THE POLITICAL CURRICULUM OF OLD UNION SQUARE
Location
This week we’ll meet at 4pm in the Tamiment Collection at NYU’s Bobst Library. Logistical instructions to come.
Agenda
This week we’ll explore the legacy of radical education that congealed around Union Square, historic epicenter for labor rallies and public protest. In the early 20th century, the area witnessed the rise of civil society organizations, progressive publishers, and radical bookstores (from the ACLU and NAACP to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Crisis magazine and Anaïs Nin’s Gemor Press). It was also home to the Rand School of Social Science (1906-35), the New York Workers School (1923-44), the Jefferson School of Social Science (1944-56) – Socialist and Communist adult education — and The New School (1931- ), itself born out of political protest. All were early to integrate Black studies. We’ll explore the legacies of the first three of these four in the Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor History Collection at NYU, and I can share some context about The New School. It’s important to note, too, that the Rand School’s labor library seeded the Tamiment collection at NYU; we can consider what it means for a radical organization’s legacy to be stewarded by a neoliberal conglomerate — and how this relationship is emblematic of broader imbalances in archival politics.
Shannon O’Neill, the collections’ curator, will be our primary guide, but we’ll be joined by Laura Nelson, an assistant professor of English at Princeton whose research focuses on “sites of study,” and who’s contributing to the activation of a related concurrent, nearby exhibition: “The Red and the Violet: McCarthyism at NYU,” curated by NYU English professor Zach Samalin, will be hosted at NYU’s Espacio de Culturas Gallery, at 53 Washington Square, from November through early spring 2027. We would have gathered there after our Tamiment tour, but the gallery’s booked every November Wednesday afternoon. We encourage you to stop by on your own time!
To Prepare for This Week
- Before we turn our attention to early 20th-century political education, let’s think about a precedent project in which the very provision of education was itself political. Explore the New York Historical’s “Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection and skim the finding aid to the schools’ records, as well as the records of the Manumission Society, the schools’ founder. I haven’t dedicated an entire session to the history of Black schools because their archival records seem to be rather dispersed — but we could certainly address this subject in our “flex week” in December. See also the supplemental resources below.
- Read Andy Hines, “The Communist Community College,” Aydelotte Foundation (February 16, 2022).
- Skim through Bobst’s finding aids for the Rand School of Social Science and the Jefferson School of Social Science. Both schools were surveilled by another organization whose records are also held in the Tamiment Library: American Business Consultants, formed by former FBI agents, tracked suspected (and overt!) Communist activity.
- Introduce yourself to a contemporary: the anarchist Ferrer Modern School, which positioned itself on St. Marks Place in 1911. Read about the Ferrer Center and Colony (I unfortunately couldn’t find a suitably short, accessible text), and skim Harry Kelly’s “The Ferrer Modern School” (1920, via the Anarchist’s Library) to understand the principles guiding the school’s pedagogy.
- Watch “Radical Americans: Who Teaches Them?” WGBH Education Foundation (April 15, 1966), via the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
- Let’s think, too, about contemporary spaces for similar political education. What about the People’s Forum, 16 Beaver, Woodbine, the Brecht Forum (whose records are now held at the Tamiment Library, too!), the Marxist Education Project?
Suppemental Resources
Supplemental Resources:
- Eric G. Anderson, “The Anarchist Classroom: A Test of Libertarian Education and Human Nature at the Modern School in New York and New Jersey, 1911-1953,” Masters Thesis, Queens College (2018).
- Michael Anderson, “‘Teaching Through Ideological Struggle’: The Radical Black Pedagogical Tradition from the Cold War Through the Black Power Movement,” Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles (2025).
- Stanley Aronowitz, “Against Schooling: Education and Social Class,” Social Text 22:2 (Summer 2004): 13-35.
- Stanley Aronowitz, “Education, Social Class, and the Sites of Pedagogy” in Classrooms Matter: Progressive Visions of Educational Environments, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Walter R. Jacobs (Routledge, 2004): 37-54.
- Paul Avrich, The Modern Schools Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (AK Press, 2005).
- George Washington Carver School, Box 37, Tamiment Library Archives Printed Ephemera Collection.
- Marvin E. Gettleman, “‘No Varsity Teams’: New York’s Jefferson School of Social Science, 1943-1956,” Science & Society 66:3 (Fall 2002): 336-59.
- Robert H. Haworth, ed., Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (PM Press, 2012).
- Andy Hines, Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
- Andy Hines, “Theory Camp versus Commie Camp,” PMLA 140:3 (2025).
- “K-12 Radical Education in NYC: A Collaborative Investigation,” Interference Archive (December 1, 2018).
- David A. Lincove, “Radical Publishing to ‘Reach the Million Masses’: Alexander L. Trachtenberg and International Publishers, 1906-1966,” Left History 10:1 (Fall/Winter 2004): 85-124.
- P. Magg, “Education for the Age of Labor,” The Kenyon Review 6:4 (1944): 632-44.
- Gorham Munson, “Education for the Age of Power,” The Kenyon Review 6:4 (1944): 645-57.
- Robert M. Zecker, “‘Training for Class Struggle’: Communist Workers’ Schools, 1923-1956,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 23:3 (2025).
- More on Black Study:
- Book on black study, fugitive pedagogy, rosenwald schools
- Alyssa Amaral, Amy Fehr, Amanda M. Greenwell, Daniel J. Pfeiffer, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, and Mariel Smith, and Anna Mae Duane, “New York African Free Schools and Their Convention Legacies,” Colored Conventions (2016).
- Charles C. Andrews, The History of the New-York African Free Schools from Their Establishment in 1787 to the Present Time, Embracing a Period of More than Forty Years and Also a Brief Account of the Successful Labors of the New-York Manumission Society (M. Day, 1830).
- * Orisanmi Burton, “Revolution Is Illegal: Revisiting the Black Panther Twenty-One at Fifty,” Spectre (April 21, 2021).
- Kathy Emergy, Sylvia Braselman, and Linda Gold, eds., Freedom School Curriculum: Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964 (Radical Democracy Project, 2004).
- Barry M. Goldenberg, “The Story of Harlem Prep; Cultivating a Community School in New York City,” The Gotham Center (August 2, 2016).
- Michael Hines, “Learning Freedom: Education, Elevation, and New York’s African-American Community, 1827-1829,” History of Education Quarterly 56:4 (2016): 618-45.
- Ariel Kates, “African Free School, First in America for Black Students, Found a Home in Greenwich Village,” Off the Grid (Village Preservation, November 2, 2017).
- Beverly Lindsay and J. John Harris III, “Progressive Education and the Black College,” Journal of Black Studies 7:3 (1977): 341-57.
- Kofi Lomotey, “Black Panther Liberation Schools,” in Encyclopedia of African American Education, edited by Kofi Lomotey (SAGE, 2010).
- Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse University Press, 1979).
- Miranda Michael, “The Corona, Queens, Chapter of the Black Panther Party,” Confluence / NYU Gallatin (May 7, 2025) – mentions a liberation school.
- “Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States,” Department of the Interior, Buletin 38 (1916).
- Christopher F. Petrella, “Resurrecting the Radical Pedagogy of the Black Panther Party,” Black Perspectives (July 3, 2017).
- John L. Rury, “The New York African Free School, 1827-1836: Conflict Over Community Control of Black Education,” Phylon 44:3 (1983): 187-197.
- Nara Roberta Silva, “The Black Panther Party: Revolution, Repression, and Black Radical Politics,” Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Fall 2026.
- Turnstile Tours, “Race, Riots, and the Right to Learn: Black Education in Antebellum New York,” Turnstile Tours 227 (June 2021).