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Although he claims not to know anything special about pedagogy, Kenneth T. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University, is among the most extraordinary teachers I’ve ever known.
Until his retirement in 2020, he regularly took his classes on the history of New York City on a midnight bicycle tour. He also had teams of students document the history and culture of New York neighborhoods.
His approach is quite rightly celebrated for its hands-on, immersive and collaborative elements.
Here was experiential learning at its finest. By taking students on midnight bicycle tours of New York City, Jackson immersed them in the physical spaces where history occurred, engaging his students’ multiple senses, making the learning experience more vivid and memorable.
Supplementing experiential learning was contextual understanding. Seeing these places firsthand helped the undergraduates connect historical events to real-world locations. The tours also required active participation, increasing engagement and retention of information.
By having students work in teams to document the history of New York City’s neighborhoods, Jackson fostered collaboration. This helped students develop not only research skills but essential social skills involving communication, cooperation and division of labor.
Focusing on local neighborhoods makes history more relevant to students’ lives. It helps them see the impact of historical events on their own communities and fosters a deeper connection to the material they are studying.
Through his emphasis on fieldwork, Jackson took learning beyond the classroom. This practical application of knowledge helped his students understand the relevance and impact of historical studies in the real world. Students were encouraged to engage critically with their surroundings, asking questions and making observations that deepen their understanding of urban history and its implications.
Without ever invoking the catchphrases of Deweyesque progressive pedagogy, Jackson offered an education that was personalized and student-centered and that broke away from traditional lecture-based teaching. By encouraging students to explore different neighborhoods and historical sites, he made learning more dynamic and engaging, and by tailoring the learning experience to their interests and curiosities, he helped students take ownership of their education.
By moving beyond traditional classroom settings and involving students directly in the learning process, Jackson created an educational experience that is both impactful and memorable. Although no one could duplicate Jackson’s passion and breadth and depth of knowledge, it’s still an awful shame that Columbia has barred bicycle tours—apparently due to liability concerns.
Jackson’s bicycle tours helped inspire New York’s first and most informative walking tours, the Big Onion tours, which began in 1991 and are led by history graduate students.
A friend and I recently took one of those Big Onion walking tours through Harlem. There are few better ways to learn about the nexus of geography, culture, history, economics and politics.
Today, you can go on a host of Harlem walking tours offered by a variety of providers. There’s a civil rights tour, a gospel tour, a jazz tour and a Harlem Renaissance tour, among others. Stops could include Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, Strivers’ Row, the Apollo Theater, Harlem Hospital, the Harlem YMCA, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and its Aaron Douglas murals, the Hotel Theresa, where many Black celebrities as well as Fidel Castro stayed, and sites associated with W. E. B. Du Bois, Madame C. J. Walker, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Carl Van Vechten and many others.
I wholeheartedly recommend these tours. They offer a wonderful way to explore Harlem’s physical environment, history, cultural significance, imaginative landscape and political influence. More generally, walking tours are time machines that bring history to life. Step by step, you will discover stories that previously have largely gone unheard.
On a walking tour, the journey is the destination.
The Capital of Black America, the Mecca of the New Negro (in the words of Alain Locke), Harlem is not just a neighborhood in New York City. It is a symbol of cultural richness, artistic innovation and political activism.
Harlem, as perhaps you know, was originally a Dutch village, founded in 1658 and named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. At the turn of the 20th century, it was predominantly German, Irish, Italian and Jewish. Real estate drives development in New York City, and between 1904 and 1907, a sharp financial downturn left hundreds of apartments vacant, opening the doors for African Americans seeking better housing. By 1930, there were more than 200,000 African Americans in the neighborhood, making up 70 percent of the neighborhood’s population, up from a third a decade earlier.
At the same time, the number of Jews in Harlem—roughly 170,000 in 1917, making it the third-largest Jewish community in the world, after Warsaw and the Lower East Side—had fallen to 5,000 by 13 years later, with synagogues sold to churches or razed. Here, we see one of the earliest examples of white flight, as German Christians, Irish and Italians as well as German and Eastern European Jews abandoned the neighborhood.
During the 1920s, Harlem (of course) became the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance and the focal point for an incredible outpouring of African American art, literature, music and thought. The neighborhood also served as a hotbed of social and political activism, with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the NAACP having a strong presence in Harlem (as later did the Black Muslims). Yet it’s also important to remember that the most famous Harlem nightclub, the Cotton Club, was for whites only.
As you walk through the neighborhood, you’ll soon discover that much of Harlem’s historical and architectural heritage has been destroyed.
- Apart from the Morris-Jumel Mansion, built in 1765, and Alexander Hamilton’s Grange, built in 1802, almost all of 18th- and early-19th-century Harlem has disappeared.
- The town houses of Madame C. J. Walker, the pioneering purveyor of beauty products, were demolished in 1942.
- Most of the Audubon Ballroom, site of one of the first theaters built for William Fox of the 20th Century Fox movie studio and the place where Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, was demolished in the 1990s. What remains is part of Columbia’s Audubon Business and Technology Center.
- In 2018, during the filming of a Bruce Willis–Edward Norton film, 773 St. Nicholas Avenue, 10 elegant row house built in 1896 and where Norman Rockwell once lived, went up in flames.
- The Renaissance Casino & Ballroom, one of the country’s few Black-owned theaters and entertainment venues and the subject of a 1949 Langston Hughes poem, was demolished in 2015.
The losses include:
“Small’s Paradise Nightclub, the Lafayette Theatre, the Casino Renaissance, the Ubangi Club, which started as Connie’s Inn, the West-End Theatre, the Church of the Master, Minton’s Playhouse, the National Black Theater, which was the original Studio Museum of Harlem, St. Thomas the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, the Audubon Ballroom and Theatre, where Malcolm X was murdered, Child’s Memorial Church, from which Malcolm was buried when every other church turned his bullet-riddled body away, the Rodney Dade Funeral Home, where Madame C. J. Walker, her daughter A’Lelia, boxer Tiger Flowers and other giants lay in state, the Pabst Music Hall lobster palace, where Sigmund Romberg was in the orchestra, that latter became the Kress Five and Dime Store, where the Harlem riot of 1935 commenced, Harlem Hospital’s splendid neo-Georgian main building, Emory Roth’s superlative Temple B’nai Israel.”
As a result, much of Harlem’s iconic landscape resides in history and fading memories.
To truly understand Harlem, one must consider two worlds: the physical environment, including the neighborhood’s ethnography, sociology, demography and economics, and the Harlem of the imagination. Both are essential.
Harlem’s physical environment has undergone constant flux, and its demographic makeup is changing once again. This process has brought the promise of economic revitalization but also concerns about displacement and cultural erosion.
Alongside the physical Harlem is the Harlem of the imagination—a crucible of cultural and artistic innovation, a place of the imagination and a powerhouse of political activism that transcends its physical dimensions. Much of Harlem’s significance lies in another realm recorded in fiction, memoirs, art and music.
Among the many literary works that Harlem has inspired and served as the backdrop for are James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, George Cain’s Blueschild Baby, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Rosa Guy’s Ruby, James Haskins’s Diary of a Harlem School Teacher, Chester Himes’s A Rage in Harlem, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Victor LaValle’s Ballad of Black Tom, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Lisa Weil’s Chicken, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Richard Wright’s Outsider.
Then there’s the music of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, James B. Johnson, Bessie Smith and Fats Waller and the artworks of Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Augusta Savage.
Ignoring the Harlem of the imagination is a gross mistake—evident in the reaction to a 1969 Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition, “Harlem on My Mind,” which sought to look at Harlem through a sociological lens and precipitated extraordinary fury.
The exhibition had several purposes in mind: To showcase Harlem’s rich cultural and social history and its political significance. To illustrate the vibrancy and diversity of Harlem through photographs, artifacts and documentary material, capturing the daily lives and challenges of its residents. To educate the broader public about Harlem’s contributions to American culture. To bridge cultural divides and foster greater dialogue across racial lines. To reflect on contemporary issues—of civil rights, social justice and economic equality—facing Harlem.
The exhibition was met with vociferous criticism. Curated without significant input from the Harlem community, the exhibition excluded painting, sculptures and other artworks by contemporary Black artists, perpetuating the marginalization of Black artists in the mainstream art world.
Composed primarily of photographs and documentary material, the exhibition did not represent the Harlem’s artistic vibrancy or the richness of Harlem’s contributions to American culture. Instead, the exhibition reduced Harlem to a sociological study that focused on poverty and socioeconomic hardships and struggles rather than celebrating its cultural, artistic and intellectual achievements. Especially inflammatory was the exhibition’s catalog, which contained offensive language and derogatory remarks and was viewed as perpetuating negative stereotypes.
This exhibition highlighted the art world’s challenges regarding representation and inclusion of marginalized communities.
As my friend and I and a group of strangers walked through Harlem’s streets, we traversed a physical landscape, but we also strode across a canvas upon which artworks, politics and various struggles were indelibly (if only symbolically) inscribed.
It’s not enough to simply gaze at the existing architecture and the street life, or even learn about the neighborhood’s shifting demographics, economy and politics. We must look beneath and beyond the material dimension and enter into other realms: the realm of the imagination, of artistic creativity, of history and collective memory. These realms are, in their unique way, just as real and consequential as the physical environment.
Harlem is much more than a physical place. It’s a tangible reality but also an idea, a symbol and a legacy, a space where physical realities meet history and the power of memory and the imagination.
I believe that college professors and their students should follow Jackson’s example and do much more to study their surrounding communities holistically—exploring their physical presence and role in our collective imagination, uncovering multiple layers of meaning and significance. Harlem is but one example. How about the Texas-Mexico border or Appalachia or the Mississippi River or the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta? To be sure, some such multidisciplinary courses exist. We need more.
These areas exist at the intersection of the tangible, the concrete, the quantifiable and the imaginative. Strive to understand their legacy and significance multidimensionally, recognizing that geographical places exist on many levels and that only cross-disciplinary approaches will suffice.
From Jackson I learned that often it’s best to discover the world one step or bike ride at a time. You walk not just through a geographical environment but through time, bridging the gap between past and present. Keep your feet on the ground (or on your bicycle pedals), but see not only what’s immediately in front of your eyes, but the stories that lie behind the facades.
