,” says Bernstein-Baker, who was canvassing in cooperation with Philadelphia Neighborhood Network, a racially and culturally diverse organization of neighborhood activists. “Many of the candidates are running for the first time [and] don’t have a lot of money [to pay for publicity]. That’s what makes them attractive to me. Sometimes, big donors feel they have a right to influence a winning candidate’s policies.”
Bernstein-Baker, a native of Queens, New York, who’s lived in Philadelphia for 47 years, got an early start in public activism.
“I got involved in the civil rights movement in the ’50s,” she says. “I wanted to go on freedom rides [in the segregated South], but my parents said it was too dangerous.” So Bernstein-Baker did the next best thing. “When I was 13 or 14, a group of us from various New York high schools would go down to the Woolworth’s [Department Store] on 34th Street and picket every weekend. It was a way to pressure Woolworth’s to end segregation at its lunch counters at stores in the South.”
Not only school but her old neighborhood fed Bernstein-Baker’s stance. She and her parents and brother lived in Queensview West, then a housing development for working and middle-income families.
“I come from modest circumstances—my mother was a garment worker in a factory and my father was self-employed as an editor, proofreader and translator—but Queensview was extremely diverse,” she says. “Some tenants were union organizers. We had social programs where we brought in speakers like Fannie Lou Hamer [a Mississippi voting rights activist] and Bayard Rustin [an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and an organizer of the massive 1963 March on Washington.] It was a wonderful place to grow up.”
Bernstein-Baker skipped a grade, and thus started college at age 16. “I attended the SUNY [State University of New York] Binghamton,” she says, “and I got my degree in political science in 1967.” She came to Philly in 1972. “My husband, Karl Baker, was admitted to Rutgers Law School, and I didn’t want to live in Camden, so we rented apartments in West Philly.” Later, they moved to Germantown, says Bernstein-Baker, who has a daughter, 43, and a son, 39.
With a deepening commitment to activism, Bernstein-Baker earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975.
“I did community organizing at Community Legal Services,” which provides free legal assistance to low-income Philadelphians. “For example, I organized tenants to fight for rent control.”
Working in a legal milieu nudged Bernstein-Baker toward law school. “I thought it would allow me to advocate more thoughtfully—dare one say more fiercely?—for clients.” In 1986, she graduated from Temple’s Beasley School of Law. In 1990, a position opened up at Penn Law School that involved creating a program for law students to perform public service as part of their degree requirement.
“Through my work at Penn, I became aware of the need for pro bono help in immigration,” she said, “and there were few lawyers to take those cases.”
In 1998, she became executive director of HIAS, a nonprofit which “provides legal, resettlement, citizenship and supportive services to immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers from all backgrounds.” She retired from that position in 2016.
“Now I take on cases of the most vulnerable people: unaccompanied youth, victims of crime and trafficking and asylum seekers,” Bernstein-Baker says. “For example, I just completed a case of a wonderful student activist from Honduras who was detained in an isolated area of Louisiana. He had a strong asylum claim, but there were no attorneys available in that area of the Deep South.”
Bernstein-Baker’s background may lead her to take difficult cases. “My mother was an immigrant from Poland,” she said. “My family would all be dead now if they hadn’t left the country before the Holocaust.”
Many of Bernstein-Baker’s clients hail from Central America’s northern triangle: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
“They come here fleeing violence,” she said. “Their governments have no capacity to protect them. Honduras is a narco-state. Often, ex-military become employed by the drug cartels, so they have ties to the government.”
When it comes to immigrants, the U.S. shoots itself in the foot, Bernstein-Baker believes.
“We’re turning away people whose talents we need,” she says, “and we’re giving out a double message. On one hand, we’re telling people they should enter the country legally. On the other, we’re decreasing legal channels. It’s urgent for the U.S. to take a clear stand on immigration. We have to decide whether we’re going to be a leader in human rights or waste billions of dollars on detaining those fleeing, or on building a wall.”
While immigration cases absorb much of Bernstein-Baker’s time, she manages to squeeze in other activities.
“I have a secret garden,” she says, pointing to a spacious backyard, bejeweled with flowers and fragrant with herbs. “I grow thyme, rosemary, sage and other herbs that I use in cooking.”
A bird feeder in her front yard and an illustrated bird chart in the living room attest to another pastime. “A friend and I took a birding trip to Cuba in 2018,” she says.
Elderhood can bring leisure for travel and other fun, but Bernstein-Baker, who still takes part in street demonstrations, would rejoice at seeing a veritable conga line of older activists—canes, walkers and all—taking to the sidewalk with their beliefs.
“If you’re an older person with free time, it’s never been more important to get civically engaged,” she says. “We seniors can make a difference. We have a responsibility to make the world better for the next generations.”
