Introducing Harlem Prep: Expanding the Lineage of Multicultural Education in the Civil Rights Era

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Innovative Practices Within Multicultural Education

Abstract

This study explores the history of Harlem Prep, an independent community school in Central Harlem from 1967 to 1974 that successfully educated hundreds of former “pushout” and other non-traditional students. Specifically, this paper explores the school’s unique multicultural philosophy, in which school leaders and its primarily Black student population believed in “strength in diversity” and cultural tolerance in ways that mirrored early theories of multiculturalism in the early 1970s and in the practices of later decades. Contextualized within nascent scholarship on Black community educational efforts of the late 1960s and 1970s, this paper argues that scholars must re-think the history of multicultural education and revisit the significance of multiculturalism in the Civil Rights Era as being a prominent emancipatory philosophy.

Author

• Barry Goldenberg, University of California, Irvine