Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community ed. by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community ed. by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morell Yalile Suriel (bio) Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community Edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morell. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 376 pages, $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. Educating Harlem is an insightful edited volume that uncovers the multitude of educational visions operating in Harlem's K–12 schools for nearly a century. From 1920 to 2010, teachers, parents, administrators, unions, and students expressed visions that clashed, inspired, and evolved—visions that spanned from pan-Africanism to the embrace of middle-class integrationist values. The volume argues that Harlem's primary and secondary schools were sites of struggle and experimentation over the meaning of quality education. While each chapter makes its own specific intervention in a variety of fields, together this collection fundamentally challenges the standard "rise and fall" narrative that has dominated histories of education, both in urban K–12 and in higher education. The commonly embraced "rise and fall" narrative situates the first half of the twentieth century as a time when schools were well funded and therefore effectively served as a central source of social mobility for students across the country. However, "the fall" occurred in the late twentieth century as deindustrialization gripped the nation, funding for schools declined, and cities underwent a crisis. With a wide temporal scope, Educating Harlem challenges this narrative by making the case that Harlem never fit this "rise and fall" trajectory. For the contributors of this volume, there was never a "time when investment matched what students needed or deserved" (7). However, despite battling crises on multiple fronts throughout the twentieth century, Harlem schools remained vibrant sites for organizing and innovation. By highlighting successes even during the period that is typically considered "the fall," Educating Harlem demonstrates how such declension narratives can be lenses that erase the successful and powerful activism that took place. This edited volume has several strengths. First, it successfully "pluralizes Black Harlem" (330). It avoids simplified top/down or bottom/up narratives by focusing on how a neglected community internally debated important issues. For example, Thomas Harbison's chapter explores how parents who saw remedial education as yet another form of segregation critiqued school administrators who developed a remedial curriculum to accommodate newly arriving Black southern and West Indian students. Kimberly Johnson's chapter excavates internal debates by exploring how shifting demographics forced Harlem residents to decide between rezoning in order to create an integrated school at a time when central Harlem became primarily Black and Puerto Rican, or embracing a Black identity, [End Page 212] thereby giving up on integration efforts and ceding to the idea of Jim Crow in the North. Clarence Taylor's chapter also highlights tension by examining the approaches of two different teachers' unions to tackling several issues including juvenile delinquency. The volume's second strength is its commitment to showcasing a multidisciplinary approach. Its chapters examine architecture, literary works, city politics, youth organizations, and union organizing to paint a rich picture of the innovation occurring in Harlem's school for nearly a century. For example, Lisa Rabin and Craig Kridel engage in film analysis to examine movies that were carefully integrated by Harlem teachers as a pedagogical technique to generate discussions about racism and to "develop activist projects as an extension of classroom discussion" in the midst of a constricted Cold War era (106). Furthermore, Jonna Perrillo looks to literature as it excavates Langston Hughes's meaningful but often forgotten engagement with children's books and textbooks used across Harlem schools. Marta Gutman uses architecture to examine how architects constructed schools that were "modern" in terms of air conditioning and building standards, but nonetheless reinforced existing patterns of segregation and in fact used "fine finishes and modern design" to compensate for continually segregated education. While some of the chapters do the important work of reinterpreting the influence of widely recognized figures such as Langston Hughes and Kenneth Clark, other chapters introduce us to lesser known figures such as Principal Gertrude Ayer who worked to implement her vision of progressive education...