Harlem

When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America's Cities and Universities is a longitudinal historical account of what was undoubtedly the most audacious effort in the nation to ride the 1960s wave of black power and transform an Ivy League university's elitist practices on campus and in the surrounding community. Written to appeal to community-engaged faculty, students, and community activists in a variety of fields, the book (1) assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of experiments to achieve racial justice in Columbia University's School of Architecture and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community, (2) demonstrates how those triumphs lived on in the lives of the school's ethnic minority recruits and as best practices in university-community relationships, and in the fields of architecture and urban planning, and (3) derives lessons learned about public scholarship and service to marginalized minority communities in todays so-called colorblind society.  Its subject matter lies at the confluence of urban history, higher education, and ethnic studies, its story narrated by a cohort of the school's highly accomplished ethnic minority alumni (the author included), who offer a unique from-below perspective on Columbia's well-documented university-community conflicts of the 1960s

In the post–World War II period, the police department emerged as one of the most problematic municipal agencies in New York City. Patrolmen and their superiors did not pay much attention to crime; instead they looked the other way, received payoffs from organized crime, performed haphazardly, and tolerated conditions that were unacceptable in a modern city with global ambitions. At the same time, patrolmen demanded deference and respect from African American civilians and routinely demeaned and brutalized individuals who appeared to be challenging their authority. The antagonism between African Americans and the New York Police Department (NYPD) intensified as local and national black freedom organizations paid more attention to police behavior and made police reform one of their main goals.

In early 2018, the Studio Museum in Harlem closed its doors to the public in preparation for a radical three- year renovation project which aims to not only expand its galleries, but also—and perhaps most importantly—to establish the museum as a true nexus for the collection, display, and discussion of work by artists of African descent. In this essay, I utilize the exhibition "Fictions"—particularly artist Genevieve Gaignard’s installation, "Kings and Queens" (2017)—as a lens through which to critically examine the ways in which the Studio Museum both succeeds and falters in accomplishing its mission statement. From here, I make suggestions as to the kinds of political, artistic, and aesthetic questions the Studio Museum should ask itself during this period of profound national and institutional transition, especially as they relate to current concerns over the intersections of race, history, violence, immigration, and religion. The essay concludes with an exhibition pitch for the museum’s inaugural show in 2021, which I propose should embody a convergence of Black excellence and perseverance in the past, present, and future.

Ann Petry's The Street (1946) tracks the struggle of protagonist Lutie Johnson as she attempts to break out of the cyclical violence and poverty of mid 20 th century Harlem. This essay presents the view of " the street " as a distorting lens, exaggerating and exacerbating black disillusionment. The street warps reality; by distending images of the world around Lutie, the street creates a hostile and volatile environment. Furthermore, as revealed in Petry's novel, " the street " is a passive-aggressive, omnipresent character that pervades day-today life in contemporary African-American metropolitan neighborhoods. Moreover, " the street " actively traps its inhabitants within the physical confines of designated urban black belts. In this sense, " the street " functions as a semiconscious adversary, facilitating the establishment of color lines within the city; it is the white construct of big cities, " the North's lynch mobs " and the method " to keep Negroes in their place. " 1 By establishing the varying aspects of " the street " and its invasive effects on the black psyche, Lutie's tragic downfall is perpetuated by the negative influences of " the street, " as an ideology, not just a geographic space. Lutie first enters the scene a paragon of true American ideology; strong-willed, hard working, and full of higher aspirations. By comparing herself to role models such as Benjamin Franklin, Lutie paints herself an image of the American Dream she wishes to achieve. However, as a result of societal oppressions, particularly racism and sexism, Lutie's aspirations are systematically beaten out of her from the moment she sets foot on 116 th Street, until she is finally forced to surrender everything.

“She Wears the Mask: Black Atlantic Masquerade in the Work of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement Exhibition Catalogue, eds. Robin Lydenberg and Ash Anderson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press and McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2018, pp. 47-56.

In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.

Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

Winner, 2010 Biennial Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for First Book of History

Commended, 2010 W. K. Hancock Prize, Australian Historical Association (one of two books shortlisted)

Shortlisted, 2009 NSW Premier’s General History Prize (one of four books shortlisted)

Choice (magazine of the American Library Association), “Outstanding Academic Title,” 2009

This study examines the contents of the images on the labels of 45 skin bleaching products sold in Harlem, New York, and whether or not these images were derogatory. This study is informed by social representation theory. A t-test was used to determine the difference in images (derogatory and non-derogatory) between the general American stores' products (n=12) and an African beauty supply store's products (n=33). Content analyses of the data on the labels were conducted to understand the content of the representations. There were no significant differences in images on the labels of the products between the stores, t (43) =0.86, p>0.05. The overwhelming majority of the images (95.6%) were derogatory images which devalued black skin. The contents of these images suggested that lightening the skin would not only make the user white but would also make their skin healthy, soft and glowingly beautiful. These images suggest that lightening the black physicality is socially acceptable because white skin is the superior and sought after ideal unlike black skin which is inferior. The persistence and resilience of the same images over many decades, and their contemporary manifestations on the labels of various skin products, which are manufactured overseas and sold in different stores in the United States, suggest that they are uniform, rigid and coercive hegemonic representations that drive the sale of skin bleaching products in Harlem.

Bookended theoretically between, on the one hand, a reassessment of the Black Radical Tradition and on the other hand, a critique of mainstream performance art history, Taking It to the Streets starts in Harlem before taking the reader on a sweeping journey that calls at Chicago and Houston and ends in New Orleans. A cursory introduction to African diasporic public ceremonial culture, the essay looks to carnival and second line parades, military marches and marching bands, funeral processions and civil rights movement demonstrations for historical antecedents and to Lorraine O’Grady and Shani Peters, three decades apart from each other, Cauleen Smith, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Sol Sax and Rashaad Newsome over the last couple of years for examples of the reemergence of these forms into contemporary artistic practices with inspiration in Caribbean and African American public performance tradition.

Star Trek has long used its unique situation as a socially and politically engaged television show to approach contemporary, historical, and futuristic ideas of race, labor, gender, nature, landscape, and place. The concept of alternate perceptions of history continues to provide engaging insights into historical representation. This paper explores how Star Trek, as an example of performance, media, and popular culture, contributes to dialogues of alternate pasts, presents, and futures. It builds upon these concepts to engage with and influence geographical dialogues of public space, nature, geopolitics, and societal structure. I explore examples from the television show and the wider universe, particularly two episodes from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that are both influenced by historical figures and events and, through time travel, reveal their own historical narratives. While Star Trek continues to operate in fictional space, constructing an 'idealized' future and imagined landscapes, this paper recognizes that its influence shapes an experienced and an embodied sense of alternate past, present, and future.

Heredero de una tradición de estudios sociales con alta carga de reflexividad, Philippe Bourgois se propone en "En busca del respeto" subrayar la relación entre estricciones estructurales y acciones individuales, aún sin proponerse resolver a priori qué elemento debe prevalecer en el análisis de los relatos y en la descripción de las conductas de los traficantes de crack que son protagonistas en su libro. En la presente reseña haremos un breve repaso sobre los temas que presenta cada capítulo de la obra, sus hipótesis y las estrategias de presentación de los datos del autor, para finalizar reflexionando sobre la noción de resistencia y sobre cómo es posible abordar el estudio de la cultura de las clases subalternas. Para ello, retomaremos las advertencias que al respecto ofrece la antropóloga norteamericana Sherry Ortner y -en un diálogo interdisciplinario- algunas de las propuestas que planteara el historiador italiano Carlo Ginzburg en el ya clásico El queso y los gusanos.

On the evening of June 24, 1928, Morgan Thompson uncharacteristically lost his temper. What had provoked him was a confrontation between his seventeen-year-old son, George, and a man visiting an apartment across West 144 th Street from the building in Harlem in which the Thompson family lived. When an exchange of words about George's behavior toward a girl on the street escalated into a confrontation in which the man stepped menacingly toward George, Morgan reacted by cutting his son's foe with a knife, first on the right shoulder, and then four times on his left arm. Bleeding profusely, the man fled down the street, and located a police officer, who helped him get to Harlem Hospital. A doctor had to use eighteen stitches to close the wounds. Later that night, officers returned to West 144 th Street, roused Morgan from his bed, and arrested him. i When the police officers brought Morgan Thompson to the 16th Precinct station and charged him with assault, they initiated a legal process that brought Thompson and his family into the written record. An affidavit from the Magistrate's Court and a case file created by the District Attorney's office identified him as a forty-year-old West Indian, a bricklayer by occupation, who had resided on West 144 th Street for a decade. That information led us to census schedules and there we learned that Morgan lived with his wife of seventeen years, Margaret, a domestic servant who had also come from the West Indies, and two children, George, and fifteen-year-old Elizabeth. The family had resided in New York City since 1917, but had not become

The Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant uprisings in July 1964 were weeklong upheavals in New York City, the first of the 1960s urban black rebellions. New York’s uprisings inaugurated a new phase of American urban history that permanently reshaped race relations throughout the United States. Within days, similar explosions began in cities around the country and would continue through the summer; literally hundreds would come over the decade. During that period, tension increasingly filled the American social atmosphere every summer, with newspapers, politicians and people on the street wondering where and how destructive the next rebellion would be. At the local level, New York’s uprisings were indicative of the city’s profound, chronic unwillingness to attend to the most basic matters of civil rights.

From the end of World War II through the 1964 rebellions, the New York City government professed great regard for civil rights and had a reputation as one of the most liberal, cosmopolitan cities in the country. Its black residents, however, faced pervasive economic and social segregation and discrimination, despite notable advances in national civil rights legislation. In nearly every measurable way, black people in New York were worse off than they were twenty years earlier. School segregation had increased, both in terms of quantity and its deleterious effects, housing segregation was more pronounced, unemployment had become more deep-seated and racial economic disparity had widened. Momentous achievements such as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 left black New Yorkers’ lives largely untouched.

This situation presents one of the most clearly contrasted examples of the difficulty in fighting northern de facto segregation: black New Yorkers had plenty of laws on their side, but few people in power willing or able to enforce them. Politicians and bureaucrats steadfastly frustrated civil rights activists through a combination of stonewalling, passing responsibility and making empty promises. While the city presented a progressive face to the world, it was, in practice, no more willing to meet civil rights demands than any southern city. It succeeded in creating a generation of black youth that was much less willing to accept the city’s glacial pace approach toward these matters than its parents’ generation was. From 1945 through 1964, the city government had changed little, but that failure to evolve had deeply affected the attitudes of its large young black population toward the government and its various appendages.

From the 1920s to the early 1960s, Harlem was the intellectual and cultural center of the black world. The Harlem Renaissance movement brought together black writers, artists, and musicians from different backgrounds who helped rethink the place of black people in American society at a time of segregation and lack of recognition of their civil rights. But where is the story of African immigrants in Harlem's most recent renaissance? Africans in Harlem examines the intellectual, artistic, and creative exchanges between Africa and New York dating back to the 1910s, a story that has not been fully told until now.

During the postwar period, antibrutality activists of all stripes united under one goal in their quest to curb police violence: establishing a civilian--dominated review board that would accept complaints from citizens against police, weigh evidence, and make disciplinary recommendations to police officials. This ambition dated to at least 1936, when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's Commission on Conditions in Harlem, responding to the Harlem Riot of 1935, recommended such a board as a way to prevent future uprisings. 1 The city created no such board at the time. In 1947, the police commissioner, under pressure from civil rights leaders, appointed a ten--member board, half police officials and half community leaders, to examine how the NYPD had handled recent controversial cases. Lacking any legal power and finding the commissioner blocking its abilities to adequately conduct reviews, the board fell apart within two months. Two months after that, the commissioner dissolved it. Over the next several years, similar types of quick, shallow attempts to appease would become a pattern. 2

This paper examines the advocacy planning movement and the socio-political climate of civil rights around 1968, focusing on two case studies that are closely connected to the critique of urban renewal in the United States: firstly, the founding of the Architect's Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), the first organization solely devoted to advocacy planning in the United States, and secondly, the establishment of the City Planning Forum at Yale School of Art and Architecture, an independent governing body which consisted of all full-time faculty members and students and – in dialogue with the civil rights movement – had as its main purpose to bring greater diversity to the department. Special attention is paid to the approaches of advocacy planner C. Richard Hatch and advocacy-inclined city-planner Christopher Tunnard, Chairman of the Department of City Planning of Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture between 1966 and 1969.

The advocacy planning approaches considered urban renewal to be incompatible with any kind of socially effective approach to urban planning. The ARCH was concerned with changing the architect’s role and replacing the idea of city building with that of city living. Max Bond, its executive director, believed that “architect[s] should be […] representative[s] of the poor people, responding to their wishes, rather than […] advocate[s] of the white middle class imposing its compartmentalizing values and gridiron street plan upon Black and Spanish-speaking people who have quite other social ideals”. This concern about involving neighbourhoods in the planning of their own housing became a central issue in the Department of City Planning at Yale School of Art and Architecture after the appointment of Tunnard as Chairman in 1966. Tunnard, who, since 1954, had established City Planning at Yale, largely criticised the involvement of Yale University in urban renewal projects in New Haven. In 1969, a group of students from the Department of City Planning of Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, who marshalled a critique against the university’s role in the top-down urban renewal strategies, founded a new governance committee named City Planning Forum, which soon joined the Black Workshop, an activist group formed by ten African American design students in late 1968.

My aim is to shed light on the emergence of the advocacy planning movement around 1968 and its aspiration to respond to the fulfilment of needs related to the welfare of society as a whole and the responsibility to provide equal housing opportunities and equal access to public amenities regardless of race, religion, or national origin. ARCH and City Planning Forum’s aspiration to democratize urban planning should be understood within the context of the struggle over civil rights for African Americans in the United States in the 1960s. A paradox underlying their efforts is the fact that, despite their intention to broaden opportunities in participation, they were based on policies that maintained the centrality of federal aid and the prominence of professional expertise. The paper examines to what extent their strategies were aligned with the ambition of President Johnson’s Great Society to renew citizens’ role without undermining existing institutions. Special attention is paid to the tension between the intention of advocacy planning approaches to bring equality into the planning process and the risk of being co-opted by a local bureaucracy or a more powerful interest group.

In the first half of the 1990s, Western popular culture experienced an infusion of drag. The success of Jenny Livingston’s seminal but highly problematic documentary of the Harlem Ballroom drag scene, Paris is Burning (1991), signaled an intrigue from popular and critical circles alike. The dance form “voguing,” born of the same Harlem Ballroom scene, appeared before and after the film’s release in music videos for Liz Torres, Taylor Dayne, Malcolm McLaren, and Queen Latifah. Madonna’s song “Vogue” and its accompanying video and live performances capitalized on the dance’s underground chic that had begun to bubble over into the mainstream. RuPaul’s “Supermodel (You Better Work)” and the clean and relatable image she created for herself around it soon after catapulted her from the Queen of Manhattan to legitimate stardom. In doing so, she and her team of collaborators turned her into a household name, musical performer, model, actress, and host of her own talk show. RuPaul’s rounding off of the edges of the drag queen image led drag characters to take center stage in the films Mrs. Doubtfire (Columbus 1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliot, 1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (Kidron, 1995), and The Birdcage (Nichols, 1996). Lady Bunny’s Wigstock festival also became a documentary focus in Wigstock (Shills, 1995) during the height of drag queen visibility in film. This dissertation traces the emergence of drag into the mainstream culture of the 1990s. I argue that three separate subcultures dramatically altered the aesthetics and aims of drag: Downtown New York new wave, Harlem House Ballroom, and London New Romantic. I explore how each of these artistic nightlife cultures incorporated drag and queer performance as well as the ways that each garnered increasing attention for drag from new audiences and media outlets. Susanne Bartsch’s role as a purveyor of drag to the worlds of fashion and art are also explored. Lastly, I examine the Hollywood films mentioned above and how drag and sexuality are treated in each, reflecting the approaches major studios, directors, and actors took in seeking a heterosexual audience for drag.

Neste artigo aborda-se a representação do personagem Luke Cage, inspirado nos quadrinhos da Marvel e adaptado pela empresa Netflix. Objetiva-se observar a questão racial, considerando a história e o contexto de alguns personagens, como também se apresenta uma reflexão sobre a emancipação política da comunidade negra no Harlem. Nesse sentido, a pesquisa trata da análise das características do herói na trama e suas representações no espaço de uma comunidade sitiada, observado nos primeiros onze episódios. Para tanto, a pesquisa bibliográfica baseia-se no conceito de representação (HALL, 2000; FERRO, 1975), de racismo e emancipação política (FANON, 2010), como também, sobre o gueto (WACQUANT, 2008). Esta abordagem proporcionou uma análise sobre personagens que simbolizam o processo de emancipação de um povo submetido às vicissitudes de uma sociedade racista.

A fierce and joyful sound, and a very warm feeling in our hearts Cauleen Smith is currently working on The Supernova Procession, a genre-bending Sun Ra-inflected procession as the culmination of her residency at ISSUE project room. Claire Tancons has researched and written extensively about Carnival, public ceremonial culture and protest movements since 2004 and, since 2008, curated art processions. Smith and Tancons pursue their ongoing conversation about processions as an unparalleled mode of public engagement with deep roots in the African American tradition. ISSUE will present Cauleen Smith's The Supernova Procession, Summer 2012.

What does an educational experiment from half a century ago have to do with today?
Harlem Preparatory School was conceived as a means to prepare poor black youth in Harlem for college. Through the efforts of Baha'i teachers and administrators, including Ed, Ann Carpenter and Hussein Ahdieh, the school proved that youths who had not academically survived the public system, could achieve academic success and rise out of poverty and find a place in the professional world.
The presentation describes the history, teaching approach, profiles of typical students, community, foundation support and media attention.

In 1968, Black and white college students took over one of America's most prestigious institutions, capturing the attention of local and state elected officials, national organizations, community dwellers and prominent activists. In Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s, historian Stefan Bradley of St. Louis University documents the collision of Black student power against Columbia University's plans to build a large, private gymnasium in the park situated between the Ivy League institution and the Harlem community. The book is structured into two parts with eight well-researched chapters. The first part attempts to highlight the important factors leading up to the student occupation of five buildings on Columbia's Morningside campus; it particularly focuses on landownership and spatial control. The second part addresses the role students played in changing Columbia University, focusing on the activism of the Students' Afro-American Society (SAS) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

From its founding in 1967, the Harlem Prep School attracted the attention of educators in New York City and elsewhere for its innovative educational philosophy and process. Harlem Prep was guided by progressive education principles that promoted individual responsibility and dignity, and community engagement. The administrators of the school were inspired by the principles of the Baha'i Faith. Harlem Prep attracted many notable supporters in education, arts & entertainment, politics, and business.

A review of Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community (New York: New York University Press, 2016), and Eli Lederhendler, American Jewry: A New History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Over the course of the 1960s, while many New Yorkers, black and white, were advocating for criminalization and imprisonment of heroin users and addicts, the Harlem Neighborhoods Association, along with affiliates like Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and Dr. Kenneth Clark articulated an increasingly nuanced and evolved perspective that argued forcefully for treating drug users humanely, compassionately, and addressing the root causes of their addictions.

This article analyzes the cultural politics of gentrification as they are deployed in the Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. Based on the comic book character, Luke Cage, who was created in response to the popularity of the 1970s blaxploitation films, and the Black Power movement, the television series portrays a Black superhero who defends contemporary Harlem and its people from crime and exploitation. Critically recognized and widely watched during its first airing from 2016 to 2018, Luke Cage was a breakthrough television series that not only centered a Black superhero but directed itself to Black experience and public dialogue during the time of Black Life Matters. The Harlem portrayed in Luke Cage is both a specific community, and a virtual invocation of Black community aspiration, and the structural violence of gentrification. The violent emotions and displacement of gentrification that are presented in the series represent a form of intramural dialogue between the Black creatives working on the show and the broader Black public that is engaging with the long-time debates around the meaning and future of Harlem.

Neste artigo aborda-se a representação do personagem Luke Cage, inspirado nos quadrinhos da Marvel e adaptado pela empresa Netflix. Objetiva-se observar a questão racial, considerando a história e o contexto de alguns personagens, como também se apresenta uma reflexão sobre a emancipação política da comunidade negra no Harlem. Nesse sentido, a pesquisa trata da análise das características do herói na trama e suas representações no espaço de uma comunidade sitiada, observado nos primeiros onze episódios. Para tanto, a pesquisa bibliográfica baseia-se no conceito de representação (HALL, 2000; FERRO, 1975), de racismo e emancipação política (FANON, 2010), como também, sobre o gueto (WACQUANT, 2008). Esta abordagem proporcionou uma análise sobre personagens que simbolizam o processo de emancipação de um povo submetido às vicissitudes de uma sociedade racista.

As a working musician, I appreciated Alice Walker's story about Bessie Smith calling on two famous white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. As Smith "entered, never having seen Carl or Fania Van Vechten before…, Fania…flung herself into Bessie's arms. Bessie knocked her flat, exclaiming over a glass of straight gin: 'I never heard of such shit!'" i Like Smith, Walker notes, Zora Neale Hurston undoubtedly "knew shit when she saw it…Yet she never knocked anyone flat for having the audacity to patronize her… The difference between Hurston and Smith? One's work-singing, to which one could dance or make lovesupported her. The other's work-writing down unwritten doings and sayings of a culture nobody else seemed to give a damn about, except to wish it would more speedily conform to white, middle-class standards-did not." ii In fact, one of Huston's most underrated protagonists-a desperately poor and uneducated white woman uneasily fitting into the middle classes-would certainly have never darkened the portals of the Van Vechten home. So even though Zora Neale Hurston might have knocked me flat for presuming to speak on behalf of her creation, I have come here today to make a case for reconsidering her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee. For support, I turn to Hurston's reporting on world events during the years leading up to her final novel and on local events afterwards. No one can doubt the need for making such a case. During her "later years," writes Walker, Hurston "became frightened of the life she had always dared bravely before. Her work, too, became reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid. This is especially true of her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, which is not even about black people, which is no crime, but is about white people who are bores, which is." iii Another critic, Mary Helen Washington, asks, "How did this celebrant of black folk culture become, in later years, a right-wing Republican, publicly supporting a staunch segregationist and opposing the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision?" (125). Hurston knew, however, that promises from the political left had little credibility in the African American community. Architects of the New Deal paid little more than lip service to integration. Moreover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt capped his presidency by sending segregated forces to fight Fascism and sending US citizens with Japanese surnames to concentration camps. By the final decades of Hurston's life, when integration finally became a matter of serious interest to Liberals, commentators such as Duke Ellington worried that African American institutions would

This chapter contextualizes the use of educational documentary film in West and East Harlem classrooms of the 1930's and 1940's within national and local mandates on film education. We pay particular attention to the exhibition practices of the Harlem Committee, the most politically assertive cadre of the New York City radical Teachers Union. The Teachers Union created the Harlem Committee in 1935 to mobilize West Harlem civic and religious groups, parents, students, and community members as well as teachers in the struggle against pervasive school inequality. In the 1940's, as administrative policy and anti-Communist discourses curtailed the Harlem Committee's ability to effect structural change, their work turned towards anti-racist educational practices and curricula., with a particular interest in current documentary film. As we will show, the Harlem Committee's promotion and exhibition of documentary included activist nuances missing from both national and local instantiations of film education, opening up the possibility for Harlem students' use of film and other media as a source of social identity and change.

From the beginning of their presence in the United States, blacks faced an all-encompassing process of marginalization and inferiorization imposed by the dominant white America, so they had to adopt different kinds of strategies in order to fight marginalization and find the respect and recognition they longed for. In the 1920s, young African American writers, greatly influenced by the modernist primitivism of the post-war Europe and the hedonistic zeitgeist of the Jazz Age America, opted to give a primitive, exotic portrait of Negro life. They naïvely believed that their primitivist representational strategy could prove their unique features and worth to whites and thus could bring them a more secure status in society by fascinating the post-war disillusioned Americans. Wallace Thurman was one of these writers who was extremely marginalized because he was not only black, but also homosexual. Trying to dispose of his subalternized status in society, Thurman went for a decadent, primitivist representational strategy since he held that an exotic portrait of Negro life, which catered to the taste of dominant whites, could grant him recognition and respect of which he had been deprived due to his "non-normative" skin color and sexual orientation. This paper tries to analyze Thurman's marginality and its influence on his choice of primitivism through a critical analysis of his play Harlem. It also aims to show that Thurman's goal to achieve recognition through the exotic representation of Negro life was a naïve, simplistic agenda which never materialized.

Throughout the postwar period, Harlem’s public schools became increasingly troubled. Racial segregation intensified and dropout rates rose. Classrooms were more overcrowded than ever before, while facilities crumbled. Parents, students and community activists fought long battles against inferior black schools in Harlem, especially after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Though these people tried nearly every means at their disposal, they were unable to stop public education in Central Harlem from declining in the years following the war. They faced a complex set of issues, including housing, employment, districting policies and government intransigence. Harlem residents and activists credited these interconnected exigencies with bringing about the explosive July 1964 uprisings in the community.

In the postwar period, Central Harlem was the most crowded, run-down, segregated and economically depressed black neighborhood in Manhattan, and conditions only worsened with time. As the city’s black population and residential segregation increased throughout the postwar period, educational segregation spread and with it, inferior black schools. School board officials and local politicians professed deep concern for the city’s educational segregation, with the board of education citing the Brown decision as an affirmation of what the city’s educational system already held to be true. After years of fruitless picketing and conferences with city officials, parents in Central Harlem began withdrawing their children from inferior segregated schools in 1958, instead preferring to educate them through tutoring.

In attempts to call attention to the many problems black New York City public school students faced, two one-day student boycotts in February and March of 1964 kept 45 percent and 25 percent of the city’s public school children out of school on those respective days. With the cry of “Boycott Jim Crow Schools,” the Harlem Parents Committee enjoined every mother and father of a school-age child to refuse to send their children to inferior schools. The committee also led a struggle for an educational concept that discarded Euro- and Anglocentric models of history in favor of one that taught black and Puerto Rican history in a proportional way. Examining these demands helps us to see the emergence of Black Power in the city as a logical outgrowth of frustration, as opposed to a nihilistic, irrational force. Despite school integration proponents’ best efforts, including multiple boycotts, sit-ins, conferences, pickets, legal intervention and more, schools were more segregated by the mid-1960s and children of color were worse off than they were in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision that invalidated separate but equal educational facilities.

This paper shows the ways in which Harlem’s public schools became increasingly segregated in the twenty years following the Second World War, leading up to the explosive July 1964 rebellions in Central Harlem and Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Residential segregation was a crucial factor in producing and maintaining Harlem’s segregated schools. Unlike today, parents in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s had no choice but to send their children to local schools. The city had a strict policy of neighborhood schools, which meant students learned where they lived, unless they went to private schools, which were not an option for most black students. Segregated neighborhoods produced segregated schools, and by the mid-1960s, there were more segregated schools than ever before. While this was a time of progress for the national civil rights movement, New York’s civil rights movement was unable to prevent social, political and economic conditions from worsening in Manhattan’s largest black neighborhood. Many of the students’ parents had recently escaped the physical and emotional violence of the Jim Crow South to seek better opportunities in New York, with its reputation for racial liberalism and economic opportunity. Instead, they found the quiet misery and slow violence of the city, with its combination of residential and educational segregation, which combined to produce poor employment prospects.

Using the Harlem Neighborhoods Association archives at the Schomburg Center, I am able to trace the ceaseless activities of Central Harlem activists and residents to combat segregated housing and schools. I will also use newspapers, NAACP branch files and social science research, such as that from Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU).

This paper makes substantial historiographical contributions to the histories of education, civil rights, and New York City. While some scholars, such as Adina Back and Clarence Taylor have written on parents’ and activists’ efforts to desegregate New York City’s schools, all have looked at the city in its entirety. In doing so, though these scholars have given us vital information on citywide school desegregation, they have not given Harlem the attention it deserves. Harlem has a long history as a site of black political organizing dating back into the 19th century, making it the urban center of the black diaspora. Also, none of these scholars places appropriate emphasis on the vital connections between housing, education and employment, linkages which activists and parents made evident at the time. While we may not think of financial institutions as having a role in creating educational segregation, it was in fact banks and mortgage brokers who decided who would be allowed to live where in New York City through granting or not granting loans, the results of which in turn fed students into the city’s neighborhood schools.

Harlem’s segregated schools are as timely a topic as they have ever been. Though nearly fifty years have passed since the end of the time period I cover, predominantly black public schools in New York City are still staffed by a much larger number of short-term teachers than are predominantly white schools, with teachers in majority black schools also earning significantly less money. Black students in the city’s public schools face a disproportionate discipline rate when compared to white students for committing the same offenses, helping to feed the school to prison pipeline. My research helps us to understand how the problems of the past continue into today, what remedies have already been attempted and how we might address segregated schools in the future.

作为一种被技术和社会的复杂性融合塑造的艺术形式，爵士一度被誉为“美 国的古典乐”。本文把物理空间的演变作为分析爵士乐历史的重要元素，􏰀述了 艾灵顿公爵的故事以及棉花俱乐部和哈拉姆爵士乐在 1927 年至 1931 年间的演 变。棉花俱乐部不仅涵盖了种族、贫富、阶层之间的浓缩和重叠，并将其映射在 爵士的音乐性里;而且，它链接和延伸了另外两个空间:一个是前棉花俱乐部时 代的华盛顿，另一个是后棉花俱乐部时代的音乐圣殿卡内基大厅。从深邃的南方 到华盛顿到纽约，从哈莱姆到棉花俱乐部到卡内基大厅，每一次爵士空间的变化， 都映射且建构了爵士本身的演变:技术性的和社会性的。如果说艾灵顿公爵 1927 年在棉花俱乐部的首秀，是爵士乐“超越边界”的尝试的话，那他在卡内基大厅 的首秀，则是要“打破边界”。作为一个时代的一种音乐表达，爵士意味着音乐 的言论自由，因此，“何为爵士”的问题注定要被争论而无定论。As an art form shaped by the its technical and social complexity, jazz was once known as "American classical music". This article takes the transformation of physical space as an important element in the analysis of jazz history, describing the story of Duke Ellington and the interaction of the Cotton Club and Haram Jazz from 1927 to 1931. The Cotton Club not only projects the overlapped intricacy across race, class and social status into the musicality of jazz; but also links and extends two other spaces: one is Washington in the pre-cotton club era; and the other is the Carnegie Hall, a music temple in the post-cotton club era. From the deep South to Washington to New York City, from Harlem to the Cotton Club to the Carnegie Hall, every change in jazz space reflects and constructs the evolution of jazz itself: both technically and socially. If the Duke Ellington's debut at the Cotton Club in 1927 was an attempt of "beyond category” of jazz, then his debut at Carnegie Hall was to "break category." As a musical expression of an era, jazz means freedom of speech in music. Therefore, the question of "what is jazz" is destined to be debated without a conclusion.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/rasheed-storey-1936-2016/
Rasheed Linway Storey, factory worker and Communist organizer, was born February 21, 1936 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Ella Mae Kimball Storey of Mobile, Alabama and James Enes Storey of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Reared in West Philadelphia’s Mill Creek, Storey attended Overbrook High for two-years beginning in 1951 where he was a classmate of Wilt Chamberlain...

Neste artigo aborda-se a representação do personagem Luke Cage, inspirado nos quadrinhos da Marvel e adaptado pela empresa Netflix. Objetiva-se observar a questão racial, considerando a história e o contexto de alguns personagens, como também se apresenta uma reflexão sobre a emancipação política da comunidade negra no Harlem. Nesse sentido, a pesquisa trata da análise das características do herói na trama e suas representações no espaço de uma comunidade sitiada, observado nos primeiros onze episódios. Para tanto, a pesquisa bibliográfica baseia-se no conceito de representação (HALL, 2000; FERRO, 1975), de racismo e emancipação política (FANON, 2010), como também, sobre o gueto (WACQUANT, 2008). Esta abordagem proporcionou uma análise sobre personagens que simbolizam o processo de emancipação de um povo submetido às vicissitudes de uma sociedade racista.

En el momento actual, marcado por el horror de la pandemia, la promesa de la indignación colectiva en nuestras calles y la incertidumbre sobre el futuro, el New York de la novela Jazz de Toni Morrison se refracta en una anamorfosis singular,  donde de nuevo “todo queda por delante”, “como la Ciudad en 1926 cuando todas las guerras han terminado y nunca habrá otra.”  Pero si no lo sabíamos en 1926, sabemos hoy que las guerras nunca se acaban.


https://in-cubadora.com/2020/06/12/oscar-j-montero-%c2%b7nyc-2020-y-el-jazz-de-morrison%c2%b7/

As a working musician, I appreciated Alice Walker's story about Bessie Smith calling on two famous white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. As Smith "entered, never having seen Carl or Fania Van Vechten before…, Fania…flung herself into Bessie's arms. Bessie knocked her flat, exclaiming over a glass of straight gin: 'I never heard of such shit!'" i Like Smith, Walker notes, Zora Neale Hurston undoubtedly "knew shit when she saw it…Yet she never knocked anyone flat for having the audacity to patronize her… The difference between Hurston and Smith? One's work-singing, to which one could dance or make lovesupported her. The other's work-writing down unwritten doings and sayings of a culture nobody else seemed to give a damn about, except to wish it would more speedily conform to white, middle-class standards-did not." ii In fact, one of Huston's most underrated protagonists-a desperately poor and uneducated white woman uneasily fitting into the middle classes-would certainly have never darkened the portals of the Van Vechten home. So even though Zora Neale Hurston might have knocked me flat for presuming to speak on behalf of her creation, I have come here today to make a case for reconsidering her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee. For support, I turn to Hurston's reporting on world events during the years leading up to her final novel and on local events afterwards. No one can doubt the need for making such a case. During her "later years," writes Walker, Hurston "became frightened of the life she had always dared bravely before. Her work, too, became reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid. This is especially true of her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, which is not even about black people, which is no crime, but is about white people who are bores, which is." iii Another critic, Mary Helen Washington, asks, "How did this celebrant of black folk culture become, in later years, a right-wing Republican, publicly supporting a staunch segregationist and opposing the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision?" (125). Hurston knew, however, that promises from the political left had little credibility in the African American community. Architects of the New Deal paid little more than lip service to integration. Moreover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt capped his presidency by sending segregated forces to fight Fascism and sending US citizens with Japanese surnames to concentration camps. By the final decades of Hurston's life, when integration finally became a matter of serious interest to Liberals, commentators such as Duke Ellington worried that African American institutions would

This master thesis focuses on the interrelation of public housing policies and concentration of poverty in hyper-segregated American inner cities known by the name of 'Urban Renewal' and 'Slum Clearance' in the 1930's and 1960's, and currently 'Neighborhood Revitalization'. The thesis' hypothesis is that the privatization of public housing in Harlem, New York City will lead to a third collapse of a black community, resegregating and reconcentrating the most vulnerable to less desirable areas with less infrastructure, less access to available jobs and desolate housing conditions, affecting inhabitants depending not only on their class, but also their race. It thereby reproduces racial hierarchies by empowering elitist stakeholders, letting them create enclaves of 'whiteness', even if they intend to do that within a ghettoized neighborhood.
Earlier in the century, poverty-ridden neighborhoods were attempted to be uplifted through installment of public housing, but due to systemic racism, this led to further concentration of poverty inside public housing projects. It contributed to a deteriorating inner city and forced Harlem into a ghetto. Especially distressing is the fact that it ensured that people of color were not able to flee these circumstances to the suburbs as whites were capable of. Twice in New York, poor black communities were broken apart by demolishing and rebuilding public housing installments. It will be argued that this phenomenon happens today again by leasing and selling off public grounds step-by-step to private developers who intend to build “affordable housing”. This housing is not affordable to affected black public housing tenants, but to the newcomers and therefore contributes to the tenants' continuing displacement.
In order to validate the findings through empirical research, two anthropological methods will be applied: Participant observation and in-depth interviews. The findings will be analyzed with Philipp Mayring's Qualitative Content Analysis. Having attended numerous Committee Board Meetings in Harlem, which are a government advisory board at the most grassroots level of the city and are quite unique in the US-American urban landscape, having visited public housing sites and talked to tenants the investigation will be complemented by interviewing a community advocate and two experts on public housing and affordable housing. The gathered data will be backed up with the 2015 Furman Center Study and data collected by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) from 2014.

Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York by Fiona I. B. Ngô (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2014)

Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America by Donald L. Miller (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2014)