Truxton Is In Shaw – Page 12

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 14 From Bed-Stuy to Shaw

This year for Black History Month we’ll review chapter by chapter Alison Stewart’s First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School. This is more Truxton Circle related then this blog’s previous annual looks at Shaw resident and founder of Negro History Week (later Black history month) Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s Mis-Education of the Negro. As Dunbar High School is located in Truxton Circle currently taking up all of Square 554.

The Bed-Stuy in the chapter title refers to a New York neighborhood from which the group Friends of Bedford hailed. It was the earlier part of the Fenty mayoral administration, which meant the Superintendent was Michelle Rhee. This was an environment for trying new things, hiring consultants, throwing more spaghetti at walls. The pasta in this case was Friends of Bedford who were tasked with fixing schools like Dunbar High.

The school building was in poor shape. The Friends of Bedford noted the unsatisfactory ADA compliance, bad interiors, dirty carpets, an unstable aged roof and ‘fair’ electrical system. FoB had a Summer Blitz where there was cleaning and fixing. Unfortunately, a lot of Dunbar’s history got ditched in the frenzy. Yeah, that happened.

In 2010 there was a very heated race for the mayor and Fenty was replaced by Councilman Vincent Gray. The chapter pointed out that Gray did not like Rhee. A lot of people did not like Rhee. I suspect some did not like her because she wasn’t Black. But many more probably didn’t like her because of all the school closures and other shake ups.

Gray was a Dunbar graduate (1959), but a post-desegregation Dunbar grad. So he didn’t have the same love or romance for the school as the legally segregated Dunbar. He was asked to be the commencement speaker for the class of 2010. Fenty was on the same platform. Both addressed the students. Fenty was booed.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 13 Children Left Behind

This chapter starts in 2008. It’s the Fenty era and Michelle Rhee is the first, and so far only, Asian American DC school chancellor. The chapter name refers to President Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ program.

The author covers the poor education students received in 2008. It didn’t improve. I covered Dunbar’s PARCC scores in 2019 and they are depressing.
PARCC by Race

PARCC Scores 2018-19, % meeting & exceeding expectations
	Black	White	Hispanic	Asian
ELA 2018-19	16.5%	N/A	n<10	N/A
Math 2018-19	.5%	N/A	n<10	n<10
Males ELA	13.4%	N/A	n<10	N/A
Males Math	.9%	N/A	n<10	n<10

ELA- basically covers English and Language Arts, that would be reading and writing. And Math is math, numbers, adding, subtracting, figuring out sales tax or a 20% tip. Less than 1% of Dunbar students were proficient in Math.

The chapter covers the school from the 1980s to the aughts. The author mentions the school’s challenges as well as a few success stories as it is not all doom and gloom, despite dismal academics. But there was a clear academic and cultural difference between pre-desegregation Dunbar and post.

That difference also showed up in a division in the alumni association. The old Dunbar alumni who were held to higher standards and expectations had trouble connecting with the younger alumni. It is not as if the Old Dunbar did not help the New Dunbar students. There were scholarships and a story about a student who was accepted into Amherst College revived a Amherst-Dunbar connection and money flowed to the student.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 12 New School

This chapter starts with the 1968 riots which pretty much destroyed much of 9th and 7th Street in Shaw. Yes, other neighborhoods experienced damage too, but we’re focusing on Shaw. The damage lasted 30 years. Whatever plans for the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area took on a new spirit after the riots and redoing Dunbar was part of it.

There were pre-riot plans for the Dunbar facility. There was a modernization plan to make it larger than Eastern High School. After the riot the School Board decided the building needed to be torn down.

As the 1970s approach Dunbar was a completely different school. Gone were the high standards and expectations of earlier years. There was a mix and range of students. And there were drug dealers around the neighborhood.

This chapter gives some detail about the prison like structure that loomed on Square 554 for 30 years. The new Dunbar Senior High School would be modern. It had open classrooms. I’m sure that idea looked great on paper.

Of course Dunbar alumni fought the good fight and tried to save the original 1916 building. Senator Brooke (mentioned in the previous chapter) lent his support for saving the old building. Apparently the building was recognized as an historic landmark. The alumni even took the city to court in 1977. June 2, 1977 the city began to knock down the old Dunbar building.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 11 Elite versus Elitism

The first half of the chapter is about all the great graduates of Dunbar. Jazz pianist Billy Taylor (1939) and Senator Edward William Brooke III (1936).

Senator Edward Brooke standing behind a chair which is decorated with the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, probably in Washington, D.C. after his election

The second half has Dunbar going through the 1960s and a tension of philosophies. To tell that story the focus is Madison Tingor, a teacher who started at Dunbar in the 1930s and in the 60s was given a chance to be the assistant principal of the formerly all-white Eastern High School. It was the philosophy and outlook that he brought from Dunbar vs the 60s Afrocentric strivers.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 10 Bolling, NOT Brown

Most are familiar with Brown v. Board of Education. It is the US Supreme Court case cited and credited with desegregating American schools. What most don’t realize (because history seems to be a drive by affair where you briefly are told of a topic and then immediately run off to the next in the chronology) that Brown v. Board was made of 5 cases, a DC case being one of them. That DC case was Bolling v. Sharpe.

The note that a M St/Dunbar graduate, Charles Houston, was on the legal team seems unimportant. What the chapter does is give a sense of what public education was like for African American students in the 1950s. The previous chapters gave it for the 1940s and earlier. Both Dunbar and Armstrong were overcrowded in 1948, as well as the other Black high schools in the city.

Armstrong High School March 1942 — Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information photograph collection (Library of Congress)- Armstrong High 1942.

May 17, 1954 the US Supreme Court made their decision on Brown v. Board and that year the District began a slow roll to desegregate starting at the elementary level. Of course, there was fighting. At least in the book, adults in positions of influence fighting about how the desegregation was going and planned.

I’m going to detour from the book to make a note. In the neighborhood had a smattering of white families in the 1950 census and by 1960, they’re gone. Doing the WSIC 1950 sell off series, I know why. It wasn’t because of school desegregation that had the families moving out. It was that those households were renters and their landlord WSIC decided to sell, specifically to Black buyers. Just looking at the census demographics and knowing about desegregation, it’s no great leap to assume that the change was due to the schools. Okay, back to the book.

“By 1957, Superintendent Hobart Corning declared, “Desegregation id complete.” But he then added this: “Desegregation is the moving about of people and things, Integration is a much longer process depending the creation of a community.”” So what does this mean for Dunbar, a school dedicated to Black academic excellence? Well it was the beginning of the end of that tradition and that culture.

Those fighting hard for desegregation weren’t thinking about Dunbar and what would come of its teachers and prospective students. Dunbar was on its way to becoming just a neighborhood school.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 9 Right to Serve

Military unit in Armstrong Technical High School which is trained by the regular Army, a tradition in all Washington schools. Library of Congress

Yes the above photo is of Armstrong students, but they are on the Dunbar campus. Chapter 9 is about Dunbar students who went to serve and have careers in the US military. I will focus on what happened at Dunbar.

Dunbar had the Dunbar High School Cadet Corps, referred to as the Corps in the chapter. Armstrong had a Corps too, but the book isn’t about them. It appears the Corps formed in the 1940s, probably a response to America’s involvement in World War II.

We learn about the importance of the Corps through Wesley Brown. Brown was the son of a truck driver and a laundress, and he himself had a job in a mailroom. He juggled school work and work work. Brown credited the high expectations he was held to at Dunbar and the discipline drilling gave him a leg up over other cadets at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. And it was at Annapolis he met and befriended Jimmy Carter.

But back to Dunbar. “The cadets were a part of everyday life at Dunbar.” They marched everywhere. Inside the building, as there was a large space on the 1st floor that could accommodate a group that size. They marched in front of the school’s armory. They practiced drills with Browning rifles. They even had a firing range at the school. Cadets were expected to keep their uniforms sharp and clean.

Students in the Corps practiced/drilled constantly. There were competitions. The author mentions drill competitions going back to 1890s. The drilling and the expectations placed on students provided them with the skills needed to serve well in our armed forces.

Black History Month meet Memory Lane: Carter G. Woodson’s House

Looking at some of the photographs I’ve taken I get to go down memory lane. Since it is Black History Month, let’s look at the father of Black History, Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s house at 1538 9th St NW. But let’s look at it in February 2014. A decade ago.

At the time it didn’t seem the National Park Service was going to do anything with this property or the adjoining properties it owned. I also vaguely remember the NPS was trying to take over a private home on the corner that is now a restaurant.

It had been this way for a while.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 8 Coming of Age

This chapter focuses on the Class of 1946 and their stories. From these individuals’ stories we can see how much Dunbar meant to them and what a unique institution it was. We can gather this group was still alive to extract this history from when the author was gathering material.

The story of Vashti Atkins, who was the Editor in Chief of the Dunbar yearbook, was less than romantic. In her sophomore year she got TB and at that time had to go to a special hospital where she stayed for a little over 3 years. But while in the hospital she was roomed with another Dunbar student, Vivian Stark and they formed a life long friendship. When she returned to Dunbar, she was a legal adult.

The next story was that of Joe Stewart was was from New York City. Dunbar must have been something special as it seemed to attract students beyond the District of Columbia’s borders. His parents were concerned about his academic future. His father graduated from M Street, so his parents decided to send him to live with grandparents in DC to attend Dunbar. Stewart recalled an instance when he and a fellow student Leon Ransom were collecting signatures to protest Safeway’s lack of Black cashiers and the police were called. Leon “Andy” Ransom was the son of NAACP lawyer Leon A. Ransom, and upon recognition of the name the police left the boys alone. The chapter also tells Carol Graham’s story and we learn later that Carol and Joe Stewart married and their lives after Dunbar.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 7 Chromatics

Oh this will be quick. There was a rumor about Dunbar that darker skinned students were not allowed there. It was wrong. Students of various shades and economic backgrounds attended.

Black History Month 2024: First Class- Ch. 6 Old School

The sixth chapter gets into the culture of Dunbar High and the teachers’ and administrators’ efforts to form future Black leaders. Not only did they have high academic standards, they also enforced high standards regarding appearance, hygiene and other mannerisms. It had elements of a finishing school when looking at the rules regarding how students were to conduct themselves.

Not everyone likes high standards and later we’ll see it manifest itself in hatred towards Dunbar by those within the DC Black community. But immediately, Dunbar started to lose students and the standards was one of the reasons cited. There are three reasons mentioned by the author: failing out; transfer to the technical high schools such as Armstrong; needing to work. The Great Migration, where US African Americans began moving out of the South to other parts of the country was just starting. Students from previously poorly run Southern country schools were probably ill prepared for the rigors at Dunbar.

Right or wrong, the faculty felt the way to preserve Dunbar was ti keep the academic bar astronomically high. The school was not a democracy but a meritocracy or a dictatorship, with academic expectation as the undeniable, unchallenged boss.

Being a Dunbar student was a way of life. The strong program was a given and was the reason why students went to Dunbar. And would excel, period. The school adopted a crest and a Latin motto, Adveris Major, Par Secundis (Greater Adversity, Equal in Prosperity).

In the handbook students were instructed in how to behave in public and on and off campus. Young ladies were cautioned by the assistant principal Miss Julia Evangeline Brooks to not powder their faces in school other than the dressing or locker rooms. She also dictated the kinds of fabrics girls should have, favoring gingham and washable fabrics over silks and chiffon.

The author also notes Booker T. Washington’s, “The Gospel of the Toothbrush.” Teaching and enforcing good hygiene was another Dunbar value. The author wrote, “Cleanliness was the American way or the upper and middle classes, and striving Negroes knew appearing immaculate was the key to their acceptance and future prosperity.” The rules and enforcement regarding hygiene and cleanliness was not equal for the sexes. Boys were encouraged to bathe daily, brush teeth more often and be neat in appearance. It seemed no one was telling them what fabrics they should and shouldn’t wear.

The punishment for failing to adhere to the rules was to go to the assistant principal’s office. Those who continued failure to maintain standards would have to reregister to return to the school.

It may seem harsh, but you can’t argue with results. The first class to go through all 4 years, the Class of 1920 included Wm. Mercer Cook and William Allison Davis. An ambassador and an anthropologist.