First Class

In 1870, seven years after the Emancipation Proclamation, citizens of Washington, DC, opened the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, the first black public high school in the United States. It would later be renamed Dunbar High and would flourish despite Jim Crow laws and segregation. Dunbar attracted an extraordinary faculty: an early principal was the first black graduate of Harvard. Over the school’s first 80 years, these teachers would develop generations of highly educated African Americans, groundbreakers that included the first black member of the presidential cabinet, the first black graduate of the US Naval Academy, the first black army general, the legal mastermind behind school desegregation, the creator of the modern blood bank, and hundreds of educators.

At its height in the first half of the 20th century, Dunbar High School sent 80 percent of its students to college. Today, like in too many failing urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students are barely proficient in reading and math. What happened? Journalist and author Alison Stewart, whose parents were both Dunbar graduates, tells the story of the school’s rise, fall, and possible resurgence as it looks to reopen its new, state-of-the-art campus in the fall of 2013.