In the first half of the twentieth century, Dunbar was an academically
elite public school, despite being racially segregated by law and
existing at the mercy of racist congressmen who held the school's purse
strings. These enormous challenges did not stop the local community from
rallying for the cause of educating its children.
Dunbar attracted an amazing faculty: one early principal was the first
black graduate of Harvard, almost all the teachers had graduate degrees,
and several earned PhDs--all extraordinary achievements given the Jim
Crow laws of the times. Over the school's first eighty years, these
teachers developed generations of highly educated, high-achieving
African Americans, groundbreakers that included the first black member
of a presidential cabinet, the first black graduate of the US Naval
Academy, the first black army general, the creator of the modern blood
bank, the first black attorney general, the legal mastermind behind
school desegregation, and hundreds of educators.
By the 1950s, Dunbar High School was sending 80 percent of its students
to college. Today, as with many troubled urban public schools, there are
Dunbar students who struggle with basic reading and math. Journalist and
author Alison Stewart, whose parents were both Dunbar graduates, tells
the story of the school's rise, fall, and path toward resurgence as it
looks to reopen its new, state-of-the-art campus.
