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Anacostia High School, 16th Street Southeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Anacostia High School, 16th Street Southeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Anacostia High School, 16th Street Southeast, Washington, DC, USA

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After Bolling: School Desegregation in DC

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Boundary Stones: WETA's Washington DC History Blog

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White students at Anacostia High School and others across the city staged a walkout in early October 1954 to protest school integration. [Reprinted with permission of the DC Public Library, Star Collection © Washington Post]

"No one knows how much trouble we went through out here in southeast Washington trying to get suitable facilities for our children," Luberta Jennings told the Washington Afro-American on May 18, 1954, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools.

Indeed, the Jennings family had been on the front lines of the fight for equality in Washington for the better part of four years. In the summer of 1950, Luberta and her husband, James, members of Campbell AME Church in Anacostia, had joined the Consolidated Parent Group's grassroots effort to desegregate District schools.

[From Left] Barbara, Luberta, and Adrienne Jennings read the Evening Star on the day of the Supreme Court verdict. [Reprinted with permission of the DC Public Library, Star Collection © Washington Post]

The Jennings had signed up two of their children, Adrienne and Barbara, to be among the group of students who would attempt to enroll at the all-white John Philip Sousa High School in September 1950. The students were turned away because of the color of their skin, and Adrienne and Barbara were soon listed as two of the plaintiffs of the Bolling v. Sharpe case that would go on to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Most chronologies of this story often leave off at the Supreme Court decision, a nice bow-on-top finish to a long struggle against segregation, but in reality, the process of integrating the schools was far from over.
"A Great Day for DC"
On the fateful day of the Supreme Court decision, Adrienne Jennings was in class at Spingarn High School when the news broke, and when she returned home her mother told her "this was a great day for DC."

Spottswood Bolling, whose name would be burnished into history by the landmark case, avoided the press for years while the case was being litigated. On the day of the verdict, Bolling was pulled out of class unexpectedly and told to go home early. He feared something had happened to his mother. "When a teacher explained that he had, in name at least, won one of the most important Supreme Court cases in history and that nothing was wrong at home, Spottswood was relieved and disinterested."

While Adrienne Jennings rushed home to celebrate with her mother, Bolling stopped by the neighborhood park to play a game of softball with friends. After winning his softball game, Bolling returned home to talk to the press about the Supreme Court verdict, the apparently less pressing of the two victories that day in the young Bolling's mind. Finally after some "prodding" from his mother, Bolling gave a meager response to the press, "It will help the future of the race. Help other children. Better teaching, better space, better books."

Spottswood Bolling and his mother, Sarah [Reprinted with permission of the DC Public Library, Star Collection © Washington Post]

Although the young students likely came to realize the importance and significance of their actions, they were in the moment--the temporal place where kids typically reside--more concerned about the impacts on their young social lives and adolescent educations. For many of the children, the news of court-mandated integration caused mixed feelings about the future of their education. Integration meant that students may have to transfer schools, possibly leaving their friends and classmates. Ultimately, both Spottswood Bolling and the Jennings sisters finished their schooling at Spingarn High School.
"To Be Accomplished with the Least Possible Delay"
Upon losing their case in the Supreme Court, District school administrators were also left to figure out how best to move forward. These officials were now tasked with combining two separate school systems, with two sets of teachers, two sports programs, and two student bodies, into one cohesive system. Between the over 100,000 students in DC Public Schools, there were merely six employees that spanned the two systems.

Superintendent Hobart Corning initially dragged his feet on supporting the verdict, signalling that he intended to wait until the Supreme Court gave direct orders on "how and when" to integrate. On the day of the verdict, his office released the following statement:

It would be futile and totally impossible for the Superintendent of Schools to make any statement concerning the deliberations of the Supreme Court until the exact nature of the Court's decree is known. Questions...having to do with how and when then schools are to be integrated, are yet to be resolved by the Court.

Due to pressure from the community and the federal government, this position became untenable, and Corning soon released an outline of his integration plan. The plan included several main principles, including that "complete desegregation of all schools is to be accomplished with the least possible delay." This position was a direct about-face from Corning's previous stance and actions against desegregation. It also ran counter to the actions of many other Southern school officials, who delayed integration by taking advantage of the high court's directive that integration happen "with all deliberate speed."

Corning's plan prioritized relieving overcrowded situations at Black schools, meaning Black students would transfer to under-capacity white schools while relatively few white students would be transferred to formerly Black schools. Critics of the proposal said this fell short of true integration.

Additionally, although Corning said his desegregation plan would be in full effect by September 1955, many supporters of integration believed it to be unnecessarily slow in achieving full integration. There was a clause that would allow students to opt out of the new school maps and stay in their previous school until graduation. Some believed this would have the effect of delaying integration by several years.

Dr. Margaret Just Butcher, a Howard English professor, experienced educator, and one of three Black members of the Board of Education at the time of the court decision, had been an ardent supporter of integration since before the verdict. She was the only dissenting vote to Corning's initial plan, and she held Corning's feet to the fire throughout the summer of 1954 to submit a full integration plan by the fall. Butcher even pressured him to cancel his summer vacation travel plans to stay in the District and finish drawing the new school boundaries. Due to Butcher's diligence, the new school boundary map was released just six weeks after the verdict, and she continued to debate with Corning over the details.
"We Were Rushed into this Thing"
On the first day of classes in September 1954, about 3,000 Black students attended newly integrated classes at various formerly all-white schools across the District. "Comparatively few" white students transferred to formerly all-Black schools, however. The transfers were focused primarily in elementaries and junior high schools. McKinley High School was the only high school in the initial phase, with over 400 Black students attending newly integrated classes.

The Evening Star, echoed by other papers, heralded the integration efforts as successful under a frontpage headline stating, "School Opening Runs Smoothly, Race Bars End."

This initial success prompted Corning to speed up the timeline of his integration plan. After the first week of school, the Superintendent announced that the rollout would be finished by February 1955, instead of September, and the integration of the rest of the city's high schools would go into effect immediately.

However, this initial success wouldn't last.

Two weeks later, on Monday, October 4, 300 white students at Anacostia High School and another 140 at McKinley High School--two formerly all white schools--skipped classes and went on strike to protest the newly integrated classrooms.

Parents and students protest in the streets of Anacostia. A mother is pushing a baby in a stroller, and a sign on that stroller reads, "Do we have to go to school with THEM?" Another sign reads, "Let us pick our KKK friends." [Reprinted with permission of the DC Public Library, Star Collection © Washington Post]

The Washington Afro-American captured the scene, which was an almost mocking parallel to the boycott against segregation in the early days of the struggle. "At Anacostia, demonstrators walked up and down R St holding up crude cardboard signs with race-baiting remarks," the paper reported. A caption under a photograph of the striking students pointed out the obvious:

And They Can't Spell--Crude signs improvised on scrap cardboard are carried by this group of Anacostia High School pupils, Washington, who Monday protested transfer of 30 colored pupils to the previously all-white school. One of the signs reads, "Let Us Pick Our Own Freinds" with the word 'friends' misspelled. Another reads, "Send 'em Back to Africa" and the third, "We Won't Go Back."

The immaturity and learned racism of the students was evident when reporters asked them about their motives for striking. One Anacostia student explained, "It might work out if [integration] had started in kindergarten. The trouble is that half of us have been brought up to hate them, and half of us have been brought up to get along with them."

A student at McKinley had difficulty articulating why he even felt that way. "I am fighting desegregation," he said, "I don't know why, but colored are made to stay by themselves and we by ourselves."

The acting principal of Anacostia High School, Eugene Griffith, walked out of the school to appeal to the crowd of striking students. "I came out as your friend, and I am simple enough to believe you are my friends...Please believe me I am asking you to report to classes," he pleaded to the students. The crowd of students booed him, and he returned inside without a single student following his lead. "Well, I gave it a try anyway," Griffith remarked to the Evening Star.

After shouting down Griffith, the striking Anacostia students marched to the nearby Kramer Junior High School to enlist the younger students in their protest. They shouted "Come out, Come out" at the school, but none of the students joined. Later, while the junior high students were outside at recess, several dozen deserted their classmates, scaled the wire fence of the school yard, and joined the strikers.

At Eastern High School, principal John Collins was more successful than Griffith in initially quashing the strike. He gathered students at an assembly and urged them to not be "led around by your nose by troublemakers." He also reportedly threatened expulsion of any rebellious students, telling a reporter, "If they come and loiter and refuse to attend class, they are in defiance of my authority. I have the right to expel them and I will."

On Tuesday, the protests spread from Anacostia and McKinley to several other schools across the District, including Eastern High School where between 200 and 300 students defied their principal's threat of expulsion. Aside from the three high schools, students also protested at six junior high schools: Kramer, Taft, Hine, Macfarland, Stuart, and Sousa Junior Highs. Most of these junior high students were less obstinate than the high schoolers, and many were persuaded to return to class soon after the school day began.

On Wednesday, Bryant Bowles, an infamous white supremacist who founded the "National Association for the Advancement of White People" to combat school integration, visited Anacostia High School after the strike to show support for the students. He told the students, "You have my backing all the way as long as there's no violence and you stay off the streets."

School officials at both McKinley and Anacostia High Schools held meetings with the striking students to urge them back to school. At one such meeting at Anacostia, one student presented a "petition of grievances," with such juvenile and outright racist reasons as "We were rushed into this thing too fast," and "We don't want to shower with them," referring to Black students. The list of twelve grievances also noted that the dissident students "do not believe this mob rule is the best way to stop integration but if other actions fail this must be resorted to."

Contrary to the signs held by students at Anacostia on the first day of the strike, the students did go back to class over the course of the week, due to a concerted effort by District officials, police, and school administrators to push back on the protests. Police increased officer presence near the schools on the second day of the strike, and officers were instructed to "revoke the driving permits of any juveniles who use their cars to participate in an anti-integration demonstration."

Superintendent Corning issued an ultimatum to the students: return to class by Friday or be barred from participating in any extracurricular activities, including sports teams, drama performances, and the cadet corps. This threat worked, and by Thursday, the protests had mostly subsided.

After the protests in October 1954, school integration continued smoothly and successfully. DC classrooms, such as this one at Barnard School in May 1955, were integrated relatively quickly after the Supreme Court decision. [Source: Library of Congress]

The protests in October 1954 were the last organized action against school integration, but the integration of schools coincided with and accelerated the rise of white flight from the urban areas of the District to the bedroom communities of Maryland and Virginia, leading to a form of de facto segregation in District schools. The number of white public school students dropped by 30% in the two years after the Bolling verdict, and by 1965, white students made up just about 10% of all public school students, down from around 50% before Bolling.

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After Bolling: School Desegregation in DC

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"No one knows how much trouble we went through out here in southeast Washington trying to get suitable facilities for our children," Luberta Jennings told the Washington Afro-American on May 18, 1954, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools.

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Taft Junior High School, Perry Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Taft Junior High School, Perry Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Taft Junior High School, Perry Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

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In an excerpt from his new memoir This African-American Life, former president of the National Urban League Hugh B. Price describes his elementary and secondary education in Washington, D.C. Price focused on his studies and dreamed of playing major-league baseball—all while he and his schoolmates made history in some of the city’s first integrated classrooms after the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

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In an excerpt from his new memoir This African-American Life, former president of the National Urban League Hugh B. Price describes his elementary and secondary education in Washington, D.C. Price focused on his studies and dreamed of playing major-league baseball-all while he and his schoolmates made history in some of the city's first integrated classrooms after the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The nation's capital of my youth mirrored America's schizophrenia about race. In contrast to the ostensibly integrated schools north of the Mason-Dixon line, the city's public schools were rigidly segregated until the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court in 1954, which declared school segregation unconstitutional.

My elementary school, the Blanche Kelso Bruce School, was all-black during the segregation era. We had our high schools-Cardozo, Armstrong, Dunbar, and Spingarn. Whites had theirs-Coolidge, Bell, Wilson, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Western.

Ardent integrationists who could afford it sent their kids to Georgetown Day School. Kline, my elder brother, went there first. I followed him after graduating from Bruce and for the first time studied alongside white kids, many of them the children of my mother's All Souls and Americans for Democratic Action crowd. Georgetown Day occupied a site at 4001 Nebraska Avenue NW, home now to NBC's offices and studios where shows such as Meet the Press are produced. My stay was brief because the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown-and the companion decision in Bolling v. Sharpe, which applied to D.C.-outlawed public-school segregation in the nation's capital and across the country in May 1954.

Under the hard-charging leadership of our neighbor Charles Hamilton Houston, Howard's law school was the intellectual and strategic epicenter of civil rights litigation action. As his biographer, Genna Rae McNeil, noted in Groundwork, Houston trained his students to become superb lawyers and "social engineers" who used the Constitution and laws to help African-Americans achieve our rightful place in the nation and to make sure the system guaranteed justice and freedom for everyone. I learned while reading Groundwork that my parents provided financial support for Houston's school desegregation lawsuits.

The school desegregation suit in D.C. truly bubbled up from the ground, a history lesson that resonates with contemporary social movements. As recounted in the May 2004 issue of Washingtonian magazine commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown, a barber named Gardner Bishop appeared at a school board meeting in 1947 to announce that he was launching a boycott of Browne Junior High, a black school attended by his daughters. Browne had eighteen hundred pupils and was so overcrowded that students attended in shifts.

The boycott persisted for months. At one point, Bishop approached Houston for help. Bishop and his lawyers filed lawsuits aimed at forcing Washington to equalize black and white schools. Their realpolitik theory was that doing so would cost the government so much money that it would eventually prefer to operate the schools under a unitary, integrated system, instead of paying for two comparably financed systems side by side.

According to Richard Kluger, author of a history of the Brown case entitled Simple Justice, the boycotting parents rallied behind Bishop's leadership and formed the Consolidated Parents group, whose ranks included my mother and her close friends Marie Smith (my friend Alonzo's mother) and Burma Whitted. The group raised money for the lawsuits and organized additional protests. Reflecting on his pivotal role in precipitating the boycott, Bishop recalled in 1992, "I had more mouth than anyone else, and I worked for myself, so there wasn't much chance of being punished by whites. Ignorant as I was, people believed in me, and I had to do it. We didn't have no president, we didn't have no vice president, we didn't have no nothing. And we were mad at everyone- the whites, the highfalutin' blacks, the board of education-everyone."

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court altered the course of American history by proclaiming in the unanimous Brown decision that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," and furthermore that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The Bolling ruling applied the logic and conclusion of Brown to the D.C. schools with equal force. The high court declared, "In view of our decision that the Constitution prohibits the states from maintaining racially segregated public schools, it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the federal government," which as a legal and practical matter controlled the affairs of the nation's capital.

As racial attitudes gradually softened and housing barriers crumbled, my parents figured in 1953 that it was time to venture beyond the neighborhood we had known since 1941. We stepped up in lifestyle from the brick row house on New Hampshire Avenue to a lovely three-bedroom single-family detached home at 4031 Nineteenth Street in northeast Washington, just off South Dakota Avenue. My father was proud as could be of our spacious new home. Only three years into his solo practice, he had now set a new high-water mark for the Price family in terms of home ownership. Our cousins from Charles County gushed over the house when they came for Christmas dinner. Although Dad was the polar opposite of the garrulous father figure in the TV sitcom The Jeffersons, its theme song, "Movin' on Up," could have been ours as well.

Yet we quickly learned another bitter lesson about racial intolerance. The Nineteenth Street neighborhood was overwhelmingly white. Since Dad was a distinguished physician, I naively assumed we would be viewed as an asset to the community, whose economic status probably ranked a notch above solidly middle class. In fact, our family likely pushed it up a tad. I cannot imagine the neighborhood's average household income declined because of us.

Our white neighbors didn't see it this way. Within a couple of years, virtually all of them fled. An armada of moving vans descended on the neighborhood month after month. The student body at Taft Junior High just down the street did not flip quite as fast. The main reason was that it drew youngsters from the heavily Jewish neighborhood along South Dakota Avenue to the north. "Little Tel Aviv," as everyone called it, stayed ethnically stable several more years before those white families began dispersing as well.

Georgetown Day was far across town and basically had been a temporary school for me after Bruce anyway. In early September 1954, my eighth-grade year, I was among the first contingent of black students to enter the newly integrated Taft Junior High, a couple of blocks from our new home.

There were two enrollment waves of black students into Taft. The initial registrants who entered on the first day of school were pupils like me, who had just graduated from grade school or were switching from nonpublic schools. The second and much larger contingent of entrants, who arrived the following month, were students who lived in Taft's district and were transferring in from a previously segregated junior high elsewhere in the city.

Since there were only a few of us at first, the early days of desegregation stirred up little fuss. The second wave was another story. Although Taft experienced none of the virulent confrontations of Little Rock's Central High School, we did endure some mild turbulence. One day in October, a bunch of white students decided to stage a walkout to protest the arrival of more black pupils. I do not know what possessed these knuckleheads, but they actually asked black students like me who were already at the school to join them on the picket line. Of course, we told them to get lost. The only thing I can figure is that they cared more about skipping school than making a statement.

Several weeks later, my well-meaning homeroom teacher had a brainstorm that a good way to promote harmony between the races was for several of us black students to serve as hall monitors during the breaks between classes when kids moved from room to room. In other words, we were posted between opposite lanes of student traffic. Far from racial healers, we became convenient punching bags and kicking posts.

This lasted about a month before we decided to return fire. One morning when a couple of perpetrators passed by just before the bell, we collared them, hauled them into the stairwell, and roughed them up enough to let them know they should cut it out.

This encounter ended the physical confrontations but didn't cure the tension. A handful of white classmates befriended black students, but they were rarities. And no matter how much adolescent hormones were raging, forget about socializing with white girls. That was strictly verboten. Black and white kids almost never visited each other's homes back then. Thus, from the outset, classrooms and sports teams were integrated, but social life after school remained rigidly segregated.

Academics came easily for me at Taft. Several white teachers, bless their souls, betrayed nary a trace of racism and took it upon themselves to encourage me scholastically. Math was a breeze. Barbara Dekelbaum and Mr. Fisher, my math teachers, brought the subject alive. In English, Mrs. Mills stretched our reading tastes and made us write papers. She even tried to turn us on to Beowulf, the epic poem written sometime between the eighth and eleventh centuries. In those days, I still expected to become a big-league ballplayer. My game plan certainly didn't include maturing into a poet or an English teacher. As Mrs. Mills droned on, trying nobly to hold our attention, I doodled endlessly-cartoons, cars, anything to distract me.

Actually, I do have something useful to show today for all the doodling. During one of those dreary ninth-grade English classes, I designed the signature I planned to use when doling out autographs as a big-league ballplayer. I utilized a stylish script patterned after the way the names Dodgers and Indians were inscribed on the fronts of the home-team uniforms of Brooklyn and Cleveland, respectively.

Nearly a half-century later, when I attained a modicum of celebrity as head of the National Urban League and author of Achievement Matters, I relished signing autographs using the very signature I created in that English class. Admittedly, this happened at speaking engagements and book-tour events, not outside pro baseball clubhouses or at autograph shows. That was celebrity enough for me.

In high school, I continued the giddy ride academically but banged against an even harder wall socially. These proved to be the unhappiest three years of my life. My parents and my brother always encouraged me to reach for the stars scholastically. The original plan after Taft was for me to attend one of those exclusive New England prep schools. This was the proven pathway to Ivy League colleges, which the children of my parents' closest friends had followed for decades. Andover, Mount Hermon, Exeter, Taft, and Kent-those were the fancy schools most familiar to black Washingtonians who harbored lofty dreams for their youngsters.

In the spring of my ninth-grade year, I was accepted by Mount Hermon. I geared up psychologically to go. But over the summer, my heart called a timeout. Why attend an all-male, socially isolated school in frigid New England during the prime of my adolescence, I wondered, when I could stay home and socialize with my friends? I put my foot down and declared I wasn't going away to prep school, period.

My parents accepted my decision with a proviso. If I stayed home, they insisted that I had to attend one of Washington's academically strongest high schools, even if it meant a lengthy trek by bus to a school outside my assigned district. Taft served as a feeder for McKinley Tech High School, a perfectly fine school. But it didn't rank up there with Wilson or Coolidge, considered the cream of the crop among public high schools. Both were overwhelmingly white. Wilson was located way past Rock Creek Park in northwest Washington-not far, in fact, from Georgetown Day School. However, now that we had moved to northeast D.C., I probably could hitchhike to Baltimore faster than busing to Wilson.

Therefore, we trained our sights on Coolidge, which was closer and almost on par with Wilson academically. School choice existed even back then, provided you knew how to game the system. The trick was to find a course offered by the school you wanted to attend but not by the one where you were supposed to go. Since science and math were my strongest suits, we told the school district it was essential I take German, and that Coolidge was the closest school to home that offered this course of study. I entered Coolidge in the fall of 1956.

The decision to go there worked out fine academically. But it was an unmitigated disaster socially, utterly defeating my rationale for staying in D.C. To begin with, my neighborhood buddies took umbrage that I did not move on to McKinley with them. They excommunicated me from their social set. I was seldom invited to the very parties I had remained in D.C. to enjoy. McKinley had a bevy of black girls who were gorgeous and smart. Yet since I neither took classes nor partied with them, they scarcely knew I existed. The social isolation lasted throughout high school. Was I miserable!

Coolidge offered no consolation. Barely two years into integration, black students were scarce at the school. The social atmosphere mirrored Taft's. White and black students at Coolidge were slightly more cordial toward each other, but the contact seldom extended beyond school. Again, we rarely visited each other's homes and never, ever dated or danced across color lines.

The isolation and ostracism I suffered in high school exacerbated my innate shyness. I'm outgoing by design, not by instinct, and surely no natural-born schmoozer. Heading the National Urban League many years later forced me even farther out of my shell. When it came time to work a crowd, I would take a deep breath and plunge in, admittedly with an eye always on the clock and the exits.

Now, don't get the idea I was a total hermit in high school. During junior year, I crossed paths with an elementary-school classmate who was pretty and smart as could be. We had been linked romantically at Bruce, if you can call puppy love "romance." I discovered that her family had moved to Sandy Spring, Maryland, a forty-five-minute drive from our house. We started dating and became quite attached to one another. Beyond the feelings I had for her, she rescued me from the deep well into which I had plunged.

The rekindled relationship lasted through high school. It petered out-mostly at my instigation-when we both went off to college. This wasn't one of my finest moments as a human being. High school had been such a traumatic time socially that I was determined to start afresh when I escaped Washington-brand-new identity, new locale, no shadow of my movie-star-handsome big brother hovering over my social life.

My scholastic success at Coolidge enabled me to write my own ticket to college, especially since Dad had squirreled away enough money to pay the whole freight. I recall getting only about three Bs the entire three years of high school, and those were for individual marking periods, I think, not for entire courses. The rest were As, all of them in honors classes. The bottom line was that I really kicked butt academically at Coolidge.

To be honest, my homeroom teacher, Ms. Anderson, who was white, believed so ardently in my potential that she occasionally challenged other teachers who had given me less-than-stellar grades. Millions of minority children struggle when saddled with teachers who lack faith in them and don't push them to excel, and with counselors who steer them down the wrong path, and with test results that misconstrue their ability and potential. If all minority children had talented and devoted teachers like Ms. Anderson who believed in them, then that stubborn racial achievement gap would shrivel up, sure enough.

I ranked tenth in Coolidge's senior class. Five of my classmates finished tied for first, with straight As all the way through high school. I set my sights on the best colleges east of the Mississippi River.

In the fall of senior year, I paid the obligatory visit to my guidance counselor to solicit her advice about where I should apply, based on my grades and SAT score. She was one of those curmudgeonly holdovers from segregation known for giving black students a hard time. In a bone-chilling conversation I will never forget, the "misguidance" counselor recommended I apply to some colleges I knew were several notches below where I should be aiming. She obviously did not have my best interest at heart. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to respond that I didn't need advice like hers, and that my parents would help me with the application process from that point forward.

In the fall of 2000, I visited the Urban League affiliate in central Long Island to talk with black parents and their youngsters who belonged to our National Achievers Society. Theresa Sanders, the talented head of the affiliate, recounted an equally outrageous conversation with a guidance counselor. It seems her daughter was doing well in school and scoring way above grade level in reading and math. Sanders paid a visit to school to find out how to enroll her youngster in Advanced Placement courses. The guidance counselor said he wasn't equipped to arrange that placement, since he did not have the requisite paperwork on hand. Nor did he lift a finger to get it from the office, or even volunteer to intercede on the child's behalf. However, the counselor did ask if Sanders wanted to place her daughter in special education. He assured her that he did have those referral forms handy.

Such were-and remain-the obstacles facing many minority students who are sailing through school. Just imagine the impediments confronting youngsters who are perfectly bright, or even middle of the pack, yet whose parents are not knowledgeable or confident enough to navigate the school system on their behalf. These millions more minds are a terrible thing for society to waste.

For whites who do not understand what African-Americans mean when we rail against institutional racism, I offer these examples as evidence. This is the subtle and malicious way we often are held back behind the scenes.

In the end, I survived the scuttled dream of becoming a major leaguer, the social isolation, and the malice and discrimination to graduate from Coolidge and head for a top-flight college. High school toughened me up for the real world that lay ahead, although I could have done without rushing the maturation process by missing out on so many joys of adolescence.
Hugh B. Price was president of the National Urban League from 1994 to 2003.
Adapted with permission from This African-American Life, by Hugh B. Price, 2017, published by John F. Blair, publisher. For more information, please visit www.blairpub.com/this-african-american-life/?rq=this%20african-american%20life

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School Desegregation in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s

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In an excerpt from his new memoir This African-American Life , former president of the National Urban League Hugh B. Price describes his elementary and secondary education in Washington, D.C. Price focused on his studies and dreamed of playing major-league baseball-all while he and his schoolmates made history in some of the city's first integrated classrooms after the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v.

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Sousa Middle School, Ely Place Southeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Sousa Middle School, Ely Place Southeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Sousa Middle School, Ely Place Southeast, Washington, DC, USA

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The D.C. Board of Education denied a petition by a group of parents in Anacostia to racially integrate John Phillip Sousa Junior High School. The following year, in 1950, the parents sought admission to the all-white school for 11 African-American children. When the request was again denied by the Board, a Howard University law professor brought a lawsuit. The claim was dismissed by the trial court.

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Supreme Court of the United States, First Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Supreme Court of the United States, First Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Supreme Court of the United States, First Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

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Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education

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The online tool for teaching with documents, from the National Archives

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Charles Sumner School, 17th Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Charles Sumner School, 17th Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Charles Sumner School, 17th Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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This historic site was one of the first public schools in the nation for African American children and currently houses records and artifacts related to DC Public School history and serves as a cultural venue, hosting programs, events, and exhibitions.

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This historic site was one of the first public schools in the nation for African American children... 1201 17th Street NW, Washington D.C., DC 20036

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Dunbar High School, N Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Dunbar High School, N Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Dunbar High School, N Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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The nation's first black public high school, Paul Laurence Dunbar High, opened its doors in Washington, D.C., in 1870. But more than 140 years later, Dunbar — like many urban schools — has fallen on hard times. The crumbling, brutalist-style building is often described as a prison, and graduation rates hover around 60 percent.

But it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, the yearbook read like a Who's Who of black America.

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The nation's first black public high school, Paul Laurence Dunbar High, opened its doors in Washington, D.C., in 1870. But more than 140 years later, Dunbar - like many urban schools - has fallen on hard times. The crumbling, brutalist-style building is often described as a prison, and graduation rates hover around 60 percent.

But it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, the yearbook read like a Who's Who of black America.

"It's really amazing because we're talking about people who literally changed America, who changed the United States," journalist Alison Stewart tells host Audie Cornish on All Things Considered. "The architect of school desegregation, Charles Hamilton Houston, was a Dunbar graduate. Elizabeth Catlett, the artist. Billy Taylor, the jazz musician. The first black general in the Army. The first black graduate of the Naval Academy. The first black presidential Cabinet member. The lists go on and on."

Stewart, whose parents attended Dunbar, traces the history of the school in her new book First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School. She tells Cornish she believes that Dunbar can serve as a model for urban schools today.

Interview Highlights
Cornish: You take us back into the 1860s ... and in those days in Washington, D.C., what makes this place a fertile ground, actually, for the education of blacks?
"It's so interesting to think that - not interesting - it's so stunning to think that in the South, before the Civil War, you could have a finger cut off if you were caught trying to learn to read if you were a slave. But Washington, D.C., while there weren't any schools for blacks, they weren't going to stand in the way of blacks getting an education.

"So as early as 1807, these small schools started popping up in churches and homes. A lot of Quakers came down from the North to Washington. They understood that this was a place where there was an opportunity to lay the groundwork for what turned into a pretty spectacular education system for black Americans."
And it helps that there's this large population of free blacks already living there.
"Exactly. And they were fighting so hard to continue the progress of education. For a long time, there were grammar schools only and elementary schools, and a few free blacks got together and they saw their moment. Because after the Civil War, the U.S. government said, 'OK, we've got all these free black children, we have to give them schools.' So a group of free blacks got together and said, 'We're going go make a high school. We see this moment in time. We're just going to do it.' And it started in 1870 with four students in the basement of a church."
Now talk a little bit about what the goals are for this school in particular. From its very beginning, academic standards are just so incredibly high.
"What ended up happening is the first African-Americans to go to competitive colleges - Oberlin, Amherst, Brown, Harvard - they would graduate from school and have nowhere to go. Many of them came back to teach at this high school. My mom and dad went to this high school in the 1940s; they had a very different experience. My mother was born and raised in Washington, D.C. My dad was born and raised in Harlem, and my grandmother picked him up at 14 and took him to D.C. just to go to Dunbar, which many people did. People moved to D.C. just to send their kids to this high school.

"And my mom used to talk about having teachers who were Ph.Ds. You had the first three black women to get Ph.Ds; two of them went to Dunbar, and two of them taught at Dunbar.

"So what ended up happening was that these next two and three generations were these hypereducated African-Americans."
So the school was basically in a way benefiting ... from the glass ceiling of segregation. That these high-achieving African-Americans, they don't have anywhere to go once they get out of these schools and broken these barriers. And they come back into the community.
"It's a perversity of it, right? And it's funny because I stayed up at night, worried that someone would think I was actually writing a book that talked about 'segregation is a good thing' because it of course isn't, it of course was horrible. And that was the other part that I found so fascinating about this story. You had all these people who were so educated, speaking two and three languages, going to a school and getting an education on par with white student in Washington, D.C., but had these other restrictions on their lives."

When you talk about being fearful that people would think that in a way you're finding some kind of silver lining to segregation, it's fascinating because in some ways, the book outlines what happens to Dunbar with integration and some of the difficulties it suffers in the years immediately after.
"The other interesting thing about the segregation issue is Dunbar was always black and has always been black. It never integrated. And D.C. for that matter, legally desegregated but never really integrated. And that is the sort of the interesting social part of the story."
There's a lot of discussion about sort of intraracial debate within the book. And Dunbar at one point has this reputation for being a place for light-skinned elites, that there are class distinctions when it comes to the community in and around Dunbar and they're reflected in its troubles later on.
"I think the interesting thing was in Washington the grammar schools suffered quite a bit in the '30s, '40s and '50s. They were overcrowded, and the purse strings were held by many racist Southern congressmen. And sometimes, often, kids would go to school for only two to three hours. So post-1954, if you read the Board of Education minutes from that summer, they just are scrambling, and they just start cutting up the city and start making this group here goes to this school and this group here goes to this school. And Dunbar went from being what we all call a magnet school, where kids came from all over the city to go to this school, specifically because they knew they were college-bound, that it became a neighborhood high school. And that meant all elements of the neighborhood: Those kids who had been able to go to elementary school all-day long, and the kids who had only able to go for two hours a day."
When you're going back to the '60s and early '70s, what are some of the aspects of Dunbar's evolution that you see are reflected in urban public education in general?
"The thing that happened in the '70s with Dunbar, which I think we can really learn from, [is that] they tore down the old school. And I think one of the things that we can learn is not to be so hasty to get rid of the old. When all this discussion about education reform was happening in D.C., I thought to myself, 'You know there's a blueprint blocks away from y'all where you could all learn so much from this high school that it was never supposed to be as successful as it was.' It turned out to be this academic powerhouse."
There's going to be yet another new facility for Dunbar that's opening in just a few weeks. What's the feeling in the school there today, and what do you think its chances are for turning things around?
"The new Dunbar is costing $122 million, and it's been a very holistic approach. They have included all kinds of stakeholders. ... It is embracing the history almost literally. ... There are going to be 200 plus plaques on the floor dedicated to some of the great graduates of the school, and they plan to leave a good number of them empty with the idea of, 'Hey, you go to Dunbar High School? That plaque could be you. You could be the next great leader, lawyer, doctor, scientist, teacher. That plaque could belong to you, the one right next Sen. Ed Brooke, or Eleanor Holmes Norton, or Charles Hamilton Houston.'"

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In Nation's First Black Public High School, A Blueprint For Reform

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Journalist Alison Stewart chronicles the history of Dunbar High School in her new book, First Class. She says the Washington, D.C., school - which has graduated Army generals, Cabinet members and musicians - can serve as a model for urban schools today.

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Dunbar High School, N Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Dunbar High School, N Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Dunbar High School, N Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

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Dunbar High School:
Paul Laurence Dunbar is the first high school to serve African-Americans in the United States. Dunbar High School defied the odds and in the process changed America.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Washington D.C’s Dunbar High was an academically elite public school, despite being racially segregated by law and existing at the mercy of racist congressmen who held the school’s purse strings.

The school’s well-educated teachers developed generations of high-achieving African Americans, groundbreakers that included the first black member of a presidential cabinet, the first black graduate of the US Naval Academy and the legal mastermind behind school desegregation.

Check out Alison Stewart's book, "First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School" here: http://alisonstewart.net/?page_id=228

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Public school renaissance? Behind Dunbar High's success