When acclaimed journalist and author Alison Stewart learned that her parents had graduated from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., she knew their story pulsed with the greater history of African-Americans seeking to successfully navigate a segregated America.
“Dunbar had a life story, a heartbeat, and a reason for living,” Stewart told theGrio. “Teachers really instilled the idea, ‘don’t give up.’ The faculty was in the kids’ business. They talked to the neighborhood. They talked to the church. They had no problem calling a parent saying, ‘Your kid is not in class.’ Going to Dunbar meant you were part of something.”
Paul Laurence Dunbar High School — also known as Dunbar High — was America’s first black public high school. Founded in 1870, Dunbar High has produced many of the nation’s pioneering black “firsts,” African-Americans who broke through barriers to become the first people of African descent to achieve in their fields — much like the poet after whom the school is named. Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first black poets to receive national acclaim.
Stewart chronicles this school’s unique past in her new book, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School. By interviewing Dunbar graduates ranging from as far back as the ’30s, in addition to plumbing yearbooks and other source materials, Stewart reveals the history of academic excellence that thrived in Dunbar’s classrooms.
Dunbar High’s esteemed list of graduates includes: Benjamin Davis, the first black general in the army; Robert Weaver, the first black presidential cabinet member; Wesley Brown, the first black naval academy graduate; Norma Johnson, the first black woman to preside as a judge in the federal courts; Eva Dykes, the first black woman to earn a doctoral degree, and the third to receive a doctorate, or PhD; Edward Brooke, the first black politician popularly elected to the U.S. Senate; Billy Taylor, famed jazz musician; Elizabeth Catlett, one of the first blacks to achieve success in the fine arts; and, Charles Hamilton Houston, a leading black lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case.
And that is just to name a few.
On the Melissa Harris-Perry show, Alison Stewart discusses Dunbar High.
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The history of Dunbar High
Despite the inequalities of segregation that were entrenched in the D.C. public school system, as the very first public high school for blacks, for some time Dunbar stood alone as a gateway towards opportunity.
Dunbar High emerged from humble beginnings in the basement of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. before its first edifice was erected in 1916. It had what many called a beautiful, “collegiate-looking” exterior.
Black families from different socioeconomic strata, many of whom had migrated from the South during the Great Migration, flocked to D.C. just so their children could attend Dunbar High.
Inequality impacts first black schools
“You still see the legacy of slavery in parts of the D.C. school system,” Stewart said of these incipient moments. “Some of these kids coming up from the South had grandparents, or great-grandparents, for whom it was illegal to teach and read, and they didn’t have a long history of education in their family. By the time legalized desegregation happened, you had a couple of generations that had been severely underserved by the public school system.”
Systematic inequality in D.C. public schools can be traced to the year Dunbar High was founded. Starting in the 1870s, the D.C. Board of Education reorganized the school system and severely underfunded black schools. According to the D.C. Board of Education Report from 1910, funding for black schools should have been proportional to the number of African-American children in the District. When more African-American families migrated from the South, funding allocations did not account for the surge in African-American students.
Despite this, according to Stewart, Dunbar High thrived on rich human capital and well-educated teachers. Dunbar alumni returned to teach after gaining prestigious graduate degrees, and imbued student morale with “race pride.”
Was Dunbar elite — or was there elitism?
The first few members of Dunbar’s founding class paid for their education, but once public education became organized and truly free, school access became more egalitarian. “That’s not to say the social black elite wasn’t there,” Stewart said. “My uncle told stories about going to parties and them saying, ‘You’re not invited here.’ At Dunbar though, you just had to be able to survive it. You just had to be able to pass and graduate. They couldn’t keep you out.”
Class differences aside, Dunbar’s student body reproduced the diversity of the black population of greater D.C. Although there was a strong presence of upper-middle class black families, Stewart’s research proves that privilege was not necessarily a prerequisite for success there.
“Dunbar was like any other public school,” Stewart affirmed. “My mom, whose father worked three jobs, had a best friend, whose family had a maid and a beautiful house, because her dad was a doctor.”
In the chapter of First Class, “Elite versus Elitism,” Stewart explores the common notion that Dunbar was only for wealthy black children. While these pages explore resentments and the sense of alienation non-elite blacks may have faced there, such as Stewart’s uncle, in reality working class students were numerous.
“There always was a sense that Dunbar was just for the super-elite, and all the kids’ parents were doctors, lawyers, upper-class blacks,” Steward said. “They were definitely there, but the documentation tells you they couldn’t all have been doctors and lawyers.”
The decline of Dunbar
In 1977, the “collegiate” Paul Laurence Dunbar school building was replaced with a modern structure that failed to capture the grandeur of the previous construction. In some ways, this change reflected the decline of this and other inner city schools across America.
“The decline of Dunbar really mirrors the difficulties of D.C. through the ’70s, the ’80s, and the ’90s – the fiscal difficulties, the drug difficulties, and the violence,” Stewart told theGrio.
Today, only sixty percent of Dunbar students graduate each year. Stewart attributes the decline of Dunbar to scarce budgetary resources and neighborhood decline, which has crippled the social fabric of the black communities that had helped students at Dunbar thrive.
The issues facing Dunbar are in step with a trend of critical problems within public school systems nationwide.
A model for public school reform
Some urban school systems are failing so miserably, locales have chosen to close schools rather than attempting to improve their performance.
According to Reuters, seventy cities across the country have closed schools over the past decade. Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have made headlines recently for closing dozens of failing schools. Many school closures occur in predominantly African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods.
First Class has provided a platform for Stewart to promote education reform and inspire leaders to examine the story of Dunbar as an exemplar for the potential of revitalizing urban public schools.
Stewart appeared on the Melissa Harris-Perry show recently with D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson to praise a recent victory for that city’s public schools.
Students made the highest gains in their annual math and science tests this year since 2008. Chancellor Henderson has advocated for longer school days, a common core curriculum, and teacher visits to the homes of their students — initiatives similar to what Stewart says allowed Dunbar to excel in its prime. (Melissa Harris-Perry wrote the foreword to Stewart’s book.)
The Legacy of Dunbar
In addition to promoting education reform, Stewart has created the First Class/United Negro College Fund Scholarship, which supports college students in financial need who have graduated from Dunbar High.
“I definitely feel some social responsibility being the daughter of Dunbar graduates,” Stewart said.
She also stays connected with other sons and daughters of Dunbar graduates, including Black Entertainment Television CEO Debra Lee, and President Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, who Stewart interviewed for her book.
This fall, Dunbar High will open with a new state-of-the-art campus based on the original turn-of-the-century architectural style. While she is optimistic about the future of Dunbar and its new campus, Stewart hopes the symbolic meaning of the school’s history will inspire more students to fulfill the legacy of their predecessors. The hallways of the new school will feature plaques honoring illustrious alumni, while leaving space on the walls for anticipated future greats from Dunbar’s coming graduating classes.
“I really have a concern that some young black Americans don’t take education as part of their history, and nobody tells them about it. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not part of your history,” Stewart stated emphatically.
Follow Dominique Mann on Twitter @dominiquejmann