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The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School
Chicago Review Press
August 2013
On Sale: August 1, 2013
356 pages
ISBN: 1613740093
EAN: 9781613740095
Kindle: B00DKMP1HC
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, defied the odds
and, in the process, changed America. 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 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 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 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.
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