THE STORY OF DUNBAR HIGH SCHOOL: HOW STUDENTS FROM THE FIRST PUBLIC
HIGH SCHOOL FOR BLACK STUDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES INFLUENCED AMERICA
A Thesis
submitted to the Faculty of
The School of Continuing Studies
and of
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
By
Kenneth Alphonso Mitchell, Jr., A.B.
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
February 28, 2012
THE STORY OF DUNBAR HIGH SCHOOL: HOW STUDENTS FROM THE FIRST PUBLIC
HIGH SCHOOL FOR BLACK STUDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES INFLUENCED AMERICA
Kenneth Alphonso Mitchell, Jr., A.B.
MALS Mentor: Maurice Jackson, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
Dunbar High School is the first public high school for black children in the United
States and the first public high school in Washington, D.C. The school was founded in
1870, as the Preparatory High School for colored youth; and was also the first public high
school in Washington, D.C. The school changed names many times before it was finally
named Dunbar, after poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The story of this school is important
because many of the students and teachers of the school went on to become some of the
most notable blacks in America. From 1870 until 1955, when the United States Supreme
Court declared segregation in District of Columbia public schools unconstitutional in the
landmark case, Bolling v. Sharpe, which was also supplemented with Brown v. Board of
Education; the school had a reputation for being the best black high school in the country
and its teachers were some of the best scholars this country had to offer. Dunbar was able
to attract teachers with outstanding credentials because most colleges, at the time, did not
hire black professors; neither did employers in most professions that required college
degrees. Brilliant scholars like Richard Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard
College; Anna Julia Cooper, an outstanding educator and the first black graduated of the
University of Paris-Sorbonne in Paris, France; and Carter G. Woodson, the historian
ii
known as “the father of black history;” all flocked to Washington, D.C. Many notable
African-Americans who made a positive impact on society, like Dr. Charles Richard
Drew, the physician who perfected the use of blood plasma; Charles Hamilton Houston, a
Civil Rights attorney and “the man who killed Jim Crow;” and Georgiana Simpson, the
first black woman to receive a Ph.D.; attended this hidden gem in Washington, D.C.
These individuals broke many racial barriers that impeded progress for blacks.
This thesis will analyze these people and their accomplishments; show how they
were able to achieve so much success at a time when blacks did not have opportunities;
and explain how many barriers to progress for African Americans may not have been
reached if it were not for the people who were a part of Dunbar High. This will be
achieved through an examination of the history of education for blacks in Washington,
D.C. I will also discuss in detail the notable people of Dunbar who have led the way in
education, sports, women’s history, politics, religion, military, entertainment, law,
medicine, business, and black Greek lettered organizations.
iii
Content
ABSTRACT
ii
CHAPTER 1: BACKGROUND
1
CHAPTER 2: PIONEERS IN EDUCATION
19
CHAPTER 3: WOMEN OF DUNBAR
35
CHAPTER 4: PIONEERS IN GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY
46
CHAPTER 5: DUNBAR ARTISTS AND ENTERTAINERS
56
CHAPTER 6: DUNBAR PROFESSIONALS
71
CHAPTER 7: BLACK GREEK LETTERED ORGANIZATIONS
94
CONCLUSION
107
ENDNOTES
108
BIBLIOGRAPHY
129
iv
CHAPTER 1: BACKGROUND
In 1800, the District of Columbia, which adhered to the strict slave codes of the
South, had 10,066 whites, 783 free blacks, and 3,244 slaves. With the white population
growing, there became a need for schools in the District. In 1804, Congress passed an act
that enabled the city to establish public schools for white children. Congress perhaps did
not foresee the growth of the free black population, and so did not consider providing
education for them. In February of 1806, the Western School was established at
Pennsylvania Avenue between 17th and 18th Streets. Western was “the first public school
in the city with its own building.”1 Western began as a primary school, and later became
a high school in 1890. This school would later be changed to the Duke Ellington School
of the Arts in 1974, in memory of the famed black jazz musician. By the end of the
decade, the District had over 15,000 whites, 2,549 free blacks, and 5,505 slaves. While
the number of whites and slaves continued to grow, so too did the number of free blacks,
whose population tripled.2
Since blacks were not allowed to go to public schools in the early part of the
nineteenth century; freed blacks, who wanted their children to be educated, created
private schools. In 1807, one year after the first public school opened for whites, “three
former slaves—George Bell, Moses Liverpool, and Nicholas Franklin, organized the
city’s first school for black students….”3 George Bell was a carpenter, while Franklin and
Liverpool were caulkers at the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast Washington. None of
these men were literate. The three men helped erect a small one-story wooden building
for the schoolhouse located at 3rd and D Street in Southeast Washington; and although the
1
building was very modest, the school was a “great step forward for the city’s black
community.”4 This was significant because slavery was still being practiced in America,
and many whites were against teaching blacks. To prevent the school from being shut
down by white dissenters, the men had to make an agreement with public authorities that
none of the teachers would write anything for a slave. Even if they did help slaves, they
had to be very convincing to whites that they were not in the business of abolition if they
wished to continue the school.
George Bell, a former slave of the Addison’s in Oxen Hill, Maryland, had his
freedom purchased by his wife, who saved enough money from selling fresh produce.
Because of Bell’s leadership and efforts to initiate educational opportunities for the
children, the school was named the Bell School. The first instructor of the school was a
white man, Mr. Lowe, who was paid from the tuition of the students. The school was
open for a few years until it was used for dwelling purposes. Soon after the Bell school
opened, many more schools for blacks were established.5
In 1810, Mary Billings, a white woman, opened the first school for blacks in
Georgetown.6 She initially taught white and black students at this school, but after much
white hostility, Billings decided to make her school exclusively for blacks. She continued
to teach for more than a decade at the school on Dumbarton Street until she retired in
1823. That same year, a black woman Anne Maria Hall started a school and became the
first black person to teach in the District of Columbia.7 Hall’s school was first located
near Capitol Hill, before moving to various sites. After teaching for twenty five years,
Hall retired in 1835. During the remaining pre-Civil war years, blacks continued to have
2
a school they called their own. Some notable schools that followed were the Smothers
School, the Columbian Institute, and Union Seminary.
In 1862, the District of Columbia, like many places in the South, was still
practicing slavery. However, by April of the same year, the District finally discontinued
their role in this peculiar institution. The bill signed by President Abraham Lincoln,
known as the Compensated Emancipation Act, freed 3,000 slaves and each slave owner
was compensated up to three hundred dollars for his loss. The abolishment of slavery in
the District preceded the Emancipation Proclamation by nearly nine months.8 On the 21st
of May, a month after the Compensated Emancipation Act, Congress passed a bill that
established a separate public school board for blacks. The bill required that ten percent of
black property taxes would go to the schools, and a separate board of trustees would be
appointed by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.9 The colored schools were left under the
authority of the Board of Trustees of the Colored Public Schools, which was granted the
“same power over black schools that white administrators had over white schools.”10 The
members of the first Board were S.J. Bowen, Daniel Breed and Jenas C. Robbins; all
were white.
The Ebenezer School, the first public primary school for black children in the
District of Columbia was opened on March 1, 1864.11 The school was opened in the
Ebenezer Church at Fourth and D Streets S.E. and served as a primary school for blacks.
The school’s first teacher was Miss Emma V. Brown, whose salary was four hundred
dollars per year. Miss Brown was assisted by Miss Frances W. Perkins, from New Haven,
3
Connecticut. 12 The church, now named Ebenezer United Methodist Church, remains at
the same site and is designated as a National Historic Site.13
By 1867, there were five schools for blacks with seven teachers and four hundred
students. All of these schools were located in the O Street School located on O Street
between Fourth and Fifth Streets Northwest. That same year Alfred Jones was elected to
the Board of Trustees of the Colored Public Schools, being the first black man to be
elected to the Board. In 1868, Jones was joined by William Syphax, who became the
second black elected to the Board.14 Syphax later became the first black president of the
Board of Trustees for Colored Public Schools. In 1869, the Board of Trustees of the
Colored Public Schools consisted of William Syphax, Albert G. Hall, and Alfred Jones.
They sent their first report to the Secretary of the Interior, which mentioned the
establishment of a high school.15
In November of 1870, the Preparatory High School for colored youth was
established.16 Classes were held in the basement of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian
Church, led by Dr. Septimus Tustin.17 The church was founded by John F. Cook, Sr. and
was formally organized on November 21, 1841, in a small school house at Fourteenth and
H Streets, Northwest. Licensed to preach by the Presbytery of the District of Columbia, a
month earlier, he was elected the first pastor of the church in 1843, continuing in that role
until he died in 1855.18 During his tenure, the church grew to one hundred members and
was also home to Union Seminary School.
The Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church became one of the leaders among black
churches in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, due in part to many of
4
the pastors who led the church. In addition to Cook, some notable pastors were Benjamin
T. Tanner, Henry Highland Garnet, and Francis J. Grimke.19 Tanner went on to become a
Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME); and his son, Henry Ossawa
Tanner, became the first black painter to gain international acclaim.20 Henry Highland
Garnet, an abolitionist, was the first black minister to preach to the United States House
of Representatives. Francis Grimke served longer than any other pastor before him, 18781928. One of the most prominent preachers of his time, Grimke was trained at Princeton
Theological Seminary, and was active with the Niagara Movement and the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Under Grimke’s leadership the church prospered and became one of the places of
worship for Washington’s black elite. Notable black people who attended the church
were Senator Blanche Bruce, Congressman John R. Lynch, and James Wormley, one of
the richest blacks in the District.21 During Grimke’s tenure “there was a great spiritual
awakening as the result of his forceful preaching.”22 Grimke’s congregation became very
active in the community and was usually well educated. Due to the rich history of the
church and its tradition of having influential leaders in the black community, it is only
fitting that the United States’ first public high school for black youth was started at this
church.
The Preparatory High School was the vision of colored public school board
members William Syphax and George F.T. Cook. Cook stated that the purpose of the
high school was to “economize teaching force by concentrating under one teacher several
small classes of the same grade of attainment…and to present to the pupils of the schools
5
incentives to higher aim in education.”23 The colored schools superintendent wanted to
make sure the schools helped students maximize their full potential and prepare them for
college.
The first principal of the school in 1870 was Emma J. Hutchins, who was also the
first teacher. Miss Hutchins was a white woman from New Hampshire who took an
interest in the education of the black population. Hutchins was the principal of the O
Street School in the District’s Colored Schools before she came to Preparatory High.
Forty five students were enrolled in the first year, four took classes on the high school
level and the other forty one students took classes to prepare for high school, which is the
reason the school was originally named Preparatory High School. Hutchins first class at
Preparatory High School was held in the basement of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian
Church in a room equipped with fifty seats.24 Her first high school level class consisted
of: Rosetta Coakley, John Nalle, Mary Nalle, and Caroline Parke; and their course of
study included: “arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy; English
grammar, composition, literature and elocution; United States; English and general
history….”25
After serving as principal for one year, Hutchins resigned to teach in a school in
Oswego County, New York. She was not dissatisfied with the school, but explained that
“there were among the Negroes themselves teachers thoroughly equipped to take up the
work and carry it on and she could find employment elsewhere.”26 Hutchins realized that
Washington was more than capable of supplying the black high school with a qualified
black principal.
6
Preparatory High School’s first class was expected to graduate in 1875, but
because the demand for teachers was increasing, they joined the faculty of Preparatory
High before they completed the prescribed course. That they were capable of teaching
before they received their diploma serves as a testament to the preparation they received
prior to and during their stint at the high school. Even though they did not attend college,
these students went on to be productive citizens following high school. 27
Rosetta Coakley married Jesse Lawson, a Howard educated lawyer who was
devoted to educating the black working class. In 1906, they were a part of a group of
educators and leaders who met to start a branch of the Bible Educational Association.
The meeting was held at the Lawson’s home at 2011 Vermont Avenue, NW. In 1917,
they established Frelinghuysen University, an adult school that offered the black working
class social services, religious training, and educational programs. Frelinghuysen, named
for F.T. Frelinghuysen, Secretary of State under President Chester A. Arthur, provided
education and self improvement for black workers until the 1940’s and dissolved in 1950.
Mrs. Lawson also founded the Alley Improvement Association, an organization
committed to improving the living conditions of the poor; and she was the first woman to
serve as a clerk and assistant to Colored Schools Superintendent George F.T. Cook.28
John Nalle was born in Culpepper, Virginia in 1856 to Charles and Catherine
Nalle. In 1872, He graduated from the Normal Department of Howard University, high
school division of Howard University; and a year later, he was appointed to teach in the
Colored Public Schools of Washington, D.C. Nalle taught until 1902, when he was
appointed Supervising Principal of the Twelfth Division of the Public Schools, retiring
7
from that position in 1926, after serving for over twenty years. 29 Nalle’s sister, Mary,
was a teacher at Dunbar, and along with her fellow teachers, she “helped lay the
academic, cultural and moral foundation of many of the men and women who now
occupy prominent positions in professional and civic affairs.”30 She also started the Nalle
Jubilee Singers, patterned after the famous Fisk Jubilee singers, who sang spirituals and
folk songs at events in the city.31
Caroline Elliot Parke, like most of her classmates, also became a teacher. She
started as an Algebra teacher in the Preparatory High School and worked there for fifty
years. Her students described her as a “very fine and thorough teacher” and her
professional associates also gave her high praise for her work.32
The second principal of the Preparatory High School was Miss Mary Jane
Patterson. When she graduated from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio in 1862, she
became the first black woman in the United States to graduate from college. She served
as principal from 1871 until 1872, when Richard Greener became the principal. Greener,
the first black graduate of Harvard College in 1870, served for one year and left to
practice law.
In 1873, Miss Patterson was reappointed principal. Under her leadership,
Preparatory High School graduated its first class in 1877. The first graduates consisted of
eleven students: Mary L. Beason, Dora F. Barker, James C. Craig, Fannie E. McCoy,
Cornelia Pinckney, Julia C. Grant, James B. Wright, Mary E. Thomas, Carrie T. Taylor,
Fannie M. Costin, and John H. Parker.33 To fulfill their graduation requirements each
student had to read an essay with an assigned topic of current relevance. The graduation
8
exercises for this class were held on June 7, 1877, at the Sumner School on Seventeenth
and M Streets, Northwest.34 Following the first graduation exercises, the school’s name
changed to Colored High School and moved from the Thaddeus Stevens School to the
Myrtilla Miner School on Seventeenth and Church Streets, Northwest. The school was
able to grant diplomas and no longer admitted students who were not on the high school
level.
In 1884, Francis L. Cardozo was appointed principal and served until 1896. He
was educated at Scotland’s Glasgow University and the London School of Theology.
Cardozo became the first black man to hold a state office when he was elected South
Carolina Secretary of State in 1868. From 1884 to 1887, the school’s enrollment, which
was 172 students in 1884, increased to 361 students.35 Commenting on the increase in
enrollment, Superintendent George F.T. Cook wrote: “this school is growing not only in
number but in a condition to perform better and more useful work”36 Cook acknowledged
that the growth was a catalyst for more productive work in the school. In 1891, the school
moved once again to 128 M Street, Northwest in the Truxton Circle neighborhood and
was named M Street High School. The school’s building was a Romanesque structure
that was designed by the Office of the Building Inspector in 1890. In 1895, the school’s
enrollment increased to 528 students.37 During these years, the school, which added a
Business Department to the curriculum, earned a reputation for being the best school in
the country for blacks.
In 1896, Dr. Winfield Scott Montgomery, a graduate of Dartmouth College in
1878 and the second black elected to Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, served as principal
9
for three years and was later appointed supervising principal for the District’s Colored
Schools. 38 In 1899, Montgomery was succeeded by Robert H. Terrell, a graduate of
Preparatory High School and Harvard College. During his tenure, the students of M
Street scored higher than the white students at Eastern and Western, on standardized tests
in English and general subjects.39 Despite the lack of resources and facilities, the test
scores showed that M Street was just as adequate as any white school.
In 1902, after being appointed a municipal court judge, Robert Terrell resigned
from M Street School. Anna Julia Cooper, a teacher at M Street, replaced him as
principal. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1884, as well as her master’s in 1887,
from Oberlin College; and received her Ph.D. in 1925, from the Sorbonne in Paris, its
first black female graduate.40 At M Street High School, she taught Latin, mathematics,
and science; and worked diligently to prepare her students for acceptance in top
universities in America. In 1905, however, Cooper came under investigation after being
accused of being a poor disciplinarian and admitting students who were not prepared for
high school studies.41 This was an attempt to oust Cooper because she supported a
classical education over an industrial education, and “adamantly opposed any lowering of
academic standards in the high school.”42 This was a big issue at the time because Booker
T. Washington, perhaps the most powerful black at the time, was an advocate of
industrial education for blacks; and many whites, particularly P.M. Hughes, the District’s
director of High Schools, supported him. Washington and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, who
supported classical education for blacks, were rivals during this time. When Cooper
invited Dr. Du Bois to speak at M Street in 1902, many supporters of Washington were
10
angered and came up with schemes to remove her.43 In 1906, Mrs. Cooper was replaced
by William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson, and returned three years later as a mathematics
teacher.
Jackson was a graduate of Amherst and one of the first black college football
players. Jackson sparked the students’ interest in athletics and also encouraged many to
attend his alma mater. In 1909, with Jackson as principal, M Street had 93 students in its
graduating class: sixty eight entered Miner Normal School, eighteen went to college, and
seven went to professional schools.44 This was remarkable as every student from this
class pursued their education after high school. In 1909, he was replaced by Edward
Christopher Williams, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio; and became the head of the Business Department. Williams, who was
the first black librarian in the U.S. and author of When Washington Was in Vogue, served
as principal for seven years and resigned in June 1916, to become librarian of Howard
University.
In the fall of 1916, the school moved a few blocks away to First Street between N
and O Streets, Northwest. The new school was named Paul Lawrence Dunbar High
School, in honor of the famed black poet. Dunbar was a “brick, stone trimmed building
with a frontage of 401 feet, equipped with classrooms, laboratories, offices, auditorium,
bank, art gallery, cafeteria, gymnasia, swimming pool, emergency room, library, and
representing an investment of more than a half million dollars.”45 The school would have
to wait ten more years for an athletic stadium; while the white public high schools
already had their own.46
11
Garnet C. Wilkinson was principal of Dunbar from 1916-1921, and devoted most
of his life to education in Washington. Wilkinson, a Washington native, graduated from
M Street High in 1898. After serving as principal of Dunbar, he served as the Assistant
Superintendent for the Colored Public Schools from 1921-1951. He also devoted much of
his time to coaching sports in the District of Columbia Public Schools.47
In 1921, Walter L. Smith, a graduate of Howard University, became principal.
Mr. Smith was married to Mary Anderson, the first black woman elected Phi Beta Kappa
at Middlebury College in 1899.48 During his administration, the school had three of the
first black women with Ph.D.’s on its faculty: Georgiana Simpson, Eva B. Dykes, and
Anna Julia Cooper. Dunbar also reached its peak enrollment of 1,724 students in 1927;
and for the next decade, the school continued to score above the national average on
standardized tests.49 In 1943, Mr. Smith died and was succeeded by Dr. Harold Appo
Haynes, an M Street graduate and an alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh. Haynes
was the husband of Euphemia Lofton Haynes, the first black woman to receive a
doctorate in mathematics. Four years later, Dr. Haynes was promoted to serve as
Associate Superintendent of D.C. Public Schools.
In 1948, Charles Sumner Lofton, a graduate of Dunbar and Howard University
became principal. Mr. Lofton maintained the tradition of sending at least 80 percent of
the school's graduates to college in the 1950s, a level exceeding all other local high
schools.50 In 1955, when the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation
in schools was unconstitutional, Mr. Lofton informed all of the students that they would
cherish that moment for the rest of their lives. In 1964, Mr. Lofton resigned his position
12
as principal and became Executive Assistant to the Superintendent of D.C. Public
Schools. Reflecting on his years as principal, Mr. Lofton stated: “I had more influence on
my students in the segregated environment. . . . They used us as role models, even
watching the way we dressed.” Although Lofton was in favor of integration, he felt that
the loss of black role models in the classroom for some students combined with the riots
of 1968, were devastating to black students of that era.
One reason Dunbar was so successful was because of its teachers. In the early
1900’s the school had thirty teachers, twenty with degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin,
Amherst, Dartmouth, and Bowdoin; and five with degrees from Howard University,
regarded as the premier college for blacks.51 This was because “federal standards
providing equal salaries for all teachers, regardless of sex or race, attracted to
Washington the best trained colored college graduates from Northern and Western
colleges in the early days….”52 Because of the federal policy, many of these teachers
found that it was more secure to teach than it was to go into the professions where racism
was prevalent and where they were unlikely to be hired. Some notable teachers of M
Street and Dunbar were Henry L. Bailey, Parker N. Bailey, Hugh M. Browne, Mary P.
Burrill, John Cromwell, Jr., Otelia Cromwell, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Angelina Grimke,
E.B. Henderson, Ida Gibbs Hunt, Harriet Riggs, Mary Church Terrell, Neval Thomas,
Georgiana Simpson, and Carter G. Woodson.
Henry L. Bailey, an 1889 graduate of Harvard University and an 1896 graduate of
Howard University School of Medicine, taught French; while Parker N. Bailey, the first
black graduate of Boston’s Latin School in 1877, and an 1881 graduate of Harvard
13
University, taught English for a number of years. Hugh M. Browne, a teacher of physics,
graduated from Howard University in 1875, and received a Bachelor of Theology Degree
from Princeton University; and Mary P. Burrill, a 1904 graduate of Emerson College,
taught English and Theatre.
John Cromwell, Jr., a 1906 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth, taught
German, Latin, and mathematics; while his sister Otelia Cromwell, the first black
graduate of Smith College in 1900, taught English. Jessie Redmon Fauset, the Harlem
Renaissance writer and a 1905 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell University, taught
French; and Angelina Grimke, another Harlem Renaissance writer taught English. In
addition, E.B. Henderson, the first black certified to teach physical education in America,
taught physical education and coached basketball.
Ida Gibbs Hunt, one of the first black women to graduate from Oberlin College in
1884, taught Latin, and Harriet Riggs, an 1892 graduate of Howard University Medical
School, taught history. Mary Church Terrell, another 1884 graduate of Oberlin College
and wife of M Street principal Robert Terrell, taught Latin; Neval Thomas, a graduate of
Howard University in 1901, taught history; and Georgiana Simpson, the first black
woman to receive a Ph.D. in 1921 from the University of Chicago, taught German. Carter
G. Woodson, the second black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, also
taught French, Spanish, English, and history at M Street.
These teachers were far more educated than some of the teachers at the white high
schools in the District that only held teaching degrees. According to conservative
intellectual Thomas Sowell, Carter G. Woodson, who held a doctorate degree from
14
Harvard, taught at Dunbar when he “should have been conducting graduate seminars at a
major university.”53 Likewise, Georgiana Simpson, Eva B. Dykes, Anna Julia Copper,
and many more Dunbar teachers earned doctorate degrees. Because of racial barriers, no
black professor held a full faculty position at a white university until 1942, when Dunbar
graduate William Allison Davis was hired at the University of Chicago. Other teachers
also held advanced degrees in disciplines other than education or teaching. Harriet Riggs
and Henry L. Parker had medical doctorate degrees, while Robert Terrell and Garnet C.
Wilkinson held law degrees. They were “trained in hard intellectual fields and had been
held to rigid standards, and this was reflected in the manner in which they taught their
students.
The teachers of M Street prepared their students to pass rigid college entrance
exams and for the college curriculum. In fact, their high school course was more rigorous
than many colleges. The historian Dr. Rayford Logan, who received his doctorate from
Harvard in 1936, stated that “M Street High School was one of the best high schools in
the nation, colored or white, public or private.”54 Professor Logan stated:
The classical or college preparatory curriculum at M Street was superior to
that of the first two years of some colleges and universities, regardless of
geographical location, in 1912. It included, for instance, two years of Greek, three
years of French, four years of Latin: grammar the first year, Caesar's Gallic Wars
the second year, Cicero's Orations the third year, and Virgil's Aeneid the fourth
year. Our courses in mathematics included geometry, trigonometry, and higher
algebra. In the English classes we read not only Silas Marner and some of the
Plays and Sonnets of Shakespeare but also William H. Prescott's The Conquest of
Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, for instance. One
of my most cherished possessions is a copy of Handbook of Composition: A
Compendium of Rules Regarding Good English, Grammar, Sentence Structure,
Paragraphing, Manuscript Arrangement, Punctuation, Spelling, Essay Writing,
and Letter Writing by E. C. Wooley, published in 1909.55
15
His courses at Dunbar prepared him for Williams College, where he earned his bachelor’s
degree. Following a lecture at Amherst about Ancient Egypt, Dunbar Alums Judge
William Hastie and Dr. Montague Cobb recalled that the lecture on Ancient Egypt they
received from their high school history teacher Neval Thomas was more stimulating.56
By 1910, the students gained acceptance into almost every notable school that allowed
blacks. From 1910-1930, most of the students went to, “Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin,
Brown, Case, Colby, Colgate, Dartmouth, Hamilton, Harvard, Michigan, Mount
Holyoke, Oberlin, Pembroke, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Radcliffe, Smith, Syracuse,
Wellesley, Western Reserve, Williams and Wisconsin.”57 In addition, Dunbar’s students
continued to have a presence at historically black colleges and universities.
Another reason why this high school became so prosperous was because it was
the school of Washington’s Black elite. Washington had one of the nation’s oldest free
black communities before the Civil War and following the war, blacks continued to settle
in D.C., especially educated blacks. Notable blacks whose families were a part of
Washington’s black elite were Frederick Douglass, P.B.S. Pinchback, the first black to
serve as governor of a U.S. state; John Mercer Langston, the first black elected to
congress from Virginia and the first Dean of the Howard University Law School; and
Blanche Bruce, the first black to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. These blacks saw
themselves as leaders, of the race, and instilled this racial pride in their families and in the
community. This element added with the faculty of the school helped the youth of the
school believe they could achieve anything if they put their mind to it.
16
Because of the school’s reputation, many families were eager to enroll their
students in the school even if they had to travel. Dunbar had students who “walked the
four and one half miles to school from the Anacostia section of the city, or took the
streetcars from Alexandria, Virginia.”58 Although by 1902, the District had another high
school, Armstrong Manual Training School; and Alexandria (Snowden School) had one,
as well; people were still eager to travel long distances to Dunbar.
Dr. Charles Richard Drew, a black physician who perfected the use of blood
plasma, came to Dunbar from a few miles outside the District. His family moved to
Arlington, Virginia, but this did not dissuade them from sending their children to the elite
school in Washington.59 Coach Edwin B. Henderson, a physical education teacher at
Dunbar and one of the first blacks to move to Falls Church, Virginia, also sent his
children to the highly respected high school.
In addition, Dunbar also had students from outside of the Maryland and Virginia
area. One such student was named Evello Grillo. Grillo was an African-Cuban who came
to Dunbar from Tampa, Florida. He stated that he was sent to Dunbar by a family friend
who heard about the school’s reputation.60 The family friend felt Dunbar was the best
place for him to go if he wanted to be successful. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, one
of the first black women in the nation to earn a Ph.D., moved from Philadelphia to attend
school at M Street and stayed with her uncle, Dr. Lewis B. Moore, a dean of Howard
University during the early twentieth century.61 Alonzo Clifton McClennan, a successful
doctor, also moved his kids to Washington from Charleston just to go to Dunbar, while
he stayed in South Carolina to continue his practice.62 In essence, Dunbar guaranteed
17
acceptance into a college with the preparation it provided, and this is what appealed to so
many blacks who came from many parts of the country.
Many of the honors and awards that Dunbar students received in college is a
testament to their high school preparation. One particular honor that some of the students
received were election to Phi Beta Kappa honor society, America’s oldest Greek lettered
society and its oldest honor society. All students in this elite group rank at the top of their
class academically. By 1965, Dunbar had nearly thirty students that were elected Phi Beta
Kappa.63 Some notable Dunbar Phi Beta Kappa were Charles Hamilton Houston,
Amherst; William Hastie, Amherst; and Sterling A. Brown, Williams.
18
CHAPTER 2: PIONEERS IN EDUCATION
Many of the Black pioneers in education had ties to Dunbar. These pioneers are
Richard Greener, Kelly Miller, William T.S. Jackson, Edward Christopher Williams,
Carter G. Woodson, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Edwin B. Henderson, Rayford Logan,
Allison Davis, Mercer Cook, and John Aubrey Davis. Greener was the first black
graduate of Harvard College, Allison Davis was the first black professor to gain tenure at
a major university, and Woodson is known as the father of black history. Two of these
educators were also black pioneers in sports: William T.S. Jackson, the first black to play
college football; and Edwin B. Henderson, the father of black basketball and the first
black sports historian. These individuals were a part of what is now known as Dunbar
High School at one time of their life.
Richard Greener was associated with the first public high school for blacks for a
brief period. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard College in 1870, was the
principal of the Colored High School when it was located in the Sumner School building.
1
Mr. Greener was born in Philadelphia in 1844, and spent his childhood in Boston and
Philadelphia. At age eighteen, he entered Oberlin College’s Preparatory School in 1862.
Dissatisfied with his experience at Oberlin, Greener transferred to Phillips Academy at
Andover. He spent two years at Andover, which prepared him for the rigors of college.
In 1865, Greener enrolled in Harvard College. Initially, he found the curriculum
to be challenging, but he eventually excelled in the classroom. As a sophomore, he won a
Bowdoin Prize for elocution and another oratory contest during his senior year. In 1870,
Greener graduated from Harvard, the first black to do so.2
19
Greener planned to practice law, but had to put those plans on hold to earn enough
money. His first stop was in his hometown of Philadelphia, where he was the principal of
the male department of the Institute for Colored Youth from 1870 to 1872.3 The
following year, he moved to Washington, D.C. to become principal of Preparatory High
School. He served as principal for one year and left for “fields of broader opportunity.”4
In 1873, he was named a professor of the University of South Carolina. He was also
enrolled in the university’s law school, and he received his law degree in 1876. The
following year, he was appointed dean of Howard University’s law school.
In the 1880’s, Greener became politically active with the Republican Party. For
his loyalty, President William McKinley appointed him to serve the country abroad. In
1898, Greener became the first U.S. consul to Vladivostok, Russia. He was so revered
that he was inducted into the Order of the Double Dragon for aiding war victims during
the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.5 He returned to the states in 1905 and entered private
practice in Chicago until his death in 1922. 6
Kelly Miller was a mathematics teacher at M Street High School for a brief period
of time, although he was known mostly for his service to nearby Howard University.7
Miller, born July 18, 1863, was from South Carolina and was the sixth of ten children. He
attended Fairfield Institute in South Carolina before enrolling at Howard University. He
graduated from Howard in 1886 and decided to further his education at Johns Hopkins
University. He was the first black student admitted to Johns Hopkins in 1887, where he
studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy. 8
20
In 1890, Miller returned to Howard to serve as a professor of mathematics and
eventually the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Howard
University “owes much of its popularity to the fact that hundreds of students took
residence there to be near the teacher whose name they had learned to hold high in
regard.”9 As Dean, the university’s enrollment increased ten-fold, and with this growth
also came expansion of the curriculum. In 1895, he introduced sociology to the university
because he thought the “new discipline was important for developing objective analyses
of the racial system in the United States.”10 To Miller, Sociology would prepare Howard
graduates to combat the segregated world that awaited them.
At the turn of the twentieth century, “no black man in America, with the
exception of W.E.B. Du Bois, was held in higher esteem in the intellectual community
than Kelly Miller of Howard University.”11 Indeed, Miller was relied upon by presidents,
cabinet members, congressmen, and other high ranking officials in America. Because of
Kelly Miller, Howard University is one of the premiere universities for blacks in
America.
William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson, a teacher and principal of M street and
Dunbar, was also a black pioneer. Mr. Jackson is notable for being the first black to run
track collegiately and is one of the first black college football players. Jackson was born
on November 18, 1866, to Lindsay and Mary Jane Smith Jackson in Essex County,
Virginia. He grew up in Alexandria, Virginia and attended prep school at Virginia
Normal and Collegiate Institute, which is now Virginia State University, in Petersburg,
21
Virginia. He left Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute after the board of trustees
removed John Mercer Langston, the school’s president at the time.
In 1888, Jackson enrolled in Amherst College. He was joined by William Henry
Lewis, a classmate of his at Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. The next year,
Lewis and Jackson joined the football team at Amherst. They were the first black
students to play college football.12 Jackson played halfback, while Lewis lined up at
center. Apparently, Jackson “was far the more spectacular of the two players at
Amherst.”13 Jackson was known for being a remarkable runner in more than one sport. In
1890, he became the first black man to run track in college, when he ran the half mile.14
In 1892, Jackson graduated from Amherst and became the first black person to receive a
master’s degree from Amherst in 1897.15
Jackson taught mathematics at M Street High School from 1892 to 1904. In 1906,
he was named principal of M Street. He served in that capacity for three years before he
became the head of the Business Department. As a teacher and principal, he “initiated the
system of individual promotion, stimulated interest in athletics, and fostered school
pride.”16 Jackson encouraged the students to have school spirit and to play sports, as he
did in college. He also influenced many of his students to attend Amherst, his alma mater.
During his stint at the high school, eighteen of his students went to Amherst; seven of
whom were elected to Phi Beta Kappa.17
In 1902, Jackson married May Howard, a famous sculptor who also taught Latin
at M Street.18 In 1931, he retired from teaching at Dunbar. In 1942, his fiftieth
anniversary of his college graduation, Amherst honored him for his undying devotion to
22
education. A year later, Professor Jackson died.19 Jackson was a pioneer for black athletes
in football and track and field.
Edward Christopher Williams was another black pioneer who was a part of
Dunbar’s legacy. From 1909-1916, Mr. Williams was principal of M Street High School,
and would be the last principal of the school before they moved into the Dunbar building.
Williams was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 11, 1871, to Daniel P. and Mary K.
Williams. He was educated in the public schools of Cleveland and graduated from
Central High School in Cleveland in 1888. Following graduation from high school,
Williams enrolled in Adelbert College of Western Reserve University, now Case Western
Reserve University.
At Western Reserve, Williams was a two sport athlete in baseball and track and
field; as well as an outstanding student. He won the Ohio championship in the mile, and
for his outstanding achievement in the classroom, he was elected Phi Beta Kappa as a
junior in 1891. He was the first black person elected Phi Beta Kappa at Western Reserve
University, and the sixth black person ever. Williams graduated as the valedictorian of
his class in 1892.20 After college, Williams began his career as a librarian at Western
Reserve. He was appointed the University librarian in 1898, and was responsible for the
expansion of the campus library. The following year, he took a leave of absence from the
library to attend the New York State Library School in Albany, New York, where he
“completed the two year curriculum in one year, becoming the first professionally trained
black librarian.”21 As a librarian, Mr. Williams continued to break down barriers. He
23
taught classes at Western Reserve’s library school and was also a charter member of the
Ohio Library Association.
In 1909, Williams left his job as the University librarian, and headed to
Washington, D.C. to become principal of M Street. Some whites in Cleveland were
baffled as to why he would quit his job as a college librarian to become the principal of a
black public school.22 They did not understand what this school meant to black America,
nor did they know what it meant to be accepted into the black elite of Washington during
these years. The black elite of Washington at the time was well educated and had a lot of
control over the institutions they used; which was not common in other parts of the
country.
During the time Williams served as principal, M Street was the premiere school
for blacks, and when Assistant Superintendent Roscoe Bruce, a fellow Phi Beta Kappa,
offered him the job, he had no choice but to accept. Williams was the second Phi Beta
Kappa to lead the school and he did a marvelous job at the helm. Bruce stated: “It is a
fact that Mr. Williams brought to the school the highest order of scholarship, the richest
and most varied possessed by any principal in the history of M Street.”23
In 1916, Williams left M Street to become a professor and librarian at Howard
University. At Howard, he was the director of Library Training and the Romance
Languages Department. 24 During his time, he raised funds to get more books and
personnel at the library. In 1929, he received the Rosenwald Fellowship for advanced
study at Columbia University’s School of Library Service. He had hoped to receive his
Ph.D. at the end of the year but died in December of 1929. 25 He was survived by his wife
24
Ethel, and his son Charles. In addition to his work in library science, Williams was also
an accomplished author. He published the “Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of
Colored Vanity Fair,” which ran in The Messenger between January 1925, and June
1926. Today it is known as When Washington Was in Vogue, and is considered an
“important but lost voice of the Harlem Renaissance.”26
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, known as the “father of Black History”, was another
pioneer of M Street High School. Born on December 19, 1875, in New Canton, Virginia,
Woodson was the eldest of nine children. Because he had to work at an early age to
support his parents, he did not attend high school until he was twenty years old. Upon
finishing high school, he attended Berea College in Kentucky and graduated in 1903. Dr.
Woodson received his Masters degree in 1908 from the University of Chicago and his
Ph.D. in History from Harvard in 1912. He was the second black to earn a doctorate at
Harvard, with W.E.B. Du Bois, who also earned his Ph.D. in History, being the first in
1895.
In 1915, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History (ASNLH). The organization was founded to “encourage young scholars to
undertake historical research, often paying for their training at the best graduate
schools.”27 The Association was originally headquartered in his home at 1538 9th Street
in Northwest Washington. In 1916, he started the Journal of Negro History to educate the
public about black history which was often ignored. Today, it is known as the Journal of
African-American History and the ASNL is now known as the Association for the Study
of African American Life and History (ASALH).
25
His works were also very important to the study of black history. Among his best
works are The Mis-education of the Negro, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861,
and The History of the Negro Church. These works are still widely read today, especially
The Mis-education of the Negro. One of the most profound quotes from this book is:
History shows that it does not matter who is in power…those who have
not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain
any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.28
In 1926, Woodson introduced Negro History Week to increase people’s knowledge of
remarkable feats achieved by blacks. It was also intended to encourage and empower
black children. Fifty years later, Negro History Week was expanded to African American
History Month and is celebrated annually in the month of February.
Roscoe Conkling Bruce, the Assistant Superintendent for Colored Schools in the
District of Columbia from 1907-1921, was born in 1879 in Washington, D.C. Bruce, the
son of Senator Blanche Bruce, the first black senator to serve a full term, and Josephine
Bruce, lived among Washington’s black elite. After two years at M Street, he was sent to
boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire because Senator Bruce
wanted his family to “enjoy the clout that came along with forming ties with a prestigious
white New England boarding school….”29 Blanche Bruce did not take his son out of M
Street for academic reasons, but he was more concerned with the political connections
that would be made at Exeter. At Exeter, Bruce wrote for “the school’s Literary Monthly
and The Exonian, where he became an editor.”30 He graduated from Exeter in 1898.
Roscoe entered Harvard College in the fall of 1898, where he was a very skilled
debater and he was elected President of the Debate Team.31 He also served as editor in
26
chief of Harvard Illustrated Magazine. He culminated his stellar career as the class orator
at graduation, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1902, and was elected Phi Beta
Kappa.32
Following graduation, Bruce went to Tuskegee Institute to head the newly formed
academic department. In 1903, He married Clara Burrill, one of his classmates of M
Street High School.33 As dean of academics, he developed the school’s curriculum and
helped Tuskegee attract industrial and academic students. Bruce left in 1907 to become
the Assistant Superintendent for Colored Schools in Washington, D.C. As Assistant
Superintendent, Bruce introduced the concept of junior high schools to the District when
Shaw Junior High School was established in 1921. Bruce went on to edit magazines and
serve as resident manager of the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem, New York.
Edwin Bancroft Henderson went on to be a pioneer in physical education and
sports. E.B., as he was known, was born on November 24, 1883, in Washington, D.C. to
William and Louisa Henderson. He graduated from M Street in 1902, and was the
valedictorian of Miner Teachers College 1904.34
In 1906, he attended the Harvard Summer School of Physical Education led by
Dudley Allen Sargent. After completing the program, Henderson became the first black
person certified to teach Physical Education in the public schools and was the Director of
Physical Education for over fifty years in Washington. 35 In this position he introduced
basketball to the District in 1904 and organized the first Public School Athletic League.36
For this, Washington, D.C. became the “birthplace of black basketball” and Henderson
was regarded as the “father of black basketball.”37
27
After introducing basketball to the district, he played professionally for the
Twelfth Street YMCA in Washington, D.C. The team was known as the “Twelfth
Streeters,” and they played teams mainly from Washington, D.C. and New York. The
Twelfth Streeters dominated every team they played in 1909 and 1910. To get the team
more support and visibility, Henderson urged Howard University to adopt the basketball
team. In 1911, Howard accepted and went from a “bit player on the black basketball
scene to its defending national champion…”38 Howard benefited from the new additions
from the Twelfth Street YMCA basketball team and dominated the sport in the early
1900’s.
Henderson was also very active in the fight for civil rights. He started the NAACP
in Falls Church, Virginia and challenged many discrimination laws in the state. He also
wrote Negro in Sports, the first book about the history of blacks in sports. Popular writers
and scholars of both races and different philosophies “have all depended on Henderson’s
work for source material, analysis, and clues in designing of their own publications
dealing with African American athletes.”39 Because of his book, many texts written about
black athletes are accurate and reliable. This was perhaps one of his greatest contributions
to society. Henderson went on to become a charter member of the Black Athletes Hall of
Fame.
Rayford Logan, one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, was born
on January 7, 1897, in Washington, D.C., to Arthur and Martha Wittingham Logan. His
father was a butler and his mother was a homemaker. Logan’s childhood home was at
28
1028 20th Street, Northwest, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, which was racially
mixed at the time, near George Washington University.40
In 1909, young Rayford was admitted to M Street High School, which was
important to the Logan family because they were not fully accepted into the black elite of
Washington. Although they were light complexioned, the Logan’s were not among the
black elite of Washington because neither parent possessed a college degree nor did they
come from a historic Washington family. However, the education he received at M Street
“put him on a level plane with the aristocrats of color and opened opportunities to him
that were available to few young people of any race.”41 By going to M Street High, he
received training from some of brightest individuals from the best colleges in the country.
In high school, Logan was a member of the cadet corps and the track team. His senior
year, he was made captain of the A company of the cadets, an honor his brother received
a year before. Most importantly, because of his stellar performance in the classroom,
Logan was named the class valedictorian in 1913.42
After M Street, Logan enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh to pursue
engineering like his brother.43 Realizing this was not his passion, Logan transferred to
Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he studied the humanities. It
was at Williams where he first felt the sting of racism. Blacks were allowed in the school,
but were excluded from the social life of the college. Not letting this discourage him in
the classroom, Logan continued to be a stellar student and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in
1917. A year later, he served in World War I as a member of the 372nd Infantry
29
Regiment. After serving in World War I, Logan went back to school and received both
his M.A. and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1932 and 1936, respectively.44
Logan went on to head the history departments of Virginia Union University,
Atlanta University, and Howard University. He chaired Howard’s history department
from 1942 until 1965. During this period, he coined the phrase “the nadir.” This referred
to the period between 1877 and 1901, when race relations were according to Logan at its
worst. After retiring, he wrote Howard University: the First Hundred Years 1867-1967.
This work captured the rich history of one of the oldest historically black colleges in the
country.
In addition to serving as a professor, Logan was a chief advisor to the NAACP on
international affairs. In the 1940’s, he worked with the Inter-American Affairs Bureau
with the State Department; and served as a member of the U.S. National Commission for
UNESCO.45 Logan was also the 15th General President of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity
and was awarded with the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1980. He died November 4,
1982.
William Allison Davis was the first black tenured professor of a white university.
He was born on October 14, 1902, to John Abraham and Gabrielle Dorothy Beale Davis.
His father worked as a federal employee while his mother did domestic work. In 1919,
Davis graduated from Dunbar as the valedictorian, just like his father did years before
him.46
After Dunbar, Davis enrolled in Williams College, like many Dunbar graduates
before him. He continued to excel at Williams, and in 1924, he graduated “summa cum
30
laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and class valedictorian.”47 In 1925, Davis was admitted to
Harvard University to pursue a Masters in English. He studied English for a few years but
became interested in anthropology. He studied anthropology at the London School of
Economics before returning to America to earn his Masters in Anthropology from
Harvard in 1935.
Davis taught at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana, before landing at
the University of Chicago in 1942. In 1947, he was granted tenure there, making him the
first tenured black professor of a top ranked university.48 He spent the next forty years
teaching in Chicago. In 1970, he was named to the John Dewey Distinguished Service
Professorship of Education.
Davis also made history by exposing the inadequacy of intelligence tests as a
determinant for measuring the aptitude or potential of children from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds. According to Davis, schools are essentially middle class institutions. From
the teachers to the textbooks to the curricula, most of the things in school depend on
being raised middle class; yet most public school students in the inner cities were not
middle class. He concluded that lower class children were penalized on intelligence tests
that relied heavily on middle class experience.49 Because of his research, New York, San
Francisco, Chicago, and Detroit abolished IQ tests in their schools. For his work to end
legalize segregation, the United States Post Office honored Davis with a postage stamp as
part of its Black Heritage Series. Davis, who died in 1983, paved the way for black
tenured professors.
31
Mercer Cook, another graduate of Dunbar, went on to have a very productive
career after graduating from Dunbar. Mercer Cook was a scholar of French and had been
a U.S. Ambassador in the 1960’s. He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1903 to musician
Will Marion Cook and opera singer Abbie Mitchell Cook. His father produced the first
black show on Broadway and was one of the best composers of the early twentieth
century. In 1935, his mother was cast as “Clara” in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
His grandfather, John Hartwell Cook, was one of the first graduates of Howard
University Law School and later served as the dean. Because he traveled all over the
country with his musician parents, Mercer Cook developed an interest in many different
cultures.50
Following his graduation from Dunbar, Mercer Cook went to Amherst College
where he was a stellar student and also a member of the school choir. After graduating
Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst in 1925, he studied at the Sorbonne, and received his MA
and Ph.D. from Brown in 1931 and 1936, respectively. Cook then became a professor of
Modern languages at Atlanta and Howard Universities.51
As a professor of French, Cook laid the foundation for curriculum changes in the
field. Because of him, many institutions have made the study of African and Caribbean
literature a requirement in their Foreign Language Departments. He did this by adding
“modern teaching methods that are now viewed in the larger academy as crucial to
students’ socio-cognitive development….”52 Cook’s innovative teaching style earned him
high praise in his field.
32
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Mercer Cook to be a U.S.
Ambassador to Niger. This was the first time a black person had been appointed as the
head of a diplomatic mission in Africa.53 He also served as a special envoy to Senegal
and Gambia from 1964 to 1966. Cook died in 1987.
Another outstanding scholar from Dunbar was John Aubrey Davis, the brother of
Allison Davis. He was born in 1912, ten years after Allison. Like his brother, John grew
up in segregated District of Columbia. Also similar to his family members, he went to
Dunbar High School, where he excelled in his studies. Following Dunbar, he went to
Williams College, where he was elected Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude
in 1933.54 He pursued graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned
his master’s degree in 1934; and at Columbia University, where he earned his doctorate
in political science 1949.55
In 1933, Davis along with Belford Lawson and N. Franklin Thorne organized the
New Negro Alliance (NNA). The NNA was a group of young college graduates who
organized to fight racial discrimination. This group established the “Don’t Buy Where
You Can’t Work” campaign after three black people were fired from their jobs at
Hamburger Grill on U Street which was in a historically black neighborhood. They
boycotted the restaurant and picketed, which caused the Hamburger Grill to shut down.
This led to a movement to boycott all white establishments in black neighborhoods that
refused to employ blacks. These protests led to the Sanitary Grocery Company (now
known as Safeway) to file a lawsuit against the alliance. This case went all the way to the
Supreme Court and was known as New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Company in
33
1938. The Supreme Court “affirmed the legal right of blacks to bring consumer pressure
against commercial establishments that refused to employ black workers.”56 This showed
how effective protesting and pickets could be. The same tactics were employed twenty
years later during the Civil Rights Movement.
In the 1950’s, he directed the academic research team for the NAACP in the
Brown v. Board of Education case that led to a 1954 Supreme Court decision that
declared segregation in public schools, unconstitutional. The academic research team
provided the historical and legislative facts upon which the team for the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund based its case.57 This research equipped the lawyers with
the necessary information to address questions regarding the effects of school
segregation. In addition to participating in protests, Davis was a professor at Lincoln
University, Howard University and later the City College of New York. He was also
State Commissioner against Discrimination in New York from 1957 to 1961. Davis died
in 2002, twenty years after he retired from teaching.
The people who laid the foundation, and opened doors for blacks in the world of
education and sports are essential because these are the institutions that the majority of
the black community’s leaders have spanned from. Most of the black athletes today have
to attend college first before they pursue a career in sports. Therefore, they too have
benefited from the barriers broken by E.B. Henderson and William T.S. Jackson. So,
when we think of Black History Month, black graduates of Harvard College, tenured
black college professors, and college athletes, it is important to know that the people who
made these things possible were affiliated with Dunbar High School.
34
CHAPTER 3: WOMEN OF DUNBAR
Throughout most of American history, black women have been striving for racial
equality just as much as black men. Many times, these feats have been overlooked,
especially the ones associated with education. During the nineteenth century, women who
wanted to get the same college education afforded to men were frowned upon. This is
because they were supposed to become good wives and tend to household matters. Thus,
it was thought that women who went to college in the nineteenth century were corrupted
and unfit to marry. But black women of this era who went to college did not let these
notions discourage them, and they persevered in order to open doors to make it
acceptable for women to get a college education.
Many black women who led the way in higher education were associated with
Dunbar High School. This includes Mary Jane Patterson, the first black woman to
graduate from college and Georgiana Simpson, the first black woman to receive a Ph.D.
Other pioneers of Dunbar who led the way in education are Anna Julia Cooper, Mary
Church Terrell, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Otelia Cromwell, Eva Dykes, Euphemia
Haynes, and Evelyn Boyd Granville. All of these women went above and beyond to
prove that black women were capable of receiving college degrees. Unfortunately, these
women are rarely celebrated and some of their stories have been forgotten.
Mary Jane Patterson, the first black woman to earn a college degree, was the first
black principal of Preparatory High school. She was born in 1840 to Henry and Emeline
Patterson. Originally from North Carolina, the family moved to Ohio after Henry earned
his freedom as a bricklayer.1 In 1857, Mary entered the Preparatory school of Oberlin
35
College and graduated in 1858. After completing the preparatory course, Mary entered
the gentleman’s course at Oberlin. The gentleman’s course was considered too rigorous
for women because it, “was a year longer, required the study of Greek, and awarded
students a diploma rather than a certificate.”2 In 1862, Mary graduated with highest
honors from Oberlin College with a Bachelor of Arts degree, becoming the first black
woman in the United States to graduate from college.3
After college, Patterson taught school in Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. In
1869, she moved to the nation’s capitol to teach school and in the fall of 1871, she
became principal of Preparatory High School, located in the Stevens Building. She was
replaced by Richard Greener in 1872, possibly because he was a man, but was
reappointed in 1873, and served until 1884, when another man Francis Cardozo was
appointed principal. A woman of a “strong, forceful personality, and showed tremendous
power for good in establishing high intellectual standards in the public schools,”
Patterson helped transform the school into an institution with high academic principles. 4
She continued to teach at the school until her death in 1894.
Anna Julia Cooper, a prominent educator and activist, was a teacher and a
principal of Dunbar High School. Cooper was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on August
10, 1858, to Hannah Stanley, a slave of George Washington Haywood, possibly Anna’s
father. At a young age, Anna loved books and developed a knack for learning. In 1867,
Cooper became one of the first students to attend St. Augustine’s Normal School and
Collegiate Institute.5 St. Augustine’s was a school founded by the Episcopal Church, for
newly freed slaves. She did so well at the school that she began tutoring older students
36
and decided to get her credentials to teach. She taught for a short period of time until age
nineteen, when she married George Cooper in 1877. Anna, like some married women of
this time period, stopped teaching in order to manage her home. But, George died two
years later, and Anna continued her education; as well as her career.
Cooper went to Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio in 1881. At Oberlin, Anna also
enrolled in the “gentleman’s course” which awarded students a Bachelor’s degree after
completion. She earned her B.A. in 1884, which placed her among the first black women
to earn a college degree.6 She distinguished herself even more when she earned her
Master’s degree in Mathematics in 1887. Shortly after college, Anna taught at
Wilberforce University and then returned home to North Carolina to teach at St.
Augustine’s. A year later, she was invited to Washington, D.C. to teach at Colored High
School, Dunbar’s predecessor.
At Colored High School in Washington, D.C., Cooper taught Latin, mathematics,
and science.7 As a teacher, she instilled in her students “high ideals of scholarship, racial
pride, and self improvement.”8 In 1892, Cooper published her first book entitled A Voice
from the South, which addressed the issues of race and sex in America. This book is now
considered a classic black feminist text.9
In 1901, Miss Cooper was appointed principal of M Street High School, serving
in that capacity for five years, until she was removed in 1906 over her stance against
implementing an extra industrial curriculum into M Street. She relocated to Missouri,
where she taught at Lincoln University for five years. 10 She returned to Washington,
D.C. in 1911, to continue teaching at M Street, where she remained for the rest of her
37
teaching career. In 1925, Cooper, at the age of sixty-six, became the first black woman to
earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris; she was also the fourth black woman to earn a
doctorate. Cooper served in a number of social activist organizations and also as
President of Frelinghuysen University, a school which provided social services, religious
training, and educational programs for black working-class adults. In 1964, she died at
the age of 107.
Mary Church Terrell, the first black woman to be a member of a board of
education, was a teacher at M Street High School. Terrell was born on September 23,
1863, in Memphis, Tennessee to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers. Her father was
known as the first black millionaire in America.11 At age six, Mary attended the “model
school,” which was connected with Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She later
attended Oberlin Academy and graduated in 1880.
After high school, she attended Oberlin College where she served as class poet
and editor for the Oberlin Review.12 Graduating in 1884 from Oberlin’s “gentleman’s
course,” she earned her Master’s degree there in 1888. She taught at Wilberforce
University for two years and relocated to Washington, D.C. In the District, Terrell
became a teacher of German and Latin at the M Street High School. There she met
Robert H. Terrell, the head of the Latin department, and married him in 1891. As a
married woman, she stopped teaching because married women were not allowed to teach
in the District’s Public Schools, and focused on other ways she could help her
community.13
38
Terrell began to actively fight for equal opportunities in education and women’s
rights. In 1895, the District of Columbia appointed her to its Board of Education. In her
autobiography, Terrell writes that she “was the first colored woman to be appointed to
such a position in the United States.”14 The colored schools were greatly improved during
her time as a board member. Because of Terrell’s devotion to social activism, in 1896,
she became a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women
(N.A.C.W.). The NACW was the “first national black organization to tackle the problems
of black people as a group.”15 This organization established homes for women, the
elderly, and the poor population.
Terrell continued to fight for civil rights in the twentieth century as a founding
member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
in 1909. In 1940, Terrell wrote her autobiography entitled A Colored Woman in a White
World, which gave an account of her experiences not only in America but in Europe, as
well.16 At age eighty, Terrell remained an active participant in protests of segregated
facilities. She died on July 24, 1954, at age ninety in Annapolis, Maryland.
Georgiana Simpson, the first black woman to receive a Ph.D., was a graduate and
teacher of Dunbar High School. Simpson was born in 1866 to David and Catherine
Simpson. She was raised in the District of Columbia and graduated from the Colored
High School in 1884. She followed that with training to become a teacher at the Normal
School of the District of Columbia under Lucy Moten.
After teaching for twenty years, Miss Simpson enrolled in college at the
University of Chicago. Due to her interest in foreign languages, Simpson majored in
39
German with a minor in French. In 1911, she graduated from the University of Chicago
with a Bachelor of Arts in German and moved to the District of Columbia to teach at
Dunbar until 1917, when she returned to the University of Chicago to pursue a graduate
degree. In 1921, at age fifty five, Simpson made history as the first black woman to
receive a Ph.D. For her distinction, she was featured in The Crisis, the NAACP’s
publication.17
She taught at Dunbar for a short period time before becoming a professor at
Howard University, where she served as a professor until 1939, when she retired. She
died five years later at her home in Washington, D.C. Miss Simpson believed:
… that every teacher of Negroes should be a teacher of the history of the race;
and, although an instructor in German and French, she had such an abundance of
knowledge of her field that she found occasion to mention and clinch in the minds
of her students many facts in literature bearing upon the Negro.18
Otelia Cromwell was the first black woman to graduate from Smith College and
also Yale University. Cromwell was born on April 18, 1874, to John Wesley Cromwell,
Sr. and Lucy McGuinn Cromwell. Her father was a teacher, attorney and one of the more
notable political activists of his day. He received his law degree from Howard University
in 1874, worked as chief examiner for the U.S. Post Office, and served as president of the
Bethel Literary and Historical Association. In 1896, John Cromwell, along with
Alexander Crummell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Walter B. Hayson, and Kelly Miller,
founded the American Negro Academy. The academy was a learned society of writers,
scholars, and artists dedicated to advancing African American culture through scholarly
publishing. 19
40
Cromwell attended M Street High School, where she excelled in the classroom
while also maintaining a part time job as an assistant to Frederick Douglass, who was the
District of Columbia’s registrar of deeds.20 In 1891, she graduated from M Street and
enrolled in Miner Normal School, where she received her teaching degree the following
year. She spent the next five years teaching in the District’s public schools.
In 1897, she enrolled in Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, where
she became the first black student. Smith, a private women’s college, is known as one of
the best liberal arts colleges in the United States. At Smith, Cromwell “was not permitted
to live on campus, though, and did not…participate in many extracurricular activities.”21
With a limited social life at Smith, Cromwell spent most of her time studying. In 1900,
she graduated from Smith, becoming the college’s first black graduate.
In 1901, Cromwell returned home again to teach in the public schools, first at M
Street and other Washington schools for over twenty years. During that span, she
received her Master’s Degree from Columbia University in 1910, and later her Ph.D.
from Yale in 1926.22 She was the first black woman to graduate from Yale with a Ph.D.,
and also the fifth black woman to earn a Ph.D. Shortly after earning her doctorate,
Cromwell returned to Smith College as an initiate of Phi Beta Kappa, since the school did
not have a chapter when she was a student.23
In 1931, Miss Cromwell was appointed Professor of English at Miner Normal
School, which had upgraded from a teachers college to a four year college. In addition to
teaching, she published essays and articles throughout the course of her life.24 Cromwell
died in 1972, and in 1989, Smith College honored her for her achievements.
41
Nannie Helen Burroughs, founder of the National Training School for Women
and Girls in Washington, D.C., was also a graduate of M Street High School. Burroughs
was born on May 2, 1879, in Orange, Virginia, to John and Jennie Burroughs. She grew
up in Washington, D.C. and graduated from M Street in 1896. After high school, she
taught school and was a member of the National Baptist Convention.25
In 1909, Burroughs established the National Training School for Women and
Girls in the Lincoln Heights part of the city. The school’s mission was to instruct students
in “the three B’s: Bible, bath, and broom,” which became the schools motto. Burroughs
served as the president of the institution from 1909 until her death in 1961. 26 She instilled
race pride and dignity in black women. Thousands of young girls attended the school and
were trained to become respectable workers.
For her work, Burroughs received a number of honorary degrees and was also
honored by the District of Columbia with a Nannie Helen Burroughs Day on May 10,
1976, and a Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue in Northeast Washington, D.C in the same
year. In addition, the National Training School was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs
School and is designated as a National Historic Landmark. NAACP leader William
Pickens declared: “No other person in America has so large a hold on the loyalty and
esteem of the colored masses as Nannie H. Burroughs.”27
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes, the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in
mathematics, was a graduate of Dunbar High School. She was born on September 11,
1890, to William Lofton and Lavinia Dey. Her father was a prominent dentist in
Washington during the early twentieth century. She graduated from M Street High
42
School in 1907 as the valedictorian and earned a teaching certificate a few years later
from Miner Normal School. Haynes continued her education at Smith College as a
Psychology major, where she graduated with honors in 1914. Following college, Haynes
taught in the District of Columbia’s public schools for forty seven years.28 During that
span, she earned her master’s degree from University of Chicago in 1930 and her
doctorate in mathematics from The Catholic University of America in 1943, the first
black woman to do so.29
Haynes also made history when she became the first woman to chair the D.C.
Public School Board of Education in 1966.30 As the chair, she played a key role in
integrating the public schools. Her husband Harold A. Haynes was principal of Dunbar
from 1943 until 1947, and also a deputy superintendent of D.C. Public Schools from
1948 until 1958. Haynes, known for being a devout catholic, received the Papal medal,
"Pro Ecclesia et Pontifex" for “her service to the church and her community.”31 She died
in 1980 at the age of ninety.
Eva B. Dykes, the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, was a
graduate of M Street in 1910. She was born Eva Beatrice Dykes on August 13, 1893, in
Washington, D.C., to James Dykes and Martha Ann Howard Dykes, who met as students
at Howard University.32 After M Street, Dykes attended Howard University and
graduated summa cum laude in 1914, the first person to earn that distinction at the
institution.33 She followed that up with another Bachelor’s degree in English from
Radcliffe College, the women’s college connected to Harvard University, in 1917.34 She
also received her Master’s degree from Radcliffe in 1918, and 1921, she became the first
43
black woman in the United States to complete a Ph.D.35 Her graduation was on June 22,
1921, and because Georgiana Simpson and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander’s graduation
dates were June 14 and 15, respectively in 1921; Eva was the third black woman to earn a
Ph.D.36
Dykes taught for a few years at Dunbar, Howard University, Walden University
in Nashville, Tennessee; and Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1940,
Radcliffe elected her to Phi Beta Kappa as an alumna.37 From 1944 until her death in
1986, she taught at Oakwood and earned many honors for her work. For her service, the
college named its library in her honor in 1973.
The second black woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics was Evelyn Boyd
Granville. She was born in 1924 in Washington, D.C. to William and Julia Boyd. Her
mother worked at the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Evelyn loved
school as a child, especially mathematics.38 She graduated from Dunbar as the
valedictorian of her class in 1941; and enrolled in Smith College, where she excelled as a
mathematics major, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1945. 39 She
then received a fellowship to pursue doctoral studies at Yale University. She completed
her Ph.D. in 1949 at Yale; the second black woman to do so.40 After receiving her
doctorate, Dr. Granville worked as a research assistant for the New York Institute for
Mathematics and became a professor at Fisk University.
In 1970, Granville married real estate broker Edward Granville in Los Angeles,
California, where she served as a professor at California State University at Los Angeles.
While at Cal State-Los Angeles, she co-wrote a mathematics textbook with Jason Frand,
44
which was used by more than fifty colleges in the United States.41 Retiring in 1984, she
moved to Texas where she served as a mathematics consultant for school teachers.
45
CHAPTER 4: PIONEERS IN GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY
Many of the African Americans who led the way in breaking the color barrier for
many top government and military positions were Dunbar graduates. These Dunbar
graduates served in the President’s Cabinet, U.S. Congress, and in high positions of the
military. Dunbar graduates were also instrumental in the major political movements of
the twentieth century, as well as serve honorably in America’s wars of the early twentieth
century. They also produced a graduate who went on to be the first black graduate of a
prestigious service academy, Wesley Brown. The notable Dunbar graduates who were
pioneers are Robert Weaver, the first black presidential cabinet member; Edward Brooke,
the first black United States senator since reconstruction; Walter Fauntroy, the District of
Columbia’s first black congressional delegate; Eleanor Holmes Norton, the first female
congressional delegate for the District of Columbia; Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first
black general of the United States Army; Wesley Brown, the first black graduate of the
United States Naval Academy; and Roscoe Brown, Jr., a member of the Tuskegee
Airmen. They led the way for most politicians and military officers today.
GOVERNMENT
Robert Clifton Weaver, the first black to hold a cabinet-level position in the
United States, was a graduate of Dunbar. He was born on December 29, 1907, to
Mortimer Weaver, Sr. and Florence Freeman Weaver, both graduates of Dunbar.
Weaver’s grandfather was Robert Freeman, the first black graduate of the Harvard Dental
School.1 His father worked as a clerk at the Post Office, and his older brother, Mortimer,
Jr., was a graduate of Dunbar and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams College.
46
Weaver attended Dunbar High School from 1921 until 1925, where he was a
member of the Cadet Corps, business manager of the school newspaper, and a member of
the debate team. In 1925, Weaver graduated sixth out of 266 students and was accepted
to Harvard “without the necessity of an entrance examination and he secured a
scholarship which paid most of his tuition for the first year.”2 At Harvard, Weaver was a
member of the debate team and won the Pasteur Medal for the best speech and the
Boylston Prize for Oratory. In 1929, he graduated cum laude, and earned his master’s in
1931 and his doctorate in economics from Harvard by 1933. Weaver became “the first
African American to achieve such a distinction from Harvard and only the second black
person to receive a doctoral degree in economics.”3 The first black person to earn a Ph.D.
in economics was fellow Dunbar alum Sadie T.M. Alexander in 1921.4
In 1934, Weaver was appointed to a position in the administration of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt with other blacks who served as advisors to the president on
race relations known as the “black cabinet.” These individuals worked in each federal
department of the government to help shape New Deal programs. Other notable members
of the “black cabinet” were Mary McLeod Bethune, noted educator and civil rights
leader; Eugene K. Jones, the Executive Secretary of the National Urban League, a major
civil rights organization; and Lawrence A. Oxley, known for his work in social welfare
programs.
By the 1960’s, Weaver became an expert on urban issues such as poverty, aged
housing, and unemployment; and President John F. Kennedy selected him as the head of
the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA).5 During this time, Weaver held
47
more Harvard degrees than any member of Kennedy’s administration.6 He also won the
NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1962 for his work in urban affairs. In 1966, President
Lyndon Johnson appointed Weaver to be the Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), the first secretary of the newly created agency, as well as the first
black to be appointed to the president’s cabinet.7 After serving in the cabinet, Dr. Weaver
served as a president of Baruch College, while continuing to influence urban policy. He
retired in 1978, nineteen years before his death in 1997. In 2000, HUD named its building
after Weaver, the first government agency to have its headquarters named after a black
man.8
The first black United States Senator of the twentieth century, Edward Brooke,
III, was born on October 26, 1919, to Edward Brooke, Jr. and Helen Seldon Brooke. His
father was a graduate of Howard University Law School and worked in the Veteran’s
Administration, while his mother, Helen, was a homemaker. 9 As a student at Dunbar,
Brooke played tennis and was a “good but not outstanding student.”10 He performed well
in liberal arts subjects but struggled in the sciences. In June of 1936, Brooke graduated
from Dunbar.
After high school, Brooke attended Howard University, where he participated in
the civil rights protests of the late 1930’s. In 1941, he graduated from Howard, but his
celebration would be short lived as he was ordered to serve in World War II, like many
blacks during this time. He spent five years in the army as an officer of the segregated
366th Regiment Infantry. In 1946, he was discharged with a Bronze Star and a
Distinguished Service Award. After the war, Brooke attended Boston University Law
48
School where he earned stellar grades and was elected to the law review.11 He graduated
in 1948 and practiced law in Massachusetts.
In 1962, Brooke was elected Massachusetts Attorney General and became the
“first African American to be elected attorney general in any of the fifty states.”12 In
1966, he was elected to the United States Senate and the first black to win election to the
senate by popular vote.13 He was the third black senator ever and the first since Blanche
Bruce left office in 1881. While in Office, Senator Brooke advocated for education, civil
rights, as well as women’s rights.
After serving two terms, Brooke left the senate in 1979, but remained in
Washington, D.C., where he practiced law and served as a board member of a number of
corporations. He was married first to Remigia Ferrari-Scacco Brooke and second to Anne
Brooke. For his devotion to the country, Brooke was awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. A courthouse is also named for him in
Boston.
Walter E. Fauntroy, Jr., the District of Columbia’s first black delegate to
Congress, was born on February 6, 1933, to William and Ethel Fauntroy. In 1952, he
graduated second in his class from Dunbar and received a scholarship, to pay for school,
from his church.14 In 1952, Fauntroy entered Virginia Union University in Richmond,
Virginia, where he graduated in 1955 and decided to answer the call to the ministry. His
next stop was Yale Divinity School, where he graduated in 1958 with a Bachelor of
Divinity degree. Shortly after graduation, he became the pastor of New Bethel Baptist
49
Church; the church he grew up in.15 He would also become heavily involved with the
Civil Rights Movement.
In 1960, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. named Walter Fauntroy director of the
Washington branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a civil
rights organization that had a large role in the Civil Rights Movement.16 He helped
develop the SCLC’s strategy and also served as its lobbyist to Congress. In addition, he
coordinated the organization’s role in the March on Washington in 1963, where King
gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech.17 Nearly a decade later, he became the
District of Columbia’s first black delegate to the United States Congress in 1971, the first
delegate from D.C. since 1875; and a founding member of the Congressional Black
Caucus (CBC) in the same year. He was elected chairperson of the CBC in 1980, and
served as D.C.’s delegate until 1990.18
Fauntroy left his political office to continue his ministry at New Bethel Baptist
Church. He retired from New Bethel in 2009, and continues to be involved in community
service, as well as social justice work. He is married to the former Dorothy Sims, and
they reside in Washington, D.C. They have two children, Melissa and Marvin.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the first woman to serve as the District of Columbia’s
Delegate to Congress, was born on June 13, 1937, to Coleman Holmes and Vela Holmes.
Her father was a civil servant, while her mother worked as a schoolteacher. She was
educated in the public schools of Washington, D.C. and her role models were Mary
Church Terrell and Eleanor Roosevelt.19
50
In the fall of 1952, young Eleanor Holmes entered Dunbar High School and was
elected class president in her senior year. In 1955, Holmes graduated as a member of
Dunbar’s last segregated class due to the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of
Education case which desegregated schools in America.20 After high school, she went to
Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In college, she was active in the civil rights
movement and was an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). As a member of SNCC, Norton participated in sit-ins in Washington, D.C.,
Maryland, and Ohio. She graduated from Antioch in 1960, and continued her education at
Yale University, where she received her master’s degree and law degree in 1963 and
1964, respectively. For a while, she worked with the American Civil Liberties Union and
also served as a law professor of New York University Law School. In 1977, Eleanor
made history when she was named the first female chair of the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC). With the EEOC, Eleanor defended the federal
government’s policies on civil rights and she also structured the EEOC’s guidelines on
what constituted sexual harassment.21
Following her stint at the EEOC, Norton served as a tenured law professor at the
Georgetown University Law Center. In 1991, she became the first woman elected to
serve the District of Columbia as a delegate to the United States House of
Representatives, a position she currently holds.22
MILITARY
Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first black general of the United States Army, was a
graduate of M Street High School. He was born Benjamin Oliver Davis on May 28, 1880,
51
to Louis Patrick Henry Davis and Henrietta Stewart. His father was a messenger for the
U.S. Department of Interior, while his mother worked as a nurse. After attending the
Lucretia Mott Elementary School, he entered M Street in 1894. He was captain of the
football team, member of the baseball team, as well as a participant in the cadet corps. He
graduated from M Street in the class of 1898.23
Instead of college, Davis chose to serve in the military. His military career began
when he served in the Spanish American War in 1898. He was commissioned as an
officer in 1901, and served in the Philippines with troop F, the 10th Cavalry. In 1902, he
returned to the United States and was stationed at Fort Washakie, Wyoming for a few
months before being appointed a professor of Military Science at Wilberforce
University.24 He served at Wilberforce from 1905 until 1909, and again in 1917 until
1919.25 During that span, he also served as a military attaché in Liberia, from 1909-1912.
On July 1, 1920, Davis was promoted to lieutenant colonel and moved with his family to
Tuskegee, Alabama.26 For a number of years following his promotion, he served his
country faithfully despite unchallenging and disappointing assignments because of his
race. However, Davis persevered and attained the rank of colonel on February 18, 1930.27
As colonel, he escorted widows and mothers of fallen soldiers to visit their graves in
Europe; while also teaching at Tuskegee Institute until 1937.
In 1940, his dedicated service paid off when he was promoted to Brigadier
General, the first black general of the U.S. Army.28 As a general, Davis served in World
War II and also conducted inspection tours. In 1948, President Harry Truman signed
Executive Order 9981, which outlawed segregation in the military. Black soldiers were
52
finally allowed to defend the country while fighting alongside white soldiers. That same
year, Davis retired after fifty years of military service.
Davis was married to Elnora Dickerson until her death in 1916. The coupled had
three children: Olive, Benjamin, Jr., Elnora. In 1936, Benjamin, Jr., was the first black to
graduate from West Point in the twentieth century; and was the first black general of the
U.S. Air Force, and commander of the Tuskegee Airmen. Davis, Sr. married a second
time to Sadie Overton. On November 26, 1970, Davis died of leukemia and was buried at
Arlington National Cemetery.
Wesley Brown, the first black graduate of the United States Naval Academy, was
born on April 3, 1927, in Baltimore, Maryland, to William and Rosetta Brown. His father
was a truck driver and his mother was a presser in a laundry. As a child, Brown and his
family moved to Washington, D.C., where he was raised. When he was young, he sold
magazines and sorted clothes at dry cleaners.29 At Dunbar, Brown gained a “sense of
confidence that he could handle any challenge; that if someone else could do something,
he could do it too.”30 He participated in track and field, tennis, and the cadet corps during
his senior year; and graduated in 1945. The same year, Congressman Adam Clayton
Powell, Jr. recommended Brown to the United States Naval Academy. In a class of 3,216
midshipmen, Brown was the only black.31 Over the next few years, he persevered through
hazing and racism; and in 1949, he became the Naval Academy’s first black graduate
when he received his degree in mechanical engineering.32
Brown received a Master of Chemical Engineering Degree from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute. His naval career took him to Europe, South America, Antarctica,
53
and Africa until he retired in 1969. After serving in the Navy, Brown worked as an
engineer with the State University of New York and Howard University. Brown and his
wife Crystal have four children, who also went on to be successful. In 2006, the Naval
Academy named its new athletic field house the Wesley Brown Field House.33
Dr. Roscoe Conkling Brown, Jr., a Tuskegee Airman, was another graduate of
Dunbar High School. He was born on March 9, 1922, to Roscoe C. Brown, Sr. and
Vivian Kemp Brown. His father was a doctor and was a member of FDR’s Black
Cabinet, and his mother was a teacher who graduated from Virginia Union University.
He was inspired to fly when he visited the Smithsonian Institution and saw the Spirit of
St. Louis; the plane Charles Lindberg crossed the Atlantic in. He graduated from Dunbar
in 1939, where he was very active with the cadet corps.34
After Dunbar, Brown attended Springfield College as a pre-med major. He
graduated from Springfield in 1943, as the valedictorian of his class.35 After college, he
joined the armed forces and was sent to Tuskegee, Alabama, where he was a member of
the 332nd Fighter Group, a squadron of black pilots training for assignments in World
War II, known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The Tuskegee Airmen were the first black
military aviators in the United States armed forces. Brown was the first Air Force pilot to
shoot down an enemy plane in World War II; and was honored with the Distinguished
Flying Cross and the Air Medal with eight Oak Leaf Clusters.36 He was discharged from
the army at the end of the war.
54
Brown earned his Master’s in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1951, in Exercise
Psychology, from New York University. After he completed his formal education, Brown
served as a professor at New York University and Bronx Community College.37
55
CHAPTER 5: DUNBAR ARTISTS AND ENTERTAINERS
The Harlem Renaissance was one of the most seminal movements to showcase
African American art and literature. It was an explosion of black literature, art, dance,
and music that redefined how blacks expressed themselves. Artists of this movement
refused to be classified by the pervasive stereotypes of blacks during this time period.
Rather, they sought to express themselves in their own imaginative and unique ways.
Langston Hughes, one of the most famous writers of this era, stated that black art was
meant for the artists to express themselves freely regardless of what blacks or whites
thought. The Harlem Renaissance was different from any other artistic movement that
came before it because its participants were mostly black and they spoke against racism.
The Harlem Renaissance reached its peak after World War I, and died down
during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. During these years, it was known as the New
Negro Movement based on an anthology by Alain Locke. Since many of the writers of
this era, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, lived in the Harlem
neighborhood of New York City; it was referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. But this
flowering of literature was not unique to Harlem, as blacks started to produce works all
over the country and the world.
Washington, D.C. also produced writers who contributed to the movement. Alain
Locke was a professor at Howard University; Zora Neale Hurston was a student of
Howard during the 1920’s, and Langston Hughes’ poetry was first discovered while
working as a busboy in a Washington hotel. This movement was heavily influenced by
people of Dunbar High School, as well. Harlem Renaissance writers Jessie Redmond
56
Fauset and Angelina Grimke were teachers of Dunbar High School during the early
twentieth century; and students of Dunbar who produced significant works during this
period were: Mary Burrill, Willis Richardson, Jean Toomer, May Miller, Sterling Brown,
and Bruce Nugent. These individuals produced groundbreaking work that helped
influence black culture for years to come.
Dunbar also produced notable musicians, actors and visual artists of other time
periods. These people are composer James Reese Europe, sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, actor
Ernest Anderson, and jazz legend Billy Taylor. Each of these artists produced pioneering
works that are still relevant today. These individuals along with the Harlem Renaissance
writers from Dunbar show how the first black public high school has influenced black art
and entertainment.
Angelina Weld Grimke was another central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
She was born on February 27, 1880, in Boston, Massachusetts to Archibald Grimke and
Sarah Stanley Grimke. Archibald Grimke was the second black to graduate from Harvard
Law School, and also served as a U.S. consul to the Dominican Republic. While her
father was in the Dominican Republic, Angelina stayed with her uncle Francis Grimke,
the notable preacher of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, in Washington, D.C.
She left the district in 1895, to attend secondary schools in Boston and stayed until 1902,
when she graduated from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.1
After college, Angelina Grimke began a teaching career that started at Armstrong
Manual Training School. Unhappy at Armstrong, Grimke was transferred to M Street
High School in 1907, where she taught English and received high praises for her work.2
57
May Miller and Willis Richardson, artists of the Harlem Renaissance, were students of
Grimke’s. Grimke, a poet and dramatist, wrote “The Eyes of My Regret”, “At April”,
“Trees,” and “El Beso.” Her play Rachel was one of the first to protest lynching and
racial violence. Although her play was successful, she gained more notoriety for her
poems. This was largely because they were published in the 1920’s, the prime of the
Harlem Renaissance.3 Grimke also took part in many of the meetings at the “S Street
Salon,” which took place at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s house to discuss politics, recite
poetry, and other subjects. Frequent guests included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, Alain Locke, and Jessie Fauset. After her father died in 1930, Grimke moved to
New York City, where she lived until her own death in 1958.
Jessie Redmon Fauset, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, was a teacher at M
Street High. She was born to Redmon Fauset and Annie Seamon Fauset, on April 27,
1882, in Camden, New Jersey. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal (AME)
minister. Fauset grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated with honors from
the High School for Girls in 1900.
After being denied admission to Bryn Mawr College because of her race, she was
accepted by Cornell University. At Cornell, she focused on languages: Latin, Greek,
French, German, and English. She graduated from Cornell in 1905 with honors and was
elected Phi Beta Kappa.4 At the time of her election to Phi Beta Kappa, she was believed
to be the first black woman elected. However, recently it was discovered that Mary
Annette Anderson, who graduated from Middlebury College in 1899, was the first black
woman elected Phi Beta Kappa. Anderson was the wife of Walter Smith, the principal of
58
Dunbar from 1921 until 1943.5 Fauset was still the first black person elected Phi Beta
Kappa at Cornell. Fauset also earned an M.A. in French from the University of
Pennsylvania.
After college, Fauset taught Latin and French at M Street for fourteen years. In
1919, she was hired to be a literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the
N.A.A.C.P. In this position, she promoted important writers of the Harlem Renaissance
and also wrote a column entitled “Looking Glass.” Her most notable works were: There
is Confusion, Plum Bun, and The Chinaberry Tree. All of these novels addressed the
issue of light-skinned blacks “passing” for white.6 Fauset has been “recognized as one of
the most significant and influential authors to come out of the Harlem Renaissance.”7 On
April 30, 1961, she died of heart disease in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Mary Powell Burrill, an M Street graduate and teacher, was highly respected for
her works and influenced notable writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She was born
August 1884 to John Henry Burrill and Clara Eliza Washington Burrill in Washington,
D.C. She had a sister, Clara, and a brother, Edmond. Clara married Roscoe Conkling
Bruce, Assistant Superintendent of D.C. and son of Senator Blanche Bruce. Mary and her
siblings grew up in a “conservative household that embraced education and selfdiscipline.”8 Mary graduated from M Street in 1901, and attended Emerson College in
Boston. Burrill wrote two plays, They That Sit in Darkness and Aftermath, which were
published at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. They That Sit in Darkness was
about the negative effects of motherhood at a young age and was featured in the 1919
issue of Birth Control Review, a monthly periodical advocating for women’s birth control
59
rights. Aftermath was published in the Liberator, and dealt with a soldier returning home
from the World War I and discovers that his father was lynched. Both plays were
produced in many theatres of New York.9
As a teacher at M Street and later Dunbar, she taught English, speech and
dramatics.10 Notable playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance who were taught by Burrill
at M Street were Willis Richardson and May Miller.11 After retiring in 1944, she moved
to New York to live with family. She died two years later.
Willis Richardson, the first black to have a play produced on Broadway,
graduated from M Street High School in 1910. He was born on November 5, 1889, to
Willis Wilder and Agnes Ann Harper Richardson in Wilmington, North Carolina. The
Richardson family, who moved to Washington, D.C. in 1898, was not as rich or as
educated as some of the families of Willis’ classmates. At M Street, Willis was captain of
both the football team and the cadet corps.12 His M Street teachers Mary P. Burrill and
Angelina Grimke influenced him to write plays.13 After graduation, he went to work for
the government to help support himself as rising playwright.
The road to being a successful playwright was difficult as Richardson struggled
with theatres that adhered to the racist Jim Crow policies. His plays were even denied by
the Howard University players because the white president of the university did not allow
plays written by blacks.14 But, Richardson’s opportunity came when Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois
referred him to the Ethiopian Art Theater, a Chicago group that was interested in
performing black plays. The Ethiopian Art Theater liked his play The Chip Woman’s
Fortune, and performed it on May 15, 1923, at the Frazee Theater in New York. This
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date is “significant in African American theater history as the first time a play by an
African American had been produced on Broadway.”15 After this play was produced on
Broadway, his plays gained exposure all over the country.
Richardson’s early success made him one of the leading playwrights of the
Harlem Renaissance. He went on to write over forty-eight plays for black high schools,
colleges and many community groups until his death in 1977. He “forged the way for
countless others who came after him, many of whom were able to garner the laurels and
accolades that he himself was not accorded during his lifetime….”16 Richardson was
married to Mary Ellen Jones, and they had three daughters.
Jean Toomer, a graduate of M Street, was an essential figure of the Harlem
Renaissance. He was born Nathan Eugene Pinchback Toomer on December 26, 1894, to
Nathan Toomer and Nina Pinchback. Toomer’s maternal grandfather, P.B.S. Pinchback,
served as a state senator of Louisiana in 1868, and following lieutenant governor Oscar
Dunn’s death in 1871, became acting lieutenant governor. In 1872, Governor Henry Clay
Warmoth was impeached, and Pinchback finished his term, becoming the first black
governor of a U.S. state.17 He was one of the first blacks elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives and U.S. Senate in 1874 and 1876, respectively; but both election results
were contested and his white opponents were seated instead. Toomer’s childhood was
spent between Washington, D.C. and New York City, where he lived with his mother.
After his mother died in 1909, Toomer lived in Washington, D.C. with his maternal
grandfather, and graduated from M Street High School in 1910.18
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After high school, Toomer attended the University of Wisconsin, the
Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in
Chicago, and the University of Chicago, never completing a degree. In 1921, Toomer
was appointed principal of Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Sparta, Georgia,
where he was inspired to write about the folk life.19 Toomer wrote many poems and short
stories. In 1923, he published Cane, a high modernist novel which was influenced by his
experiences in Georgia. According to George Hutchinson, “not only was Cane a
tremendous influence upon the Harlem Renaissance and later African American writing,
it was produced by the same confluence of institutions and even individuals that helped
produce the Harlem Renaissance.”20
In 1924, Toomer studied under Armenian leader George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and
toured the world with him and lectured in many countries. In 1931, he married Margery
Latimer, who died a year later in childbirth, and Toomer named the child Margery. He
remarried in 1934, to Marjorie Content and moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where
he formally joined the Quakers and withdrew from society.21 As a Quaker, Toomer
served on committees, worked with high school students, and continued to publish
articles.22 Although he continued to write, he never duplicated the success he had with
Cane. In 1967, he died, after many years of poor health.
May Miller, one of the better known dramatists of the Harlem Renaissance was
born on January 26, 1899, in Washington, D.C., to Kelly Miller and Annie Mae Butler
Miller. Her father, Kelly Miller, who was previously discussed, was the dean of Howard
University. By the time she was fifteen, Miller published her first poem and short story
62
and was encouraged at M Street by Angelina Grimke and Mary Burrill. 23 Burrill
encouraged her to write her first play, Pandora’s Box, which was published in School
Progress magazine in 1914. She graduated from M Street in 1915, at age sixteen.
Miller went to Howard University, where she was active in the drama and history
clubs. Miller’s work at Howard was so stellar that the university honored her with its first
outstanding award in drama.24 She graduated from Howard in 1920, at the top of her class
and then went to Baltimore to teach high school at Frederick Douglass High School.
While teaching at Douglass High, Miller continued to write plays, as well as
poetry. In 1925, her play The Bog Guide was published in Opportunity, and it placed
third in the Urban League’s contest.25 Nine of her plays were published; and she also
collaborated with Willis Richardson to publish the Negro History in Thirteen Plays in
1935. She was also a participant at the “S Street Salon,” that met at the home of Georgia
Douglas Johnson in Washington, D.C.
In 1940, Miller married John Sullivan, and moved back to Washington, D.C.
Three years later, she retired from teaching but continued to write poetry. Miller the most
widely-published black female playwright of her era was “recognized as one of the most
outstanding black playwrights during the Harlem Renaissance.”26 She died in her home
on February 8, 1995.
Sterling A. Brown, a renowned scholar, poet, and literary critic, was born on May
1, 1901, in Washington, D.C. in a household where getting an education was expected.
His father, Sterling N. Brown, was a pastor and professor in the Howard University
School of Divinity; while his mother, Grace Adelaide Allen Brown, was a graduate of
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Fisk University, and was her class valedictorian.27 During his years at Dunbar, he was
taught English and Latin by Harlem Renaissance legends Angelina Grimke and Jessie
Fauset. Along with his mother, these two women encouraged his interest in literature. At
Dunbar, he was also captain of the cadet corps and also organized the debating society.
Graduating from Dunbar in 1918, among the top students in his class, Brown earned a
scholarship to Williams College.28
At Williams College, he was a member of the debate team and the tennis team.
He and his doubles partner, Dunbar alum William Allison Davis, won many national
competitions.29 In 1922, Brown graduated with honors and was elected Phi Beta Kappa.30
He went on to earn his master’s degree from Harvard, a year later. After earning his
master’s degree, Brown taught at Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg, Virginia;
Lincoln University in Missouri; and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.31 While
teaching in the South, Brown explored the black culture of the region with a poet’s eye.
His poems examined black experiences, languages, and customs of the South. The use of
vernacular in some of his poems was not always accepted, as many educated blacks
looked down on the use of the language. By employing this language, Brown created “his
own poetic diction; by fusing several Black traditions with various models he provided
the Anglo-American poets with a unified and complex structure of feeling, a sort of song
of a racial self.”32
In 1929, Brown became an English Professor at Howard University. Known as
the “Dean of Afro-American literature,” he continued to teach and write about African
American literature and folklore.33 He wrote two books of poetry: Southern Road and No
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Hiding Place.34 Southern Road, his most popular piece, was a collection of poetry about
black people of rural America, while No Hiding Place, was a collection of poems that
were a critique of America’s social and cultural institutions. Some notable people he
taught include Toni Morrison, Stokely Carmichael, Thomas Sowell, Ossie Davis, and
Amiri Baraka. In 1979, The District of Columbia honored him with Sterling Brown Day
on May 1st, and named him its first poet laureate in 1984. Brown, who was married to
Daisy Turnbull Brown, died in 1989.
Richard Bruce Nugent, another notable writer of the Harlem Renaissance,
attended Dunbar High School. He was born on July 2, 1906, to Richard Henry Nugent
and Pauline Minerva Bruce. It is not clear if he was related to Senator Blanche Bruce, but
he came from a very prominent family in his own right. His mother’s family descended
from Daniel Bruce, (1779-1853), son of Robert Bruce, a loyalist Scottish entrepreneur,
and Frances, a Native American. Their family had been free since the eighteenth
century.35 While a student at Dunbar, one of his favorite teachers was Angelina Grimke,
who taught English.36 In 1922, he left Dunbar before graduation and moved to New
York, where he decided to pursue the arts more seriously. In 1926, he published “Smoke,
Lilies, and Jade,” a short story that is one of the first publications by an African American
that depicts homosexuality openly.37 The story appeared in the only issue of the
magazine Fire!!, a gay publication. During these years, he stayed in an apartment in
Harlem with fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman. Their apartment was
known as “Niggeratti Manor” because it was the informal meeting place for the group of
young blacks who were more independent and rebellious with their views and ideologies.
65
This group known as the “Niggeratti,” consisted of Nugent, Thurman, Langston Hughes,
Gwendolyn Brooks, John P. Davis, a Dunbar graduate; and Zora Neale Hurston. This was
also where most of the black literary avante guard and visual artists of the Harlem
Renaissance met and socialized.38
Nugent was a mainstay in the Harlem Renaissance, which is evident in films and
writing that focus on the movement. The 2004 film “Brother to Brother” portrays his life,
and his works are the focus of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the
Work of Richard Bruce Nugent by Thomas H. Wirth. Nugent is known as “the first
African-American to write from a self-declared homosexual perspective...” and he is
regarded as a pioneer for the genre of black gay literature.39 Nugent died on May 27,
1987.
ARTISTS AND ENTERTAINERS OF OTHER ERAS
James Reese Europe was born on February 22, 1880, in Mobile, Alabama to
Henry Europe and Lorraine Saxon Europe. His family moved to Washington in 1890, and
lived in the same neighborhood as musician John Phillip Sousa. As a child, he studied
violin under Joseph Douglass, a prominent soloist and the grandson of Frederick
Douglass, who also played the violin.40 In the early 1890’s, Europe attended M Street
High School where he “was a popular and enthusiastic member of Captain Joseph
Montgomery’s prize drill company and served as Color Sergeant for the corps.”41 When
Europe’s father died in 1899, he left school and moved to New York City.
In 1910, Europe helped organize the Clef Club and served as its first president.
The Clef Club was a society for blacks in the music industry. In 1912, Europe and
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members of the Clef Club performed a “Symphony of Negro Music” at Carnegie Hall,
the “first performance ever given by a black orchestra at the famous “bastion of white
musical establishment.””42 His new found fame helped him to become a bandmaster in
World War I, where he led the band of the 369th Infantry Regiment known as the
“Harlem Hellfighters.” Europe’s band performed all over France, and is credited with
introducing European audiences to American ragtime, blues, and jazz.43
In 1919, shortly after returning from war, Europe was fatally stabbed after a
performance in Boston. Without Europe’s works, “much of the development of American
music in the 1920’s, and indeed since then, would be inconceivable.”44 He opened doors
for many musicians like Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, and Duke Ellington.
Elizabeth Catlett, another Dunbar graduate, is one of the premier black artists of
the twentieth century. She was raised by her mother and paternal grandmother in
Washington, D.C. After graduating from Dunbar in 1931, Catlett entered Howard
University where she studied design, printmaking, and drawing; and graduated with a
B.S. in Art in 1935. Catlett taught Art in Durham, North Carolina before entering the
University of Iowa for graduate school. At Iowa, she focused more on sculpture, instead
of painting and in 1940; Catlett became the first person to receive a Master of Fine Arts
degree from the University of Iowa. 45 Her MFA thesis was a limestone sculpture of a
black mother and child entitled Mother and Child and won first prize at the American
Negro Exposition in Chicago.46 Since then, Catlett has been regarded as the premier
black sculptor. Catlett’s other notable works are Sharecropper, Seated Figure, and
Homage to My Young Black Sisters. She says most of her works focus on empowering
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black women because “I am a woman, I know more about women and I know how they
feel.”47
In 1947, Catlett moved to Mexico and married Mexican artist Francisco Mora. In
1958, she became the first woman to serve as the head of Mexico’s National School of
Fine Arts until she retired in 1978. After retirement, Catlett continued to create art and
lecture at various universities. Honored by New York Times as “the dean of black female
artists,” her portraits and sculpture are among the most popular works of black art. 48
Ernest Anderson, the first black actor to portray a positive character in film, was
also a Dunbar graduate. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, a few miles outside of Boston, he
grew up in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Dunbar High in 1934. He graduated
from Northwestern University in 1938, and moved to Hollywood to pursue an acting
career.
Life in Hollywood did not lead to instant success for Anderson, who worked a
number of odd jobs while he was on the West Coast before he landed his big role. In
1941, he debuted in the movie In This Our Life starring Bette Davis, about a young white
woman who evaded a hit and run charge by blaming it on Parry Clay, a black law student
and handyman. Originally, the character was supposed to behave in a manner that was
neither pleasing to Anderson nor other blacks; but Anderson demanded a change in the
script and it was revised immediately. Instead of acting in a negative and stereotypical
way, Anderson’s character held his composure until the main character admitted her
guilt.49 This performance was the first time a black was portrayed positively on film and
appreciated all over the country.
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For his portrayal, Anderson received praises from black leaders and other back
moviegoers.50 Black soldiers at a viewing were so moved that they “stopped the showing
and demanded the rerunning of the key scene.”51 Anderson was in a number of films but
never duplicated the success of his debut. After retiring in the 1960’s, he continued to
fight against demeaning roles given to African Americans. He died in 1997.
Dr. Billy Taylor, a jazz pioneer, received his musical training from Dunbar. He
was born on July 24, 1921, in Greenville, South Carolina but moved to Washington, D.C.
at age five. His father, William, was a dentist and his mother, Antoinette, was a school
teacher. At Dunbar, Taylor was encouraged to become a musician by his teacher Henry
Grant, an M Street graduate, who also provided music lessons to Duke Ellington. Taylor
graduated from Dunbar in 1939.52
After high school, Taylor went to Virginia State College and his B.S. in Music in
1942. During his career, he worked with jazz legends Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie,
and Miles Davis.53 In 1958, he became the musical director of NBC’s The Subject is Jazz,
the first television series about jazz and made history once more when he became the
band director for The David Frost Show, the first time a network television show had a
black band director.54 He later served as the artistic adviser for the Kennedy Center and
his “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center” was an annual event.55
Taylor, also an educator, earned his Ph.D. in Music Education from the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1975 and served as Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale
University, where he taught courses on jazz. He was also a correspondent to CBS’s
Sunday Morning television show and earned “two Peabody Awards, an Emmy, a
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Grammy and a host of prestigious and highly coveted prizes.”56 He also earned twenty
three honorary doctoral degrees. Taylor, at the age of 89, died of heart failure in 2010.
Dunbar students were large contributors to the early movements that influenced
black literature, music, drama, and art. Harlem Renaissance artists used their works to
prove their humanity and demand for equality; and the race consciousness and pride
exhibited during this era helped lay the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the
1950’s and 1960’s. The Renaissance also influenced the Hip Hop era that originated in
the late 1970’s. This movement featured a new type of black expression in music,
literature, poetry, and even style. The freedom of expression that is perpetuated in Hip
Hop art and music was first exhibited during the Harlem Renaissance.
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CHAPTER 6: DUNBAR PROFESSIONALS
In the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, African Americans were
not welcome in most professions that required law, medical, and business degrees. This is
because segregation was still the custom in America at the time. Many professional
schools did not accept black students until the middle of the twentieth century; this was
also the case for white employers who received applications from black professionals.
Many blacks who were fortunate enough to receive training in the professional fields
were limited to the economically disadvantaged African American community. Because
of this, black professionals did not have much financial success in their occupations; and
as a result, many of these early black professionals devoted their lives to educating future
generations. The sacrifices of these early professionals made the road easier for black
professionals today.
Many Dunbar students who led the way for blacks in the legal profession took on
the dual role as educators and community leaders in the fight for equality. One of the
most notable blacks in the field of law, Charles Hamilton Houston, known as “the man
who killed Jim Crow” was a graduate of Dunbar. Other notable Dunbar graduates in law
are Robert Terrell, Clement G. Morgan, Francis Rivers, Clara Burrill Bruce, Sadie T.M.
Alexander, William Hastie, and Oliver White Hill.
Dunbar also produced many black pioneers in the medical profession. These
individuals faced a lot of discrimination in their quest to gain the proper experience to
provide quality healthcare to members of their race. Dr. Charles Richard Drew, one of the
most notable doctors of the early 20th century, was a graduate of Dunbar and his
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pioneering research was felt all over the world. Other Dunbar blacks who influenced the
black medical profession are Dr. Clarence Sumner Greene, Dr. William Montague Cobb,
Dr. Burke Syphax, and Dr. Ruth Smith Lloyd.
Many black pioneers in business and other professions were also affiliated with
Dunbar, including H. Naylor Fitzhugh, one of the first blacks to earn a Masters in
Business Administration (MBA); John W. Cromwell, the first black Certified Public
Accountant (CPA); and Hilyard Robinson, the architect who designed most of the
buildings of Howard University. In addition, George and Robert Scurlock of the Scurlock
Studio of photography, graduated from Dunbar. These pioneers, along with other Dunbar
graduates in the legal and medical profession, opened doors for African Americans in
these occupations today.
LAW
Robert Herberton Terrell, the first black judge in Washington, D.C., was a student
and principal of M Street. He was born on November 27, 1857, in Charlottesville,
Virginia; but was sent to public schools in the District of Columbia, where he “was a
member of one of the early classes in the old Preparatory High School.”1 After attending
the Preparatory High School, Terrell completed his preparation for college at the
Lawrence Academy in Groton, Massachusetts and entered Harvard College, graduating
cum laude in 1884. He became the “first black man to deliver a Harvard Commencement
oration.”2
After college, Terrell returned to Washington to teach in the public schools.
During his tenure, “he was quite popular, and people liked to talk about the first colored
72
boy who had graduated from the high school of Washington who had taken a degree at
Harvard University.”3 At the Colored High School, Terrell was the head of the Latin
department where he taught a senior class on Virgil.4 Terrell also studied law at Howard
University School of Law and graduated in 1889. In 1891, he married social activist
Mary Church Terrell; they met while both were teachers at M Street High School. He
practiced law for most of the 1890’s but returned to M Street High School as principal in
1899. As principal, he was known to treat his superiors, as well as his subordinates with
the utmost respect, and his national reputation also gave the school added prestige.5 He
also recommended a number of M Street graduates to Harvard College.
In 1902, Terrell resigned to serve as justice of the peace and in 1909, President
Theodore Roosevelt nominated him to be a Municipal Court Judge of the District of
Columbia, the first black judge in Washington, D.C.6 He served as a judge until his death
in 1925. He also served on the faculty of Howard University School of Law, and Terrell
Law School was named in his honor.
Clement G. Morgan, a founding member of the Niagara Movement and the
NAACP, was born a slave in Virginia in 1859 and moved to Washington after
emancipation. After graduating from Colored High School in 1878, he moved to St.
Louis working as a barber and a teacher for four years. He then moved to Boston and
attended Boston Latin School, where received further training for college.7
In 1886, at age 27, he entered Harvard College, where one of his classmates was
W.E.B. Du Bois, who became one of the nation’s greatest scholars. Morgan was “one of
the best speakers of clearly enunciated English on the campus and won the Boylston
73
Prize for oratory…while Du Bois came in second.”8 He was the first black to win the
Boylston Prize for oratory, and his selection as class orator received a lot of attention
from the white press, which was astonished at the appointment. Du Bois remarked that
“there were editorials in the leading newspapers, and the South especially raged and
sneered at the audience of ‘black washerwomen’ who would replace Boston society at the
next Harvard commencement.”9 This selection caused such a sensation because whites
would not accept that a black man was the best orator at that nation’s leading institution
of higher learning. In years that followed, other top schools elected black students as
class orators.10
Morgan graduated from Harvard College in 1890, and entered Harvard Law,
graduating in 1893, as the first black to hold degrees from both the college and the law
school.11 He practiced law in Cambridge, where he was active in local politics and fought
for racial and political equality. Morgan joined his classmate W.E.B. Du Bois as “a
founding member of the Niagara Movement and its successor, the NAACP.”12 Clement
G. Morgan died on June 1, 1929.
Clara Burrill Bruce, the first black president of a law review, was born in 1880 to
John Henry Burrill and Clara Washington Burrill in Washington, D.C. She was the sister
of noted dramatist Mary P. Burrill, and was the wife of D.C.’s Colored Public Schools
Superintendent Roscoe C. Bruce, the son of Senator Blanche Bruce. She graduated from
M Street in 1897, and earned a teaching degree from West Chester Normal School in
Pennsylvania in 1899. After receiving her teaching degree, she enrolled in Howard
University but later transferred to Radcliffe College, the women’s auxiliary to Harvard.
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In 1903, she married Roscoe Bruce, the Academic Dean of Tuskegee Institute at the time,
and left Radcliffe College to live with him in Tuskegee, Alabama.13 They had three
children: Clara, Jr., Roscoe, Jr., and Burrill. Although Mrs. Bruce did not work, she
published several essays and poems for many publications. One of her most notable
poems, “We Who are Dark,” which addressed the effects of abuses that affected black
people, was published in The Crisis in 1918.14 She also assisted her husband as manager
of Dunbar Apartments in New York City.15
Clara Bruce returned to school after twenty years and enrolled in Boston
University Law School in 1923, where she was elected to the law review in 1924; the
first woman to ever receive that honor at any law school. The following year, she was
elected editor in chief of the Boston University Law Review and became “the first black
student to head a law review in the history of American legal education.”16 In the law
school yearbook, her classmates remarked: “All Hail to the Conqueror! That is the way
this lady should be addressed. Not only is she an honor student of the first rank, but she
has achieved a distinction never conferred on a woman before—she is Editor in Chief of
the Law Review.”17
On October 27, 1926, Mrs. Bruce was admitted to the Massachusetts bar; the third
black woman to do so and became an accomplished attorney. Bruce, a pioneer for women
and blacks in law, and her husband were known as a “power couple” in the early
twentieth century. She died in 1947, at the age of sixty five.
Francis Ellis Rivers, one of New York’s black legal pioneers, was a graduate of M
Street High School. He was born July 30, 1893, to Reverend David F. Rivers, a Baptist
75
preacher, and Silene Gail Rivers. He graduated from M Street in 1911, and went to Yale
University, where he majored in history and economics, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in
1915, as the only black in his class.18 In 1922, Rivers graduated from Columbia Law
School and was admitted to the New York bar, a year later. He immediately entered
private practice and established his own firm, and became the first to “break the color bar
of the New York State Bar Association,” (NYSBA).19 The NYSBA, founded in 1876, is a
voluntary association of lawyers and had been all white prior to Rivers’ admission. He
was also the first black member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York
(ABCNY), another voluntary association, since 1870. The publicity helped him get
elected to the New York general assembly, where he was responsible for passage of
legislation that created the 10th judicial district in Harlem, which guaranteed that black
lawyers would get a chance to serve as judges. Soon James Samuel Watson and Charles
Ellis Toney were elected as judges of the municipal court in 1930.20 Rivers became an
Assistant District Attorney for New York in 1938, and a judge on the court of New York
City in 1943. After a fifty year legal career, Rivers died in 1975, at age 82.
Charles Hamilton Houston was born on September 3, 1895, to William LePre
Houston and Mary Hamilton Houston. His father was one of the first blacks to practice in
Washington, D.C. and his mother was a hairdresser. With two parents who were
entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century, young Charles’ childhood was relatively
comfortable. He entered M Street High School at age twelve and had a difficult time
adjusting because of his young age. In fact, his teacher Jessie Fauset sent a note to his
76
mother alerting her of Charles’ immature behavior. He eventually settled down and
became one of the best students, in his class, and graduated at age fifteen in 1911.21
In the fall of 1911, Charles entered Amherst College as the only black in his class,
and perhaps the youngest.22 Although racism was not much of a problem for him,
Houston was not known to socialize much and devoted most of his time to his studies. He
graduated with honors in 1915, at age nineteen, and performed so well academically that
he was elected Phi Beta Kappa and chosen to deliver the commencement address.23 The
next year he became an English professor at Howard University where he taught until he
was drafted to serve in World War I in 1917. Charles, along with the other black soldiers,
dealt with racial injustices from their own military while abroad. After this experience, he
wrote: “I made up my mind that I would never get caught again without knowing
something about my rights; that if…I got through this war; I would study law and use my
time fighting for men who could not strike back.”24 Houston was discharged in 1919, and
decided that studying law was the best way for him to fight racism and injustice in
America.
In the fall of 1919, Charles entered Harvard Law School, where he was one of the
best students in his class. For his academic prowess, he was the first black elected to
serve as editor of the Harvard Law Review.25 In 1922, he graduated cum laude from
Harvard, and stayed another year to earn his Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.).
Immediately after he graduated, he was admitted to the District of Columbia bar and
began to practice with his father. After practicing law, Houston was asked to become the
Dean of Howard Law School. During his stint at Howard, the school was accredited by
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the American Bar Association and was transformed into a full-time day school. Some of
his notable students at Howard Law School were Thurgood Marshall, the first black
Supreme Court Justice; and Oliver White Hill, a member of the legal team that argued the
Brown v. Board of Education case. Marshall credits Houston with laying the groundwork
for Brown v. Board of Education and also for making him into the lawyer he became. He
taught his students that the black lawyer had to be a social engineer for his community
and the “mouthpiece of the weak and a sentinel guarding against wrong.”26
Houston left Howard in 1935 to serve as Special Counsel to the NAACP. In 1938,
he argued and won his first Supreme Court case: Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada,
which declared that states that provide a school to white students must provide in-state
education to blacks as well. It involved Lloyd Gaines who filed suit against the
University of Missouri Law School for denying him on the basis of his race. He stated
that this violated his fourteenth amendment right because Missouri did not have a law
school for black students. The Court held that when the state provides legal training, it
must offer it to every qualified person to satisfy equal protection. The state cannot send
them to other states, nor can it condition that training for one group of people on levels of
demand from that group. This case laid the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education.
Houston’s appearance marked the first time the NAACP was represented by a black
attorney in the Supreme Court. Houston challenged many more cases such as Hale v.
Kentucky, which dealt with racial discrimination in the selection of juries for criminal
trials; Shelley v. Kaemer, which held that courts could not force racial covenants on real
estate; and Nixon v. Condon; which dealt with voting rights for blacks. He also provided
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legal support and advice to nearly every major Supreme Court case that dealt with civil
rights.27
After fighting tirelessly to destroy Jim Crow, Houston died of a heart attack in
1950. It was said that he worked himself to death. To honor his legacy, the NAACP
posthumously awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1950, and Howard University School
of Law renamed its main building Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. His legacy was
further cemented when Barack Obama, future President of the United States, became the
first black president of the Harvard Law Review and paid homage to Charles Hamilton
Houston with a minute long infomercial in 1991.28 Harvard Law School has a
professorship endowed in his name and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was the
Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law while she taught at Harvard.
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the second black woman elected to a law review
and one of the first black women to earn a Ph.D., was born on January 2, 1898, in
Philadelphia to Aaron Albert Mossell and Mary Tanner Mossell. Her father was the first
black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School in 1888.29 Her mother
was the daughter of Reverend Benjamin Tucker Tanner and also the sister of Henry
Ossawa Tanner, the great artist. She attended elementary school in Philadelphia, but
moved to Washington, D.C. to attend M Street High School. She graduated from the high
school in 1915 and decided to attend the University of Pennsylvania.30 At the University
of Pennsylvania, Alexander felt alienated at times because there were few black students
there .31 Nevertheless, she overcame the challenges of being a black female on a white
college campus in the 1910’s and graduated with high honors in 1918. She was left out of
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the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society at graduation because of her race, but eventually
received her Phi Beta Kappa key decades later in 1976.32 She later earned her Master’s
degree in 1919 and on June 15, 1921, Sadie became the first black woman to earn her
Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania; the second black woman to earn that
distinction in America.33
Three years later, Alexander enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s Law
School where she became the first black woman admitted, elected to the law review, and
to graduate (1927). Later that year, Alexander became the first black woman admitted to
the Pennsylvania bar.34 She practiced law with her husband Raymond Pace Alexander, a
Harvard Law graduate and also the first black person to graduate from the Wharton
School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. During her legal career, she fought
against discrimination and segregation; as well as women rights until 1982. She died
seven years later in 1989
William Henry Hastie, the first black federal judge and Charles Hamilton
Houston’s right hand man, was born in 1904 in Knoxville, Tennessee where he lived until
1916, when his family moved to Washington, D.C. He fit right in at Dunbar, where he
was a very good student and athlete. He graduated as the valedictorian of Dunbar’s class
of 1921, and received a scholarship to Amherst, just like Charles Hamilton Houston.35
At Amherst, William ran track and thrived in the classroom. On the track, he ran
the 440 yard dash and the 880 yard run; and won most of his meets.36 William graduated
Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 1925; and was also the class’s valedictorian.
Immediately after college, he taught at a high school in Bordentown, New Jersey. Shortly
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after that, he entered Harvard Law School, becoming the second black to be elected to the
Harvard Law Review. He graduated with honors in 1930 and received his Doctorate in
Juridical Science (S.J.D) 1933.37
Following law school, he joined Charles Hamilton Houston and his father’s firm
Houston and Houston. He also served as a professor at Howard University School of
Law, when Houston was the dean. In 1937, he made history when he became the nation’s
first black federal judge; he was appointed to the U.S. Virgin Islands, serving for two
years. In 1939, he returned to Howard to serve as Dean of the law school and was also an
aide to the Secretary of War, but resigned because the army continued its policy of
segregation. He was dissatisfied with the racially segregated training facilities in
the Army Air Force, insufficient training for African-American pilots, and the unequal
distribution of assignments between whites and non-whites. In 1943, he earned the
NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for his protests, as well as his lifetime achievements.38
Hastie again made history when he became governor of the Virgin Islands in
1946, the Islands’ first black governor.39 After serving as governor, he returned to the
United States to become the first black man appointed to the federal circuit court of
appeals, the third circuit in Philadelphia, and he became the first black chief judge of a
federal circuit court of appeals in 1968.40
In addition to his professional accomplishments, Hastie became the first black to
serve on the board of trustees of his alma mater; Amherst College.41 He also received
over twenty-one honorary doctorates, including an LL.D from Harvard in 1975. He was
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married to Beryl Lockhart Hastie and they had two children, Karen and William, III.
Hastie died of heart attack in 1976.
Oliver White Hill, a member of the legal team that argued Brown v. Board of
Education, was born on May 1, 1907, in Richmond, Virginia, to Olivia Lewis White-Hill
and William Henry White II. He grew up in Washington, D.C. and graduated from
Dunbar in 1925. After Dunbar, he entered Howard University, and graduated in 1930.42
He then went to Howard University School of Law, a member of the first class that
entered the law school under Dean Charles Hamilton Houston and graduated second in
his class behind future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Hill and Marshall
were great friends in law school, and remained so for the rest of their lives. After law
school, he returned to Richmond to practice law; and in 1949, he became the first African
American, of the twentieth century, to be elected to Richmond’s city council. Two years
later, he served as the “lead attorney in one of the five school desegregation cases that
eventually were joined to form Brown v. Board of Education.43 The case he argued was
Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Va.), which challenged
segregation in Prince Edward County Public Schools in Virginia.
After sixty years of practicing law, Hill retired in 1998. He argued over one
hundred civil rights cases throughout the course of his career. For his role in the pivotal
Brown v. Board of Education, Hill received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Oliver W. Hill Building in Virginia’s Capitol
Square is named in his honor. Hill died at age 100 in 2007.
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MEDICINE
Dr. Clarence Sumner Greene, the first black neurosurgeon, was born in
Washington, D.C., on December 26, 1901. Greene graduated from Dunbar in 1920,
where he was regarded as one of the top athletes at the school. After high school, he went
to the University of Pennsylvania Dental School and graduated in 1926. During this time,
a college degree was not necessary for most professional schools. Following the advice of
one of his mentors, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania to earn his Bachelor’s
degree in 1932, and four years later he earned his MD from Howard University College
of Medicine. 44 He interned at the Cleveland City Hospital and served a residency at the
Douglass Hospital in Philadelphia. Dr. Greene next served as an assistant resident at
Freedmen’s Hospital, now Howard University Hospital, in Washington, D.C. After
serving four years, Greene decided to study neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological
Institute (MNI) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He graduated from MNI in 1949, as the
first black neurosurgeon, and “became the first African American to be certified by the
American Board of Neurological Surgery.”45 This was very important for the black
community of Washington, D.C., as neurological care at the Freedman’s Hospital was
previously run by general surgeons.
Greene was the first doctor at the hospital to perform “intracranial aneurysms,
brain tumors, herniated intervertebral discs and sympathectomies for hypertension.”46
These procedures were essential to transforming Freedman’s into a hospital that provided
its patients with the same services that were received at white hospitals. Unfortunately, he
died in 1957, at the age of 55 of a cardiac infarct. The Clarence Sumner Greene recovery
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room at Freedman’s Hospital was named for him. The room served as a short term care
of post-operative patients, as well as an intensive care area.47
Perhaps one of the most notable graduates of Dunbar is Dr. Charles Richard Drew
who perfected the use of blood plasma. Drew was born on June 3, 1904, to Richard
Thomas Drew and Nora Burrell Drew in Washington, D.C. At Dunbar, Drew played
football, basketball, and track for four years earning the James E. Walker Memorial
medal for being the best all-around athlete.48 Drew credited Dunbar basketball coach E.B.
Henderson, the father of black basketball, for being the person who set a standard for him
to live by on and off the field.49 Drew graduated from high school in 1922.
In the fall of 1922, Drew, similar to other notable Dunbar graduates, entered
Amherst College where he continued to excel in athletics. As a football player, he was an
All-American halfback and the team MVP; and as a track athlete at Amherst, Drew won
the Junior Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) high hurdles championship in 1926.50 At the
conclusion of his college career, Drew was awarded the Howard Hill Mossman Trophy,
the greatest honor for an Amherst athlete.51 After graduating in 1926, Drew went to
Baltimore to serve as a football coach at Morgan College. After coaching at Morgan
College for a couple years, Drew enrolled in McGill University Medical School in
Montreal, Quebec, Canada. At McGill, he became vice president of Alpha Omega Alpha,
the medical honor society, and “graduated second in a class of 137,” in 1933. 52 He won
the J. Francis Williams Fellowship in Medicine and earned a Master of Surgery degree
(C.M.). 53
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Drew completed two more years of graduate study at Columbia University, where
he was the first black resident in surgery.54 In1940, He graduated from Columbia with a
Doctorate in Medical Science (ScD), the first black to receive this degree. His doctoral
dissertation was entitled “Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation.” After
Columbia, Drew became the director of the first American Red Cross blood bank, which
was the model for other blood banks around the nation. He also served as the medical
director of the Blood for Britain project, a humanitarian operation that was responsible
for sending vast amounts of liquid plasma to British soldiers in World War II. His role in
these various projects made him an international leader in medicine.55
In 1941, Drew returned to Washington, D.C. as a professor of surgery at Howard
University College of Medicine and chief surgeon at Freedman’s Hospital. The next year,
he became the first black surgeon to serve as an examiner on the American Board of
Surgery.56 Because there were only two historically black medical schools, Meharry
Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and Howard; Drew trained most of the black
surgeons who were approved by the American Board of Surgery.57 In 1944, Drew was
awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal for his pioneering research in blood plasma that he
provided during World War II which, “saved tens of thousands of lives. Since then,
millions of civilians (white and black) have had blood plasma transfusions.” 58 Tragically,
he died in a car accident on the way back from a conference he attended in Tuskegee,
Alabama, on April 1, 1950. He was married to Lenore Robbins, and they had four
children: Bebe, Charlene, Sylvia, and Charles, Jr.
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Dr. William Montague Cobb, the first black to earn a Ph.D. in Anthropology, was
born on October 12, 1904, in Washington, D.C., to Alexzine Montague Cobb and
William Elmer Cobb. At Dunbar, he excelled in academics and was a varsity letterman in
cross country and track. He graduated from Dunbar in 1921, and headed to Amherst
College, where he was joined by Dunbar classmates William Hastie and William Mercer
Cook, and Charles Richard Drew the following year. At Amherst, Cobb won three cross
country championships and two titles in boxing.59 He was also awarded the Blodgett
Scholarship for study at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts
near Martha’s Vineyard. He graduated from Amherst in 1925 and went to Woods Hole,
where he studied under Ernest Everett Just, an eminent black biologist and Howard
Professor.60 Cobb also earned his MD from Howard University College of Medicine in
1929. He later attended Case Western Reserve University where he earned a Ph.D. in
anatomy and physical anthropology in 1932, the first black to do so.61
The following year, Cobb returned to Howard to become professor, where he
taught for more than forty years. While serving as a professor, he sought to dispel certain
myths about race in the fields of anatomy and anthropology. One of his most critical
articles “Race and Runners,” dealt with the results from a series of physical tests focused
on Jesse Owens to refute the notion that he was such a great sprinter because of his black
genes, which accounted for a lack of intelligence. Dr. Cobb concluded that there was no
distinct evidence that differentiated Owens from white athletes; physically.62
Dr. Cobb also served as the National President of the NAACP from 1976 to 1982,
and challenged many medical schools and hospitals to integrate their staffs. 63 He also
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became the first black inducted as an Honorary Fellow of the College of Physicians of
Philadelphia, the oldest medical society in the United States, in 1976.64 Cobb, who died
in 1990, “helped train more than 6,000 physicians and wrote more than 625 scientific
papers.”65
Dr. Burke Syphax was one of the first black doctors to be certified by the
American Board of Surgery. Dr. Syphax was born on December 18, 1910, to William
Syphax and Nellie Burke Syphax. He was a cousin of William Syphax, the first black to
serve as president of the board of trustees of the Colored Public Schools in Washington,
D.C. Dr. Syphax graduated from Dunbar in 1928 and attended Howard University, where
he was a member of the 1929 undefeated championship basketball team. 66 He received
his B.S. in 1932 and his MD degree in 1936, before entering Freedman’s Hospital’s
surgical residency program. In 1941, he became the first Rockefeller fellow in surgery at
the Strong Memorial Hospital of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.67
In 1943, he, along with Dr. Charles Drew and Dr. Clarence Greene, became the first
blacks to be certified by the American Board of Surgery.68 He was also Howard
University College of Medicine’s first chief of general surgery and served in this role for
forty years. Dr. Syphax, who died in 2010, trained thousands of doctors in metropolitan
Washington; and because of his reputation, he was known as the “Master of the
Abdomen.” 69
Dr. Ruth Smith Lloyd was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in anatomy, and
was the sister in law of Dr. William Montague Cobb. She was born on January 17, 1917,
in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Dunbar in 1933 and attended Mount Holyoke
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College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1937
and earned her master’s degree in zoology from Howard University in 1938.70 Next, she
entered the anatomy program of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and
graduated in 1941, becoming the first black woman to receive a doctorate in anatomy.
She returned to Howard and began her career as a professor, focusing on fertility issues,
endocrinology, and medical genetics. She also served as HUCM’s Committee on Student
Guidance and the director of its Academic Reinforcement Program. Dr. Lloyd died in
1995.
BUSINESS
John Wesley Cromwell, Jr., the first black certified public accountant (CPA), was
a teacher at M Street and Dunbar High School. He was born on September 2, 1883, in
Washington, D.C., to John Wesley Cromwell, Sr. and Lucy McGuinn Cromwell. His
father was a prominent teacher, political activist, and attorney during the nineteenth and
early twentieth century. He had three sisters: Otelia, Mary, Martha, Lucy, and Fanny.
Otelia, who was mentioned earlier, was the first black graduate of Smith College. Unlike
his sisters who attended M Street High, John W. Cromwell, Jr. went to Howard
University Preparatory School, the high school division of Howard University.71
Cromwell attended Dartmouth College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in
1906, and earned his master’s in mathematics the following year. Because there were no
job opportunities for blacks when he graduated from college, Cromwell came back home
to teach mathematics, German, and bookkeeping at M Street High for the next twenty
years.72
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In 1921, John W. Cromwell, Jr. traveled to New Hampshire to take the test to
become a certified public accountant (CPA). To become a CPA, an individual has to
work for a CPA, but because no white CPA’s would hire blacks at that time, it was
virtually impossible for blacks to get certified. But, New Hampshire’s rules were not as
strict at the time and they allowed any one to take the exam without working for a CPA.
Cromwell passed the exam and became the first black CPA in the United States.73 In
1930, he began to practice as an accountant in the District of Columbia, mainly working
in the black community, serving lawyers, churches, restaurants, and funeral homes. He
was also the comptroller of Howard University for a short period of time. As the only
black CPA in the District for about forty years, Cromwell ensured that most of the black
establishments kept accurate accounts of sale.74 In 1972, at age 88, he died of a heart
attack. He was married to Yetta Mavritte and they had a daughter Adelaide. Adelaide
Cromwell Hill is a graduate of Dunbar and Smith College, and was a professor at Boston
University for a number of years.
Hilyard Robinson, a renowned black architect, was born in 1899 in Washington,
D.C. He graduated in the final class at M Street High in 1916, and studied architecture at
the University of Pennsylvania before transferring to Columbia University, where he
earned a B.A. and M.A. in architecture in 1924 and 1931, respectively.75 Following
graduation, he became a professor of architecture at Howard University and later Dean.
Most of Robinson’s work can be seen throughout the campus of Howard University:
Aldridge Theatre, Bethune Hall, Ernest Everett Just Hall, Cook Hall, Cramton
Auditorium, Drew Hall, Slowe Hall, Howard Fine Arts Building, Howard School of
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Dentistry, and the Howard School of Pharmacy. These buildings have facilitated historic
events that have taken place on Howard’s campus. Robinson also designed Armstrong
Hall, Harkness Hall, and Davidson Hall at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia.
Robinson also designed the Langston Terrace Dwellings and the Tuskegee Army
Field. Langston Terrace, Robinson’s masterpiece, was the first federally sponsored public
housing project in Washington, D.C. and among the first in the nation. The complex, a
$1.8 million dollar project to provide relief for the homeless and housing for former alley
dwellers, was the first of eight housing projects designed by Robinson, and “received
architectural acclaim when a model of the project was exhibited at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City.”76 The Tuskegee Army Field was where the legendary
Tuskegee Airmen began pilot training in December 1941. He also completed a wing of
the Provident Hospital in Baltimore and designed the homes of Dr. Rayford Logan, Dr.
Ralph Bunche, the first black to receive the Nobel Peace Prize; and Belford Lawson, one
of the founding members of the New Negro Alliance. Because of his successful projects,
Robinson served on the National Capital Planning Commission and was the director of
the Washington Housing Association.77 In 1986, at the age of 87, Robinson died from a
lengthy illness.
Howard Naylor Fitzhugh, the “Dean of Black Business,” was born in Washington,
D.C. in 1909. 78 After graduating from Dunbar in 1925, he entered Harvard College
where he was one of only four blacks in class of a thousand students. He graduated cum
laude in 1930 and became one of the first blacks to receive an MBA from Harvard
Business School in 1933.79 Fitzhugh soon realized that two Harvard degrees still did not
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afford him anything as a black man, and his only choice was to return home and teach at
Howard University, where he taught marketing and management for thirty one years. At
Howard, Fitzhugh’s objective was to transform the landscape for blacks in business as he
developed “the university's marketing program, organized its Small-Business Center and
advised the student marketing association for many years.”80 When corporations opened
their doors to blacks, some of the first hired were students of Fitzhugh. Lillian Lincoln
Lambert, a Howard graduate and the first black woman to receive a Harvard MBA,
credits Fitzhugh for having a profound influence on her aspirations in business.
In 1965, he left Howard to accept a marketing position at Pepsi-Cola Company,
where he improved marketing research techniques and also created the concept of target
marketing in corporate America, which is a technique businesses use to aim its marketing
efforts and merchandise to a specific group of customers who, when targeted, show a
strong affinity or brand loyalty to that particular brand.81 These methods, which are
commonly seen in advertisements today, were adopted by many large corporations.
Fitzhugh, who served as vice president of Pepsi until his retirement in 1974, died in
1992.82 Earl Graves, Sr., American entrepreneur and founder of Black Enterprise
Magazine, writes that the brains and talent, of many black finance professionals of today,
“may have never seen the light of day if it were not for the vision of one H. Naylor
Fitzhugh.”83 In addition, Harvard Business School holds an annual conference in honor of
H. Naylor Fitzhugh and there is an endowed chair at the school in his name.
The Scurlock brothers, legendary photographers of black America, were also
graduates of Dunbar. Robert Scurlock and George Scurlock were born in 1916, and 1919;
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respectively. They were the sons of Addison, the founder of the Scurlock studio, and
Mamie Scurlock. Robert graduated from Dunbar in 1933, while George graduated in
1936 and was the manager of the basketball team and cadet corps. They both went to
Howard University where they studied business; Robert graduated in 1937 and George
graduated in 1941.
After college, the brothers joined their father’s studio, beginning a career that
would involve capturing most of the significant events in black history. Their
photographs of Marian Anderson’s historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial and the D.C.
riots of 1968 following Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death are among the most
common.84 The Scurlocks’ are also known for their portraits of black leaders of the
twentieth century, including Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Madam C.J. Walker, and Dr. Ernest
Everett Just, among others. The Scurlocks’ portrait of Carter G. Woodson “became the
dominant public image of Woodson for most of his career.”85 This portrait was used by
Woodson until it was replaced by a portrait of a much older Woodson that was also taken
by Scurlock. The Scurlock photograph of Madam C.J. Walker is also among the most
common of the prominent businesswoman. In fact, the Black Heritage stamp series issued
by the U.S. Postal Service included the Scurlock portrait of Walker on its stamp of her.86
The Scurlocks’ portrait of Dr. Ernest Everett Just, renowned biologist, was also included
in the Black Heritage stamp series.
More than 50,000 images from the Scurlock collection are contained in the
Smithsonian’s National Museum. The Smithsonian also published a book of the
Scurlocks’ collection entitled The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the
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Promise. The Scurlocks’ photographs are essential to black history in the twentieth
century because they “created a lasting visual record of a separate society and its
sometimes turbulent, always dynamic transitions throughout the twentieth century.”87
Without the Scurlocks' photographs, the magnitude of many movements in black history
may not be properly appreciated.
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CHAPTER 7: BLACK GREEK LETTERED ORGANIZATIONS
For many years, Black Greek lettered organizations have played big roles in the
black community. Many of their members have served as leaders of the black community
and played important roles in every major movement of the twentieth century. Martin
Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, and Mary McLeod Bethune are all members of Black
Greek lettered organizations, and have contributed to the uplift of the black community.
The Black Greek fraternal movement began in 1905 by three students at Wilberforce
University in Wilberforce, Ohio. This organization was known as Gamma Phi and was
active on campus until 1947. According to Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity member Walter
Kimbrough, Gamma Phi is the first Black Greek letter organization and “any discussion
of the history of Black fraternal organizations must include this organization that has
essentially been missing from any conversations up until this time.”1 Gamma Phi, like
many other black Greek letter organizations has died off, but others have persisted and
continue to thrive on college campuses and in communities all over the world.
In 1930, the National Pan Helenic Council, a collaborative organization of black
Greek lettered fraternities and sororities, was established. This group is commonly
referred to as the “divine nine,” and consists of five fraternities: Alpha Phi Alpha
(Alphas), Kappa Alpha Psi (Kappas), Omega Psi Phi (Omegas), Phi Beta Sigma
(Sigmas), and Iota Phi Theta (Iotas); and four sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha (A.K.A’s),
Delta Sigma Theta (Deltas), Zeta Phi Beta (Zetas), and Sigma Gamma Rho (S.G. Rho’s).
According to Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People: Inside America's
Black Upper Class, “many among the old guard black elite would argue that only three of
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the fraternities—the Alphas, the Kappas, and the Omegas—and two of the sororities
AKA’s and the Deltas—actually fit the “society” profile.”2 To these older members of
black high society, membership in one of these five organizations has been a part of the
families’ traditions for many years. Indeed, on many college campuses today, these
organizations are the most popular and recognizable black Greek lettered organizations.
With the exception of Kappa Alpha Psi, all of them have at least two founders who
graduated from what is now known as Dunbar High School. Because each member that
enters these organizations is required to remember the names of its founders for the last
ninety plus years, every member knows something about at least two graduates of the
school now known as Dunbar and; thus, has been influenced by the legacy of the first
public high school for black students
ALPHA PHI ALPHA
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the oldest Black Greek lettered organization, was
founded on December 4, 1906, at Cornell University. The fraternity’s colors are black
and old gold, and its mission is to develop leaders, promote brotherhood and academic
excellence, while providing service and advocacy for the community.3 The fraternity’s
founders, known as “Jewels,” are: Henry A. Callis, Charles Henry Chapman, George
Biddle Kelley, Nathaniel Allison Murray, Robert Harold Ogle, Vertner Woodson Tandy,
and Eugene K. Jones. Nathaniel Allison Murray and Robert Harold Ogle are graduates of
M Street High School.
Nathaniel Allison Murray was born April 10, 1884, into Washington’s black elite
during the late nineteenth century, to Daniel Alexander Payne Murray and Annie Evans
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Murray. His father, an assistant librarian of Congress, came from a wealthy black family
of Baltimore and was “one of the richest African Americans in Washington.”4 His mother
was a graduate of Oberlin College, and was the daughter of Henry Evans, one of eighteen
people imprisoned in Cleveland for defying Fugitive Slave Laws in Oberlin, Ohio. Her
great grandfather, Murray’s great-great grandfather, Lewis Leary was a friend of
abolitionist John Brown, who led the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Mr. Murray devoted
most of her life to providing free kindergarten programs to children in Washington, D.C.
In 1905, Murray graduated from M Street High School and headed to Ithaca, New
York to attend Cornell University. At Cornell, Murray and the other black students felt
alienated and decided to start a group to address certain issues they experienced. From
the “first meetings of the social/study group in his room, Murray was part of the
contingent that wanted to create a fraternity.”5 They organized into a Greek lettered
fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. Murray proposed the first frat dues of one dollar and worked
on the original constitution committee.6 He graduated from Cornell in 1911, and returned
to Washington, D.C. to teach biology at Dunbar and Armstrong High Schools. 7 He
taught for over forty years and continued to stay active with the fraternity for the rest of
his life. When discussing Nathaniel Murray, Alpha Phi Alpha member Dr. Stefan Bradley
writes: “More than any other founder, Murray noted the events of the early years of the
fraternity in his speeches, articles, and addresses.”8 He died in 1959.
Robert Harold Ogle was born on April 3, 1886, in Washington, D.C. to Jeremiah
and Mary Ogle. Ogle, like fellow Alpha founder Nathaniel Allison Murray, grew up in
Washington, D.C., graduated from M Street High in 1905 and attended Cornell, the
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following year.9 Robert Ogle attended Cornell as a Special Agriculture student from 1905
to 1906. It was Ogle, who made the initial motion to organize Alpha Phi Alpha into a
fraternity and he also proposed black and old gold as the colors of the organization.10
While in Ithaca, Robert married Helen Moore and they had two daughters by 1908. His
wife died in 1908, and he and his family moved to Washington, D.C., where he served as
a professional staff member to the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations.
He also clerked for two municipal court judges. Ogle, who died in 1936, was known for
his attention to details and creating an organization that has existed for over one hundred
years.
Martin Luther King, Jr., W.E.B Du Bois, and Thurgood Marshall were all
members of Alpha Phi Alpha. Charles Hamilton Houston, Rayford Logan, Edward
Brooke, Burke Syphax, Robert and George Scurlock; and Hilyard Robinson are notable
members of Alpha Phi Alpha that graduated from Dunbar. In fact, Rayford Logan served
as the fraternity’s fifteenth General President. Today, the fraternity that Murray and Ogle
helped found has over 185,000 members and has lasted for over one hundred years. Each
year on the fraternity’s anniversary, the members commemorate its seven Jewels.
OMEGA PSI PHI
Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, another fraternity whose founders graduated from what
is now Dunbar, was founded on November 17, 1911, at Howard University. The
fraternity’s motto is “friendship is essential to the soul;” its principles are manhood,
scholarship, perseverance, and uplift; and its colors are royal purple and old gold. The
fraternity’s founders are Bishop Edgar Amos Love, Frank Coleman, Dr. Oscar James
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Cooper, and Dr. Ernest Everett Just. Coleman and Cooper were graduates of M Street
High.
Frank Coleman was born on July 11, 1890, in Washington, D.C. As a student at
M Street, Coleman became interested in physics and participated in the cadet corps. In
1909, Coleman “graduated from M Street with highest honors and continued his
studies…at Howard University.”11 At Howard, he continued to study physics and the
natural sciences. As a junior, Coleman helped found the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, and
was the fraternity’s first Grand Keeper of Seal (national treasurer). Coleman also served
as Basileus of Alpha Chapter at Howard in 1911.12 In 1913, Coleman graduated with a
B.S. in Physics, later earning his master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1915,
and continuing his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as a first
lieutenant in the army during World War I and after being discharged in 1918, he married
Mary Edna Brown, a founder of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and sister of poet and
Dunbar alum Sterling A. Brown. She died a year later in childbirth. Coleman became a
professor and chaired the Physics department at Howard for over fifty years.
Oscar James Cooper was born on May 20, 1890, to James and Mary Cooper. He
graduated from M Street High School in 1909, and went to Howard University where he
majored in biology and worked as a laboratory assistant for Professor Ernest Everett Just,
a young scientist who was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College in 1907.
While serving as the assistant of Ernest Just, it is said that Cooper gained the esteem of
the eminent professor and “there had developed between the student and the professor a
friendship that has abided through the years.”13 Since Cooper was an assistant to Just, the
98
three undergraduates were able to seek advice from the professor on starting the Omegas
Psi Phi Fraternity. Because Just played a big role in the founding of the fraternity, he was
made a founder of Omega Psi Phi. Cooper also served as the first Grand Keeper of
Records (Secretary) and the fraternity’s second Grand Basileus (National President). 14
Upon graduating, Cooper entered Howard University College of Medicine, and
earned his Doctor of Medicine Degree (MD) in 1917. After earning his degree, he moved
to Philadelphia, where he practiced for over fifty years until his death in 1972. It was the
friendship that this M Street graduate formed that enabled the three undergraduates to
receive the proper guidance to form a fraternity that has lasted nearly one hundred years.
Omega Psi Phi fraternity has expanded to over 750 chapters worldwide. Some
prominent members of the fraternity include Jesse Jackson, Ronald McNair, Langston
Hughes, and Michael Jordan. Notable Omega Psi Phi members who were graduates of
Dunbar are Charles Drew, Robert Weaver, William Montague Cobb, Mercer Cook,
William Allison Davis, Edwin B. Henderson, William Hastie, Sterling A. Brown, and
Howard Naylor Fitzhugh. In addition, Charles Richard Drew and Mercer Cook wrote the
fraternity’s national hymn; Herman Dreer, a graduate of M Street, wrote the official
history of the fraternity; and Campbell C. Johnson, another graduate of M Street, was the
fraternity’s 18th Grand Basileus.
ALPHA KAPPA ALPHA
Alpha Kappa Alpha, America’s first black sorority, was founded on January 15,
1908, on the campus of Howard University. The sorority’s colors are salmon pink and
apple green; and place an emphasis on service and promoting education among young
99
college women. Ethel Hedgeman Lyle, Beulah Burke, Lillie Burke, Margarett Flagg
Holmes, Marjorie Hill, Lucy Slowe, Marie Woolfolk Taylor, Anna Easter Brown, and
Lavinia Norman made up the first nine women who were at the first meeting of the
sorority. A month later they added seven sophomores: Joanna Berry, Norma Boyd, Ethel
Jones, Sarah Meriweather Nutter, Alice Murray, Carrie Snowden, and Harriet Terry. All
sixteen of these women are considered the founders of this sorority. In 1913, twenty two
undergraduate members of the sorority wanted to change the name and structure of the
organization. This disturbed member Nellie Mae Quander and she spread the news to as
many graduate members as possible. This led to Quander, Julia Brooks, Nellie Pratt
Russell, and Minnie Smith helping to incorporate the sorority on January 13, 1913. For
their efforts, founder Ethel Hedgeman Lyle declared that they should be recognized
alongside the founders as members who were important to the existence of the sorority.
These four women along with the sixteen founding members are known as the sorority’s
twenty “pearls.” Margaret Flagg Holmes, Norma Boyd, Sarah Meriweather Nutter, Nellie
Mae Quander, and Julia Brooks are graduates of Dunbar High School’s predecessor, M
Street.
Nellie Quander, who was much older than the founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha,
was born in Washington, D.C. in 1880. Her family has documented over three hundred
years of residence in Maryland and Virginia, and has the longest recorded African
American lineage in America. She was related to Nancy Quander, a slave that former
President George Washington freed in his will. Nellie Quander graduated from M Street
100
in 1898 and Miner Normal School in 1901. She taught in the D.C. public schools before
enrolling in Howard University.15
In 1910, Quander was initiated into the Alpha Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha
Sorority while a student at Howard. She is most remembered by her sorority for resolving
a crisis which involved the younger members of the sorority who wanted to change the
organization’s name and colors. Quander, with assistance of Norma Boyd and Minnie B.
Smith “set in motion a plan of preservation and expansion that led to the chartering of
Alpha Kappa Alpha on the Howard campus and its incorporation on January 29, 1913,
under the Code of Laws of the District of Columbia.”16 With Quander’s leadership,
Alpha Kappa Alpha became the first black sorority to be incorporated.17 Nellie Quander
served as the first Supreme Basileus (national president) of the Alpha Kappa Alpha
Sorority from 1913-1919. She continued to teach in Washington, D.C. for more than
thirty years and retired in 1958, three years before she passed away.
Margaret Flagg Holmes was born Margaret Flagg in Greensboro, North Carolina
in 1886. She moved to Washington, D.C. and graduated from M Street High School in
1903. At Howard University, she studied Latin, English, and History. Flagg attended the
first meeting of the Sorority, and helped develop its constitution.18 She graduated from
Howard in 1908, and moved to Baltimore, where she taught in the public schools. In
1917, Flagg earned a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Columbia University.19 Later
that same year, she married John Holmes and moved to Chicago, where she became a
member of the NAACP, and the YWCA. She made an “impact upon those who were to
101
become the future leaders of the sorority.”20 After dedicating her life to community
service for over sixty years, Mrs. Holmes died January 29, 1976.
Norma Boyd was born in 1888 in Washington, D.C., where she attended school.
She graduated from M Street in 1906 and went to Howard the following fall. She joined
Alpha Kappa Alpha at Howard as one of the seven sophomores who were admitted in
1908, and was the first Supreme Epistoleus (corresponding secretary) on the first
directorate of the sorority. She graduated in 1910 and went on to teach mathematics for
thirty years in the District of Columbia Public School’s system. 21 Boyd, a strong
advocate for human rights, in 1959, organized the Women’s International Religious
Fellowship, a group that was dedicated to protecting children’s rights. Boyd “combined
the ideas of service to others with a warmth and humanity recognized and appreciated
wherever she was.”22 She died in Washington, D.C. in 1985.
Sarah Merriweather Nutter was born in 1888, to James and Mary Merriweather.
Her father was a graduate of Howard University’s Law School, while her mother was a
graduate of Oberlin in 1870. Mrs. Nutter’s sister, Mary Ellen Merriweather Henderson,
was a prominent educator in Virginia and was also the wife of Edwin B. Henderson, the
father of Black basketball.23 Mrs. Nutter graduated from M Street High School in 1906,
and decided to enroll in Howard University.
At Howard, she majored in English and History, and in 1908, she was among the
seven sophomore students chosen as members of Alpha Kappa Alpha. Nutter graduated
from Howard in 1910, and then attended Miner Normal School to receive her teaching
degree in 1912. Nutter also represented Howard University at the World Student
102
Federation Convention in 1914, and sent Nelly Quander a cutting of ivy from the grave of
Grover Cleveland, which was planted near the Manual Arts Building at Howard
University.24
In 1920, Sarah married T. Gillis Nutter and moved to Charleston, West Virginia,
where they remained for the rest of their lives. She helped establish Nu Chapter of Alpha
Kappa Alpha at West Virginia State College, and remained active in many organizations
before her death in 1950.25
Julia Evangeline Brooks was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but grew up in
Washington, D.C., where she graduated from M Street High School in 1900, and later
attended Miner Normal School.26 Her father was Walter H. Brooks, a prominent minister
of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. At Howard University, she was
initiated in Alpha Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority in 1911, and graduated in
1916. Brooks was listed in the Certificate of Incorporation of the sorority as a member of
its directorate (national board) and served as the first Tamiouchus (national treasurer) of
the sorority from 1913-1923. She also wrote The History of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority,
which was presented at the sorority’s national convention in 1923. Brooks taught English
and Spanish at Dunbar, before earning her Master’s Degree from Columbia University in
1928. After receiving her Master’s, Brooks returned to Dunbar to serve as assistant
principal until her death in 1948.
These Dunbar graduates along with the other founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha
established a sorority that has over 170,000 members today. Many of these members like
Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and Maya Angelou have influenced the world in many
103
different professions. Alpha Kappa Alpha members Georgiana Simpson, Clara Burrill
Bruce, and Marjorie H. Parker were graduates of Dunbar, while Anna Julia Cooper,
notable teacher and principal of Dunbar, was also a member. Marjorie Parker served as
the sorority’s 15th Supreme Basileus and wrote one of its history books Past is Prologue:
The History of Alpha Kappa Alpha (1908-1999).
DELTA SIGMA THETA
Delta Sigma Theta, the second black sorority, was founded on January 13, 1913,
by twenty two members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, mostly undergraduates, who wanted to
restructure the sorority. These members wanted to establish a national organization,
broaden the scope of activities of the sorority, change the sorority's name and symbols,
and be more politically oriented, but their plan for reorganization was rejected by alumni
members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, who wanted the name, colors and symbols to remain the
same. Thus, they denounced their membership and founded Delta Sigma Theta. The
organization’s colors are crimson and cream and their motto is “intelligence is the torch
of wisdom.” The twenty two founding members are: Winona Cargile Alexander, Madree
Penn White, Wertie Blackwell Weaver, Vashti Turley Murphy, Ethel Cuff Black,
Frederica Chase Dodd, Osceola Macarthy Adams, Pauline Oberdorfer Minor, Edna
Brown Coleman, Edith Mott Young, Marguerite Young Alexander, Naomi Sewell
Richardson, Eliza P. Shippen, Zephyr Chisom Carter, Myra Davis Hemmings, Mamie
Reddy Rose, Bertha Pitts Campbell, Florence Letcher Toms, Olive Jones, Jessie McGuire
Dent, Jimmie Bugg Middleton, Ethel Carr Watson. Vashti Turley Murphy and Eliza Pearl
Shippen are founding members who graduated from M Street High Schools.
104
Vashti Turley Murphy was born in 1888 in Washington, D.C. and graduated from
M Street High School in 1910. She went to Howard University, where she majored in
education and was an active member of the Howard University branch of the NAACP.
She graduated from Howard in 1914, and married Carl Murphy, editor of the Baltimore
Afro-American, a newspaper founded by his father, John Murphy, in 1892. She moved to
Baltimore and remained active with Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and the NAACP. She
had five daughters; most of whom joined Delta Sigma Theta, as well. Her granddaughter,
the Reverend Vashti Murphy McKenzie was the national chaplain of Delta Sigma Theta
and also became the first female bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME)
Church. Vashti Turley Murphy died in 1960.
Eliza Pearl Shippen was born in 1888 in Washington, D.C., where her family was
well known. She graduated from M Street in 1907, and later attended Miner Normal
School and graduated first in her senior class.27 After Miner, she attended Howard
University and graduated magna cum laude in 1912, a year before Delta Sigma Theta was
officially organized but was among the twenty two women who decided to leave Alpha
Kappa Alpha.28 Shippen later earned a Master’s degree from Columbia University and a
Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. After long, productive career in
education, Shippen died in 1981.
Thanks to these ladies and the other founding members, Delta Sigma Theta has
over 200,000 members.29 These women are very prominent in many professions and also
are committed to servicing their respective communities. Some notable black women
who are members of Delta Sigma Theta are Patricia Roberts Harris, Mary McLeod
105
Bethune, Dorothy Height, and Carol Moseley Braun. Notable Delta Sigma Theta
members who were Dunbar graduates include Eva B. Dykes, Sadie T.M. Alexander, and
Elizabeth Catlett. Mary Church Terrell and Jessie Redmond Fauset were also members of
Delta Sigma Theta. Sadie T.M. Alexander was the sorority’s first National President and
Mary Church Terrell wrote the sorority’s ritual.
Today, the Dunbar legacy lives on in many of the chapters of these black Greek
fraternities and sororities all over the world. Their members continue to be leaders in
their respective communities. What is often overlooked is the fact that all these
organizations had deep connections with the first public high school for blacks and their
founders’ had similar backgrounds and were educated to be leaders of the race.
106
CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION
Graduates of Dunbar became national leaders for all of America. Their principals
included the first black woman to receive a bachelor’s degree, the first black to graduate
of Harvard College, and one of the first black college football players. Among their
teachers were the father of black history, the first black woman to earn a Ph.D., the first
black woman to graduate from Yale University, and the first black certified public
accountant in the United States. The graduates of Dunbar include the first black cabinet
member, the first black U.S. Senator of the twentieth century, the first black general of
the U.S. Army, and the first black editor of Harvard Law Review.
Today, inner city schools encounter many problems. The facilities and
surrounding environment of these schools have been heavily criticized. In particular, the
District of Columbia Public Schools has not enjoyed favorable rankings, and many feel as
if the students of DCPS have no role models and no examples of success. But this is not
true; Dunbar alone has produced so many outstanding individuals that are pioneers for
black children all over America. As the first black public high school, Dunbar set the
precedence for all of the schools that followed despite the barriers of Jim Crow that
prohibited them from most institutions and facilities in the country. These former
students of Dunbar graduated at the top of their classes at America’s most prestigious
colleges and they continued to prosper and serve as a beacon of hope for their race.
107
ENDNOTES
CHAPTER 1: BACKGROUND
1
Howard B. Furer, Washington, A Chronological and Documentary History, 1790-1970
(New York: Oceana Publications, 1975), 4.
2
Letitia Woods Brown, Free Negroes in The District of Columbia, 1790-1846 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1972), 11.
3
Sandra Fitzpatrick and Maria R. Goodwin, The Guide to Black Washington: Places and
Events of Historical and Cultural Significance in the Nation's Capital (New York: Hippocrene
Books, 1990), 57.
4
The Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and
Culture, The Black Washingtonians: The Anacostia Museum Illustrated Chronology (New Jersey:
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005), 15.
5
Ibid.
6
Emmett D. Preston, Jr., “The Development of Negro Education in the District of
Columbia,” The Journal of Negro Education 9, no. 4 (Oct., 1940): 596.
7
Ibid.
8
Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and The Struggle Over Equality
in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 25.
9
Harvey Crew, Centennial History of the City of Washington, D.C. (Dayton: United
Brethren Publishing House, 1892), 482.
10
Preston, “The Development of Negro Education in the District of Columbia,” 600.
11
Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), 286.
12
M.B. Goodwin “History of Schools for the Colored Population” Special Report of the
Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District
Columbia, 1871, United States Department of Education (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1871), 254.
13
Fitzpatrick and Goodwin, The Guide to Black Washington, 56.
108
14
Preston, “The Development of Negro Education in the District of Columbia,” 600.
15
E. Delores Preston, Jr., “William Syphax, a Pioneer in Negro Education in the District of
Columbia,” The Journal of Negro History 20, no. 4 (1935): 457-458.
16
Preston, “William Syphax,” 470.
17
Crew, Centennial History of the City of Washington, D.C., 565.
18
John W. Cromwell, “The First Negro Churches in the District of Columbia,” The Journal
of Negro History 7, no. 1 (1922): 80-81.
19
Ibid.
20
Marcia Matthews, Henry Ossawa Tanner: American Artist (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1969), xi.
21
22
Francis J. Grimke “Segregation,” The Crisis, June 1934, 173-174.
Cromwell, “The First Negro Churches in the District of Columbia,” 81.
23
Mary Church Terrell, “History of High School for Negroes in Washington.” The Journal
of Negro History 2, no. 3 (1917): 255.
24
Mary G. Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 1870-1955 (New York: Vantage Press, 1965), 16.
25
Ibid.
26
Terrell, “History of High School for Negroes in Washington,” 254.
27
Preston, “William Syphax,” 470.
28
Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women Book II (Detroit: Gale
Research Inc., 1996) 398-400.
29
G. Smith Wormley, “Educators of the First Half Century of Public Schools of the District
of Columbia,” The Journal of Negro History 17, no. 2 (1932): 132.
30
Ibid., 131.
31
“Along the Color Line,” The Crisis, June 1915, 59.
32
Henry S. Robinson, “The M Street High School, 1891-1916,” Records of the Columbia
Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 51 (1984): 125.
109
33
Terrell, “History of High School for Negroes in Washington,” 254.
34
Robert Mattingly, Program from first Preparatory High graduation, Washingtonia
Collection at MLK Library, Washington, D.C., 6.
35
Terrell, “History of High School for Negroes in Washington,” 257.
36
Ibid.
37
Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 61.
38
Caldwell Titcomb, “The Earliest Black Members of Phi Beta Kappa,” The Journal of
Blacks in Higher Education, no. 33 (2001): 93-94
39
Robinson, “The M Street High School,” 122.
40
Vivian M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 33.
41
Robinson, “The M Street High School,” 123.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid., 138.
45
Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 66.
46
Ibid.
47
Robinson, “The M Street High School,” 127-128.
48
Cyndy Bittinger, “Black Women in Vermont History: The Story of Nettie Anderson,”
Vermont Public Radio, March 8, 2010, http://www.vpr.net/episode/48106/, (accessed April 17,
2011).
49
Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 61.
50
Patricia Sullivan, “Charles Sumner Lofton; Principal at Dunbar During Civil Rights Era,”
The Washington Post, August 10, 2006.
51
Kenneth Robert Janken, Rayford Logan and the Dilemma of the African American
Intellectual (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 20.
110
52
Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 65.
53
Thomas Sowell, “Black Excellence: The Case of Dunbar High School,” The Public
Interest, Issue 35 (1974), 20.
54
Rayford W. Logan, “Growing Up in Washington: A Lucky Generation,” Records of the
Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 50 (1980), 503.
55
Robinson, “The M Street High School,” 141.
56
Gilbert Ware, William Hastie: Grace Under Pressure (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1984), 20.
57
Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 70.
58
Janken, Rayford Logan, 19.
59
Spencie Love, One Blood: The Death of Resurrection of Charles R. Drew (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 102.
60
Evelio Grillo, Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir (Houston: Arte Publico Press,
2000), 62.
61
Susan Ware, ed., Notable American Women Book: A Biographical Dictionary
Completing the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 2004), 18.
62
Robert Schneller, Jr., Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy’s First Black
Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: New York University Press, 2005),
66.
63
Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 78.
CHAPTER 2: PIONEERS IN EDUCATION
1
Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, Blacks at Harvard: A
Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (New York: New
York University Press, 1993), 37-39.
2
Ibid.
3
Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds., African American Lives
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 350.
111
4
Terrell, “History of High School for Negroes in Washington,” 256.
5
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 351.
6
Ibid.
7
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 594.
8
“Dedication: Kelly Miller,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 36 (2002), 1.
9
D.O.W. Holmes “Phylon Profile IV: Kelly Miller,” Phylon 6, no. 2 (1945): 125.
10
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 594.
11
“Dedication: Kelly Miller,” JBHE, 1.
12
Gregory Bond, “The Strange Career of William Henry Lewis,” in Out of the Shadows: A
Biographical History of African American Athletes, ed. David K. Wiggins (Fayetteville: The
University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 43.
13
Edwin Bancroft Henderson, The Negro in Sports (Washington: Associated Publishers,
1949), 8.
14
Robert Anderson Bellinger, The Hope of the Race: African Americans in White Colleges
and Universities, 1890-1915 (Boston: Boston College, 2000), 155.
15
Frank Lincoln Mather, ed., Who’s Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical
Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (Chicago, 1915): 151.
16
Robinson, “The M Street High School,” 124.
17
Robert Mattingly, Autobiographic Memories, 1897-1954: M Street—Dunbar High
School (privately printed in Washington, D.C., May, 1974).
18
A’Leila Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madame C.J. Walker (New
York: Scribner, 2001).
19
Evan J. Albright, “A Slice of History,” Amherst College,
https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2007_winter/blazing/slice (accessed
February 22, 2011).
20
Titcomb, “The Earliest Black Members of Phi Beta Kappa,” 97-98.
21
Ibid., 98.
112
22
E. J. Josey, “Edward Christopher Williams: A Librarian’s Librarian,” The Journal of
Library History 4, no. 2 (1969): 113.
23
Dorothy B. Porter, “Phylon Profile, XIV: Edward Christopher Williams,” Phylon 8, no. 4
(1947): 317.
24
Titcomb, “The Earliest Black Members of Phi Beta Kappa,” 97-98.
25
Adam McKible, When Washington Was in Vogue (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), xx.
26
Ibid., xiii.
27
Fitzpatrick and Goodwin, “A Guide to Black Washington,” 152.
28
Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Associated
Publishers, 1933), 129.
29
Lawrence Otis Graham, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First
Black Dynasty (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 167.
30
Ibid., 180.
31
Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, Blacks at Harvard, 203.
32
Graham, The Senator and the Socialite, 216.
33
Ibid., 245.
34
Bob Kuska, Hot Potato: How Washington and New York Gave Birth to Black Basketball
and Changed America’s Game Forever (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 14
35
Ibid., 11.
36
David K. Wiggins, Glory Bound: Blacks Athletes in a White America (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1997), 221.
37
Doug Merlino, The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White (Bloomsbury,
New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2011), 57.
38
Kuska, Hot Potato, 30.
39
Wiggins, Glory Bound, 222.
40
Logan, “Growing Up in Washington: A Lucky Generation,” 501.
113
41
Janken, Rayford Logan, 18.
42
Ibid., 23.
43
Ibid., 24.
44
Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, Blacks at Harvard, 271.
45
The Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and
Culture, The Black Washingtonians, 358.
46
Ira Harrison, African American Pioneers in Anthropology (Champaign: University of
Illinois, 1998), 171.
47
Morris Finder, Educating America: How Ralph Tyler Taught America to Teach
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 44.
48
Robert Bruce Slater, “The First Black Faculty Members at the Nation’s Highest-Ranked
Universities,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 22 (Winter 1998-1999): 102.
49
Finder, Educating America, 46.
50
Carol E. Boyce-Davies, ed., Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences,
and Culture (ABC-CLIO, 2008), 325.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
53
“JFK Practiced What He Preached in Foreign Lands,” Jet, December 12, 1963, 28.
54
Bart Barnes, “In Memoriam,” PS: Political Science and Politics 36, no. 2 (2003): 325.
55
Wolfgang Saxon, “John A. Davis, 90, Advocate In Major Civil Rights Cases,” The New
York Times, December 21, 2002, final edition.
56
Fitzpatrick and Goodwin, “The Guide to Black Washington,” 173.
57
Saxon, “John A. Davis.”
CHAPTER 3: WOMEN OF DUNBAR
1
Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women Book I (Detroit: Gale
Research Inc., 1992), 826.
114
2
Nellie Y. McKay, “Introduction,” Mary Church Terrell: A Colored Woman in a White
World (New York: G.K Hall & Co., 1996), xxi.
3
Ellen Henle and Marlene Merrill, “Antebellum Black Coeds at Oberlin College,”
Women’s Studies Newsletter 7, no. 2 (1979): 10.
4
Terrell, “History of High School for Negroes in Washington,” 256.
5
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 190.
6
Ibid.
7
Robinson, “The M Street High School,” 122.
8
Ibid.
9
Kate Reed, New Directions in Social Theory: Race, Gender and the Canon (Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc., 2006), 51.
10
Terrell, “History of High School for Negroes in Washington,” 259.
11
Nellie Y. McKay, Mary Church Terrell, xxi.
12
Ibid.
13
Stephen G. N. Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to be: The Black Freedom Struggle from
Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010), 116.
14
Mary Church Terrell, Mary Church Terrell: A Colored Woman in a White World (New
York: G.K Hall & Co., 1996), 129.
15
Nellie Y. McKay, Mary Church Terrell, xxv.
16
Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World.
17
“Achievement,” The Crisis, September 1921, 223.
18
“Georgiana Simpson,” The Journal of Negro History 29, no. 2 (1944), 247.
19
Adelaide M. Cromwell, Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Voices: The Cromwell Family in
Slavery and Segregation, 1692-1972 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 3-5.
20
Ibid., 4.
115
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 133.
23
Ibid.
24
Otelia Cromwell, Lucrecia Mott: The Story of One of America’s Greatest Women
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958); Otelia Cromwell, ed., Readings from Negro Authors
for Schools and Colleges, with a Bibliography of Negro Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and Company, 1931).
25
Smith, Notable Black American Women Book I, 138.
26
The Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and
Culture, The Black Washingtonians, 142.
27
Smith, Notable Black American Women Book I, 137.
28
Bettye Anne Case and Anne M. Leggett, eds., Complexities: Women in Mathematics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 19.
29
Ibid., 18.
30
Ibid., 19.
31
Ken Feil, “Obituary: Euphemia Lofton Haynes,” The Washington Post, August 1, 1980.
32
DeWitt S. Williams, She Fulfilled the Impossible Dream: The Story of Eva B. Dykes
(Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1985), 18.
33
Ibid., 27.
34
Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, Blacks at Harvard 159.
35
Williams, She Fulfilled the Impossible Dream, 16.
36
“Achievement,” The Crisis, 223.
37
Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, Blacks at Harvard, 159.
38
Diann Jordan, Sisters in Science: Conversations with Black Women Scientists about
Race, Gender, and Their Passion for Science (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 2006), 107.
39
Phyllis Goldman, ed., Monkeyshines Explores Math, Money, and Banking (Greensboro,
NC: North Carolina Learning Institute for Fitness and Education, 2002), 68.
116
40
Jordan, Sisters in Science, 108.
41
Ibid., 109.
CHAPTER 4: PIONEERS IN GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY
1
Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and The American City: The Life and Times
of an Urban Reformer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 8.
2
Ibid., 19.
3
Ibid., 30.
4
Ibid.
5
The Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and
Culture, The Black Washingtonians, 264.
6
James Barron, “Robert C. Weaver, 89, First Black Cabinet Member, Dies,” The New York
Times, July 19, 1997, final edition.
7
Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver, 2.
8
“Milestones,” The Crisis, September/October 2000, 8.
9
Senator Edward W. Brooke, Bridging the Divide: My Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2007), 6.
10
Ibid., 9.
11
Ibid., 47.
12
Ibid., 96.
13
Ibid., 146.
14
Gale Group, L. Mpho Mabunda, Contemporary Black Biography 11 (Detroit: Gale
Research Inc., 1996), 78.
15
Florence Ridlon, A Black Physician’s Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, M.D.
(Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 240.
16
Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Men (Detroit: Gale Research Inc.,
1999), 396-399.
117
17
Ibid., 397.
18
Ibid., 398.
19
Hal Marcovitz, Eleanor Holmes Norton (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004),
20
Joan Steinau Lester, Fire in My Soul (New York: Atria Books, 2003), 57.
21
Ibid., 194.
22
Ibid., 272.
22.
23
Marvin E. Fletcher, America’s First Black General: Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. 1880-1970
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas), 10.
24
Ibid., 35.
25
Catherine Reef, African Americans in the Military (New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2004),
26
Ibid., 84.
27
Ibid.
28
Fletcher, America’s First Black General, 1.
29
Schneller, Jr., Breaking the Color Barrier, 171.
30
Ibid., 173.
31
Ibid., 185.
32
Ibid., 246.
84.
33
"United States Naval Academy Honors First Black Graduate with $45 million
Facility," Jet, April 10, 2006, 6.
34
Reef, African Americans in the Military, 40.
35
Betty Kaplan Gubert, Miriam Sawyer, Caroline M. Fannin, Distinguished African
Americans in Aviation and Space Science (Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2002), 45.
36
Reef, African Americans in the Military, 51.
118
37
Ibid.
CHAPTER 5: DUNBAR ARTISTS AND ENTERTAINERS
1
Dickson D. Bruce, Archibald Grimke: A Portrait of a Black Independent (Baton Rouge,
LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 98.
2
Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 116.
3
Ibid., 136.
4
Caldwell Titcomb, “New Discovery of an Earlier Black Female Member of Phi Beta
Kappa,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 45 (2004), 96.
5
Ibid., 97.
6
Philip Bader, African-American Writers (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2004), 86-87.
7
Ibid., 87
8
Graham, The Senator and the Socialite, 235.
9
Kathy A. Perkins, Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 55.
10
Hundley, The Dunbar Story, 133.
11
Perkins, Black Female Playwrights, 55.
12
Christine Rauchfuss Gray, Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African American
Drama (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 13.
13
Ibid., 12.
14
Ibid., 17.
15
Ibid., 18.
16
Ibid., viii.
17
Werner Sollors, “Jean Toomer’s Cane: Modernism and Race in Interwar America,” in
Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Michael Feith (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 32.
119
18
George Hutchinson, “Identity in Motion: Placing Cane,” in Jean Toomer and the
Harlem Renaissance, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Michael Feith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2001), 39.
19
Ibid., 40.
20
Ibid., 54.
21
Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for
Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 6.
22
Ibid., 7.
23
Errol Hill, Black Heroes: Seven Plays(New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers,
1989), 120.
24
Smith, Notable Black American Women I, 750.
25
Hill, Black Heroes, 120.
26
Smith, Notable Black American Women I, 751.
27
Joanne V. Gabbin, Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 19.
28
Ibid., 22.
29
Ibid., 23.
30
Ibid., 24.
31
John Edgar Tidwell and Mark A. Sanders, Sterling Brown’s A Negro Looks South (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6.
32
Gabbin, Sterling A. Brown, xi.
33
Tidwell and Sanders, Stering Brown, 3.
34
Gabbin, Sterling A. Brown, 68.
35
Thomas H. Wirth, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of
Richard Bruce Nugent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 7.
36
Ibid., 8.
120
37
Ibid., 45.
38
Ibid., 15.
39
Ibid., 1.
40
Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 19-20.
41
Ibid., 22.
42
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 281.
43
Ibid., 282.
44
Ibid.
45
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 152.
46
Lynn Norment “Dean of Women Artists: Prolific Sculptor and Print Maker Creates Art
for ‘cultural advance,’” Ebony 48, no. 6, (April 1993): 46.
47
Ibid., 48.
48
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 153.
49
Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History
of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 138.
50
Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War
II to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 33.
51
Ibid., 32.
52
The Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and
Culture, The Black Washingtonians, 174.
53
“The Billy Taylor Story,” The Official Website of Billy Taylor,
http://www.billytaylorjazz.com/ (accessed March 2, 2011).
54
Peter Keepnews, “Billy Taylor, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 89,” The New York Times,
December 29, 2010, final edition.
121
55
The Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and
Culture, The Black Washingtonians, 338.
56
“The Billy Taylor Story,” The Official Website of Billy Taylor,
http://www.billytaylorjazz.com/ (accessed March 2, 2011).
CHAPTER 6: DUNBAR PROFESSIONALS
1
Terrell, History of High School for Negroes in Washington, 259.
2
Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, Blacks at Harvard, 3.
3
Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World, 65.
4
Ibid., 66.
5
Robinson, “The M Street High School,” 122.
6
Ibid.
7
Bruce A. Kimball, “This Pitiable Rejection of a Great Opportunity: W.E.B. Du Bois,
Clement G. Morgan, and the Harvard University Graduation of 1890,” The Journal of African
American History 94, no. 1 (2009), 9.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., 11.
10
Ibid.
11
Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, Blacks at Harvard, 59.
12
Ibid.
13
Graham, The Senator and the Socialite, 235.
14
Clara Burrill Bruce, “We Who Are Dark,” The Crisis, December 1918, 67.
15
Graham, The Senator and the Socialite, 237.
16
J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 111.
122
17
Lorraine Dusky, Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth About Women and Justice in
America (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1996), 19.
18
“Our Future Leaders,” Crisis, July 1915, 137.
19
J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation, 402.
20
Ibid.
21
Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton and the Struggle for Civil Rights
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 30.
22
Ibid., 31.
23
Ibid., 33.
24
Ibid., 42.
25
Ibid., 51.
26
Ibid., 85.
27
Richard Kluger, “The Legal Scholar Who Plotted the Road to the Integrated
Education,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 4 (1994): 69.
28
Barack Obama, “Barack Obama in a Black History Minute from 1991,” YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L489QHEQa_4 (accessed February 12, 2011).
29
J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation, 153.
30
Smith, Notable Black American Women I, 6.
31
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 14.
32
"Alumni Membership," Jet, September 3, 1970, 30.
33
“Achievement,”The Crisis, 1921, 223.
34
J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation, 612.
35
Ware, William Hastie, 10.
36
Ibid., 17.
37
Sollors, Titcomb, and Underwood, Blacks at Harvard, 261.
123
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Karen Hastie Williams, “William Henry Hastie: Facing Challenges in the Ivory Tower,”
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 24 (1999): 122.
41
Ibid., 123.
42
“Dedication: Oliver White Hill,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 57
(2007), 1.
43
Ibid.
44
W. Montague Cobb, “Clarence Sumner Greene, A.B.,D.D.S., M.D., 1901-1957,” Journal
of the National Medical Association 60, no. 3 (May 1968): 253.
45
Shearwood McClelland III, MD, “The Montreal Neurological Institute: Training of the
First African-American Neurosurgeons,” Journal of the National Medical Association 99, no. 9
(September 2007): 172.
46
Cobb, “Clarence Sumner Greene,” 253.
47
Evelyn E. Henley, “The Clarence Sumner Greene Recovery Room,” Journal of the
National Medical Association 60, no. 3, (May 1968): 254.
48
Love, One Blood, 104.
49
Charles R. Drew “Letter from Charles R. Drew to Edwin B. Henderson,” May 31, 1940,
Original Repository: Howard University. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Charles R. Drew
Papers.
50
Love, One Blood, 107.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 113-116.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid., 121.
55
Columbus Salley, Black 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential African Americans, Past
and Present (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1993), 209.
124
56
“Dedication: Charles Richard Drew,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 52
(2006): 1.
57
Paul B. Cornerly, “Charles R. Drew (1904-1950): An Appreciation,” Phylon, 11, no. 2
(1950): 176.
58
Salley, Black 100, 207.
59
Charles H. Epps, Jr., MD, Davis G. Johnson, PhD, and Audrey L. Vaughan, MS, “Black
Medical Pioneers: African-American “Firsts” in Academic and Organized Medicine, Part Three,”
Journal of the National Medical Association 85, no. 10, (1993): 778.
60
“Remembering an Uncommon Man: W. Montague Cobb, African-American Pioneer in
Anthropology,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 23 (1999): 56.
61
Gates and Higginbotham, African American Lives, 176.
62
Harrison, African American Pioneers in Anthropology, 120.
63
“Remembering an Uncommon Man,” JBHE, 56.
64
Raymond B. Webster, African American Firsts in Science & Technology (Detroit: Gale
Group, 1999), 251.
65
Ibid.
66
Emma Brown, “Burke ‘Mickey’ Syphax dies at 99, led Howard University’s Department
of Surgery,” The Washington Post, July 26, 2010, final edition.
67
Webster, African American Firsts in Science & Technology, 204.
68
Epps, Johnson, and Vaughan, “Black Medical Pioneers: African-American “Firsts” in
Academic and Organized Medicine, Part Three,” 793.
69
“Dr. Burkey[sic] “Mickey” Syphax, Pioneering Surgeon and Educational Pillar, 19102010,” Howard University College of Medicine,
http://medicine.howard.edu/about/news/events/releases/syphax/obitt.htm (accessed: March
15, 2011).
70
Epps, Johnson, and Vaughan, “Black Medical Pioneers: African-American “Firsts” in
Academic and Organized Medicine, Part Three,” 787.
71
Cromwell, Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Voices, 157.
125
72
Ibid., 158.
73
Theresa A. Hammond, A White-Collar Profession: African American Certified Public
Accountants Since 1921 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 16.
74
Ibid., 18.
75
Fitzpatrick and Goodwin, “The Guide to Black Washington,” 66.
76
Ibid.
77
David Spurlock Wilson, ed., African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary
1865-1945 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 352-353.
78
Lillian Lincoln Lambert with Rosemary Brutico, The Road to Someplace Better: From
the Segregated South to Harvard Business School and Beyond (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., 2010), 77.
79
Ibid., 78-79.
80
Wolfgang Saxon, “H. Naylor Fitzhugh, 82, Educator and Pioneer in Target Marketing,”
The New York Times, July 29, 1992.
81
Lambert, The Road to Someplace Better, 82.
82
Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the
Color Barrier in American Business (New York: Wall Street Journal Books, 2007), 69.
83
Earl Graves, “Tribute to the Dean,” Black Enterprise, October 1992, 9.
84
Paul Gardullo, Michelle Delaney, Jacqueline D. Serwer, and Lonnie G. Bunch, III, eds.,
in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, The
Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise (Smithsonian Books, 2009).
85
Ibid., 166.
86
Ibid., 168.
87
Ibid., 211.
CHAPTER 7: BLACK GREEK LETTERED ORGANIZATIONS
1
Walter M. Kimbrough, Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Black
Fraternities and Sororities (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2003), 30.
126
2
Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class (New
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999), 89.
3
“Mission and Vision,” Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Website,
http://www.alpha-phi-alpha.com/Page.php?id=53 (accessed: March 21, 2011).
4
Stefan Bradley, “The First and Finest: The Founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity,” in
Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty First Century: Our Fight Has Just Begun, ed.
Gregory S. Parks (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 30.
5
Ibid., 31.
6
Charles H. Wesley, The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Development in College Life
(Washington, D.C.: Foundation Publishers, 1929), 19.
7
Cornell University Library, “Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity: A Centennial Celebration,”
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/alpha/ (accessed: April 2, 2011).
8
Bradley, “The First and Finest: The Founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity,” 31.
9
Herman “Skip” Mason, The Talented Tenth: The Founders and Presidents of Alpha
(Winter Park, FL: Four-G Publishers, 1999), 128.
10
Wesley, The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Development in College Life, 21.
10
Bradley, “The First and Finest: The Founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity,” 32.
11
Ibid., 6.
12
Ibid., 22.
13
Herman Dreer, The History of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity: A Brotherhood of Negro
College Men, 1911 to 1939 (Washington, D.C.: Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., 1940), 5.
14
Ibid., 13.
15
Stephanie Y. Evans, “The Vision of Virtuous Women: The Twenty Pearls of Alpha
Kappa Alpha Sorority,” in Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty First Century: Our Fight
Has Just Begun, ed. Gregory S. Parks (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 57.
16
Andre McKenzie, “In the Beginning: The Early History of the Divine Nine,” in African
American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision, eds. Tamara L. Brown, Gregory
S. Parks, Clarenda M. Phillips (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 186.
127
17
Lawrence C. Ross, Jr., The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities
and Sororities (New York: Kensington Publishing Corp, 2000), 185.
18
Ibid., 166.
19
Evans, “The Vision of Virtuous Women,” 46.
20
Ross, The Divine Nine, 186.
21
Evans, “The Vision of Virtuous Women,” 51.
22
Ross, The Divine Nine, 192.
23
History of Tinner Hill, http://www.tinnerhill.org/history/, (accessed: December 11,
24
Ross, The Divine Nine, 195.
25
Ibid.
26
Evans, “The Vision of Virtuous Women,” 57.
2011).
27
Paula Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the
Black Sorority Movement (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1988), 38.
28
Jessica Harris, “Women of Vision, Catalysts for Change: The Founders of Delta Sigma
Theta Sorority,” in Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty First Century: Our Fight Has
Just Begun, ed. Gregory S. Parks (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 88.
29
“Mission Statement,” The Official Website of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.,
http://www.deltasigmatheta.org/stmt_purpose.htm (accessed: January 22, 2011).
128
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