Interview with Ansley Erickson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community
Interviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis
This week on Gotham we hear from the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP), a multi-platform program at Columbia University that includes a digital collection, exhibits, and the recently published Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, as well as many other resources for teaching the history of education. Today, Dominique Jean-Louis interviews the Project’s co-director, Ansley T. Erickson, co-editor of the book.
Dominique Jean-Louis: Thanks for talking to us! We’re so excited to get to know more about Educating Harlem and your work on it. My first question is: how did you come to study Harlem? Your first book is on Nashville, Tennessee, so what brought you to this topic?
Ansley Erickson: My interest in Harlem’s history started with me getting a job as a teacher in one of the new small high schools that were popping up in the New York City landscape in the late 90s, early 2000s. I was a teacher in the building that had been JHS 136, on the corner of 135th and Edgecombe, for two years from 2000-2002. I had learned some pieces of Harlem history as a teacher preparing to teach my students, but I didn’t have any systematic study.
Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community
Edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell
Columbia University Press
When I came to Teachers College in 2011, I arrived at the same time Ernest Morrell arrived, as the director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education. Ernest asked me what he should read about Harlem’s education history to ground the kind of work he was planning in local schools. I thought it was a great question, and a question that lots of people in education should ask! And then, when I started to tally what books or articles to direct him to, while I could think of several examples of specific studies on community control or integration activism, there was nothing comprehensive. While I’m not claiming that our book is fully comprehensive, there was a sense of absence, and out of that sense of absence came our interest in working together on this project. We knew a good starting point would be to ask scholars who were already working on the history of education in Harlem to come together to contribute to an edited volume. We started talking about submissions for the volume in 2012, and that’s the conversation that ultimately produced the volume.
Looking back on my own experience as a teacher, I was working in a building that was one of three junior high school buildings, which had been the center of a boycott by a group of Harlem mothers. That was called the Harlem Nine Protest, and it produced a really consequential piece of civic action against segregation in the late 1950s. It always struck me that that knowledge, that story, which I did not know when I was teaching there, might have changed what I taught my students, it also might have changed some of how I thought about the community in which I was working, possibly even changed how I thought about connections with parents. I always hoped that this book would be a resource for people who are working with children in Harlem. They should know something about the educational traditions from which those children come, and the rich history of activism, of which they’re a part.
DJL: That makes sense, as you have a free digital edition available online. How do you see this book functioning for those people? How do you think this kind of a resource should be available to folks, and ideally how should they use it?
AE: One of the nice things about the fact that books have long lives is that we can have an initial answer to this question, and then we can keep on working on it. It was important from the very beginning that we think about any knowledge that got produced in this project as being publicly accessible. Access is important! It’s materially important, it’s symbolically important.
But at the same time, access isn’t enough. So one of the things I’m excited about is that we got an NEH grant to support a summer institute for teachers on the history of education movements in Harlem, working with the Schomburg Center. The institute draws upon this book, and other new work, and facilitates conversation about what happens to the way you understand the civil rights movement if you put questions of education in Harlem at the very center. Two of the contributors of chapters of the book are presenting at the institute, and I’m co-directing, so in some ways that feels like one example of how the book can get connected to people in classrooms, and affect their thinking about their work.
DJL: Harlem is such an important place, yet one that is so hard to define. How did you limit your study so the project stayed feasible?
AE: One of the boundaries that we ended up accepting, even though we intended to challenge it, was the idea of “schooling” vs. the entire educational landscape. Our hope was that we would really be able to offer a more cross-cutting view of places where people learned, inclusive of but beyond schools. And in the end, Ernest and I both realized that so many scholars, for many reasons, were working on schools. We had that broader mission initially, but unfortunately we weren’t able to pursue it. So hopefully other people will.
DJL: I agree that’s tricky to do! I think it helps that this book reflects a number of different disciplines, it doesn’t feel like just a straightforward history of schools, it feels like there’s a real diversity of thought. Was that intentional?
AE: While I do agree that the book represents some kinds of interdisciplinary conversation, I also think that, compared to other approaches that we could imagine, we’re all thinking empirically about the past. But people are doing that with tools that come from film studies, or tools that come from architectural history.
As an editor, after we got to the point where the chapters were all in really good shape, what we were thinking about was coherence. A lot of the editorial challenges came down to how things are in conversation with each other. But having outside reviewers helped us to appreciate having a breadth of approaches, rather than just “how does this fit tightly together?” In some places, the story diverges, and that’s powerful, too.
DJL: I know that in urban studies, there’s a lot of talk about whether or not the neighborhood feels like a useful unit of analysis. Historians of education also often end up working at a neighborhood level, because we’re working with schools and school districts. Did you come away with any new feelings about what happens when we focus on neighborhoods?
AE: This is really one of the things that we came to see pretty quickly. A lot of the projects that had been written about Harlem’s educational history focus on community control, or even something else, weren’t really thinking about the unit of the neighborhood, but something even smaller. And there certainly is literature that works at the neighborhood level. Wendell Pritchett’s book on Brownsville, is a great example of starting with that physical terrain and seeing what issues and changes intersect with it. But a lot of the history of education literature on New York City was really working conceptually at the level of the city.
We realized that if the neighborhood was the level you were looking at, you were going to end up telling a very different story than the one you would tell if you were trying to tell a broader city narrative. That is one of the things that we think is a contribution of the book. A lot of the big city narratives, especially the “rise and fall” narratives of American urban education, only work if you aggregate across the city as a whole. If you put the focus on a community or neighborhood that, because of its blackness, is the target of waves and waves of institutional neglect, then that “rise and fall’ narrative just doesn’t work. And so you come to see how important scale is.
But at the same time, working at the neighborhood scale, you get a sense of the incredible density of ideas, of imagination, of really powerful people working individually and collectively, and so that makes the neighborhood actually feel so much more dynamic.
DJL: But at the same time, did this end us changing how you think about New York City as an entity, either historically or in a contemporary way?
AE: New York is so small, in its own way. In my fall semester as a fellow at the Schomburg, I would walk there, from Teachers College, passing by at least 4 schools. I felt how the density really operates. When you are thinking about the lines that divide Central Harlem from the Upper West Side, or the lines that divide a particular school zone from another, you realize how small these spaces are. And that’s a benefit for me, being able to work locally, so that it’s not just like “Oh, that’s District 3 versus District 5,” abstractly. We’re talking about the difference of a few blocks, two minutes of walking time. So that sense of proximity has affected a lot of my thinking. I don’t know if it shows up in the book, but it does as a human living here.
More and more I see how every single one of these buildings, every single one of these blocks is a repository of important historical knowledge. Or is the locus of tremendous history. And the relative absence of that history from the streetscape is really striking. That’s everything from school buildings that have changed names but show no sign of their previous existence, to the relatively few historical markers. In a landscape as dense as this one is with history, it’s striking to see its relative absence. And that’s not just an absence, of course, it’s an active process of destruction, with lots of unlandmarked, but important historic things, no longer present where they used to be.
DJL: You can’t help, once you start studying education, thinking much more about parents. I’m wondering if there’s anything you wanted to say about what this book can teach us about why we should be paying attention to parents?
AE: Parents in this book appear in every historical period as really important activist leaders, as really important theorizers, and as people who are insistently present in their students’ schooling. That doesn’t mean that they agree on what that schooling should look like, or who should have authority over it, but they’re really present. In popular American discourse, we have a very dismissive set of descriptions about parents living in poverty, about black and Latinx parents. Just recognizing these stories, we see people who were living in strained circumstances, but their insistent hope for their kids led them to educational activism. It’s a good counterweight to that discourse.
We also have today a parental discourse about punishment. For example, Tennessee has talked about withholding welfare benefits for parents who don’t go to parent-teacher conferences! This is the sort of thing that is all punitive, and as social scientists would say, “deficit-minded.” And I think there’s a lot in the book that challenges that still-too-powerful deficit notion of what exists in black communities like Harlem, both past and present.
DJL: I’m wondering if over the years of seeing this project through to fruition, and as you continue to develop it through the digital space, how it changed how you interact with the larger world.
AE: I think one of the things that was on my mind a lot was humility. Trying to figure out how to recognize how important Harlem is as an American place, as a New York place, as a black place, but also to recognize how fraught it is to think about that history from Columbia University, given the troubled decisions that Columbia has made historically, and how it has responded to Harlem. So trying to work humbly, but also trying to live up to the richness of these stories and their value, was something that was on Ernest’s and my minds, both, a lot.
The wonderful thing about working slowly, and working on this project alongside other youth projects that connected us to schools, as well as a collaborative oral history project, is that we got to be learning from individuals in a lot of different positions along the way. And those conversations always reinforced both the importance of the story, and the necessity of approaching this history with a great deal of humility. We made an effort to try to represent people and institutions well, but we understood that there’s always the risk of not doing that. We’re reminded of the stakes. We’re in a community that has been so often misrepresented, or represented for so many varying agendas. It’s the challenge of this kind of work. And especially at a historically white institution, yes, with a diverse group of contributors and partners, but still, at a historically white institution. So the hope is that the resources of that institution can be put to good use.
DJL: One of my favorite things about this book is how particular characters just come up again and again, the histories can echo throughout the chapters. Obviously it’s a delicate game to pick favorites, but do you have a piece of information, or something you learned over the course of the editing, that was a revelation moment?
AE: The presence of women’s leadership, in so many ways. We always wanted to make sure that women’s voices were very clearly present throughout the work, but it really comes through when you think about who is doing so much, who’s at the front, as well as who’s doing so much of the background labor. In many of the stories that we’re telling about activism, you see women.
You also see people involved in multiple phases of work over time, and I find that really inspiring. A reminder that people are not just born doing all this, people like Ella Baker, people like Babette Edwards. They are adapting and learning and shifting, and their ideas are changing over the courses of their lives.
So many people, including those less frequently celebrated as leaders, have very clearly worked out ideas about what is missing in their children’s schooling, what is missing in their community’s schooling, what they want for their children. So leadership looks like a lot of different things.
Dominique Jean-Louis is a historian and curator at New-York Historical Society, where she most recently worked on the award-winning Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow (2018) and the exhibition Meet the Presidents which opened Presidents Day Weekend, 2020. She is a doctoral candidate in US History at New York University, where she is completing a dissertation on race, education, and youth culture in post-Civil Rights Era New York City. Dominique regularly writes and lectures on race, New York City history, and immigration.
Ansley T. Erickson is an Associate Professor of History and Education Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University and co-director of the Center on History and Education. A historian of the 20th century United States, her research focuses on the interactions between schooling, urban and metropolitan space, racism, and capitalism.