Harlem: Cradle for New Careers

"Anything is Possible": Envisioning the Future of Schooling in Harlem, 1957-1967

Laura Pires-Hester, Social Worker at Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) 1963-65: At HARYOU, there was kind of an atmosphere, an environment, of anything is possible. And, you know, the beginning of the sixties, that's what, you know, the Kennedys ... It was like "we can do anything." We really believed the budget of $118 million ... we believed that that would be forthcoming. [Laughing] We believed that that was going to make a major change. 

Hope Leichter, Professor, Teachers College and Training Director for Parent-Teacher Teams, 1967-1970: So it was, you know, the era of the Great Society and ... these weren't empty words. Someone could go out and have an idea for how to create a more egalitarian society, create opportunities for those who wouldn't have had them. And it wasn't just like "oh, we're going to work for equity and we're going to have a benchmark of equity." It wasn't. I'm not saying it was all totally sincere - or ever is - but I'm saying it wasn't unreal. 

Laura Pires-Hester and Hope Leichter have known one another for nearly half a century. They met while working to build paraprofessional programs in New York City through an organization called the Women's Talent Corps in the late 1960s. Their paths led both of them through Harlem, where they encountered the growing "urban crisis" - including an educational crisis in the overcrowded, dilapidated, segregated schools of the area - but also a groundswell of community-based activism in response to it. Interviewed recently, Pires-Hester and Leichter were clear-eyed about the challenges that students, parents, and activists faced, but both remained awed by the energy and commitment of Harlem's activists in these years. It was this energy that produced some of the first demands for parent and early models for paraprofessional programs like Parent-Teacher Teams. 

Postwar Educational Activism in Harlem: Seeking Community Involvement

Educational activism in Harlem dates back to the early twentieth century, but a combination of factors gave this organizing new urgency in the decades following the Second World War. These included the explosive growth of Harlem's population during the Second Great Migration - leading to overcrowded schools - and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in New York City. 

The history of educational activism in New York City is most often told as a story of the failure of campaigns for school integration, which peaked with a one-day boycott of over 400,000 students in 1964. Following these campaigns, Black and Latino New Yorkers moved to seek community control of local schools, which culminated in clashes between parents and teachers in 1968. Throughout this period, however, educational activists in New York City fought for increased parent involvement and participation in school governance. Meeting with Mayor Robert F. Wagner in 1957, Harlem NAACP leader Ella Baker demanded not only the desegregation of Harlem's schools but "the highest degree of democracy" in the city's school syste, to be facilitated through increased parent involvement. One avenue for involvement that Baker and other activists proposed was direct local hiring of parents to work in public schools, where their presence would serve to support students, inform teachers, and connect parents to the educational process. 

While real ideological debates took place within and among civil rights organizations, a wide range of activists came to support local hiring by the early 1960s. Supporters of this vision included Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, who hoped such programs would desegregate the municipal workforce and open job opportunities; American Federation of Teachers Vice President Richard Parrish, who believed paraprofessional educators would improve teaching and help integrate the faculty; and radical social worker Preston Wilcox, who saw local hiring as a route to greater community participation, and ultimately community control, in public schooling. These organizers seized upon the chance to put their visions into action when the opportunity presented itself in the form of federal funds for community action.

Richard Parrish (right) receives an award for his work as president of the Community Teachers Association, in which capacity he partnered with HARYOU to create a model paraprofessional program in Harlem. (Photo Credit: New York Amsterdam News/Proquest Historical Newspapers)

Modeling Community Education at HARYOU

Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc (HARYOU), a federally-funded, community-based antipoverty organization that became a model for the War on Poverty, provided several early opportunities for parents and teachers to work together. Richard Parrish (pictured), a Harlem teacher who led the desegregation of the American Federation of Teachers in the 1950s, worked with HARYOU to hire parent educators to work with teachers in an afterschool program. The program was designed to give students the opportunity to “identify and associate with adequate role models on a more personal level” and encourage “parent and teacher cooperation.” By 1963, the program served 2,800 students at 10 Harlem schools and community centers. HARYOU's "Committee on Education and the Schools" pressured district superintendents to hire parents in similar roles, and to focus their hiring on "welfare mothers," who needed jobs that left room for childcare. 

In 1964, HARYOU published a seminal report on their activities. Titled "Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change," it not only diagnosed the challenges facing young Harlemites, but offered solutions. Among HARYOU's "Ten Anticipated Needs" for Harlem's youth was a direct call for parent educators:

“The youth of Harlem appear to be in need of parent aides or surrogates who would demand for them what middle-class parents demand and obtain for their children from schools and other social institutions. HARYOU should seek to provide machinery whereby community groups such as fraternities, sororities, social groups, PTAs, and churches assume the responsibility of this role. It would be important that the activities of these groups do not increase the dependency of the parents, but rather stimulate and motivate them to develop an increasing sense of their own power to affect desired change.”

Thanks in large part to the influence of HARYOU's model programs, and the wide reach of "Youth in the Ghetto," this was a call that came to be answered in the years to come. 

Frank Riessman works with parent educators at Mobilization for Youth on the Lower East Side. He conducted similar workshops with HARYOU students and parents in 1963 and 1964. (Photo credit: Collection of Mary Dowery). 

Harlem's Influence: The Rise of the New Careers Movement

After reading a draft of "Youth in the Ghetto," Laura Pires-Hester added an explanatory paragraph to the document. Her goal was to describe in detail the multiple benefits of hiring local residents to work with their neighbors: 

"In a very real way, the use of indigenous nonprofessionals in staff positions is forced by the dearth of trained professionals. At the same time, however, the use of such persons grows out of concern for a tendency of professionals to 'flee from the client,' and for the difficulty of communication between persons of different backgrounds and outlooks. It is HARYOU's belief that the use of persons only 'one step removed' from the client will improve the giving of service as well as provide useful and meaningful employment for Harlem's residents."

When the report was published, Pires-Hester's friend Frank Riessman, an influential social psychologist who worked with her at HARYOU, was taken with this paragraph. One year later, Riessman used it as the opening for his own policy manifesto, New Careers for the Poor: The Non-Professional in Human Services co-authored with Arthur Pearl. As Riessman explained:

This statement, take from the HARYOU proposal, forms the basis thesis of this book. Hiring the poor to serve the poor, is a fundamental approach to poverty in an automated age ... At the same time that it provides vastly improved service fo those in need, this approach can also reduce the manpower crisis in health, education, and welfare fields.

Riessman's book launched a "New Careers Movement" in antipoverty policy. In 1966, New York Congressman James H. Scheuer co-sponsored a "New Careers Amendment" to the Economic Opportunity Act (the principal act that funded War on Poverty programming) that directly funded such programs, including many in New York City. Federal officials in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), which administered the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also pushed local school districts to use newly-allocated funding from the ESEA to hire locally. As this funding made its way back down the ladder of government into Harlem and other New York City communities, the same grassroots activists and local institutions that had inspired Riessman's vision had the opportunity to put it into practice. 

Harlem: Cradle for New Careers