First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School - Hardcover

Stewart, Alison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1613740093 ISBN 13: 9781613740095

Verlag: Chicago Review Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alison Stewart is an award-winning journalist whose twenty-year career includes anchoring and reporting for NPR, NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News. She got her start covering politics for MTV News. Stewart is a graduate of Brown University.

Melissa Harris-Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University and host of The Melissa Harris Perry Show.

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First Class

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

By Alison Stewart

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2013 Alison Stewart
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61374-009-5

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, 

CHAPTER 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.

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 CSPAN 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Chicago Review Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1613740093
• ISBN 13: 9781613740095
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar