“Geniuses Growing on Streets?” The Cleveland Urban League’s Street Academy, Alternative Visions of Black Youth, and the Struggle to Transform Public Education, 1970–1978

In 1970 the Urban League of Cleveland, Ohio, opened a “street academy,” an alternative school for public school dropouts. A street academy would reduce the dropout rate, prepare black youth for college, and develop a pilot program to transform urban public schools. Street academies also promoted an alternative vision of black youth after a decade when many Americans perceived them as “social dynamite,” delinquents, and rioters. This article explores how the Cleveland street academy’s efforts to achieve educational equality for black youth ended in failure as crime control became increasingly entangled with education. Tracing the Cleveland street academy’s history reveals how education and the criminalization of black youth became linked through the linchpin of the dropout. The academy’s inability to advance its understanding of black youth and reform public education illuminates the late twentieth-century processes framing urban youth as problems, underscoring the interplay between those processes, the diminished likelihood of educational equity, and mass incarceration.

Smith-Pryor, Elizabeth M. “‘Geniuses Growing on Streets?’ The Cleveland Urban League’s Street Academy, Alternative Visions of Black Youth, and the Struggle to Transform Public Education, 1970–1978.” The Journal of African American History 105, no. 2 (March 1, 2020): 271–301. https://doi.org/10.1086/707730.