4 - Psychiatry for Harlem: Wartime Activism and the Black Community's Mental Health Needs, 1942–45

Summary

After two years with the Special Child Guidance Unit, Max Winsor felt that he had not done enough to fight mental health disparities in Harlem. In November 1941, Winsor wrote to Viola Bernard, admitting that he had “tended to narrow interests, contacts, and hopes to the Unit's work since coming to the Bureau.”1 He worried that this kind of insularity might impede the larger fight against institutional racism.

In late 1941, Winsor, Bernard, Justine Wise Polier, and others within both the Domestic Relations Court and the Bureau of Child Guidance realized that their ability to reform their institutions from the inside was limited. When public funds were not sufficient to finance the Harlem Unit or the Domestic Relations Court clinic, Polier and her fellow civil servants relied on philanthropy. But private contributions were not enough to sustain social programs in one of America's largest cities. As La Guardia sought to appeal more to his conservative Italian base during his third mayoral term, Polier could not always count on him to continue supporting her progressive policy experiments. Given these limits, racial liberals realized that they might have to call on civil society to place political pressure on the mayor.

Between 1942 and 1947, proponents of social justice in juvenile justice and public education forged an alliance with leaders from Harlem's black freedom struggle. They found support for their institutional reform efforts within a pivotal new civil-rights organization, the City-Wide Citizen's Committee for Harlem (CWCCH). Assembled in 1941, the CWCCH was composed of private citizens and African American community leaders. This group initially sought to understand and prevent crime in central Harlem. The CWCCH welcomed input from school and court officials with experience tackling youth crime in Harlem. CWCCH leaders such as the Harlem YMCA's Channing Tobias were eager to work with local authorities willing to promote racial justice. Polier, Winsor, and Bernard fit that bill, offering them the opportunity to promote the emotional health of black children as a matter of civil-rights import.

Thanks to the advocacy of Polier and other racial liberals, the CWCCH incorporated color-blind psychiatry with juvenile delinquents into the wartime civilrights movement. Once appointed to the CWCCH Subcommittee on Crime and Juvenile Delinquency, Polier, Winsor, and Bernard secured the organization's support for three of their antiracist policy efforts in the courts and schools. Two of these proposals were enacted.