First Class

The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School

By: Alison Stewart

Narrated by: Alison Stewart

Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, defied the odds and, in the process, changed America.

In the first half of the 20th 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 extraordinary 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 80 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 state 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 too many troubled urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students struggle with 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 in the fall of 2013.

©2013 Alison Stewart; foreword © 2013 by Melissa Harris-Perry (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Good history of DC's elite Black High School

I've seen other citations of this book regarding the history of the Dunbar school, so I figured since this was an audiobook to give it a listen. There are issues with the audio quality. I see the author was the narrator, and after listening to several other audio books sometime one can tell the difference between a carefully edited audiobook, with a professional narrator, done in a studio. I could tell the difference. But it wasn't so bad that I didn't enjoy the book, it's just that I noticed.

The best part of the book was the content of the book. It inspired me to get a paperback copy of the physical book!

The book intermixes the school's past and near present. The present at the time being Barack Obama's inauguration and the marching band's entry in the parade. I lived not far from Dunbar and I remember students practicing on the neighborhood's streets. Since I despise crowds I did not attempt to see them perform. I also missed their TV coverage and the opinions Stewart writes about in her book. This was to illustrate the stark difference between the Dunbar of yesteryear and the Dunbar of today.

The book covers the beginnings of the M Street school and its eventual evolution into the Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School. Stewart highlights the school's glory days in the face of racism and criticism. I liked how she explained how the staff supported students and although it was not a neighborhood school, its students were not all from the elite class or pale shades of brown, She also covers the changes that made Dunbar a school for high achieving academically minded African Americans to a neighborhood school with other aims.

She criticizes, but doesn't put down what Dunbar has become. She praises some of the students from the post- segregation era.

Stewart also does a decent job of explaining what there have been four different buildings in the school's history. This includes efforts by the alumni to save the old building facing 1st street which was torn down for a Brutalist structure that was eventually demolished.