Harlem History Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Effectively ending federal non-involvement in mental illness in the US, John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Care Act in October 1963. Some psychoanalysts took to the CMHC movement, some not, while others had been working in community-based services like the Lafargue clinic in Harlem since the 1950s. To what extent did America’s historical tendency to merge social class and race influence these psychoanalysts, their theories, their formal associations like APSaA? To understand the psychoanalytic profession’s construction of race and of white-black relations in the 1960s, this essay is not a history but rather a historiographic inquiry that explores how key players of the era itself understood the
challenge. Based solely on materials written or spoken between 1958 and 1972, this is a narrative of power
that interweaves the mid-century union of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the residues of slavery, and the on-going white ambivalence about the emerging influence of a multi-ethnic, religiously diverse popular campaign for basic civil rights. With few exceptions, the psychoanalysts tended to idealize their own sense of democracy while remaining oblivious to the exclusionary nature of their enclaves. Ultimately, however, we find that American psychoanalysis was probably no more racist in the 1960s than other systems of thought, but no less either.

- by Elizabeth Ann Danto
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- Race and Racism, History Of Psychoanalysis, Harlem History

On any given weekday, you can find families, intrepid athletes, elderly strollers, and young friends grazing Riverbank Park along the West Harlem landscape. The twenty-eight acre park is home to an Olympic-sized pool, an athletic complex with a gym, tennis and handball courts, a cultural theater holding eight hundred people, and a covered skating rink where people can ice-skate in the winter and roller-skate in the summer. This place did not come about from the plans of elected politicians. Nor is it the product of any philanthropic interest looking to extend their name into new territory. Riverbank State Park was built precisely as a result of what lies underneath this haven of green, a water treatment facility servicing some one million residents of Upper Manhattan—North River Water Treatment Plant—and the surrounding residents’ response to this being built in their backyard.

- by Isaac Carrino
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- History, American History, Drugs and drug culture, Organized Crime

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.

Riffing on the multiple resonances of black stars, I explore the diasporic entanglements of Harlem’s churches and music clubs and examine how sacred and profane activities have often occupied the very same city spaces. This essay appears... more

- by shane white
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- Colorism, Local Government, Life Style, Housing
- by Jasmin Young
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- Social Movements, Harlem History, Columbia University, Harlem

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.

- by Hussein Ahdieh
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- Education, Educational Research, History of Black Popular Culture, Charter schools
- by Nancy Deffebach
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- Modern Art, Painting, Great Depression, American art/ Art of the United States

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.

- by Lisa Rabin
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- History of Education, History of Film, East Harlem, Harlem History
- by Davide Mano
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- Israel/Palestine, Colonialism, Religious Conversion, History of Missions
- by shane white
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- Digital Humanities, Historical GIS, Segregation, Urban History