In The Nation's First Black High School, A Blueprint For Reform : Code Switch : NPR

In The Nation's First Black High School, A Blueprint For Reform : Code Switch : NPR:

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

by NPR STAFF

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Dunbar High School has a notable list of graduates, including the first black presidential Cabinet member, the first black general in the Army and several of the lawyers who argued the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Courtesy of Chicago Review Press

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.