Growing Up in Harlem

Deborah Lucas-Davis was born and raised in Harlem. She defines the neighborhood as beginning at 110th Street, just above Central Park, and stretching north to 155th Street. She attended Harlem schools for elementary and junior high school, and graduated from Wadleigh Junior High School in 1964. Speaking in 2016, Lucas-Davis recalled the Harlem of her youth as a tight-knit neighborhood and community. Lucas-Davis’s recollections shed light on the experiences and disparities of New York City schooling in the 1960s, and the importance of community in her school experiences.

Lucas-Davis recalled that while heavily segregated, Harlem and its schools provided ample services for its residents. Lucas-Davis reported her impression that the neighborhood had everything that its residents needed. This feeling of living in a bustling, caring community profoundly shaped Lucas-Davis’s impression of Harlem:

At the same time, Lucas-Davis’s recollections of growing up in Harlem reveal disparities between schools within Harlem’s bounds and those outside of Harlem. Her enrollment choices for secondary education reveal perceived disparities among Harlem schools themselves, with Wadleigh Junior High School as the neighborhood’s crown jewel. At Wadleigh, she remembers, teachers fashioned close relationships with students, from whom they demanded academic success and decorous behavior. The same was not true of her experience in high school, where she experienced isolation and educational neglect.

Lucas-Davis’s story provides a first-hand account of the educational opportunities available to Harlem residents in the 1960s. More than that, however, it reveals the story of how schools in Harlem nurtured and socialized African American youth, made do with fewer resources than majority-white schools, and took on the added challenge of attempting to prepare students to face schools and a society that often regarded them as “less than.” Lucas-Davis emphasizes the role that community played in nurturing students–and in preparing them to leave Harlem.

Harlem Elementary Schools

Lucas-Davis attended P.S. 10 from kindergarten through fifth grade. She remembered the school warmly and spoke of a comfortable environment. “I remember P.S. 10 always smelling like soup. […] It always smelled like, they were cooking vegetable soup in the cafeteria,” she remembered. She described kindergarten gardening experiments, calling up her second grade teacher for chats, and learning the Pledge of Allegiance in fifth-grade Spanish class. In many ways, she noted, the school climate at P.S. 10 was just as supportive as at Wadleigh Junior High School, with caring teachers and varied academics.

P.S. 10’s physical resources were in poor shape. P.S. 10 parents won promises for a new school building in 1956, when Lucas-Davis was in second grade.

In addition to “dilapidated” conditions, according to The New York Amsterdam News, the school had also become extremely overcrowded. (Lucas-Davis clarified that she remembered the school as “full,” with classes of about thirty students each, but she would not call the school “crowded.”) Local newspaper reports suggest that many Harlem parents supported the closure of P.S. 10, given the building’s physical condition. Some parents, however, expressed concern that relocating the school would delay integration and potentially force their children to attend school in a “slum area.” Parents’ mixed reactions to the displacement of their students suggest competing priorities with regard to educational remedies. Where, exactly, should students attend school, and with whom?

The Board of Education blamed residential segregation for segregated schools while simultaneously conceding that school zoning lines themselves could “encourage integrated rather than segregated schools.” Despite this admission, the Board of Education continued to funnel students from Central Harlem, where more than 95% of residents were Black, into segregated schools. While the school boundaries within Harlem appear to have been somewhat porous, the boundaries between Harlem and neighboring majority-white districts appear to have been more rigidly enforced.

When P.S. 10 closed its doors, Lucas-Davis was about to enter the sixth grade. She was zoned for P.S. 180, located north of P.S. 10, as were many of her former P.S. 10 classmates. She recalled the new school’s improved facilities. At P.S. 180, students had access to a playground–unlike at P.S. 10, where the ground floor served as a makeshift play space. Classrooms at P.S. 180 had their own sinks and water fountains, she noted. Students were “amazed” at the new space. Lucas-Davis endured the longer walk to school each day until she graduated the sixth grade.

Navigating Junior High School

When it came time to enroll in junior high school in 1961, Lucas-Davis found herself drawn to Wadleigh Junior High School. There was only one problem–Lucas-Davis was not zoned for Wadleigh. Official school zone borders from that time have proven elusive to historians. During Lucas-Davis’s time as a student, the Board of Education formally divided Harlem into three local school districts. Lucas-Davis recalls a barrier at 7th Avenue. Those east of the line were potentially zoned for James Fenimore Cooper Junior High School (also known as JHS 120), she recalls, while those west of the line were zoned for Wadleigh. Cooper appears on this map at 119th Street and Madison Avenue, labeled as JHS 120.

Lucas-Davis believed that she was residing in Cooper’s probable catchment zone, but recalled emphatically that she “didn’t want to go there.” After attending an evening program at Wadleigh and hearing the school’s esteemed Glee Club sing, Lucas-Davis knew that she wanted to be part of Wadleigh. She registered for the school by using a family friend’s address as her own. (Lucas-Davis did go onto sing with in Wadleigh’s Glee Club, even performing at the World’s Fair in 1964.)

Lucas-Davis’s choice reveals that families developed ways to work around the Board of Education’s school assignment policies. The city had begun developing a limited “open enrollment” policy as Lucas-Davis was about to enter junior high school, but this did not affect Lucas-Davis’s decision. The policy was ostensibly designed to promote integration. It permitted students zoned for schools with a high concentration of Black or Puerto Rican students to enroll in select majority-white schools. The Board of Education deemed 20,000 students attending highly segregated schools eligible for the voluntary transfer program. In its first year, fewer than 400 students—a mere 2% of those eligible—enrolled in the program. In 1963, the Board of Education briefly proposed integrating schools in Harlem and neighboring Washington Heights. The New York Amsterdam News wrote that many white parents in Washington Heights opposed this integration plan.

Lucas-Davis was familiar with open enrollment at the high school level, but had no idea that a similar policy existed for younger students. When Lucas-Davis first enrolled in school, virtually all public school students attended neighborhood schools, with boundaries that amplified residential segregation. Lucas-Davis repeatedly emphasized that even after 1960, in practice, “there was no choice” about where to attend junior high school. If Lucas-Davis had the option to transfer schools prior to high school, “nobody told us.” Her experience affirms activists’ criticisms and historians’ interpretations that the Board of Education’s early transfer policy was ineffective by design.

Even had Lucas-Davis’s family known about the 1960 open enrollment policy, it would not have helped her transfer from Cooper to Wadleigh. The policy did not permit students to transfer from one majority-black school to another, though activists noted that white families used the plan to transfer their students to majority-white schools, actually worsening segregation.8 Under the 1960s open enrollment policy, Harlem schools were all “sending” schools, where students could transfer out but not in.9 “Open enrollment” prioritized limited integration at some majority-white schools; it did not prioritize Black students’ educational preferences.

Two key points emerge from Lucas-Davis’s description of choosing Wadleigh over Cooper. The first is that while catchment zones did exist–she concealed her real address throughout her time in school–they were loosely enforced, perhaps especially within segregated neighborhoods. The second is that different Harlem schools had very different reputations among students. Influential organizations like HARYOU, which decried Harlem schools as inadequate in its 1964 report “Youth in the Ghetto”, and the Board of Education painted these schools with a broad brush. In contrast, Lucas-Davis’s strong preference for Wadleigh indicates a real difference in how she perceived her educational options. All Harlem schools, and all majority-black schools, were not interchangeable. For Lucas-Davis, Wadleigh offered a “quality education” with dedicated teachers, an impressive music program, and classmates who cared for each other as friends and neighbors.

Lucas-Davis’s family drew on their social network to create options for where to send their children to school. In the years before “community control” or “school choice” became rallying cries for many educational activists and parents, parents like Lucas-Davis’s may have drawn on social networks within their communities to make clandestine choices about their children’s education. Speaking in 2016, Lucas-Davis expressed concern that an emphasis on charter schools may exclude some students from a quality education. Instead, she argued that all students should be entitled to a high-quality public education.

Teacher-Student Interactions at Wadleigh Junior High

Lucas-Davis named caring teachers as a defining characteristic of Wadleigh Junior High School. She recognized many teachers were part of the Harlem community, and felt that they took a keen interest in their students’ lives and successes. Their interactions stretched outside of Wadleigh’s walls. Here, Lucas-Davis reads from an article she wrote to honor Mr. Plummer, whose reputation for high expectations preceded him:

Teachers supported students in ways that extended beyond mere discipline. Lucas-Davis attended her first debutante ball while she was in the seventh grade. The ball was hosted at Rockland Palace, located here on 155th Street. It was held on George Washington’s Birthday, and organizers wore Revolutionary-style garb in honor of the event.

Lucas-Davis invited her Spanish teacher, Mr. Lavergneau, who attended in full formal attire. This anecdote captures the sense of respectability and preparedness that Lucas-Davis’s favorite teachers both projected and demanded of their students, their care for students, and her affection for them.

Wadleigh’s teachers remained on Lucas-Davis’s mind for decades. Shortly after Mr. Plummer, whom she had as both a math and a homeroom teacher, was recognized by the New York Times in 2014, Lucas-Davis wrote a piece to honor his long career of teaching and mentorship. She wrote that Mr. Plummer “taught us the discipline that we would need to be focused, the structure, work ethics, and habits that we would need in order to be successful, [and] the integrity of being trustworthy and truthful to one’s self.” She felt that his strict discipline and exacting standards “taught us readiness for the covertly competitive arena that we would face as a minority people.”

In many ways, Lucas-Davis’s memories of Black teachers at Wadleigh call to mind historian Vanessa Siddle Walker’s description of “interpersonal caring.” As Siddle Walker explains, teachers who demonstrated interpersonal caring “made [students] feel like they could relate to the teachers, made them want to be like their teachers, and made them believe what teachers told them about their success potential.” Siddle Walker suggests that interpersonal caring especially impacted the educational successes of African American students who attended segregated schools, as Lucas-Davis did.

Lucas-Davis remembered that Wadleigh teachers dedicated “everything there was to offer” to their students, modeling care and professional behavior at every turn. Lucas-Davis maintained a close relationship with Mr. Plummer until his death in 2018. She remains close with Doris Brunson (her former English teacher) and Rene Lavergneau to this day. She cited these ongoing connections as evidence of teachers’ abundant care for students.

Wadleigh Junior High School

Ms. Lucas-Davis attended Wadleigh High School from fall 1961 through spring 1964, for the seventh through ninth grades. Lucas-Davis spoke repeatedly of Wadleigh as “the best education I ever had.” Lucas-Davis spoke highly of Wadleigh’s teachers, sense of community, and academics. Lucas-Davis recalled a sense of knowing everyone at the school, by sight if not by name. Beyond her direct classmates, she knew her peers at Wadleigh through her siblings and from around the neighborhood. Lucas-Davis was enrolled in an advanced track, taking courses in core academic subjects like English and mathematics, plus electives in foreign language and graphic arts.

One theme that emerges in Lucas-Davis’s recollections of Wadleigh is how orderly and, at times, strict the school was. Teachers and school programs aimed to instill Wadleighites with a sense of discipline and decorum. Students learned how to carry themselves outside of Wadleigh:

One ritual for instilling a sense of discipline was the weekly assembly program. One day per week, students would attend a grade-level assembly. These featured guest speakers and student performances. On assembly day, students were required to dress up. In this clip, Lucas-Davis explains what students wore on assembly days:

Beyond proper dress, students were expected to embody proper behavior. Teachers recognized those who exemplified model behavior and castigated those who misbehaved. Lucas-Davis describes the system of “commendations and charges” that tracked every student’s conduct.

Wadleigh students could also earn certificates for the values of scholarship, citizenship, punctuality, and attendance. Lucas-Davis is still in possession of the certificates she earned for all four of these attributes, as well as for accolades in English, Spanish, home economics, and graphic arts.

She described Wadleigh students as both “coddled” and “pushed” by teachers who devoted considerable attention to the youth under their care. Lucas-Davis noted that students also took pride in maintaining a decorous school environment. Student “patrols” maintained order in the hallways, and classmates shunned those who were seen as habitual troublemakers. Safety patrols wore badges like this one. Many senior students adorned themselves with these badges in their class pictures for the Wadleigh Way yearbook.

Rather than a site of low standards, as many published accounts portrayed Harlem schools, Lucas-Davis’s Wadleigh grounded itself in high expectations for academic achievement and student conduct. She appreciated the school’s structure and discipline, which she felt pushed her to succeed.

Field Trips

Lucas-Davis made frequent excursions outside of Harlem, some through school trips and others with friends. She described her younger self as “kind of sheltered,” but explained that she was always allowed to participate in school-affiliated and educational activities. Visiting the Donnell Library, which was located across from the Museum of Modern Art, was a favorite pastime. At the Donnell, Lucas-Davis and her friends could gather away from the watchful eyes of parents and neighbors.

School-sponsored field trips were also commonplace. By the time she graduated, Lucas-Davis reasoned that she had been to “every museum that was there in New York City.” Students would huddle onto the subway or buses to visit sites like the Museum of the City of New York, one of Lucas-Davis’s favorites. Just as Wadleigh’s weekly assembly brought outside speakers into the school, these field trips exposed students to a variety of cultural attractions outside of their neighborhood.

Teachers at Wadleigh often prompted their students to think beyond Wadleigh’s walls, both by taking them around the city and pushing students to prepare for high school and college. Lucas-Davis would indeed leave Harlem as she continued her education. She navigated the city’s public transportation system, taking the subway an hour each way to attend Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, then to Louis D. Brandeis in Manhattan. While Lucas-Davis identified Harlem as the center of her community, her school routines drew her outside of its bounds.

Civil Rights in Harlem

Lucas-Davis’s adolescence coincided with the height of activity in the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington just weeks before Lucas-Davis began her ninth grade year at Wadleigh, and Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shortly before the schoolyear ended.

One way that Lucas Davis learned about the Civil Rights Movement was through television. Lucas-Davis recalled that she and her peers watched the Civil Rights Movement unfold through “our little black-and-white televisions with the rabbit ears.” Newspapers were another source of information. This was especially true for Lucas-Davis, whose father owned a newsstand, located at 138th St. and Lenox Avenue. Lucas-Davis remembers the stand being fully stocked with local newspapers and prominent black newspapers, including the New York Amsterdam News and the Pittsburgh Courier.

While Lucas-Davis remembers her classmates as being aware of the Civil Rights Movement, she seemed to recall students watching events unfold from a distance. While the violence of the southern Civil Rights Movement struck her as a teen, she characterized the segregation she experienced in New York City as more “covert.” Lucas-Davis recalled hearing about employment discrimination and Woolworth’s, a department store on 125th St., and realizing that Wadleigh Junior High School had fewer material resources than did the high schools she attended.

For the most part, though, Harlem’s segregation acted as a buffer from any visible forms of discrimination for Lucas-Davis. “In Harlem, no one was standing at the door saying you can’t come in here. […] We knew where we could go, or where we could be.” Lucas-Davis only realized the extent of racial segregation in New York City as an adult.

Others may not have shared this sense of insulation from overt discrimination. When Lucas-Davis was in the ninth grade, hundreds of thousands of students participated in a boycott of New York City schools on February 3, 1964. The boycott protested unequal conditions for black and Hispanic students in city schools. Principal Perry Spiro reported that over 90% of all Wadleigh students were absent on the day of the boycott. One of Lucas-Davis’s classmates, Alicia Montague, seemed to commemorate the event with this poem in the Wadleigh Way yearbook:

“Thousands of students all over the city Didn’t go to school, it was a pity Teachers marched in picket lines, Quietly showing slogans and rhymes Of laws that the Board should have long ago passed Integration! And equal rights they asked. In this way we clearly stated Some of the wrongs and injustices we hated. The boycott was successful and right. Maybe someday soon we will win our fight!

With Montague’s last line, she includes herself and Wadleigh students in the struggle, identifying the boycott as part of “our fight.”

Lucas-Davis does not recall the boycott. In fact, when she saw a draft of this exhibit, she immediately called a former classmate to corroborate–he did not remember a student boycott happening either. Lucas-Davis had impeccable attendance, and she was certainly in class that day, just as she would have been on any other school day. There is no memory of a boycott among her many recollections of Wadleigh.

Lucas-Davis’s reaction prompts several questions. First, who actually participated in the 1964 student boycott? Were all grades and academic tracks represented among the student boycotters? How did the boycott affect students, parents, and faculty at Wadleigh? Lucas-Davis was, at that point, a ninth grader on an advanced academic track. Perhaps her immediate classmates connected less to the boycott than did other members of the Wadleigh community.

Second, as Lucas-Davis asked, how did families learn about their schools’ material disadvantages? Lucas-Davis, for one, became aware of the material inequalities that Harlem schools faced only after she left the neighborhood for high school. Parents and activists had been calling for more integration, better resources, and more options for their students for many years. Community organizations and local media provided channels for families to communicate, coordinate, and participate in collective action.

Navigating High School

Wadleigh was the last Harlem school that Lucas-Davis attended. The only high school in Harlem at that time was Benjamin Franklin High School, pictured here at the eastern edge of Harlem. Lucas-Davis recalled few Wadleigh classmates attending Benjamin Franklin. Her impression was that “No one wanted to go Benjamin Franklin,” as the school had a reputation for gang activity.

The city’s open enrollment policy, which permitted students zoned for some majority-black and Puerto Rican schools to voluntarily transfer to some majority-white schools, had expanded to high schools by the time Lucas-Davis graduated junior high school. Lucas-Davis enrolled at Evander Childs High School in the Bronx. She casts her tenth grade year at Evander Childs in stark contrast to the environment at Wadleigh. In terms of material conditions, the majority-white Evander Childs boasted resources that Wadleigh lacked. There were enough microscopes for every student in her tenth grade science class, for example, and many of her classmates seemed familiar with how to use them. In contrast, at Wadleigh, students in her science class had to share a single microscope.

The most striking difference between the schools, however, was in the lack of support Lucas-Davis received at Evander Childs. Only a handful of Wadleigh graduates enrolled at Evander Childs, she remembered. She described Evander Childs as unprepared to support students of color, staffed with teachers and administrators unconcerned with her success:

Evander Childs demoted Lucas-Davis from college preparatory classes down to the general education classes after failing courses. At P.S. 10 and at Wadleigh, for comparison, Lucas-Davis was enrolled in advanced courses. Lucas-Davis noted that she felt alone in her academic struggles, though she has since realized that at least one of her former Wadleigh classmates faced similar academic and social challenges at the school. If she had known she was not alone or had been offered academic support, she speculated, perhaps she could have remained at Evander Childs.

Lucas-Davis convinced her mother to let her transfer schools. Lucas-Davis transferred to Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side halfway through her junior year. There, she fought to make up the ground she had lost. She advocated for herself, demanding to be put on the commercial track, a step above the general education track she was forced into at Evander Childs.

She also bargained with teachers to take English IV–a graduation requirement that Evander Childs had neglected to put on her schedule when she was a sophomore.

Lucas-Davis described Brandeis High School as more integrated in terms of students and staff, and better able to support her education than Evander Childs had been. But without the sense of community she had experienced in elementary and junior high school, Lucas-Davis saw high school as means to a diploma. Even at Brandeis, she said, “virtually everyone was a stranger.

Lucas-Davis graduated from Brandeis High School in June 1967 with a commercial diploma. She then enrolled at Boston’s Graham Junior College for a year, and later completed additional post-secondary schooling. She maintains that of all of these, “Wadleigh was the best school I’ve ever been in.”

Wadleigh Reunions

At present, Lucas-Davis leads the Wadleigh alumni group. It is in this capacity that she has been influential in linking former Wadleigh students to the Harlem Education History Project–many oral history participants’ names came to the project through Lucas-Davis. She became involved in the alumni group through Ms. Brunson, a longtime Wadleigh teacher, with whom she kept in touch. Lucas-Davis estimates that about 600 people are included in the group. She sends members postcards and keeps them abreast of school news.

The group meets annually for a picnic in Central Park. Alumni and former teachers are encouraged to bring photographs and memorabilia from their time at the school, as well as to catch up with one another. The picnic draws attendees from across the five boros and out of state. Most of these alumni are contemporaries of Lucas-Davis, though she aims to reach out to Wadleigh alumni from the 1970s and 1980s. Lucas-Davis noted that Wadleigh High School, an all-girls school that closed in 1954 and reopened as Wadleigh Junior High in 1956, previously had a formal alumnae group. The Wadleigh Junior High alumni group extended an invitation to these “High School Ladies” for the annual picnics.

Lucas-Davis emphasized the informal nature of the alumni group in our interview, though she also described its regular schedule. For Lucas-Davis, the alumni group functions as an extension of a very active and organic social network. Lucas-Davis described hour-long phone conversations with Mr. Lavergneau, her former Spanish teacher, and visits to Mr. Plummer’s home in Maryland. She also mentioned, in detail, the whereabouts of her former classmates, pictured above, and pointed out those with whom she is still in contact.

For Lucas-Davis and many others who participate in these annual picnics, Wadleigh Junior High School remains very much alive. She remains concerned with the future of Wadleigh. Wadleigh Junior High School closed in the early 1990s, with numerous experimental and charter schools sharing the building since then1–and shared worries about the school being displaced by “the occupancy of charter schools,” one of which now occupies the building’s top two floors.

Sources

Oral History

Lucas-Davis, Deborah. Oral History with Brittney Lewer, Part I. [link]

Lucas-Davis, Deborah. Oral History with Brittney Lewer, Part I. [link]

Primary Sources

“393 Here Shifting to Other Schools,” New York Times, Sep. 21, 1960.

“Few Negroes or Puerto Ricans Use Right to Change Schools,” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1960, 39.

“Integration Is Issue,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 2, 1963, 1

“Jack Meets with Parents on New PS 10.” New York Amsterdam News, April 6, 1957, 25.

“Open Enrollment New School Rule,” New York Amsterdam News, Sep. 3, 1960, 1.

“Parents Press for New PS 10,” New York Amsterdam News, November 10, 1956, 3

“Parents Still Plan to Strike Schools,” New York Amsterdam News, Sep. 10, 1960, 19.

“Photo Standalone 42,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 9, 1963, 34.

“Text of Statement on Integration,” New York Times, Sep. 1, 1960, 15

Booker, James “What They Said at PS 81 and PS 144,” New York Amsterdam News, March 21, 1964, 50.

Brown, Councilman Earl. “Missing Report,” New York Amsterdam News, June 7, 1958, 8.

Lucas-Davis, Deborah. Conversation with the author, June 17, 2016

Lucas-Davis, Deborah. Phone call with the author, Dec. 14, 2018.

Nall, Al. “P.S. 10 PTA Maps Plans to Get New Building; 100 at Meeting,” New York Amsterdam News Nov. 3, 1956

Terte, Robert H. “16 Schools Named in Transfer Plan,” New York Times, Sep. 23, 1960, 58.

U.S. Census, 1960, via Social Explorer, www.socialexplorer.com

Secondary Sources

Delmont, Matthew. Why Busing Failed: Race, Media and Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016)

Glass, Michael R., “‘A Series of Blunders and Broken Promises’: IS 201 as a Turning Point,” Gotham Blog

Lee, Sonia Song-Ha. Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)

Ravitch, Diane. The Great School Wars: A History of New York City Public Schools (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 251-266.

Taylor, Clarence. Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

Credits

This exhibit was created by Brittney Lewer, Ph.D. candidate in the History of Education at New York University, with editorial assistance from Deborah Lucas-Davis. It was peer reviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis and Kimberley Springer.

The exhibit was developed in Neatline, and has been reformated to be compatible with Wax.

Lewer would like to thank Deborah Lucas-Davis, who invited her into her home for two interviews. She shared memories, photographs, and memorabilia from Wadleigh and from her childhood. Deborah also provided extensive feedback on multiple drafts of the exhibit, becoming a key editor of the exhibit. Lewer writes that “In every interaction, her care for Wadleigh and her Wadleigh community was palpable.”