Educating Harlem

A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Ansley T. Erickson, Ernest Morrell, Ansley T. Erickson, Ernest Morrell

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231544047
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

Over the course of the twentieth century, education was a key site for envisioning opportunities for African Americans, but the very schools they attended sometimes acted as obstacles to black flourishing. Educating Harlem brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to provide a broad consideration of the history of schooling in perhaps the nation's most iconic black community.

The volume traces the varied ways that Harlem residents defined and pursued educational justice for their children and community despite consistent neglect and structural oppression. Contributors investigate the individuals, organizations, and initiatives that fostered educational visions, underscoring their breadth, variety, and persistence. Their essays span the century, from the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance through the 1970s fiscal crisis and up to the present. They tell the stories of Harlem residents from a wide variety of social positions and life experiences, from young children to expert researchers to neighborhood mothers and ambitious institution builders who imagined a dynamic array of possibilities from modest improvements to radical reshaping of their schools. Representing many disciplinary perspectives, the chapters examine a range of topics including architecture, literature, film, youth and adult organizing, employment, and city politics. Challenging the conventional rise-and-fall narratives found in many urban histories, the book tells a story of persistent struggle in each phase of the twentieth century. Educating Harlem paints a nuanced portrait of education in a storied community and brings much-needed historical context to one of the most embattled educational spaces today.

PART ONE

Debating What and How Harlem Students Learn in the Renaissance and Beyond

CHAPTER I

Schooling the New Negro

Progressive Education, Black Modernity, and the Long Harlem Renaissance

DANIEL PERLSTEIN

One afternoon in the early 1930s, young Jimmy Baldwin was asked by his mother if his teacher at Harlem’s Public School (PS) 24 was colored or white. “I said she was a little bit colored and a little bit white,” Baldwin would recall years later in a conversation with psychologist Kenneth Clark. “That’s part of the dilemma of being an American Negro; that one is a little bit colored and a little bit white, and not only in physical terms but in the head and in the heart.… How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation?”1

Baldwin’s teacher—Principal Gertrude Ayer—had long been a fixture of Harlem’s leading social, intellectual, and political circles. She contributed a landmark essay on Black women to the celebrated 1925 New Negro anthology that announced the Harlem Renaissance and she was a featured speaker at the 1927 opening of the Schomburg Collection at Harlem’s 135th Street Library. But as Baldwin sensed, Ayer’s understanding of the multiple demands and educational tasks facing African Americans was complex. To enable students to make sense of and navigate that complexity, Ayer, as the Pittsburgh Courier reported, was “a specialist in progressive education.” Her “pupils are encouraged to think [their] own problems out.”2

Not far from Gertrude Ayer’s 128th Street school, another Black Harlem educator was developing a different version of progressive education, but one that was also “a little bit colored and a little bit white.” In 1934, Mildred Johnson opened The Modern School at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church on 134th Street. One cloudy November morning, Johnson discovered a Con Edison worker at the door, there to turn off the power because St. Philip’s had been unable to pay its utility bill. “We [are] going to spend a day like the pioneer children,” Johnson recalled telling her young students. “We talked about the hard times people had before electricity was put into houses. We made up stories and poems about pioneer times … [and] ate by candlelight.… We discussed the making of candles and remade one from an old candle we found.”3

The Modern School’s goal, Johnson proclaimed, was “to develop the full child and make him aware of his responsibilities and opportunities in the world around him.… Classroom methods are progressive.” John Dewey and other white progressives had long hailed the pioneer homestead as foreshadowing their pedagogical ideal (as well as the exceptional promise of individual autonomy and opportunity in the United States), and pioneer reenactments were a common means of learning by doing in white progressive classrooms. Black students, however, faced the contradictory task of escaping their brutalizing experience and environment as well as constructing meaning out of them; Johnson transmitted to her students an ideology and identity that challenged the pervasive racism of U.S. life. “Every Modern School child,” she promised, “is indoctrinated with the fact that he must be well poised and be capable of doing everything that he is expected to do just a bit better than his competitor. He must understand his background and be proud of his heritage.”4

Two schools, one public and serving Harlem’s poor, one private and serving its elite, both pedagogically progressive, both headed by educators with stronger ties to the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro era of the 1920s than to Harlem’s radical school organizing of the 1930s. By highlighting the educational concerns at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, we can broaden our understanding of the history of race and education and provide an expansive vision of education for children seeking to construct a meaningful life upon what Ralph Ellison called “the horns of the white man’s dilemma.”5 To do so, the chapter situates Gertrude Ayer and Mildred Johnson’s Black progressive educational visions and practice in the New Negro understandings of race, education, and modern life that emerged in Harlem and that were expressed in celebrated literary works that helped define the Harlem Renaissance.

Historical studies of Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance were forged by Gilbert Osofsky, Nathan Huggins, and David Levering Lewis. Huggins argued that in their efforts to articulate a distinctly Black voice and identity, Renaissance writers lacked individual artistry; Lewis portrayed the same artists as insufficiently connected to actual Harlem life; Osofsky suggested that Harlem’s celebrated writers and literary life masked the then emerging Harlem ghetto. This scholarship invited contrasting naively optimistic Renaissance cultural activities with radical organizing to confront ghetto conditions in the 1930s.6

More recent scholarship has viewed the Renaissance more favorably, situating literary production within the broader patterns of Black life and thought (not only within the United States but across the globe), discovering nuanced Renaissance understandings of the intersections of Black with white and of race with class, gender, and sexuality. Scholars such as Houston Baker Jr. and James de Jongh analyze Renaissance Era Black thought in relation to literary modernism.7 George Hutchinson and Ann Douglas reveal Renaissance intellectuals’ engagement with white thinkers such as John Dewey, challenge notions of autonomous Black or white cultures, and demonstrate the interplay of elite, avant-garde literature and popular culture.8 Finally, historians have illuminated Harlem’s emergence as a both real and imagined space, which James de Jongh has called a “landscape and dreamscape,” neither of which can be understood without the other.9

This more recent scholarship, highlighting interracial meaning-making and notions of identity that extend beyond and problematize racial categories, is vast, but virtually none of it examines the Renaissance as an educational phenomenon. Moreover, this scholarship has had little influence on educational history, which has focused far more on the 1930s and grassroots activism than on elite Black intellectual activity and the questions of epistemology and ontology raised by Black modernists. Building on the more recent Renaissance scholarship, this chapter examines the interplay of Black modernism and progressive education in Renaissance thought and schooling.

Education and the New Negro

The New Negro artists, activists, educators, and intellectuals who fashioned the Harlem Renaissance lived in contradiction. They simultaneously echoed and disavowed what the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has labeled the “politics of respectability,” as well as vindicationist campaigns to counter allegations of Black inferiority with accounts of Black achievement. They both embraced calls for Black self-direction and highlighted the centrality of interracial activity. They expressed a growing cultural self-confidence even as they accommodated white patrons. They announced a new racial pride even as they challenged racial essentialism.10

In the first decades of the twentieth century, especially in the urban North, Black people increasingly participated in the broad currents of modern U.S. life. The Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to northern cities, the commercialized economy migrants found there, together with Black political, economic, and cultural activity, transformed African American life. Black artists, activists, intellectuals, and educators were well aware of the enduring power of racism in U.S. society (in the North as well as the South) but also of the ways modern life was reshaping African America and allowing African Americans to reshape themselves.11

“I am not a race problem,” Alain Locke wrote to his mother (and implicitly to W. E. B. Du Bois as well) on becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar. “I am Alain LeRoy Locke.” (Even in the statement of his name, Locke highlighted the new opportunity for Black people to transcend the limitations that had been placed on them and to redefine themselves. The name his parents gave Locke was Arthur. Alain was his invention.)12

In the new world of the mid-1920s, Locke argued, African Americans were for the first time free to express their full humanity, to represent universal human concerns within the particularities of African American life. Whereas previously, Black writers “spoke to others and tried to interpret, they now speak to their own and try to express.” And Locke was not alone in his view. “I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life,” James Weldon Johnson claimed. “My inner life is mine.”13

Although scholars debate the exact contours of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement it epitomized, one can roughly characterize it as the African American strand of modernism. Modernists expressed the consciousness of the individual in a society marked by fragmentation, fluidity, and uncertainty. New Negro modernists, as Daphne Lamothe argues, challenged “representations of African Americans as subhuman” but also commonsense notions of identity, authenticity, and truth. Rather than seeking to re-create the segregated Black communities of the South, they explored Blackness and its insta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction
• Part I. Debating What and How Harlem Students Learn in the Renaissance and Beyond
• Part II. Organizing, Writing, and Teaching for Reform in the 1930s Through the 1950s
• Part III. Divergent Educational Visions in the Activist 1960s and 1970s
• Part IV. Post–Civil Rights Setbacks and Structural Alternatives
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index