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FINDING A WAY OUT: ADULT EDUCATION IN HARLEM DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION
The struggle of black adults for equal educational opportunity for themselves is far more obscure than their struggle to achieve the same for their children. Leading black educators and their allies in the service agencies, libraries, business, and government often had goals which were in conflict with either institutional mission or the dominant societal norm. Black adults, three-fourths of whom had a grade school education or less in 1934, were not a specific concern of the growing adult education movement until the Depression when Harlem was chosen as the northern site for a national experiment. How this experiment and other contemporary programs were implemented is the subject of this study.
Harlem, home for 70 percent of Manhattan's blacks in 1930, represented the best and the worst of what was available to them in America. As a lively and physically attractive community with its own rhythm and sense of style, it gave writers a living stage, entertainers a livelihood, and patrons a taste of the exotic. In 1931, a July 18th editorial of the New York Age cited Harlem as "the greatest Negro city in the world today and greatest Negro city in history." Yet Harlem was also a reservoir of cheap labor, a spawning ground for vice, and the site of a disproportionate number of early deaths. The lack of opportunity, the physical poverty, the cheapening of human life, and the effects of racism were reflected in alarming statistics. During the Depression, Harlem's fine homes fell victim to urban blight, unemployment increased ten-fold and families on relief exceeded 50 percent. Before the Depression, privately sponsored adult education programs strengthened Harlem's positive image and campaigned against its problems. The New York Urban League, for example, conducted weekly excursions into Harlem, formed an interracial committee whose purpose was in part to inform whites about blacks, and sponsored vocational, health, and cultural classes. The Young Men's Christian Association's (YMCA) newly opened "Opportunity School" pledged itself to reduce illiteracy. James Weldon Johnson, contributing editor of the New York Age, regularly promoted adult education and black culture in his weekly column. The newspaper also conducted a crusade against crime and unscrupulous landlords. These efforts were the results...