Wilcox, Preston, 1923-2006

From 1958 to 1964, Preston Wilcox worked as a tenant organizer and later as director of the East Harlem Project; as a program consultant to the East Harlem Summer Festival, a United Neighborhood Houses initiative designed to prevent juvenile delinquency; and as a consultant and catalyst for the Massive Economic Neighborhood Development (MEND), an anti-poverty program in East Harlem. He also participated as a social researcher in the Princeton University six week summer studies program for junior high school students that led to the nationally-funded Upward Bound Program.

Known as "the father of school decentralization" in New York City, and "the leading theoretician of the community control movement," Wilcox was at the forefront of the campaigns at Intermediate School 201 in Harlem and later in the Ocean-Brownsville school district, for parent participation in curriculum development and in the hiring of school supervisors and teachers. A prolific writer, he authored in the period between 1963 and 1973 some 200 articles, position papers and essays on public education and community empowerment, published in professional journals and as chapters in books. He also taught courses in social work theory and community organization at Columbia University's School of Social Work between 1963 and 1968, and at Atlanta University, Medgar Evers College and other institutions of higher learning in the 1970s.

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