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

Chapter 2 Resources

Materials accompanying "'A Serious Pedagogical Situation': Diverging School Reform Priorities in Depression Era Harlem" by Thomas Harbison

Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1941)

Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans migrated from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities like New York City. Artist Jacob Lawrence documented the Great Migration in a series of sixty paintings, presented with explanations and context in this exhibit from the Museum of Modern Art. The “Visualizing the Great Migration” page includes graphs and maps of the population change that occurred.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

W.E.B. Du Bois, an author, intellectual, and activist who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. It is comprised of sociological essays on race, including a critique of Booker T. Washington’s plan for Industrial Education in chapter 3.

“The Complete Report of Mayor LaGuardia’s Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935”

The 1935 Harlem uprising occurred in response to the rumored killing of a young man by a police officer. Mayor LaGuardia formed a commission to explore the events and the underlying conditions in Harlem that led to them. The results of the investigation were not published, but they were leaked to the Amsterdam News and printed in 1936. Chapter 6 of the report discusses the lack of educational and recreational resources in Harlem.

Photographs of 1930s Harlem

This digitized collection of photographs from the New York Public Library includes street scenes of Harlem in the 1930s.

Black and white image of Harlem storefronts

View of Harlem storefronts, 1939. Credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Mapping Inequality

This website explores the creation of residential discrimination and segregation through “redlining,” discriminatory mortgage lending practices, which helped make Harlem’s demographic transition in the 1930s and beyond. Readers can view the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlining maps for Harlem and other neighborhoods across the United States.

Discussion Questions

  1. Versions of the curricular debates that chapter 2 describes have occurred in many different moments in US and African American history. Perhaps the most famous debate about what Black students should learn in school, and the consequences of curriculum for Black communities and their advancement, took place between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the 20th century. These texts from DuBois and Washington argue for different approaches to schooling for African Americans. How is their debate similar to or different from the one underway in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s?

  2. In chapter 2, author Thomas Harbison discusses the residential segregation in Harlem that contributed to and was amplified by segregationist school zoning policies. Mapping Inequality documents the process of redlining, which helped restrict Black residents to Harlem. Read the website’s introduction and find Harlem on the map of 1930s Manhattan. How did discrimination in housing shape Harlem in this time period? With what consequences for its schools, according to Harbison?