We find the woman, figuratively, struck in the face daily by contempt from the world about her.... Through it all, she is courageously standing erect, developing within herself the moral strength to rise above and conquer false attitudes. She is maintaining her natural beauty and charm and improving her mind and opportunity. She is measuring up to the needs and demands of her family, community, and race, and radiating from a hope that is cherished by her sisters in less propitious circumstances throughout the land. The wind of the race's destiny stirs more briskly because of her striving. (Gertrude) Elise Johnson McDougald, 1925 (1) The lives of African American activists who taught in York City during the first half of the 20th century have been conspicuous by their absence from the historical accounts of teachers and teaching, labor organizing, and social reform movements. Biographies of York City's progressive era educators, social reformers, and union organizers depict a generation of women who were white and largely privileged. (2) In turn, historiographies of African American teachers, while they increasingly represent the lived experiences and perspectives of the teachers themselves, have largely focused on education in the South. (3) The lives and experiences of York City's African American educators who assumed leadership and worked for social change before 1950 warrant further attention. This essay profiles a different generation of women, the relatively unknown stories of three African American female educators and community leaders who lived and worked in from the 1920s through the 1950s. The collective careers of Lucile Spence, Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer, and Layle Lane spanned forty years and encompassed progressive era social reforms, teacher union organizing, and civil rights work. Socially conscious and militant, these seamlessly incorporated their work as educators as part of a larger project for racial and economic justice and community uplift. In this essay I situate their educational philosophies, writings, and political activities in light of key events in during the 1930s and 1940s. BLACK CAPITAL: HARLEM IN THE 1930s By 1930 had become the largest and most diverse urban black community in the United States. From 1920 to 1930 the black population of increased by over 158 percent to 186,000. By 1940 it would reach 267,000, with 33,000 school-age children. (4) While the majority migrated from the South, one quarter of Harlem's residents were foreign born, immigrating from over fourteen Caribbean nations. As prominent religious leader Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. noted, Harlem became the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere. (5) In the landmark 1925 issue of Survey Graphic that officially launched a new phase in the New Negro literary movement, philosopher and literary critic Alain Locke described as another statue of liberty on the landward side of York. (6) While acknowledging the distortions of life found in the white press, Locke concluded that, Harlem is neither slum, ghetto, resort, or colony, though it is in part all of them. It is--or promises at least to be--a race capital. (7) Part myth and part reality, this uptown neighborhood in York City represented the best and worst of what the United States had to offer her citizens of African descent. (8) It was a mecca for African American writers, intellectuals, and musicians, such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Robeson and scores of lesser known artists who arrived in the 1920s and participated in Harlem's Renaissance. (9) Political activists James Weldon Johnson and Walter White, socialists and labor organizers A. Philip Randolph and Frank Crosswaith, and intellectuals L. …