First Class Page 2

  However he did it, Chambers grew the band to sixty-five students by the end of 2007. He wanted to convey the message that music can take you to places you’ve never been. “Kids want to travel, to go places. Sometimes the only way to get there is to be a part of a band or football or something because some of the kids have never even been to the south side of Washington. They don’t cross the river.”

  By the fall of 2008, there were about eighty-five kids in the band. That’s when Chambers put into action his plan to be a part of the inauguration. It would give the kids a goal. He worked on the band’s résumé, listing the awards it had won for indoor dance and drum-line competitions, and made a DVD. “The DVD kind of told the story, not just the DVD of performance, but told the story of where we’ve come from and what we’ve done, and we had some really good recommendation letters,” Chambers said.

  Dunbar alumni, including then DC city council chairman Vincent Gray and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, weighed in with their support. But Chambers knew the odds were long. There were 1,382 applications submitted for only a handful of slots. Chambers wanted to protect the kids and himself from disappointment. “We told everybody we weren’t going to apply like the other high school bands. If we didn’t get it, then we’d have egg on our face. So we were telling everybody, ‘No we’re not applying, we’re not applying.’ ”

  Chambers got the official invitation on December 9, 2008.

  The media flocked to the story. It was an irresistible headline. MARCHING INTO HISTORY read the Washington Times. D.C.’s DUNBAR, THE FIRST BLACK HIGH SCHOOL IN THE U.S., PREPARES TO HONOR THE NATION’S FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT read the banner on one website. Barack Obama had been elected exactly 138 years to the day after the country’s first black public high school opened its doors.

  The inaugural eve concert would take place on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and would be dedicated to America’s children. The story wrote itself. C-SPAN covered the band’s preparation four days before the big event. Chambers instructed the kids to keep their lines straight and to keep their knees high. “It’s going to be twenty degrees on Tuesday!” he yelled. One young student named Lynwood told the C-SPAN interviewer, “I’m honored to do it for Barack Obama. He’s a black president and now that shows hope—that now black kids can now say I can grow up and be a black president because, you know, we never really had no black president before.”

  “We understand it is a privilege,” a nervous but smiling Chambers told the C-SPAN interviewer.

  On January 20, 2009, at 5:09 PM, the Dunbar Senior High School marching band made its way past the First Family on the reviewing stand. It was a feat, given what had happened that morning.

  Earlier in the day, the band joined the other parade participants, lining up for the big event. It was a bitterly cold day with the wind chill in the teens. People were lining up along the parade route as early as 7:00 AM, even though the parade didn’t begin until 2:30 PM. “We had to wait so long out there in the cold, and the kids, not all of them, behaved poorly,” Chambers said. “They were tired and cold, and there’s not a lot of parental support, so they think they are adults. And they were cussing and stuff like that.”

  Chambers recalled the story a week later, hunched over with his forearms on his knees, hands clasped and fingers laced as if praying, his shaved head hanging low. He almost hadn’t shown up for the meeting. A week after the inauguration he had agreed to a post-parade interview but initially was nowhere to be found in the Dunbar school building. He wasn’t in the band room or in the main office. Repeated calls and text messages to his cell phone went unanswered. He finally surfaced around noon and explained that he hadn’t answered the messages because he had been in his car getting a few minutes of peace before heading back to the classroom. “I guess all the excitement is over now, so I guess I’m a little melancholy,” he said with a shrug.

  One would expect Rodney Chambers to be completing a victory lap after the big day, but he really didn’t want to talk about what had happened. “It was bittersweet. We had a lot of problems that day with the kids.”

  The morning of the inauguration, while the band was getting into formation, Chambers realized that some band members were missing. They’d all arrived together, but now his head count was off. Some of his students had taken off into the crowd of a million and a half people. “And then they got lost. And then the military picks them up. We had to wait three hours after the parade, on our buses, for the military to deliver those kids.” Chambers looked pained retelling the story. “It wasn’t a good day.”

  Without its renegade members, the rest of the group, which had practiced so hard for this big day and wanted to do the best job possible, did what they went there to do. The Crimson Tide reached the viewing stand where the President, First Lady, and their then ten- and seven-year-old daughters watched the parade. Three pretty girls in red, shiny, formfitting track suits and white knit caps were energetically high-stepping as they held the gold and red D-U-N-B-A-R sign. Behind them came ten more girls, the Dunbar Dolls, clad in tight white spandex unitards, faux white fur vests, and white headbands. They looked simultaneously cute and a tad mature. The high energy drum majors were next, followed by musicians with a heavy horn and drum sound. The flag team brought up the rear.

  As the Dunbar Dolls reached the stand, their drop-it-like-it’s-hot moves reflected the times—and in a few instances might have impressed an exotic dancer. Two young men, the drum majors, couldn’t be missed with their Trojan warrior helmets with foot-long white feather plumes. They looked more confident than the others and tried to keep the spirits high and the musicians on beat.

  In two minutes, the big moment in front of the president was over. However, thanks to the Internet, moments like the Dunbar band’s brush with the new First Family last forever. The video of the band’s performance was uploaded to YouTube within a day, and the viewer’s comments were blunt.

  southeasttink wrote: “Dunbar was a disgrace”

  delemadiance wrote: “… luckily there were other black schools to counteract the raunch and filth displayed.”

  bluephi182k wrote: “I disagree with most of you, its not about the way they danced in front of the President because that’s what they normally do. Don’t get upset with the band staff and parents now.”

  Ripshanky08 wrote: “All yall that is hatin on dunbar, fuck yall, yall just mad because yall cant wear something like dat … they was good so fuck all yall all that don’ like them and how they performed.”

  CT4L wrote: “Poor kids. Blame the band director.”

  There’s plenty of blame to go around for Dunbar’s troubles. The band director blamed the students’ difficulties on an inadequate school system and strained home environments. “The kids struggle. They have a lot to do…. They go home and take care of young brothers and sisters.” As if having an epiphany, he added, “Out of the eighty-five kids I had, I could only think of one kid who has the mother and father at home. And her behavior is so much better than all the rest.”

  The poor behavior of the students was on display as he spoke. He repeatedly had to raise his considerable voice and request that a couple of unwelcome loungers leave the band room. The loiterers ran off, for the moment, and he continued his train of thought, speaking like a man who needed to get something off his sizeable chest.

  “Some of these kids I’ve taught for four years—I’ve never met a parent. What is that about? I took the band to Florida for six days. We went to Ohio, and New York, North Carolina, and some of the parents I’ve never met. I wouldn’t know who they were if they were to walk in the door now.” He said he personally paid for kids’ food on many of these trips. “I’ve never been in a place where parents don’t seem to care. But the only time you see parents really here is when the kids get in a fight, and then their parents come to fight. The parents come to school to fight.”

  He went on, “When I grew up in North Carolina, if I got in a fight, my mother gave me a good whipping.” Chambers e
xpressed despair about what happened at the inauguration, what had been happening at the school, the loss of good teachers, and the school’s changing principals. He was contemplating leaving, maybe before the end of the school year. “I’m not sure. I keep praying on it. I’m still taking some mental time to try to decide where I want to go from here.”

  As his next class began to trickle in, a huge commotion broke out in the hallway. The band room was on the first floor by one of the school’s exits. Suddenly a man’s voice came over the P.A. It was the principal.

  “Pardon me for the interruption. At this time I need for all my security administration to make sure that they are walking the halls and [to] remind some of our students if there are any fights in my building today, I’m going to make you aware that I am putting you up for involuntary transfers, so today will be your last day at Dunbar Senior High School. I will be doing involuntary transfers. So, staff, please give me their names, I’ll just pull them out of here.”

  At the time, according to Section 2501.1 of the disciplinary code for the District of Columbia Public Schools, educators have several choices for discipline:

  Disciplinary options for intervention, remediation, and rehabilitation shall include, but are not limited to, the following strategies: in order is as follows: (a) Reprimands; (b) Detention; (c) Additional work assignments; (d) Restitution; (e) Mediation; (f) In-school disciplinary centers; (g) Alternative educational programs and placements; (h) Rehabilitative programs; (i) Crime awareness/prevention programs; (j) Probation; (k) Exclusion from extracurricular activity; (l) Peer court; and (m) Transfer.

  Dunbar’s principal said that day he’d choose the last option, transferring out whoever had started that fight. That student would be someone else’s problem tomorrow. According to Rodney Chambers, “A lot of people don’t want to work in DC. It’s rough. You hear all the things on the news and then once you get inside and experience it …” His voice trailed off.

  An ambulance arrived shortly after the announcement. Chambers gave me a sidelong glance and said, “You say your mom went here?” Pause. “It’s not the same Dunbar.”

  2 TEACHING TO TEACH

  APRIL 16 IS A legal holiday in Washington, DC: Emancipation Day. The only reason anyone outside the District might know this is that occasionally the District-wide day off pushes back the income tax deadline. On a spring day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act, which ended slavery for the estimated thirty-one hundred slaves in Washington, DC—a small number compared to the four million in the country at the time. The move happened almost nine months before Lincoln’s more well-known Emancipation Proclamation. The official language of the DC act read, “Be it enacted that all persons held to service or labor within the District of Columbia by reason of African descent are herby discharged and freed of and from all claims to such service or labor.” The compensation part of the law referred to local slave owners who would be given $300 for the loss of their human property. Washington, DC, was now a city with a large population of free colored men, women, and children, which meant old systems would have to adjust. Just one month later, on May 21, 1862, Congress would pass a bill requiring public funding for schools for all free coloreds in the District.1 It was what a small community in Washington and Georgetown had been wanting for for years.

  While DC had a very healthy slave trade, it also had a good number of free blacks, as they were also called, living among whites and slaves, dating as far back as the early 1800s. Some had purchased their freedom; others had been freed by manumission. Still others were the free sons or daughters of slaveholders or coloreds who perhaps had never been enslaved at all. By the time DC’s Emancipation Act was passed there were about eleven thousand free colored people in the district, about 20 percent of the entire population.

  While their status was “free,” their lives were hardly characterized as ones enjoying liberty. A free colored person was not owned by anyone, but did not have the rights or protections of a white Washingtonian. They were subjected to degrading Black Codes, laws that restricted where they could live, what jobs they could hold, and even when they could walk down the street. All free blacks were required to register with the city and have whites bear witness to the registration on their behalf. For example, on September 11, 1840, this entry was made to the District of Columbia Free Negro Register under Certificate of Freedom.

  Hannah Cooke, a credible white person, swears that she has known Lucy Duckett, the wife of Augustus Duckett, for many years and she is free. Lucy’s two children, Richard Edward, who is about twelve years old, and William Augustus, who is about eight, were born free.

  On May 6, 1842, Henrietta Carroll registered for her free status when the lady of the house saw fit to let her go:

  Maria Ford frees her servant woman named Henrietta Carroll, who she has held as a slave for a term of years. Henrietta is a bright mulatto woman about thirty years old.

  Nighttime curfews were established. A free black person could be arrested if he or she wasn’t carrying the correct identification, and that could land a person a six-month jail term. And everyone knew you did not want to wind up in the infamous District Jail, a hideous institution regularly condemned by some northern senators as inhumane.2 Sometimes a free black man or woman would have to pay an inexplicable fine just for existing, a fee called a peace bond to insure continued “good” behavior.3

  The Black Codes were meant to deter runaway slaves from coming to Washington and to keep free blacks in their place. But, given the oppressive nature of the restrictive codes, there was a glaring omission: while there were no laws supporting the education of free blacks in the District, there were no laws restricting their education either, as there were in much of the South.

  Imagine the sheer will of a free black carpenter, George Bell, and two other free men, Nicholas Franklin and Moses Liverpool, skilled caulkers—all illiterate but determined to build a schoolhouse for their children, decades before Emancipation Day. Bell’s wife, Sophia, sold produce and meals at local markets and she made enough money to buy her husband’s freedom for $400 when he was forty years old.4 Six years later, in 1807, Bell, Franklin, and Liverpool partnered with a white abolitionist named Lowe who accepted the teaching position at the newly built Bell School. It is thought to be the first physical schoolhouse built for colored children in the District.5

  Over time, more and more schools were formed in black churches and in private homes with progressive Northerners serving as teachers. Among them were Mrs. Mary Billings’s School, St. Frances Academy for Colored Girls, the McCoy School, and the Ambush School, to name a few. This shadow education system was necessary because, very simply, the original law requiring public schools in the District of Columbia clearly stated that the funds would support public schools for whites only.

  Two years after the District’s government was established in 1804, the charter was amended to provide a permanent educational institution for white children ages six to seventeen, paid for by the government. The city elders believed there was “an inseparable connection between the education of youth and the prevalence of pure morals.”6 The money would come from taxes on “slaves and dogs and licenses for carriages and hacks, ordinaries retailing wines and spirituous liquors, billiard tables, theatrical hawkers and peddlers.”7 Tax the sins to pay for budding virtue.

  President Thomas Jefferson, who was also president of the first DC School Board of Trustees, contributed $200 to start an endowment that would help defray the cost.8 For some of the more class-conscious Washingtonians, the idea of public schools seemed on par with how some people feel about public toilets. Detractors of the government-sponsored education plan thought that the “public” academies were low class and conjured up a structure of “pauper and charity schools.”9 For several years, wealthy parents were told not to send their children to these schools so that there would be room for only the most destitute.

  It wasn’t until the 1860s that the idea of free
education was presented in a way that made it palatable to most Washingtonians. The new movement—complete with a rebranding campaign, “Schools for all: Good enough for the richest, cheap enough for the poorest”10—pushed for the construction of substantial buildings for children who lived in the nation’s capital, but still only for white children. As one former superintendent of schools acknowledged, “It may be stated at the outset that the colored children of the District of Columbia were not included among the beneficiaries of the public schools in any legislation by the Congress or the city council prior to the abolition of slavery in 1862.”11

  A small woman from the North disagreed with this position.

  It was hard for Myrtilla Miner to work on her family’s farm in Brookfield, New York. Compared to her twelve hale siblings, she was small, thin, and pale, and she suffered from a weak spine. However, she tried to work the fields, picking hops so that she could afford the luxury of occasionally buying a book. Most of the time she borrowed them from the library. She often joked that in her lifetime she had every book from the library in the family home at some point.

  The Miners lived in poverty like most people in the Oneida region. Her father saw to it that his children had just enough education and learned to read, but the farm life came first. Myrtilla, or Myrtle as she was known to family and friends, was permitted to go to school for a brief time. It was a distance from her home on the hill, and getting there was a challenge, given her back problems. Still, as often as she could, she hiked down from her house and across a footbridge, crossing from the farmland into a small town where she could take a seat in an old red schoolhouse.