Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU): Listening to Youth in 1960s Harlem

• In Event: 18.023 - Juvenile Delinquency, Student Voices, and 20th-Century School Reform

Abstract

With support from President Kennedy’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency, psychologist Kenneth Clark and a group of Harlem leaders worked to understand and improve community and educational conditions for Harlem youth in the early 1960s. They were interested not only in significant participation by community adults, in line with nascent ideas of “maximum feasible participation” and “community action” to which their work contributed. They also saw local young people as research colleagues and contributors. Youth were, as one HARYOU staffer later put it, “the helpers as well as the helped” in HARYOU. Adolescents from ages 14 through 18 helped shape HARYOU’s community study, which provided the empirical basis for Clark’s nationally-influential and best-selling 1964 Dark Ghetto and informed HARYOU community programs over the next decade.

This paper explores how HARYOU gathered, incorporated and learned from youth voices. Paying particular attention to the specific sources through which youth voices were captured, it asks how social science researchers like Clark and his colleagues conceptualized youth voice and how they sought to foster and learn from it. The manuscript collections of key figures in HARYOU, including Kenneth Clark, Olivia Pleasants Frost, and Kenneth Marshall provide extensive documentation of the project’s work with youth; HARYOU’s early phases are documented as well in the Harlem Neighborhood Association papers, all at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

In a moment in which several influential and ultimately enduring ideas about youth, and especially African American youth in cities, were in formation, HARYOU illuminates how leading thinkers and community activists of the 1960s attempted to capture and learn from the voices of young Harlem residents.

Author

• Ansley T. Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University