Cinema for Social Change: The Human Relations Film Series of the Harlem Committee of the Teachers Union, 1936-1950

• In Event: Harlem Stories: Contesting Educational Goals and Strategies for Reform in the 20th Century

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of film for the teaching of anti-racist education by the Harlem Committee of the New York City Teachers Union in the late 1940’s. The presentation introduces specifically the Harlem Committee’s 1948-1949 “human relations films” curricula and discussion series at the Teachers Union Institute. From the detailed analysis of the curricular and programmatic offerings of the Harlem Committee and accompanying educational materials of the PEA, this presentation presents new perspectives for understanding progressive and activist education during the post World War II years, introduces new viewing positions on social relations depicted in these films, and reconsiders the mid-century efforts of anti-racist, human relations, and intercultural education as situated in public schools of Harlem and New York City.

The Harlem Committee’s use of film for radical teaching arose from the “Human Relations Film Series,” developed by leftist filmmakers for the Progressive Education Association’s Eight-Year-Study and in other radical education settings in New York City during the 1940s. The longer history of the series in activist education buttressed the Harlem Committee’s belief in the power of film as a social intervention, a way of capturing the social world in material terms that would successfully mobilize student, teacher, and community audiences in the work of civil rights.

This research expands upon the historiography of radical education in Harlem as it also contributes to the historiographies of two overlapping narratives of teaching and learning: intercultural education and the mid-century use of film in non-theatrical spaces. While historians have interpreted film’s role in intercultural curricula to have a more inert role, our research reveals that New York City radical educators used film for teaching a more activist strain of intercultural education. Meanwhile, although films on the Harlem Committee’s list have been studied by film historians for their use within the context of “intergroup” relations in the 1950s our examination of these films in 1940s radical education experiments illuminates a different historical use-value.

This paper draws on films at the National Archives II: Moving Images Division; New York City teachers’ journals at the Library of Congress and US Department of Labor; manuscripts of the Teachers Union at Cornell University; New York University Educational Film Library; and local and national historical newspapers.

Authors

• Lisa Rabin, George Mason University

• Craig Kridel, University of South Carolina