Remembering Harlem Prep and Multicultural Education in the Long Struggle for Justice

It was the mid-1960s in the fabled Black Mecca of Harlem, and less than half of all the neighborhood’s youth were completing high school (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc [HARYOU], 1964; Marable, 2011). As a prominent researcher wrote at the time, the general summary of academic achievement in Central Harlem was “one of inefficiency, inferiority, and massive deterioration... .” (HARYOU, 1964, p. 166). Harlem’s activists and educational stakeholders knew that such deficitminded descriptions did not accurately reflect the brilliance of their young people, and they needed to take matters into their own hands. And so, in 1967, they started a school. “Prep School in an Armory Begins ‘Revolution’,” enthusiastically printed the New York Times a day after the school’s opening. “These kids are going to destroy a lot of old myths about education,” added its newly-appointed headmaster, Edward Carpenter. “Their potential has been grossly underestimated. They have the ability to change the world” (New York Urban League, 1967a). However, this would not just be any school, but a multicultural school in both principle and practice. “Education should provide students with the global experiences to work and function in a multi-racial world,” wrote the new headmaster (Carpenter, 1969, p. 3). “Because of the racial and cultural differences that exist in the world, our students are exposed to an education that prepares one to live and function in a multi-religious, multicultural, and multi-racial society” (Carpenter, 1973, p. 30). From 1967 to 1974, a school called Harlem Prep, led by a husband-and-wife pair of Black educators Edward and Ann Carpenter, became a cherished community institution that filled a dire neighborhood void. Holding classes in an abandoned, open-space supermarket in Harlem and supported by private funds, the school’s constant lack of resources did not hinder it from sending more than 750 nontraditional students to colleges nationwide (i.e., Gordon, 1972). Yet, despite the emergence of