First Class Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Alison Stewart

  Foreword copyright © 2013 by Melissa Harris-Perry

  All rights reserved

  First edition

  Published by Lawrence Hill Books

  An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61374-009-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  To my family

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Melissa Harris-Perry

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1 It Is What It Is

  2 Teaching to Teach

  3 The Law Giveth and the Law Taketh Away

  4 It’s the Principal

  5 Bricks and Mortarboards

  6 Old School

  7 Chromatics

  8 Coming of Age

  9 Right to Serve

  10 Boiling, Not Brown

  11 Elite versus Elitism

  12 New School

  13 Children Left Behind

  14 From Bed-Stuy to Shaw

  15 The Fall

  16 New New School

  17 Back to the Future

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Melissa Harris-Perry

  IN 2007, CONTROVERSIAL EDUCATION reformer Michelle Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty embarked on an aggressive, and short-lived, era of education reform in Washington, DC. Within four years Rhee had resigned and Fenty was defeated in his bid for reelection in a campaign that centered on his school-reform efforts.

  In subsequent years, multiple interpretations of their story have fueled an ongoing debate about what is broken in American education and what it will take to fix it. Driven by ideology rather than information, the reform debate tends to offer more heat than light. First Class enters into this moment in an entirely unique, wholly surprising, and especially illuminating way.

  Alison Stewart is a journalist by training and craft. She has spent her career reporting on the cultural, social, and political life of contemporary America. As a journalist, she trades in the urgency of the relentless twenty-four-hour news cycle, reporting on breaking political events, interviewing key newsmakers, and offering insights on the issues of our moment.

  Given this esteemed career, you might expect that her book about education in Washington, DC, would begin in 2006, when Adrian Fenty staked his nascent mayoral administration on reforming the city’s schools. And you might expect to find, beneath of the covers of such a book, a series of interviews with the young reformers who have galvanized public attention in the past decade.

  That might be a good book, but it would be a wholly ordinary one— one whose relevance would barely exceed the shelf life of a magazine. Alison Stewart did not write that book.

  Instead, Stewart takes us back to the nineteenth century, when most blacks below the Mason-Dixon were still enslaved and when DC’s Black Codes ensured that free coloreds in the city remained disenfranchised, impoverished, segregated, and most importantly, uneducated. She begins in that moment with one story, the story of a small group of education reformers who founded a small project that ultimately becomes Dunbar High School, the first public high school for blacks in America. And then she tells us what happens to Dunbar. It is one story that spans more than a century and illuminates everything we think we already know about education.

  Through Stewart we learn that Washington, DC—capital of the nation, site of the preservation of the Union—is also the original laboratory for African American education. Stewart’s long, historical sweep destroys any easy assumption that deeply politicized, ideological battles over education, race, and reform are new. Instead, as you read this tale, you will learn that teachers, principals, families, neighborhoods, students, and whole communities have long tied their identities and their dreams to their education. School is a place of making meaning, and in no place is this truer than in Dunbar High School.

  In the beginning, educating “colored” children in DC was the private crusade of a handful of courageous white teachers. But with the founding of Dunbar High School at the turn of the twentieth century, educating black students was part of a national movement for justice and citizenship. Classically educated black pupils who knew Greek, physics, mathematics, and literature were incarnate examples of the inherent equality of the races. Their excellence proved that notions of essential racial inferiority were patently false. Dunbar High School committed itself fully to the radical mission of proving black worthiness by cultivating black academic excellence. Dunbar had stunning achievements and produced a startling share of black leaders.

  But Dunbar’s story is not wholly triumphant. When Stewart’s book begins, the performance of Dunbar’s marching band at the inauguration of President Obama evokes pity and shame rather than pride from DC’s black middle class. The deteriorating physical plant of the school is a monument to decades of collective disinvestment in Dunbar’s core mission. The proud Dunbar alumni do not exist, even as faded stories, for the current Dunbar students. The legacy of accomplishment has been supplanted by the realities of underachievement.

  But even as it falters, Dunbar retains a spirit of struggle and an attachment to community that promises to see it through the latest epoch of reform. There is still a cadre of teachers, parents, students, and alumni who believe in pursuing the mission of exemplary public education for students who have been relegated to second-class status. There are just enough to write a new chapter in Dunbar’s history and, therefore, in the history of American education.

  There is no one better suited to tell this story than Alison Stewart. She is the child of Dunbar graduates, and introduces us to this school with the passion and love that can emerge only from an early childhood attachment to a story and to a place. To read First Class is to glimpse Stewart’s love letter to a complicated and sometimes disappointing beloved. Her narrative situates Dunbar in the long history of American educational reform, the ongoing struggle for racial equality, and the deeply personal history of a family that has contributed so much to the tapestry of America.

  INTRODUCTION

  FIRST CLASS IS A collage of memories, news articles, ephemera, interviews, research, reporting, and observations about one of the most spectacular success stories in education. The genesis of this project was a conversation around the dinner table. My parents were reminiscing about what a good education meant to them as African Americans and how Dunbar High School had shaped their future.

  One day in early 2003, I was in DC for work, and I decided to go take a look at the school I had heard so much about as a child, the segregated high school that became a mecca of African American education. Dunbar had produced doctors, legal scholars, educators, and civil rights leaders. Dunbar graduates had been honored with postage stamps bearing their portraits and had argued in front of the US Supreme Court, changing history. They were men and women who had refused to let the disgusting practice of segregation limit their ambitions. Dunbar was a defining institution for African Americans of a certain age. It was such a part of their lives that Dunbar is often listed in the obituaries of its older graduates. Dunbar meant something in DC. I had to see Dunbar. When I mentioned to a colleague where I was going, his response was, “Dunbar—hey, they have a great basketball team.”

  After visiting Dunbar, I understood his response. The Dunbar I visited that day, unannounced and unquestioned by staff as I walked the halls,
was not like the place my parents described. The students weren’t in class. Correct grammar was optional. Teachers were doing their best under adverse conditions. The only remnants of Dunbar’s former academic glory could be seen in a dusty display case filled with faded pictures and tarnished trophies. What had happened to Dunbar? How had it managed to be successful when the laws and social mores of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked against its students and their families? How had it managed to deteriorate in the twenty-first century? And why didn’t more people know about the school’s reputation? Where were the graduates of Old Dunbar today? And what would happen to their stories if someone didn’t write them down? Those who lived the Dunbar story were in their later years, and their numbers were diminishing. It was important that their history be remembered. In this age where we are all looking for education reform, there is a blueprint that could be followed: Dunbar’s blueprint.

  Please consider these three points as you read this book:

  First, after consulting veteran African American journalists and college professors of African American studies, I chose to include the language of the eras about which I wrote. Sometimes it was hard to write the words and perhaps it will be hard to read them, but that is part of the story, the struggle for respect and recognition through education. In the nineteenth century the word “colored” was in standard use, as was the word “nigger.” Sometimes a person might have the status of a “free black” or “free colored.” In 1930 the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly changed their stylebooks and began to use “Negro” in their articles. Following the black power movement of the 1960s, again the New York times made a shift—this time to “black,” as did the Associated Press. In the late 1980s, “African American” became more prevalent. You will see the language change throughout the book as the story progresses.

  Second, the school went through several name changes over the years. From 1870 to 1892 it was called the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth. From 1892 it was known as the M Street High School, and in 1916 it took on the name Dunbar. Until the 1954 Supreme Court decision Dunbar was segregated and was the only purely academic public high school available to African American children in Washington, DC. The fact that Dunbar High School was a winner during a time of segregation does not in any way suggest that racial segregation in the United States was anything but a demeaning, cruel, and unconstitutional system. Dunbar made the best of the limiting practice of segregation— but this does not make segregation palatable or condonable in any way.

  Finally, all quotes (unless otherwise noted) come from first-person interviews I conducted for this book. For this book I traveled from a rough neighborhood in Chicago to the historical home of a nineteenth-century poet in Dayton, Ohio, to the White House. I am enormously grateful to all of the Dunbar graduates and educators who welcomed me into their homes and offices. Not every story could be included in the book, but every interview, conversation, e-mail, and phone call informed the narrative. The number of graduates who accomplished extraordinary things is long and includes achievements in medicine, the arts, the military, education, politics, civil service, and the law. At the Charles Sumner School and archives, the official museum and archives of Washington, DC, public schools, there are folders several inches thick with biographies and obituaries that celebrate the life and accomplishments of M Street/Dunbar graduates.

  The story of Dunbar shows what can happen in spite of huge legal, societal, and professional hurdles. It shows what is possible when a group of people focus and band together to make something better. Dunbar shows what happens when a stable middle class exists. And Dunbar shows us that politics pollutes education. And through all this, Dunbar helped create the greatest generations of African Americans.

  Dunbar High School

  Courtesy of Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives

  PROLOGUE

  IF YOU STAND ON the corner in front of Dunbar Senior High School and look down New Jersey Avenue, you can clearly see the front of the Capitol, where history was made on January 20, 2009. That day Joe and Carol Stewart watched on television with nearly 38 million other American viewers as Barack Obama was inaugurated. What made their experience distinct was that sixty-five years earlier, just ten blocks from where the first black president of the United States was being sworn in, they had attended a segregated high school—the first public high school for blacks in the United States.

  In the 1940s, Joe and Carol were teenagers in the southern city of Washington, DC, at a time when they and their friends couldn’t grab a hamburger in some restaurants or buy a pair of shoes from certain stores. Now, in their lifetime, a black man had been elected to the highest office in the land.

  “What a magnificent display of what Homo sapiens is capable of in his most civilized state, you know?” marveled Carol, ever the biology teacher, as she settled in on the couch. “I enjoy the whole thing, the whole concept—the mass of humanity, without any fights or pushing or screaming, but with everybody smiling. Everybody just wants to be hopeful, and there’s just so little to lift your spirits these days. So, if he can lift the spirits, God bless him. God bless him. God bless him. He’s got a lot on his plate, you know.”

  Joe Stewart, who as a young black kid had almost slipped through the cracks, was visibly moved by President Obama’s inaugural address. “It was the tenor of the speech—that for the first time since Ronald Reagan, it is ‘We are together and we are going to get it done,’ and that these divisions between us are nowhere near as important as the things we have in common. And I think that spirit has been missing for at least the last eight years—and time before that, from the time of Newt Gingrich and maybe back to Reagan. Because, while Reagan said it was ‘morning in America,’ he also in a sense said that we weren’t responsible for one another. So, I’m glad to see a return to the idea that it’s one country and the idea that diversity is a good thing. That’s truly the idea, that diversity is a good thing instead of just lip service.”

  “Daddy, did you think you’d live to see the day that there would be a black president?” I asked Joe, my father.

  “I don’t know that I did. It is stunning, just stunning.” But he did live to see the first black president; he lived to see it by seventy-one days.

  Later that evening I called my mom to see if they had watched Dunbar High School marching band in the parade.

  “I can’t believe those girls were switchin’ their behinds,” my mom said in the curt way that high school teachers do. Oh, yes, she had seen it. “That was not what young ladies should do!”

  1 IT IS WHAT IT IS

  ON SEVERAL COLD, DARK mornings, and a few weekends too, the Dunbar Senior High School marching band practiced, practiced, and practiced some more for the historic day. Within six weeks Dunbar’s band, the Crimson Tide, would participate in the inaugural parade for the forty-fourth president of the United States.

  A high-profile performance like this was something band director Rodney Chambers couldn’t have pulled off four years earlier, when he arrived at Dunbar. “We had sixteen kids in the band. That was everybody.”

  In the summer of 2004, Chambers, a transplanted North Carolinian, was working in DC with a music-education nonprofit when he heard through the grapevine that Dunbar didn’t have a band director. “This was like a week, two weeks before school started. I’m like ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll see if I can find somebody.’ ”

  Sporting a shaved head and a goatee, the forty-year-old Chambers has the manners of a southern gentleman and the physique of a former football player. “I talked to the principal and told her I would do it for a month or two. She said, ‘There’s no need to volunteer; you might as well get paid.’ And I’ve been here four and a half years.”

  Chambers didn’t realize what he had signed on to do. The principal who hired him left the school, as did her successor—and her successor’s successor. The twenty-first-century Dunbar Senior High School had problems—academically, physically
, and, it could be persuasively argued, spiritually. The almost forty-year-old facility, a hulking “greige”-colored building that had clearly been designed in the 1970s, was in bad shape all the way around. The alarms on the doors didn’t work. The escalators between the cavernous floors rarely worked. Kids ran wild in the parts of the building that were no longer in use due to dwindling attendance. The library had encyclopedias from the 1990s and computers that could be museum pieces.

  In the lobby, pictures of illustrious alumni hung in broken plastic picture frames. It was a hall of fame featuring strong African American leaders such as Senator Ed Brooke and Dr. Charles Drew, looking out at students who couldn’t recognize them as role models because the kids didn’t recognize them at all. The halls echoed with the sounds of “motherfucker” and mangled variations the verb “to be.” Truthfully, the academic picture wasn’t unique for an urban high school facing persistent economic and social challenges, but the sight was indeed shocking given Dunbar’s rich history. Shocking and sad.

  Once upon a time, not so long ago, Dunbar High School was a nationally known, academically elite public high school. Its graduates were among the most educated and most productive Americans of a generation. Flying in the face of racist stereotypes and restrictive segregation laws, Dunbar graduates broke through glass ceilings and shattered assumptions. The first black general in the US Army was a Dunbar graduate, as was the first black federal court judge and the first black presidential cabinet member. Once upon a time, not so long ago, expectations for Dunbar students were extremely high. By the early 2000s expectations were depressingly low.

  “When I got here, it was, like, so much they needed,” band director Chambers recalled. Things like instruments. When Mayor Adrian Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee took over the school system in 2007, Chambers was already a year into wading through streams of red tape, trying to redirect some funds his way. “They gave us $3.7 million, and we got uniforms and instruments for everybody. It took almost three years to get those things. It has been really tough.” He had forty band members by the end of September 2004. He said he recruited forty-five students by the end of 2005. There were persistent rumors and whispers that Chambers used ringers—any kid who would show up, a warm body—to supplement the band, not that anyone would have noticed.