Chapter 11 Resources
Picking up the Pieces: New York Fiscal Crisis” [link coming soon]
In this exhibit, Seth McCall discusses the 1975 fiscal crisis and the way it was experienced by the community at Wadleigh Junior High School in Harlem.
Many issues of Wadleigh Junior High School’s yearbook, The Wadleigh Way, are available digitally. They contain students’ creative writing and art, photographs, and descriptions of activities. The issues from the late 1970s depict student life during the fiscal crisis. One reference to the crisis is in the opening pages of the 1977 yearbook. PTA president Minnie Eley writes, “Education should be the first priority, but in the last years it has been put way, way down, almost down the drain.”
Letter from PTA president Minnie Eley in the Wadleigh Way, 1977. Credit: Wadleigh High School yearbook.
City University of New York Digital History Archive
These resources on the history of the City University of New York (CUNY) include materials from the fiscal crisis and subsequent period of austerity. As referenced in chapter 11, the discussion addresses the end to tuition-free higher education and the magnified impact of austerity measures for poor and working-class students, particularly at the campuses that served predominantly Black and Latinx students including those coming from Harlem.
“City Layoffs: The Effect on Minorities and Women” (1976)
This report by the New York City Commission on Human Rights discusses the unequal effects of the city’s retrenchment in response to the fiscal crisis. Looking at those employed by the city in departments under the control of the mayor, the commission found that overall 28.2% of workers lost their jobs. As described on page 7, the rates for people of color were starker; 35% of Black employees and 51.2% of Latinx employees lost their jobs.
Harlem Prep Step by Step: A Retrospective 1967-1975 and The Harlem Prep Project
Harlem Prep was an alternative, private high school in Harlem. Founded by philanthropists in 1967, the school’s mission was to educate people who had dropped out of high school and encourage college attendance. It was part of a set of institutions in the 1960s and 1970s that created new educational opportunities out of a sense that public schooling was failing Harlem’s students. These two projects, one by former assistant principal Hussain Ahdieh, and one by historian Barry Goldenberg, document Harlem Prep’s history until its affiliation with the Board of Education in 1974. They include photographs, oral histories, and reflections.
Discussion Questions
-
Chapter 11 ends, “The people who blocked traffic on 125th Street in the spring of 1976 did so out of an insistent faith that the schools and children of Harlem were not hopeless and should not be abandoned, that there remained much within them worthy of salvage and transformation.” How does this chapter resist a rise-and-fall narrative of Harlem’s schools while discussing their challenges in the 1970s?
-
In this op-ed in the New York Times, chapter co-author Kim Phillips-Fein compares New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis to the national response to the coronavirus pandemic. What connections do you see in the ways inequality can be magnified during a crisis?