The Thurgood Marshall Academy: Honoring the Past, Teaching the Future

Lisa Merlini

February 16, 2004

For the first time in a long time, Harlem is going through growing pains. Old Navy, Marshall's and H & M, CVS and Pathmark, along with a Starbucks, have transformed 125 Street into the northern equivalent of 34th Street. Columbia University plans to expand its campus to the Manhattanville section of West Harlem. President Lee Bollinger is spearheading the campaign for expansion so that Columbia University can remain competitive, especially in the sciences, with other Ivy League schools. And on the very ground where Ed Small built his legendary jazz club, "Small's Paradise," high school students, who one day may be conducting research in those new science labs, are going wireless.

Or their classrooms are, anyway. On February 2, 2004, the new building for the Thurgood Marshall Academy of Learning and Social Change, located at 135 Street and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard, opened its doors and welcomed its first students. The occasion was a joyous one, even if the school's construction did encounter some resistance along the way.

The Marshall Academy is the first new public school in Harlem in 50 years. Eleven years ago, Reverend Calvin Butts, the pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, founded the school as a public charter school. His goal, he said, was to change Harlem "day by day, student by student."

Marshall Academy began as an intermediate school with five teachers and 100 students. Since then, the school has moved four times and quadrupled in size, its last residence the top two stories of a building at 135 Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. There, Destiny, an eighth-grade student, said they were "crammed like sardines."

Dr. Sandye Poitier-Johnson, the school's principal since her appointment in 1996, is an elegant woman with a commanding yet gentle presence. From the start, she promised change. She installed metal detectors and hired security guards at the school on St. Nicholas Avenue, and sought to inspire achievement by offering academic awards, which were named "Thurgies" (modeled after the Oscars), to those students who excelled in their studies.

She also promised the students a new building, if, she said, "they kept up their studies and academic performance." According to the Academy's 2002-2003 school report card, published on www.insideschools.com, over 90 percent of their students go on to attend colleges and universities. That's a number, Johnson said, that they've maintained since the late nineties.

What they needed to make her vision a reality was financing. Abyssinian Development Corporation, along with the New York City Department of Education, provided them with what they needed. Yvette Jackson, Abyssinian Development Corporation's Director of Policy, said the cost to build the school averaged $422 per square foot. The total came to $38 million, with Abyssinian contributing $1 million, and the Department of Education footing the rest.

Now, the 378 seventh and eighth-grade and high school students can enjoy six stories of internet-ready wireless classrooms, a 20,000-book library, career and college counseling centers, free health care, six new science labs plus a greenhouse, art and music studios and a large, airy gym. The new Thurgood Marshall Academy signals a change many in Harlem believe to be for the better. Others, though, fear another piece of Harlem's heritage might have been lost in the process.

No new building rises without memories of its predecessor coming to the surface. The glass and brick building sits on the site of Small's Paradise, one of Harlem's, if not New York's, most famously renowned nightclubs. For musicians Charlie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge and Jimmy Smith, to name a few, Small's Paradise became one of their regular stomping grounds, and as such, became legend.

When Abyssinian Development Corporation and the New York City Board of Education announced plans in 2000 to tear down the building that once housed Small's, Harlem's residents let their voices be heard. For Michael Henry Adams, a Harlem preservationist, as quoted in a recent New York Times article, tearing down a historic, albeit unused, landmark amounted to no less than "cultural genocide." Jeanne Littlejohn, apart from not wanting to see a landmark destroyed, had more personal reasons for opposing the change. An artist and Abyssinian church parishioner, she lived right next door to the new school, and claimed that the school's construction ruined her apartment.

Now, images of these jazz icons grace the wall of the student cafeteria, Small's Café, in the building's basement -- the basement where, in the original building, it's said, Ed Small spent most of his time. Their images are the only reminder that musical greats ever played there, a reminder that nonetheless the building's designer and artists felt necessary to preserve. John Rettick, of the non-profit Citiscape Institute, headed the school's art committee. He put it their decision best. "We wanted to reflect Harlem's past," he said, "and look to its future."

Architect Austin Harris, a young man with glasses who looks like he could still be in graduate school, designed the school. He says he wanted to capitalize on that connection. "I've been working on this building for four years, and know how important it was to have the community's involvement," he said. "All the spaces and colors were designed by the school's community, especially Sandye's (the principal) office on the third floor."

Dr. Johnson's office is a glass box in the middle of the third floor hallway. Its open layout is a nod to earlier days when teachers would hold classes in her office. There just simply wasn't any other room, she said, and besides, she would miss seeing the students, and the students, from their reaction to seeing her in the candy-colored hallways, would miss her too.

At Sunday Services the day before the school's opening, Reverend Butts invited the members of his congregation to walk a procession from the church to the school, about 6 blocks away. He did not march with them. Instead, he and a group of men from the congregation waited at the schoolhouse door.

It was his intention, he said, to show the students, their families, Mayor Bloomberg and anyone else paying attention that the men of Harlem are strong, present and ready to help their children make a difference.

(Updated April 28, 2004)