OK, we’ve got all these free black children, we have to give them schools. So a group of free blacks got together and said, “We’re going go make a high school. We see this moment in time. We’re just going to do it.” And it started in 1870 with four students in the basement of a church.
– Allison Stewart
History
Washington’s Dunbar High School is one of the landmarks of Black education in the United States. Founded in 1870 in the aftermath of the Civil War, a time of many small-scale efforts to educate the free Black population of Washington, Dunbar was the first high school for Black students in the United States.
The early successes of the school grew, after the turn of the century, into its placement of its students in elite universities:
“Before 1900, most graduates went on to study at Miner Teachers College and become teachers, but from the beginning and increasingly after 1900 it was common for graduates to attend Howard University, which taught medicine, law, and theology, or elite Northern universities such as Dartmouth, Harvard, or Yale” (www.blackpast.org).
As Dunbar grew, it fed its own success. A cycle of graduates returning to teach in or administer the schools grew as well because of the restrictions in other parts of the country that blocked these academics from going anywhere else, other than back to Washington D.C.; as Audi Cornish put it in an interview with Dunbar historian Alison Cornish, “these high-achieving African-Americans, they don’t have anywhere to go once they get out of these schools and broken these barriers. And they come back into the community” (www.npr.org).
But what a community it was, with some of the first principals being “Mary Jane Patterson, the second African American female college graduate, Anna J. Cooper, the fourth African American woman to earn a Ph.D., and Richard T. Greener, the first African American graduate of Harvard in Massachusetts” (www.blackpast.org). Setting the example, these principals and the qualified educators that Dunbar attracted led to exemplary graduates. As Cornish points out, the school’s alumni have included the “architect of school desegregation, Charles Hamilton Houston,” as well as “Elizabeth Catlett, the artist. Billy Taylor, the jazz musician. The first black general in the Army. The first black graduate of the Naval Academy. The first black presidential Cabinet member. The lists go on and on.” (www.npr.org)
The complicated nature between this fairly isolated example of quality education for African American students and the surrounding racism in Washington D.C. can be seen in the stories of Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City.
Characters
In Lost in the City, Dunbar is one of the geographical and cultural landmarks that establishes the shape of Jones’s Washington across multiple stories. For example, although both Lydia of “Lost in the City” and the narrator in “The Store” only mention their secondary education offhandedly, the ways in which their graduation from Dunbar influences their paths displays itself across the texts.
Both characters mention Dunbar by way of recalling partners they dated in high school. Lydia, for instance,
“told her diary about the evening the boy busted her cherry: ‘The movie was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He told me that I was the most beautiful girl at Dunbar, but when he walked me back home after the ‘dirty deed’ was done, he acted like he didn’t know me anymore’” (143).
In the same way, the narrator of “The Store” draws on the memory of a high school love to bring up that education: “Despite my aches, I went dancing with Mabel Smith, a girl I had gone to Dunbar with” (87).
In many ways, Lydia enjoys the kind of career trajectory that Dunbar meant to create: she goes to law school, moves to a different side of town, and this growth in education and social capital pulls her into a different part of society, as well as a different neighborhood in Washington D.C. At the death of her mother, Lydia is drawn back to her past, and in asking to get lost in the city, gets relocated in that past.
The narrator of “The Store,” however, retains a closer attachment to the school and the area around it: “My allegiances had always been to the world around New York Avenue and 1st Street, around Dunbar, because that was Home” (93).
Even going so far as to label them “Home” with a capital “h,” the narrator feels this affinity, but at the same time, there are the “restrictions” that Alison Stewart talks about on NPR. Speaking of traveling, the narrator retails a piece of wisdom from dad:
“My father had always told me that white people did not like to see Negroes driving cars, even a dying one like my ford” (Jones 104).
Literally and figuratively, journey to education represents the larger dynamic we have discussed here: is significantly impacted by the attitudes and the racism of the individuals surrounding him in the city, ignorant of the growing Black excellence being produced in their segregated schools.
References
Cornish, Audie, and Alison Stewart. “In Nation’s First Black Public High School, A Blueprint For Reform.” All Things Considered, NPR, 29 July 2013, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/22/206622688/the-legacy-of-dunbar-high-school.
Rixon, Karla. “Paul Laurence Dunbar High School (1870- ).” The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed, www.blackpast.org/aah/paul-laurence-dunbar-high-school-1870.
Wiley, Amber N. “The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African American Cultural Heritage.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, vol. 20, no. 1, 2013, pp. 95–128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/buildland.20.1.0095.
