The Academy for Black and Latin Education: A Pedagogy of Life in a New York Community

In this text, Ujju Aggarwal transports us to New York City in the 1960s and the creation by the community-organized and -led youth academies for Black and Latinx people, whose goal was to teach in a way that addressed the needs of the community and where students would learn and understand themselves in relation to the world, in order to transform it. 

“From then on, I split my teaching time between the storefront and the hospital where my students arrived wearing hospital gowns as they went through their detoxification. From this experience, I learned the power of grassroots organizing, […] the power of community and the joy of taking care of each other.” In “Reflections on the Academy for Black & Latin Education” (2022), life-long activist Iris Morales recalls when, in 1970 as a college student and before joining the Young Lords Party, she and others at the Academy for Black and Latin Education (ABLE) joined forces with Mothers Against Drugs (MAD) to occupy St. Luke’s Hospital in New York. Together, they demanded that the hospital addresses the immediate needs of the community by creating an adolescent detoxification program. 

As I would learn, ABLE, an independent street academy, was located on 104th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues in a neighborhood that was understood by some to be part of Harlem and referenced by others as “Manhattan Valley.” I know the neighborhood well and have spent over two decades working there—many of them on 104th Street—with others to build a base-building community organizing center called Center for Immigrant Families. Rooted in popular education, community building and storytelling were foundational to our work that centered collective knowledge production as key to understanding, and working to transform, our lived material conditions and the structures of power that produced them. We eventually came to organize around public schools and gentrification. Our vision, like that which grounds most organizing, was motivated by something that did not yet exist—public schools that reflected, served, and respected the communities that they were part of—that we understood as necessary to addressing immediate needs and critical also to reclaiming and remaking power in place at a time when the violence of gentrification was intensifying.  

When, in 2011, I learned about ABLE from Morales, I wanted to understand how the organization—it’s work and occupation of St. Luke’s— was in dialogue with key questions and contradictions that had emerged amidst our organizing. Among them, the potential of state and non-state institutions that have historically generated harm to be spaces for struggle that are not already constrained by reformist reform but rather, representative of containers to reclaim, defend, and transform; and how such repurposing is part of the presence that Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as abolition. I wanted to understand more about the pedagogy and praxis of knowledge production at ABLE that generated an unfolding and insurgent epistemological map of enclosure that led them to occupy St. Luke’s Hospital; and what this unfolding map might tell us about our present. 

Integral to how racial capitalism works, enclosure is “representative of the social mechanism that constructs race, gender, class and sexuality” as described by Damien M. Sojoyner in First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (2016).

Understood as such, enclosure provides a way to discern and map the interconnected circuits of organized abandonment and dispossession as they relate to social reproduction, or the multi-scalar structures, systems, and processes that guide the labor and forms of relation through which life is made and remade.  

Before turning to the epistemological map of enclosure generated through the pedagogy and praxis of ABLE, it is important to first consider the context out of which it emerged. Education had long been recognized as a central node of Black freedom struggles, and in New York City—from the work of Reverend Milton Galamison, the fight of the Harlem Nine, the massive 1964 school boycott, to the Movement for Community Control of Schools—there was a growing consciousness forged in iterative relationship to an accumulation of experience, bringing together seemingly distinct theories of change, that had come to recognize what Russell J. Rickford calls “local systems of public education as colonial apparatuses designed to stultify children of color.” (We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination, 2016). Yet, even as this understanding was emerging, there was a question as to where energies were best directed. The massive boycott had been accompanied by the establishment of Freedom Schools and amidst a shifting political context, a growing sentiment questioned the possibility of fighting for change within the existing system—even if proponents of this strategy understood it to be non-reformist. 

The Street Academy Program ///

It was amidst these thick tensions and debates about where to fight, how to build, and the importance of addressing immediate needs, that The New York Urban League’s (NYUL) Street Academy Project (SAP) emerged. Initially funded by the Ford Foundation, and officially launched in 1965, the SAP was informed by Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited’s 1964 report, Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change. At a time when over half of the students in Central Harlem (1959–1962) left school without receiving a diploma, the SAP sought to provide an alternative: 

“In a climate of incredible educational failure the Street Academy Program quickly became a hopeful innovation with the potential for positively affecting the lives of thousands of minority youngsters in New York City […] who were branded as uneducable by a public school system whose responsibility it was to educate them.” (NYUL, 1971)

Importantly, the New York Urban League was explicit that it did not understand itself in competition with or in opposition to public schools, but rather, in “a strong cooperating relationship.” Key to the SAP model was the staffed position of the “street worker,” which for many, stood in distinction to traditional social workers, as the street worker held deep ties with, and was from the community. Students were mostly Black and Puerto Rican and ranged in age from 14 to 22 years old. The curriculum included “core disciplines” of reading, writing, math, science, and history, as well as subjects—including Marxism-Leninism; Black Man in World History; and U.S. History and the Black experiences—that aligned “with the needs and interests of students.” The program grew quickly, and by 1972 served 650 students annually. Graduating students could then enter Academies of Transition and College Prep Schools.

The Academy for Black and Latin Education ///

As the SAP program grew, the model caught more traction within and beyond the borders of Harlem. Not all street academies were under the auspices of the NYUL, and one that stood out in distinction was the West Side Street Academy. Founded in 1968 at 109 West 104th Street (and later moving to 73 West 105th Street), the academy was later renamed the Academy for Black and Latin Education (ABLE). Part of the rationale for not aligning with the NYUL included an understanding of the importance of local, decentralized, community control in the neighborhood, as well as a desire to not be financially dependent on the corporate-funding model that had become dominant for the NYUL’s Street Academy Program. As Morales, who was a teacher at ABLE recalled in 2011, while there were several street academies, “this one was most akin to some of the freedom schools that had been set up down south.” ABLE’s distinction as an independent street academy was also tied to its beginnings and eventual evolution. In 1967, the NYUL had operated a short-lived summer street academy in the neighborhood, and a group of young white residents wanted to follow on that work and create an independent West Side Street Academy. Through initial discussions and planning involving Black and Latinx community members, “it was realized that the effectiveness of the program was dependent upon black and Spanish members of the community running the program to meet the needs of their community. It was felt that if the program was to be truly for the community it must in a very real sense be of the community.” Director Dave Walker and teacher Dallas Garvin explain: 

“Those who think that Black and Latin people can not learn together are mistaken. ABLE knows the spirit of our people. We know what we are doing. We know that all our work is worth and what it means to the people. We are ready, nothing can deter our efforts, not for a single moment. We will teach, we will educate and we will demonstrate to this community what the people can do.” (Sting, 1969). 

This sentiment was reflected in the academy’s staffing, structure, curriculum, as well as in the changing of its name to the Academy for Black and Latin Education. Vernon Douglas, ABLE’s street worker who later became its assistant director, was clear, for example, that building a space for community self-determination was also guided by a strong critique of the systemic failure of public schools and too, of many of the programs that claimed to help, noting: “That’s the trouble with the whole public school system […]. That’s what’s always happened to black and Puerto Rican kids. They end up in some stupid vocational program. We don’t want that here.” (West Side News, 1968). This became, then, another important distinction of ABLE: it was not driven by goals of inclusion or meritocracy. Instead, the goal of learning was, in the tradition of popular education, to understand oneself in relation to the world, in order to transform it: 

“There is no child who does not want to learn about the world, the society into which he is born. However, unless a student can find validation of his desire […] unless he can find, both in the school and the rest of the world, the meaning and value of his education, the end in sight, then the natural struggle and rebellion necessary to growth becomes and remains infantile […] His intelligence suffocates in the stagnant air of disease and finally dies in a morass of pride-hurting, death-dealing vices […]. Our alternative to death in a public school is life in a community.” (Sting, 1969). 

The “meaning and value of education” was nurtured pedagogically through discussion instead of lecture, which encouraged broad participation, led by teachers who, like streetworkers, held organic ties to the community.

And it was what Walker and Garvin describe as the “life in a community,” that further set ABLE apart from other street academies. “Community” was far from an add-on or appendage at ABLE Rather, as Walker and Garvin explain, “equally important as this [education] […] is the process by which it is achieved.”

This pedagogy was distinct from those that either prepared young people for opportunities that directed them to either leave their communities or for vocational programs referenced by Douglass. 

As Morales reflected in 2011, “one of the things that I learned [at ABLE] is that education is beyond the classroom […] and that education is action.” Understanding education as beyond the classroom meant then, a dialectical relationship not only involving the community in the academy or the academy in the community but rather, a symbiotic relation between the two. This relation was part of ABLE’s infrastructure, articulated for example, through weekly Monday night meetings open to community members to congregate and assess the direction, focus, and approach of the academy’s programs as well as its Community Research Program. 

Education is action: occupation as a pedagogy of life in a community ///

As it happened, the needs of the community became increasingly clear. Morales explains:

“We were 18, 19 [years old] we had three teachers there […] working out of this storefront—we were kids ourselves—we had 14, 15, 16-year-olds in our classes, basically preparing them for the GED, but most of them were strung out on heroin, the big epidemic of my generation. So Dave decided to approach St. Luke’s about dealing with the health of our kids. This goes full circle to that education is more than just taking tests in a classroom. And, they told him: it’s not our problem. He said: ‘but these are kids in our community, and you’re situated right here in our community, you need to respond.’”

The hospital rejected Walker’s appeal that as an institution in the community, it needed to address the needs of the community. Yet, as Morales noted in 2022, “administrators refused to meet with him saying there was nothing they could do, that it was not their job, that they had no funds.” 

Soon after the hospital rejected Walker’s appeal, the premature death of Walter Vandermeer in December 1969—just thirteen days after his 12th birthday— shook Harlem. As historian Robin D.G. Kelley describes it in 2023, Water Vandermeer, the youngest person at the time to have died from a heroin overdose, became Harlem’s Emmett Till: while not murdered by the police, many recognized themselves in the photographs of Walter that captured headlines. Perhaps part of what was recognized was the way that enclosure—articulated, as Sojoyner reminds us, as the removal or denial of structures, systems, and services foundation to individual and collective life and well-being—worked, and was embedded within and as daily life. As Walter’s older brother, activist and Africana Studies Professor Tony Van Der Meer, reflected in 2021:

“Things began to unravel for [my family] when my Surinamese father was deported. Our family needed a just and equitable society. Instead, we got segregated, under-resourced schools; dangerous, underpaid jobs; dilapidated housing; and grossly negligent child welfare and mental health systems. Rather than providing support to keep our family together, the state of New York took Walter and me into custody. Walter struggled, as many children in his situation would. In custody, he was isolated and overmedicated with Thorazine. Once he was introduced to heroin, after years of failed state interventions, it became a form of self-medication.” 

Confirming ABLE’s understanding of the public school as a place of death entrenched also within a system of family policing, it was when Walter was only nine years old that a school suspension set off a journey of being shuttled from one social service agency to the next. None of agencies or services succeeded in helping Walter, and some harmed him, but consistent in various reports was the comment that he was a child who was in need of care, seeking love, and often, also filled with rage; a response most ten-year-olds might have after being “kicked out of school, taken from his family, and shuttled between shelters and the streets” as Kelley writes.

The state refused to see Walter as a child, as human, but the community did see his humanity, and a life that was violently cut short by enclosure. As Morales writes, the death of Vandemeer had left her and others at ABLE heartbroken but also filled with purpose: “We felt we had to act, more than telephoning public officials, gathering petitions, and marching on streets, all which we had done.” And what they understood was needed as not only the dismantling of state and administrative violence, but the presence of needed services directed by and accountable to the community. 

Amidst growing calls from activists for radical community health-centered solutions to the growing epidemic, on January 13, 1970, ABLE joined with Mothers Against Drugs (MAD) to occupy St. Luke’s Hospital Center’s Division of Community Psychiatry. The action was guided by clear demands for a dedicated adolescent detoxification program. In addition to beds, resources, and care, the groups’ demands were also guided by an understanding of the need for the hospital to work in direct collaboration with the community.

These demands demonstrated a marked difference between reformist strategies and community control as they simultaneously extended power beyond the institution while also creating mechanisms through which to grow capacity and power for more organizing. 

After four days of occupation, the hospital administration had agreed to the group’s demands and the program, “the first of its type in a general hospital setting,” was officially in operation. According to the joint statement issued on behalf of ABLE, MAD, and St. Luke’s Hospital, in addition to the setting aside of beds to treat minors, the hospital made a “firm and unequivocal pledge to the community to develop jointly a rehabilitation program, as proposed by Mothers Against Drugs and the Academy for Black and Latin Education, within the community,” as well as a comprehensive study to understand that scope of the problem, and the development of a resource center. The community plan was dedicated to Walter Vandermeer.

Conclusion ///

If ABLE and MAD’s occupation of St. Luke’s was an articulation of the pedagogy of life in a community, such a pedagogy does not stand still. Struggle instructs struggle, and unfolds. In the months that followed the occupation of St. Luke’s, MAD would lead a mobilization targeting Roosevelt Hospital. Later that same year, the South Bronx Drug Coalition—comprised of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party (which Morales had, by that point, joined), the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, and community members—would take over Lincoln Hospital, creating the Lincoln Detox Center. Tracing the insurgent maps of enclosure that undergird these occupations, and their unfolding, holds significance to how we fight in the present, to how we not only defend rights to “death in a public school,” but also build spaces for collective care and knowledge production where we confirm human life when the forces of the racial capitalist state work to the contrary. It is such spaces—often small in scale and rooted in praxis and experimentation, like ABLE—where we can also cultivate transformative worldviews and extend our imaginations to consider what presence is needed, and what might be reclaimed, remade, and transformed in place, to collectively make and keep life towards a horizon of liberation. ■