“Young people are making their voices heard”: From Harlem’s Youth Movement in the 1930s and 1940s to DSA-NYC
By Mary Reynolds
The ongoing press scrum over New York’s 2021 mayoral election has obscured the down-ticket candidates in the June 22 primary races for the City’s fifty-one Council seats. These contests could be better bellwethers for the city’s future, and recall a little-known era of the city’s radical past.
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Rainbow LaGuardia: An Interview With Stephen Petrus and Thierry Gourjon-Bieltvedt
Interviewed by Adam Kocurek
Today on the blog, we talk to Stephen Petrus and Thierry Gourjon-Bielvedt about their project Rainbow LaGuardia, a virtual exhibition that examines what it means to be LGBTQ in academia. In it, viewers can explore dozens of video and audio clips taken of twenty-seven LGBTQ faculty and staff at LaGuardia Community College. In these clips, participants talk about everything from their professional lives as LGBTQ academics to their formative experiences in their youth.
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“The Colored People Have Dispersed”:
Race, Space, and Schooling in Late 19th-Century Brooklyn
By Judith Kafka and Cici Matheny
“The doing away with the distinctively colored schools and … bringing about mixed classes,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September of 1899, “has done more toward the education of the race than any other individual effort.” Brooklyn’s Board of Education had officially ended racial segregation in schooling in 1883, by requiring all district schools to admit any student living within their enrollment boundaries.
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A Long and Complex Legacy:
An Interview with Thai Jones on the Columbia University and Slavery Project
Interviewed by Robb K. Haberman
Today on the blog, editor Robb Haberman speaks with Thai Jones, who co-taught the Columbia University and Slavery Seminar in 2020, about the history of slavery and its continuing legacy at King’s College and Columbia University.
Read More"Sorry Junior, Recess is Over":
Integration, White Backlash and the Origins of Police in New York City Schools
By Rachel Lissy
On the morning of September 19, 1957, 17 year old Maurice Kessler walked into an American History class at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, Brooklyn and tossed a bottle of lye. The bottle exploded, splattering 18 pupils and the teacher with corrosive liquid. The attack was aimed at 16 year-old David Ozersky, whose face was described by other students as "melting off," and who was reported to be partially blinded in the attack.
Read MoreIn Pursuit of Knowledge: An Interview with Kabria Baumgartner
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Kabria Baumgartner, author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. In her book, Baumgartner explores the origins of the fight for school desegregation in the 19th century Northeast by focusing on the stories of African American girls and women.
Read MoreThe Enigma of Rescue: On a Recent History of the New School for Social Research
By Ben Wurgaft
The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson saved lives and scholarly lineages. He also burnished the reputation of the institution he helped build, establishing a University in Exile (renamed the Graduate Faculty) within the New School itself. An academic institution in downtown Manhattan, equally committed to adult education and to using the social sciences to analyze all that is oppressive in social, cultural, and political life, the New School has — at certain moments in its history — embodied a set of egalitarian and progressive values. In 1918, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen published his The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, in which he criticized academic institutions for defending the interests of the ruling class. He practically anticipated the 1919 founding of the New School in response to the actions of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, who had fired two faculty members for protesting the U.S.’s entrance into the war in Europe. Many elite academic institutions have flattering stories they tell about themselves. Some value their historical connections to wealth and power. Some value their political histories (“the Free Speech Movement happened here”). Some their famous former professors (“That was Foucault’s favorite sandwich shop”). The New School values its two foundations: on the basis of protest, in 1919, and on the basis of rescue, in 1933. In his memoir Kafka was the Rage, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard captured the way American students at the New School, after WWII, could turn the narrative of rescue into one of personal triumph: “We admired the German professors. We had won the fight against fascism and now, with their help, we would defeat all the dark forces in the culture and the psyche.”
Read MoreBuilding Communities of Inquiry: Learning with the Harlem Education History Project
By Nick Juravich
I started with the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP) in the fall of 2013 as a newly minted doctoral candidate. Fresh from my exams and starting my dissertation research, I had the unique opportunity to participate in both sides of the emerging project, which today appear on the home page as the book and the digital collection. Despite the embryonic nature of my own project, co-directors Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell invited me to contribute to the inaugural scholarly workshop that served as their first step toward the edited volume. That same fall, I signed up to audit “Digital Harlem Research Collaborative” (DHRC), Erickson’s first HEHP course, a deep, yearlong dive into the worlds of digital, public, and Harlem history.
Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem
By Marta Gutman
Faced with intransigent bureaucracy, struggling schools, deteriorating buildings, and entrenched racial segregation, parents in Harlem demanded direct control over the core functions of public education in the 1950s and 1960s. One new building became a flashpoint in the battle for community control—Intermediate School (IS) 201, the infamous windowless school that abuts the Park Avenue railroad viaduct two blocks north of East 125th Street, straddling Central Harlem and East Harlem. White architects and politicians, including the mayor, John Lindsay, rallied to defend “Harlem’s besieged masterpiece,” but parents in Harlem disagreed.[1] The location and the architecture, which many of them opposed, stood as a constant reminder of their unmet demands, from exclusion in policy making to broken promises of integration.
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