Book Excerpt! Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell

“An outstanding collection of cutting-edge essays, Educating Harlem rewrites the narrative of twentieth-century urban education. Eschewing a single thesis or grand narrative, this groundbreaking volume shows the creativity, debate, fierce love, and impassioned determination of a community to make education a human right amid the ever-changing but always inequitable landscape of New York City.”

~Martha Biondi, author of To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

We’re closing out Harlem Week with an excerpt from Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell. Over the course of the twentieth century, education was a key site for envisioning opportunities for African Americans, but the very schools they attended sometimes acted as obstacles to black flourishing. Educating Harlem brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to provide a broad consideration of the history of schooling in perhaps the nation’s most iconic black community.