Educating Harlem
A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Reading and Teaching Resources


These reading and teaching resources offer primary sources, articles, online exhibits, and discussion questions to prompt deeper engagement with the events and themes explored in Educating Harlem. They may be useful for readers interested in discovering more about specific time periods or themes in Harlem’s educational history or teachers planning lessons around Educating Harlem chapters.

Readers can explore a timeline of events and maps visualizing census data about Harlem’s population over time.

Browse resources organized by chapter:

(To browse by popular themes, see the next section)

  1. Schooling the New Negro: Progressive Education, Black Modernity, and the Long Harlem Renaissance by Daniel Perlstein

  2. “A Serious Pedagogical Situation”: Diverging School Reform Priorities in Depression Era Harlem by Thomas Harbison

  3. Wadleigh High School: The Price of Segregation by Kimberly Johnson

  4. Cinema for Social Change: The Human Relations Film Series of the Harlem Committee of the Teachers Union, 1936–1950 by Lisa Rabin and Craig Kridel

  5. Bringing Harlem to the Schools: Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Negroes and Crafting a Juvenile Readership by Jonna Perrillo

  6. Harlem Schools and the New York City Teachers Union by Clarence Taylor

  7. HARYOU: An Apprenticeship for Young Leaders{ by Ansley T. Erickson

  8. Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem by Marta Gutman

  9. Black Power as Educational Renaissance: The Harlem Landscape by Russell Rickford

  10. “Harlem Sophistication”: Community-based Paraprofessional Educators in Central Harlem and East Harlem by Nick Juravich

  11. Harlem Schools in the Fiscal Crisis by Kim Phillips-Fein and Esther Cyna

  12. Pursuing “Real Power to Parents”: Babette Edwards’s Activism from Community Control to Charter Schools by Brittney Lewer

  13. Teaching Harlem: Black Teachers and the Changing Educational Landscape of Twenty-First Century Central Harlem by Bethany L. Rogers and Terrenda C. White

Browse resources organized by theme:

For those seeking connections between this volume and topics frequently discussed in US history, African American history, and the history of education, these topic pages compile relevant resources from the chapter pages listed above.

  1. The Harlem Renaissance

  2. Segregation and Desegregation

  3. Black Power

  4. Curriculum History

  5. History of Teachers and Teaching

These resources were curated by Rachel Klepper, with input from an advisory group that included Daniel Amsterdam, Michelle Purdy, and Karen Taylor.