First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar

The students of Dunbar High School in Washington DC put on a dance show to celebrate Obama’s election. Most of the audience found it vulgar, clumsy, and low class. Their school has a history of problems, like many inner city schools. But 60 years ago, it graduate the best black students in DC.

This book tells me that much of what drove progress in the DC black community of the time was elitism. If you were a good student who was able to attend high school, then you had to act the part. Always be properly dressed, well-behaved, and speak in perfect English. It was an “academics first” education, and if you couldn’t conform, off you went to vocational school, where you’d be trained for a respectable career. Either way, whether you were trained in classics or cabinetry, you were prepping for a career. Nowadays the vocational schools are gone and the academics are weak. In the old days, girls were more likely than boys to graduate high school because they felt no need to be macho and get a “tough guy” job. There weren’t a lot of jobs for women; they couldn’t be cops, prison guards, security guards, or army sergeants, just teachers, nurses, or secretaries. So you’d better go to school, or end up scrubbing floors.

Washington DC isn’t all about Senators and Congressmen. There are regular people living there, who’ve never visited the Capitol Building. To long-time DC natives, their city is just another southern town with southern character. Unlike Savannah and Charlestown, however, the character hasn’t been especially good; crime, drug use, dangerous schools and a crack-smoking mayor haven’t helped. There are a lot of hardworking people there, who often get pushed aside by the decay. In his autobiography Step By Step, Bert Bowman (longtime Senate employee) tells the story of DC, and it doesn’t seem as bad as I expected. Prior to the 1950’s, most of it was safe. You had streets full nice row houses where the black doctors lived in their own private homes, apartment houses where teachers lived, well-kept boarding houses where the men lived, working for the government and sending money home, strict rules of behavior enforced by the landladies. Somewhere, I bet you had the derelict houses, where winos and hookers lived. But somewhere along the way, the dereliction spread. Just like with Dunbar High School, the professionals moved away, and the “other” people creeped in to fill the space.

Dunbar High School is an example of what happened all over the USA. People moved out of inner-city neighborhoods and into the suburbs. The inner city schools declined and collapsed, and the technical schools were phased out, victims of the “college or bust” idea. This was once a big disagreement between DuBois and Washington, whether to promote technical or academic education. I guess DuBois won out. But what are we left with?