Word: harlem
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Harlem Report...
...they didn't bother to get married until Billie was three. She began to work at six, scrubbing steps before school and minding babies after, was only 14 ("big for my age, had big breasts, big bones") when she got her first singing job in a Harlem joint at $2 a night. Her first record (Tapping the Barrel) was made with a green young band leader named Benny Goodman, and she was soon getting feature billing...
Many teachers resented appointment to Harlem, hated their Negro, Spanish, and Italian pupils ("All the boys are interested in," said one, "is women and shirking work"). The teachers rapped knuckles, shouted and yelled. One teacher ripped up pupils' notebooks whenever they were not perfectly neat. Another punished a child by having the whole class line up to smack him. In P.S. 10 ("A prison," said the school's principal), some kids were kept away from class for as long as a month, seated in an anteroom where teacher-clerks, to discipline them, kept them idle and quiet...
Camps, Clubs, Clinics. In the three schools, the Harlem Project set up a mental hygiene clinic for delinquents, boys' clubs and summer camps. It got after-hours jobs for the older boys. It organized child-psychology courses for parents and teachers. It negotiated truces between gangs. It investigated homes and health, gave psychiatric help to kids who needed it. Almost every truant and delinquent turned out to need such help...
After four years, the project thought its experiment successful enough to be tried in other Harlem schools. But Harlem, they insisted, would need dozens of camps, clubs and clinics, a battery of psychiatrists and new teachers to make up for its slums, sickness and ignorance. The project thought that the world's richest city could afford them...