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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
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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 

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References

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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.”

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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.

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