printable versionHarlem streets offer lessons to spring break study group
20 students, faculty and staff visit New York neighborhood
BY BARBARA PALMER
Participants in the African and African American Studies Program's learning expedition to Harlem surround an artwork inlaid in the lobby floor at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
It's hard to imagine a more visceral illustration of the complexities of contemporary Harlem than the scene that unfolded on March 28, not far from the area's historical heart at Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue) and West 125th Street.
Under a gray sky, 20 participants in a learning expedition sponsored by the Program in African and African American Studies stood on a sidewalk in a circle around Michael Henry Adams, author of an architectural and social history of the area, who was dressed in a bowler hat and hand-tailored waistcoat. The Stanford students, faculty and staff listened as the historian told stories about the poets and writers, jazz musicians and entrepreneurs who peopled the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when "Harlem was the center of the universe," as Adams put it.
Discussing the accelerating gentrification of the once-blighted area, Adams described the rapid rise in prices of its brownstones and tenements, and the displacement of longtime residents. The historian actively opposes the dismantling of Harlem's historic buildings to make way for development, a trend that he terms "cultural genocide."
One resident watched the street, without expression, from a second-story window. Suddenly, a man who looked about 60, but could have been have a decade older or younger, broke into the circle. "Get out of our neighborhood," he demanded loudly and angrily, speaking directly to Adams, but including with his gestures the predominantly African American study group. "Get out of our neighborhood," he repeated, until another, younger man, led him away.
Since the early part of the 20th century, when African Americans and other immigrants began moving there in large numbers, Harlem has been a bittersweet center of struggle and opportunity and the locus of African American social, political and artistic identity.
"For black America, Harlem is the defining American city," said Lawrence Bobo, the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor, who directed the trip. Bobo, a professor of sociology, is director of the Program in African and African American Studies (AAAS) and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. "Going on this sort of expedition takes the experience out of the context of routine reading, studying and test taking. It puts history, culture and politics into personal experience and demands a very different kind of engagement and reflection."
The AAAS program began its learning expeditions, which are offered as a course, in 1999 as a way to increase student awareness of the multifaceted nature of the African Diaspora around the United States and the world. Groups previously have traveled to the Sea Islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia and to Jamaica, Ghana and Belize.
In heading to Harlem, "I deliberately chose a site that was not particularly exotic or 'sexy,' but of genuinely critical importance to how African American studies is taught around the country," the professor said. And, he added, the time was ripe.
Early in the weeklong trip, Bobo had sat in the basement of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, wondering how the church, one of Harlem's leading institutions, would hold up under the onslaught of change. "It's important to see [Harlem] now," he said. "It'll be radically different in five or 10 years."
Hip-hop history, soul food and moreHarlem's gentrification was only one of the themes that the learning expedition explored. Organizers described the trip as an "immersion" into the culture and history; the intensity and range of experience offered by the closely packed itinerary also resembled a waterfall.
In addition to the walking tour with Adams—which ended with refreshments in Adams' Harlem apartment, which he must soon vacate, due to its impending sale—the group toured the neighborhood with architect John Reddick, who pointed out such landmarks as the Lenox Lounge (and Billie Holiday's table in the lounge's Zebra Room); the Apollo Theater; the site of the studio of Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee; and the old Blumstein's Department Store, the site of an early boycott that resulted in the store integrating its staff.
Another afternoon was spent touring Harlem and the Bronx with Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers, who narrated a history of hip-hop. Trip participants spent time at the offices of the New York City Bar Association, where trip participants examined historical documents related to anti-slavery and anti-segregation cases, and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where artwork inlaid in a lobby floor holds ashes of the poet Langston Hughes. They also fit in performances of jazz and classical music, visits to art galleries, a Broadway play and dozens—and dozens—of platters of soul food.
"I think everyone responded differently to the variety of experiences we shared," said AAAS Associate Director Vera Grant, who designed the trip's itinerary and also created a lecture series during winter quarter that prepared participants for the expedition. Grant also carved out times—late at night over pizza or over morning cups of coffee—for group participants to talk about what they seen and experienced. "We all take something different with us and we don't know what will come of it, but fantastic things usually do," she said.
For many participants, the emotional and intellectual centerpiece of the trip was at the Ted Weiss Federal Building downtown, the site of the African Burial Ground. In 1991, the remains of hundreds of African Americans who died in the 17th and 18th centuries were discovered when construction crews were doing pre-construction excavation.
Remains of 419 people were eventually exhumed and analyzed at Howard University before being reburied at the site. The discovery uncovered tangible evidence of slavery in the North. In 1703, 42 percent of New York's households owned slaves and almost one in five colonial New Yorkers was an enslaved black person. It also revealed slavery's harsh conditions: Many of the remains were of children, whose bones showed signs of disease and stress fractures from overwork.
The discoveries at the African Burial Ground, now a national monument, led to the creation of an exhibit, "Slavery in New York," at the New York Historical Society, which trip participants visited on its crowded final day.
The number of people flooding into the exhibit underscored for student Amanda Johnson the incompleteness of what is taught about slavery in schools. "There are missing pieces of history," Johnson said.
For student Ruth Stefanos, whose parents emigrated from Eritrea before she was born, the trip helped her connect the African and African American parts of herself, she said. "It was always a balancing act. I felt divided."
An exhibit on African and African American migration at the Schomburg Center helped her appreciate the diversity of the African Diaspora and its place in American history, she said. "I never thought of it as a continuing story before," she said. "It fills in the gaps of my own history."
For Dandré DeSandies, associate director for freshman advising, the trip was an opportunity to revisit the streets he walked as a kid. His grandparents emigrated from Trinidad to Harlem, and his parents left its crime and drug-infested neighborhoods when he was a child. "That was back when people were trying to get out, not to get in," DeSandies said. "We left Harlem," he added, "but Harlem never left us."
