The Wadleigh History Project is a collaborative, public, digital history project to recognize, document, and teach the 120-year history of Black students, teachers, and community members at Harlem’s Wadleigh High School (1902-1954), Wadleigh Junior High School (1954-1993), and Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts (1997-present).

This is work in progress, last updated July 2024.

Shaded from the late-summer sun by Central Park’s arching oaks, forty or so Wadleigh alumni gathered in August of 2022 to embrace one another and share stories and laughter. Black people in their sixties and seventies, children of Harlem now living close by and far away, they came together to recognize and continue a connection rooted in their shared experience as junior high schoolers now as many as six decades ago. Some attendees passed around a laptop holding digital copies of old yearbooks. They pointed out their own faces to grandchildren or friends and recalled names of others present, or no longer here. Every year, a few intrepid graduates from an even earlier era, the 1940s, arrived too. Often they moved on unsteady feet, and often they came bearing bearing their own photographs and yearbooks. So did a few teachers who had stayed in touch with their former students over the years and joined the reunion.

The 2022 gathering was especially poignant, as the COVID-19 pandemic had prevented coming together for the previous two years. In those years, the losses - of peers, of former teachers - had accelerated. Photographs and funeral notices filled a board of rememberance compiled by alumni organizer Deborah Lucas Davis. The pandemic made the need for connections between people, including within and across the Wadleigh community, more vivid. Amidst pandemic on-line schooling, current Wadleigh high schoolers and alumni from earlier decades reached each other on Zoom, recording oral histories and finding a moment of shared ties in a fragmented time.

Changes wrought by the pandemic added to other transformations underway in Harlem over the last few decades. Housing costs skyrocketed as new, often white and wealthy, residents arrived. Storied old schoolbuildings, including Wadleigh, gave space to new charter schools, and teenagers travel out of or into Harlem to go to school, with fewer ties between home neighborhood and school. Walking a half a mile from the treed lawn in Central Park takes you to large red-brick New York City Housing Authority developments and nearby tenements for poor and working-class people and new immigrants, to new multi-million dollar glazed penthouses for the city’s rich, or to park benches made nightly into temporary homes by some of the most needy.

How does history matter in a relentless city? How does Black history matter when historically Black spaces like Harlem are changing? Where do histories of Black childhood and Black schooling live? How can histories of the educational past account for what the city’s adults provided for, and what they took from, Black students in schools? How could these histories help today’s young people in their quests for the education they deserve?

This project has explored these questions over nearly a decade, and continues to do so. It is the result of collaboration between Ansley Erickson, a historian at Teachers College - Columbia University, Teachers College graduate students, and Wadleigh community members across multiple generations who contributed as advisors, teachers, and storytellers. Among those collaborators, Paul McIntosh and Deborah Lucas Davis have played leading roles.

Who built this site and how?

In 2013, at the suggestion of Veronica Holly, Wadleigh Secondary School librarian Paul McIntosh met with Ansley Erickson and Ernest Morrell, Teachers College faculty members, and graduate student Barry Goldenberg, to discuss their work in support of Youth Historians in Harlem and what became the Harlem Education History Project. In that conversation, McIntosh called the group’s attention how much of Wadleigh’s history was held in the memories of elders, including school alumni and former teachers, whose stories had not yet been recorded and could soon be lost. He invited Erickson, who had previous experience with oral history, to begin to collect oral histories of Wadleigh community members.

Over the next decade, different groups of participants collaborated in various ways to gather oral history interviews, interpret them, and share them on this website. Deborah Lucas Davis, who organizes the Wadleigh alumni annual picnic, agreed to contribute by connecting alumni with oral history interviewers (who were Teachers College graduate students (2014-2016) and Wadleigh high school students (2019-2021)). Interviewers learned oral history practice through graduate courses at Teachers College (2014-2016), through a three-week summer institute for high school students in the summer of 2019 co-led by Wadleigh alumna Tianna Morris and Erickson, or in co-taught classes for seniors at Wadleigh, co-taught by Wadleigh teachers and Teachers College graduate student fellows, at Wadleigh in the spring of 2021. Over the course of 2018-2019, small groups of Wadleigh alumni met with Erickson to discuss continued oral history work. They reviewed interview themes and crafted the permissions and ownership agreements for these interviews. In the spring of 2023, with support from the Teachers College Digital Futures Institute and the Morningside Area Alliance, students at Wadleigh participated in a Youth Media Fellowship in which they developed the video projects included as exhibits on this side.

Librarian Paul McIntosh also shared with Erickson the school library’s collection of yearbooks. Additional yearbooks were part of the collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. Erickson used Teachers College research funds to support the digitization of the items held by the NYPL, and worked with Paul McIntosh and graduate student Barry Goldenberg to make digital copies of those yearbooks available only in the Wadleigh library. Some Wadleigh alumni contributed their own yearbook copies as well.

In the 2024-25 year, with this site in progress as a prototype, Ansley Erickson is collaborating with interested Wadleigh alumni to review and revise the presentation of the school’s history to be accountable to their goals and knowledge.

Credits

Paul McIntosh and Deborah Lucas Davis provided the invitation and initial contacts to begin this work, and have guided it through informal conversations and multiple formal contributions over several years.

The following Wadleigh community members have participated in meetings and discussions that shaped this project: Deborah Lucas Davis, Paul McIntosh, Wil Buckery, Helen Buckery, Claudette Telfair, Vinie Burrows, Marcia Thurmond, Christina Heath, Valerie McKee, Cynthia Perry, Sona Kludjian, Alvin Keitt, Charles Evans.

The following Teachers College graduate students contributed to this work as editors, facilitators, and co-teachers: Jean Park, Antonia Abram Smith, Deidre Bennett Flowers, Esther Cyna, Yianella Blanco, Matt Kautz, Rachel Klepper, Benji de la Piedra, Barry Goldenberg, Natacha Robert, and Noa Ovadia.

The following Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts teachers and alumni contributed to this work as co-teachers and facilitators: Tonia Byrd-Lee, Mary Pieri, Melissa Ettman, Kaitlyn Creegan, Ronald Jabradally, Tiana Morris.

Ernest Morrell, founding co-director of the Harlem Education History Project, guided the spirit of this work from its inception, and his work in youth participatory action research has provided a model for collaborative local historical work.

Karen D. Taylor’s model of local Black history as recognition and advocacy, through her organization While We Are Still Here, is an inspiring model.

This site was developed by Ansley Erickson with extensive and extraordinary technical and design support from Alex Gil and Aliasger Kiranawala for Griffon Web Studios. Some of the digital exhibits included here were originally published on the Harlem Education History Project when it operated from 2014 to 2021 on the Omeka platform witih Neatline plug-ins and was supported by the Columbia University Libraries.

Digital exhibits included here were created by their authors in classes at Teachers College. They were revised through an open peer review process designed by Esther Cyna. Cyna, Rachel Klepper, and Lisa Monroe edited exhibits prior to publication.

Some of the work on this project was completed during Ansley Erickson’s term as a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. The Harlem Education History Project, which contributed to this work, has received support from Teachers College, including from the Center on History and Education, the Provost’s Investment Fund, and the Zankel Fellows program.

Building and Designing the Site

This site uses Wax, a minimal computing (minicomp) framework for the creation of static web collections and exhibits led by Marii Nyröp, and Facets, a Wax theme developed by Alex Gil and Angela Zoss.

This site uses the colors gold, black, and royal blue to reflect Wadleigh’s school colors throughout its history. When the Wadleigh High School for Girls opened in its Harlem location in 1902, the school’s colors were gold and royal blue. From the late 1950s to the late 1990s, when Wadleigh was a Junior High School and today, as the Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the school’s colors are gold and black.