Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T09:24:12.010Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Negotiating the Aims of African American Adult Education: Race and Liberalism in the Harlem Experiment, 1931–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2018

Amato Nocera
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines an “experimental” program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)—who believed in the value of liberal adult education for democratic citizenship—and several prominent black reformers who led the program. I argue that the program represented a negotiation between these two groups over whether the black culture, politics, and protest that had developed in 1920s Harlem could be deradicalized and incorporated within the funder's “elite liberalism”—an approach to philanthropy that emphasized ideological neutrality, scholarly professionalism, and political gradualism. In his role as the official evaluator, African American philosopher Alain Locke insisted that it could, arguing that the program, and its occasionally Afrocentric curriculum, aligned with elite liberal ideals and demonstrated the capacity for a broader definition of (historically white) liberal citizenship. While the program was ultimately abandoned in the mid-1930s, the efforts of Locke and other black reformers helped pave the way for a future instantiation of racial incorporation: the intercultural education movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © History of Education Society 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Morse A. Cartwright, “Adult Education: What? Why?,” in Findings of the First Annual Conference on Adult Education and the Negro, Held at Hampton Institute, Virginia, October 20–22, 1938 (Hampton, VA: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1938), 5.

2 For information on the history of adult education, see Grattan, Clinton Hartley, In Quest of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Adult Education (New York: Association Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Knowles, Malcolm S., A History of the Adult Education Movement in the United States (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company, 1994)Google Scholar; Amy Deborah Rose, “Toward the Organization of Knowledge: Professional Adult Education in the 1920s” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979); and Stubblefield, Harold W., Towards a History of Adult Education in America: The Search for a Unifying Principle (London: Croom Helm, 1988)Google Scholar.

3 Rose, “Toward the Organization of Knowledge”; Alan L. Jones, “Gaining Self-Consciousness While Losing the Movement: The American Association for Adult Education 1926–1941” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1991); Michael J. Day, “Adult Education as a New Educational Frontier: Review of the Journal of Adult Education, 1929–1941” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1981); Stubblefield, Towards a History of Adult Education; and Keith, William M., Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 Locke, Alain, ed., “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” special issue, Survey Graphic, no. 11 (March 1925)Google Scholar.

5 For an example of Keppel's interest African American art, see Keppel, Frederick P. and Duffus, Robert L., The Arts in American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1933), 32–33 Google Scholar.

6 For examples of this, see Harris, Leonard and Molesworth, Charles, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)Google Scholar; M. Anthony Fitchue, “Situating the Contributions of Alain Leroy Locke within the History of American Adult Education, 1920–1953” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1995); and Armfield, Felix L., Eugene Kinckle Jones: The National Urban League and Black Social Work, 1910–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Ferguson, Karen, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ferguson highlights that black reformers often embraced respectability politics—policing African American's moral and behavioral standards—as a means of “prov[ing] the citizenship of black people.” With the Harlem Experiment, Locke shifted respectability politics from the behavioral to the scholarly, emphasizing that black art and scholarship could live up to the standards of elite liberalism and that African Americans were worthy of inclusion within the concept of liberal citizenship.

8 For information about institutional incorporation of the civil rights and black power movements, see Ferguson, Roderick A., The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rojas, Fabio, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Ferguson, Karen, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The history of philanthropic involvement in African American education has amassed a considerable literature in recent decades. See, for example, Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Eric and Moss, Alfred A., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902– 1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Watkins, William H., The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865– 1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

10 Keppel, David, FPK: An Intimate Biography of Frederick Paul Keppel (Washington DC: privately printed, 1950)Google Scholar.

11 Lagemann, Ellen Condiffe, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 106.

13 Keppel, Frederick P., “Education for Adults,” in Education for Adults and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), 15Google Scholar.

14 Keppel noted in the mid-1930s that the Corporation was “in consultation with no fewer than 68 national scholarly organizations” to “provide a check and balance … [and] to protect the [Corporation] from the danger of arbitrary decisions.” Keppel, Frederick P., “Philanthropy and Learning,” in Philanthropy and Learning, with Other Papers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 14–15 Google Scholar.

15 Cartwright, Morse A., “Annual Report of the Director in Behalf of the Executive Board for 1933–34,” Journal of Adult Education 6, no. 3 (April 1934), 345Google Scholar.

16 Keppel, Frederick P., “Report of the President,” Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1937), 49Google Scholar.

17 Cartwright, “Annual Report of the Director,” 1934, 346.

18 For an overview of elite whites’ response to Black migration into northern cities, see Miller, Karen R., Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit (New York: NYU Press, 2015)Google Scholar; and Gordon, Leah N., From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; and Kliebard, Herbert M., “‘That Evil Genius of the Negro Race’: Thomas Jesse Jones and Educational Reform,” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 10, no. 1 (Fall 1994), 5–20 Google Scholar.

20 Richard David Heyman, “The Role of the Carnegie Corporation in Africa, 1925–1960,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1970).

21 Jones, Thomas Jesse, Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), 2Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., vol. 1, 4.

23 Ibid., 7.

24 Edwin R. Embree, “Vocational Education,” Edwin Roger Embree Papers, box 6, folder 8, (hereafter Embree Papers), 2.

25 Ibid., 4.

26 Edwin R. Embree, “Objectives of Colonial Education,” box 6, folder 9, Embree Papers, 8.

27 Ibid., 2.

28 Quoted in Hine, Darlene Clark, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 213Google Scholar.

29 Schuyler, George S., “Mr. Embree Discovers a New Race,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 10, no. 6 (June 1932), 175–76Google Scholar.

30 Keppel and Duffus, The Arts in American Life, 32.

31 Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder & Company, 1867), viiiGoogle Scholar.

32 Heyman, “The Role of the Carnegie Corporation in Africa,” 21. On the influence of the Corporation and the Phelps-Stokes Fund in Africa, see also Glotzer, Richard, “A Long Shadow: Frederick P. Keppel, the Carnegie Corporation and the Dominions and Colonies Fund Area Experts 1923–1943,” History of Education 38, no. 5 (Sept. 2009), 621–648 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rich, Paul B., White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism 1921–60 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

33 Morse A. Cartwright, interviewed by Isabel S. Grossner, June 5, 1967, Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project: Phase I, 205, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University, New York.

34 Frederick P. Keppel to Arthur Schomburg, Jan. 8, 1936, box 4, folder 28, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

35 Johnson, James Weldon, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 3Google Scholar.

36 Frazier, Franklin E., “Negro Harlem: An Ecological Study,” American Journal of Sociology 43, no. 1 (July 1937), 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Johnson, Black Manhattan, 151.

38 For authoritative histories of the Harlem Renaissance, see Lewis, David L., When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981)Google Scholar; Baker, Houston A. Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

39 Hughes, Langston, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation 122 (June 23, 1926), 692–94Google Scholar.

40 Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta, 4.

41 Armfield, Eugene Kinckle Jones, 37.

42 It is possible to view Jones's racial conservatism in light of the NUL's dependence on white funders. As a number of historians have pointed out, white philanthropists often used their social and political power to define “acceptable” black politics and stem radicalism. See Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Gasman, Marybeth, “Rhetoric vs. Reality: The Fundraising Messages of the United Negro College Fund in the Immediate Aftermath of the Brown Decision,” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 70–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Arnove, Robert F., ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980)Google Scholar.

43 Elizabeth Bennett, “A Report of the Harlem Adult Education Experiment” (master's thesis, New York School of Social Work, 1932), 25.

44 Eugene Kinckle Jones, “The Negro Community's Responsibility for Mass Education,” in Findings of the First Annual Conference on Adult Education and the Negro, 69–70.

45 Bennett, “A Report of the Harlem Adult Education Experiment,” 5.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., 6.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 7. While this reputation certainly made Atlanta far from typical in the South, the reality of Atlanta's racial politics did not conform to its image. See Kruse, Kevin M., White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

50 Cartwright, Morse A., “Annual Report of the Director in Behalf of the Executive Board for 1930–31” in Journal of Adult Education 3, no. 3 (April 1931), 380Google Scholar.

51 Alain Locke, “Report on Negro Adult Education Projects” March 15, 1934, series III, box 10, folder 10, Carnegie Corporation of New York Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York (hereafter Carnegie Corporation Records).

52 Reid, Ira De A., Adult Education among Negroes (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), 20Google Scholar.

53 Bennett, “A Report of the Harlem Adult Education Experiment,” 9.

54 “$15,000 Given for Education Project Committee Launched for Adult Program—Dixie City Gets $6000,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 16, 1931, 9.

55 Bennett, “A Report of the Harlem Adult Education Experiment,” 45.

56 Ibid., 46. Meeting minutes for the Harlem Adult Education Experiment show it was rare for more than five members to attend the monthly meetings.

57 “Community Life,” (New York) Dunbar News, Feb. 24, 1932 as quoted in Bennett, “A Report of the Harlem Adult Education Experiment.”

58 Rose, Ernestine, “Racial Development and Cooperation: A Record of Two Experiments,” Journal of Adult Education 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1933), 55Google Scholar.

59 Ibid., 56.

60 “Report to Mr. Cartwright for the Quarter,” 1933, box 7, folder 7, 135th Street Branch Records, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library (hereafter 135th Street Branch Records).

61 “Course on Human Relations,” box 7, folder 8, 135th Street Branch Records.

62 “Excellent Program Given by Combined Choruses of New York and Brooklyn,” New York Age, June 10, 1933, 7.

63 “Art by Negroes of Harlem Put on Exhibition,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 28, 1933, 40.

64 Bement, Alon, “Some Notes on a Harlem Art Exhibit,” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life 11, no. 11 (Nov. 1933), 340Google Scholar.

65 Turner, Joyce Moore, “From Barbados to Harlem,” in Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920–1972 , ed. Burghardt, W. Turner and Joyce Moore Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 30Google Scholar.

66 P-138 to the Bureau, April 4, 1921, Casefile BS 202600-667, in Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans, 1917–1925: the First World War, the Red Scare, and the Garvey Movement, ed. Kornweibel, Theodore (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1985)Google Scholar, microfilm, reel 7, 316.

67 P-138 to the Bureau, Oct. 10, 1920, Casefile BS 202600-667, in Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans, 1917–1925, reel 7, 313.

68 Emancipator, April 20, 1920, quoted in Makalani, Minkah, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism From Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 39–40 Google Scholar.

69 Ernestine Rose, “Advising Readers in Harlem,” box 6, folder 8, 135th Street Branch Records, 3.

70 “‘New World Order’ to Be Discussed at Harlem Forum,” New York Age, June 4, 1932, 10.

71 “Propaganda against Dark Races Hit by Bell[e]garde,” Atlanta Daily World, June 5, 1932, 6.

72 “Sound Need for Better Business: Holsey Tells Adult Education Forum,” New York Amsterdam News, March 16, 1932, 11.

73 Reid, Adult Education Among Negroes, 55. Other than a single statement by Reid, there is little evidence that this happened.

74 Allen G. Cleveland, “Race Labor and NRA Discussed at Institute: Clark Foreman and Others on the New York Program,” Chicago Defender, Aug. 4, 1934, 24; and “The Labor Institute,” New York Amsterdam News, July 28, 1934, 8.

75 Rose, “Advising Readers in Harlem.”

76 Studebaker, John W., The American Way: Democracy at Work in the Des Moines Forums (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935)Google Scholar.

77 Ibid., 3.

78 Cartwright, Morse A., Ten Years of Adult Education: A Report on a Decade of Progress in the American Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 140Google Scholar.

79 Ernestine Rose, “First Quarterly Report to Mr. Cartwright,” October 4, 1932, box 7, folder 7, 135th Street Branch Records.

80 Quoted in Heyman, “The Role of the Carnegie Corporation in Africa,” 104.

81 Morse Cartwright to Frederick Keppel, memo, April 18, 1939, series III, box 13, folder 19, Carnegie Corporation Records.

82 Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 119–27.

83 Kallen, Horace, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism” Journal of Philosophy 54, no. 5 (Feb. 1957), 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Locke, Alain, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic 53, no. 11 (March 1925), 631Google Scholar.

85 Alain Locke, “Negro Needs as Adult Education Opportunities,” in Findings of the First Annual Conference on Adult Education and the Negro, 8.

86 Fitchue, “Situating the Contributions of Alain Leroy Locke,” 289–90.

87 Locke, “Report on Negro Adult Education Projects,” 3.

88 Ibid., 2.

89 Locke, Alain, “Lessons of Negro Adult Education,” in Adult Education in Action, ed. Ely, Mary L. (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1936), 225Google Scholar.

90 Locke, Alain, “The Harlem Experiment,” Journal of Adult Education 5, no. 3 (June 1933), 303Google Scholar.

91 Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 119.

92 Alain Locke, “The Question of Race Tradition: Society for Research Hears Subject Discussed,” The (Chicago) Broad Ax, Jan. 20, 1912, 4.

93 Locke, “Report on Negro Adult Education Projects,” 2.

94 Cartwright, “Annual Report of the Director,” 1934.

95 Alain Locke, “Objectives of Adult Education,” box 164–167, folder 8, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (hereafter Locke Papers).

96 Locke, Alain, “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism, Part II,” in The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of his Essays on Art and Culture, ed. Stewart, Jeffrey C. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983), 233Google Scholar.

97 Locke, Alain, “The High Cost of Prejudice,” The Forum 78 (Dec. 1927), 507Google Scholar.

98 Locke, “Report on Negro Adult Education Projects,” 5.

99 Frederick Keppel to Mr. Cartwright, memo April 2, 1934, series III, box 10, folder 10, Carnegie Corporation Records.

100 “FPK and MAC,” memorandum of interview between Frederick Keppel and Morse Cartwright, Nov. 7, 1934, series III, box 10, folder 10, Carnegie Corporation Records.

101 Cain, Rudolph A., Alain Leroy Locke: Race, Culture, and the Education of African American Adults (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 41Google Scholar.

102 Morse Cartwright to Frederick Keppel, Nov. 20, 1934, series III, box 10, folder 10, Carnegie Corporation Records.

103 Morse Cartwright to Alain Locke, June 21, 1934, box 164–19, folder 54, Locke Papers. The final budget for the two programs was $6,000.

104 Fitchue, “Situating the Contributions of Alain Leroy Locke,” 298.

105 The Associates received roughly $12,000 in their ten years of operations (1935–1945).

106 Lagemann suggests that Keppel's experience with the Harlem Experiment, and his relationship with Locke, may have been on his mind when he conceived of Myrdal's study. See Lagemann, Politics of Knowledge, 129–32. For Myrdal's study see: Myrdal, Gunnar, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944)Google Scholar.

107 Locke, Alain, “Education for Adulthood,” Adult Education Journal 6, (July 1947), 110Google Scholar.

108 Harris, Leonard, Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917 (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 1983)Google Scholar.