Curate is perhaps one of the most overused words of the past decade. Yet when it comes to a volume of collected essays, curate is an apt description for what editors ideally do—select, solicit, and organize individual contributions in such a way that the book as a whole is something different than the sum of its parts. It helps, of course, if, as is the case with Educating Harlem, the volume's chapters are each engaging and illuminating on their own. But Ansley Erickson and Ernest Morrell have not merely benefited from the strong contributions of their authors. In intentionally curating a wide range of historical perspectives tied together through a focus on one particular neighborhood and community, Erickson and Morrell also make an argument about historical scale and the ways that bounded narratives can both deepen and broaden larger historiographies. Harlem, as Erickson and Morrell assert in their introduction, “has long been an idea as much as a place, for both its residents and for those looking on from outside” (p. 2). The trick this volume pulls off is never losing sight of Harlem's symbolic importance, even as each chapter explores a small slice of Black Harlem's lived educational history.
In many ways the scope of Educating Harlem is modest. Its focus is bounded geographically (to what is often termed Central Harlem), by time period (roughly the past century), and by population (Harlem's Black community); the educational history it examines is limited to K-12 and mostly located or defined through formal schooling. Maps in the front pages make the geographic boundedness of the book more explicit and give the reader a sense of the block-by-block relationships between chapters while revealing Harlem's small footprint relative to the entirety of New York City. Yet the stories told in the pages that follow resonate far beyond the volume's boundaries.
Organized chronologically between the bookends of Erickson and Morrell's compelling introduction and conclusion, Educating Harlem's chapters begin and end with teachers. Daniel Perlstein opens with an examination of the constructivist pedagogical practices of two Black Harlem women educators of the 1920s and 1930s—practices that Perlstein argues were rooted in, and essential to, the ideals and ideologies of the Harlem Renaissance. Bethany Rogers and Terrenda White close out the volume by documenting demographic changes in Harlem's teaching force in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as Black teachers became more and then less common in Harlem's public schools.
Two other chapters explore the transformative (and often thwarted) potential of Harlem's classroom educators. Clarence Taylor argues that the demise of the multiracial and equality-oriented Teachers Union in the 1950s, displaced by the more bread-and-butter-focused Teachers Guild, harmed community–school relations and fostered distrust between teachers and families in Harlem long before the rise of the Black Power and community control movements of the 1960s. Nick Juravich describes the advent of the classroom paraprofessional in 1960s and 1970s Harlem, detailing the ways this new position created job opportunities for Black and Latina women, opened up possibilities for pedagogical and even structural reform, but ultimately became marginalized within the New York City Board of Education (NYCBOE) bureaucracy. All of these chapters are undeniably about educators in Harlem, and each on their own offers insight into the development of the teaching force in that neighborhood, but they are also all about how we make sense of the history of teachers and teaching, and as a group they ask us to interrogate our understandings of the role of Black (and to a lesser degree Latinx) teachers in the context of Black neighborhoods and communities, nested within larger social, political, and economic structures.
The remaining nine chapters of Educating Harlem range in scale and purpose. Some, like Kimberly Johnson's study of Wadleigh High School for Girls, are tightly tied to place. Johnson shows the many forces and individual choices that led a once mostly white institution celebrated for its academic excellence to gradually, and then rapidly, become an underenrolled, segregated “Black” high school with a remedial focus that eventually closed in 1954. Wadleigh's transformation is a somewhat familiar tale that fits the dominant “rise and fall” narrative of twentieth-century urban development, although Johnson's study shifts the timeline slightly and makes clear that this story of Harlem is not the story of the city as a whole. Moreover, Johnson's chapter, along with Thomas Harbison's exploration of school administrators’ structural and curricular responses to the Great Migration and growing Black student population in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, illuminates a specific and previously untold history of Harlem schooling. Importantly, Johnson and Harbison, along with many other authors, eschew simple narratives of White domination and Black resistance (although of course that strand remains); instead they tell complicated tales of internal divisions and contestation within Black Harlem. Johnson, for example, describes an argument over the future of Wadleigh High School in the 1940s that resonates today, as some parents and community members sought to reshape the school as a “fort or frontier” of excellence regardless of who attended, while others maintained that school integration should be the central goal (p. 92).
Debates over what should be taught in Harlem schools, and how, features prominently in many of the volume's early chapters. In addition to Perlstein, Harbison, and Johnson, Jonna Perrillo's discussion of Langston Hughes's 1952 reader for children, The First Book of Negroes, details how an important figure in Harlem history sought to center Black experiences, art, history, and literature in the education of Black children. Lisa Rabin and Craig Kridel explore the use of film in some Harlem classrooms and school clubs as a means of promoting critical discourse, rejecting representations of Black Americans in popular media and challenging racial inequalities on the ground. In a later section, Russell Rickford argues that “questions of pedagogy were at the heart” of community efforts in Harlem in the 1960s and early 1970s to raise “black consciousness” and promote Black self-determination through education (p. 211). Individually, these studies deepen our understandings of how Harlem teachers, parents, students, community members, activists, and administrators debated and enacted the purpose of education. As a group, the chapters present a strong case for the broadening of curricular history to include pedagogical traditions and content that may not have been reflected in district directives, but that nonetheless shaped students’ educational experiences.
Other chapters in the volume, particularly those focused on the civil rights era and beyond, seek to reshape or expand existing narratives about the history of Harlem schooling. Marta Gutman's discussion of Intermediate School 201, for example, brings new insights to the story of a building often remembered as a symbol of the NYCBOE's bad faith and unfulfilled promise of school desegregation. Gutman articulates the architectural logic of IS 201, acknowledging its symbolism while bringing to life the memories of former teachers and students who recall the school's modern amenities and Afrocentric and arts-focused curricula with fondness. Erickson's study on Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited's (HARYOU) youth programs, one of the few chapters to address educational venues outside of schools, complicates Dr. Kenneth Clark's legacy as an advocate of the notion of “Black pathologies” by exploring Clark and HARYOU's efforts to center the place-based knowledge of Harlem youth in their educational programming. Kim Phillips-Fein and Esther Cyna show the material (and disproportionate) impact of the 1970s fiscal crisis on Harlem schools, giving new shape and nuance to the declension narrative of late twentieth-century urban education. Phillips-Fein and Cyna note that activists who once protested against racially unjust practices in Harlem's schools fought those same schools’ proposed closings, correctly viewing the closures as public disinvestment in the neighborhood and its people. Brittney Lewer uses the trajectory of a key Harlem activist, Babette Edwards, to trace a complicated line from Harlem's community control movement of the 1960s to neighborhood support for vouchers and charter schools decades later. Like many of the volume's authors, Lewer weaves together a story that is particular to Edwards and her Harlem context but unique to neither, outlining an important intellectual history through documentation of the concrete.
For readers looking for an overview of the history of education in New York or Harlem, this book is not the place to start. Refreshingly, the chapters do not rehash tales well-explored elsewhere. The Harlem uprising of 1964 and the teachers’ strikes of the late 1960s, for example, are referred to in several chapters without much discussion. Readers who want to know more can check the abundant footnotes for references. On the other hand, even the most place-based chapters in Educating Harlem can be understood on their own terms, and each looks outward to inform a larger historical narrative, making the entire book, as well as individual chapters, excellent candidates for undergraduate and graduate-level syllabi. The free online version of Educating Harlem includes links and additional visual material in several chapters, and has the potential to continue to expand and evolve.
Curation requires hard decisions, and given the richness of Educating Harlem, it seems unwarranted to begrudge Erickson and Morrell theirs. Nonetheless, I wish they had more directly addressed the presence of Latinx (and especially Puerto Rican) families, teachers, and activists in Central Harlem, who appear in chapters throughout the volume, and whose educational histories are both distinct from and undeniably intertwined with those of Harlem's Black residents. Acknowledging and interrogating what is lost when we ignore or simplify the “Black and Brown” relationship in Harlem (and elsewhere) would have been a welcome addition to this excellent collection of essays. As it stands, however, Educating Harlem makes important contributions, both in parts and as a whole, to the historiographies of New York City, Harlem, African American schooling, and US education more broadly. What's more, this volume may serve as inspiration for readers hoping to use the lessons of history to make a better tomorrow. Educating Harlem does not offer easy solutions to the problems of structured inequalities, but it does make clear the fierce and persistent efforts of Black educators, families, and activists who viewed education as a means of challenging the existing order and suggests that many other such efforts await for their histories to be told.
