First Class

by Alison Stewart

  Hematology—the study of blood—may not seem that dynamic or controversial, but it was both for Drew. The premise of his dissertation, “Banked Blood,” proved to be true: plasma could be separated from cells and thereby stored long-term. He figured out how to make a blood bank at a time when war casualties were high and soldiers were often bleeding to death. Dr. Drew, who was also a surgeon, became the authority on blood preservation and was dispatched to the UK during WWII to help set up the Blood for Britain campaign. He also came up with the idea of refrigerated mobile blood banks, still in use today.

  After his success in England, Dr. Drew returned home and was tapped to be the director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, the first of its kind. His first assignment was huge: organize a massive blood donation campaign for the military at the height of WWII. At the time, the military had a strict policy: white blood for white soldiers. Black blood was to be separated out. There is type A blood, B blood, AB blood, and O blood—but not black or white blood. Yet the military directive stated, “It is not advisable to indiscriminately mix Caucasian and Negro blood for use in blood transfusions for US military.”

  Dr. Drew resigned his position in protest and returned to Washington, DC, to be the chair of the department of surgery as well as chief of surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital, and to teach at Howard University. He spoke about the situation often, and once when accepting an award told the audience, “It is fundamentally wrong for any great nation to willfully discriminate against such a large group of its people…. One can say quite truthfully that on the battlefields nobody is very interested in where the plasma comes from when they are hurt…. It is unfortunate that such a worthwhile and scientific bit of work should have been hampered by such stupidity.”21

  The year after the military stopped segregating blood, Dr. Drew died as a result of a car accident. He was forty-five. A myth about his death developed and persists to this day because it rings of a truth of the time. The apocryphal story is that an injured Dr. Drew was turned away from a North Carolina hospital because of his race and then bled to death. This didn’t happen, but it is certainly believable that such a thing could have happened in 1950. Indeed, it had happened to Walter White’s father.

  According to the Dunbar Alumni records, 200 M Street/Dunbar graduates served in World War I and 963 served in World War II. The school produced a brigadier general, nine colonels, a lieutenant colonel, twelve majors, and many captains and lieutenants. Of all the Dunbar-related military stories, the one that may have had the most lasting effect—not on the military, but on United States history—is that of Charles Hamilton Houston, second lieutenant in charge of field artillery. Houston graduated from M Street when he was fifteen and then was Phi Beta Kappa at Amherst. He taught for a bit before enlisting in the army at the age of twenty-four.

  While stationed in Paris during World War I, the story goes, Houston happened one evening upon a group of white soldiers who were screaming at a Negro soldier about a girl. Within minutes, two trucks full of white soldiers arrived and surrounded Houston and the other soldier. He feared for his life as the white soldiers told the “uppity niggers” not to think too much of themselves because they were wearing uniforms.

  This was one of many frustrating experiences for Houston, and his time in the army became the catalyst for his life’s mission—to end segregation. Houston said of the time, “The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them…. I made up my mind … that if I got through this war, I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”22

  By the 1940s, pressure from legal minds like Houston, the Negro press, and the threat of marches by the NAACP made Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as well as the army brass uncomfortable. What made the situation morally impossible to ignore was the harm and harassment of Negro veterans. Truman, who had dropped the N word on occasion, was shaken by two acts of senseless violence. Isaac Woodward, a World War II veteran, was pulled off a bus in South Carolina and beaten to blindness by the town sheriff. George Dorsey had been home from the Pacific for just ten months when he was shot to death by a white mob, sixty shots fired in all. Truman ordered a federal inquiry into his murder, but no one was ever charged.

  By the end of the decade, President Truman signed the executive order that stated: “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.” The order was issued July 26, 1948, one year before Wesley Brown graduated 370 out of a class of 800, demerits and all.

  Lieutenant Commander Wesley Brown went on to a successful naval career. He was recognized in 2006 when the Naval Academy broke ground on the $52 million, 140,000-square-foot Wesley A. Brown Field House, a state-of-the-art athletic center at Annapolis.

  Along the way, Brown married a groundbreaker in her own right. When he went off to the academy, his fellow Dunbar alum and not-yet sweetheart Crystal Malone headed north to the University of Vermont seeking fun and friends. And it wasn’t hard for the gorgeous girl. “I’m a gadabout, so it was easy. I could make friends easily, and Dunbar prepared me to do anything in the world!” she remembers, showing me a Life magazine with a photograph of her with some friends. Crystal had accepted an invitation to join the Alpha Xi Delta sorority. “In the charter it said a girl of certain quality, certain academic achievement, certain recommendations, and I had all of those.”

  What she didn’t have was white skin. When the sorority’s national administrators realized a Negro had been pursued and accepted at the UVM chapter, the organization rebuked the local chapter. The national president in charge of sixty chapters and nineteen thousand students headed to Burlington to sort out the situation.23

  Crystal was approached by the sorority’s national representative, a Mrs. Beverly Robinson, who tried to explain to Crystal why she should gracefully bow out. Mrs. Robinson told the eighteen-year-old, “Life is selective, and maybe it’s just as well to learn it while we are young.” When the young women in the chapter refused to rescind the invitation, the chapter’s charter was suspended.

  Malone said later that she had talked to them about quitting. “I know for a lot of people that was the most important thing in their life, was the girls. And I would not want to take that from them. They said, no, no this is our choice; the national sorority was wrong.”

  When the story made the national press, Mrs. Robinson told a reporter, “I am sorry this happened both for [Crystal’s] sake and for ours. But I expect the girls up there thought she was an exotic and interesting person—the way you would think of someone from a foreign country.”24 But Crystal was not a creature from a far-off land, she was a girl from the nation’s capital.

  Although the chapter was suspended, the school and the girls remained steadfast in their beliefs that they had done the right thing. Years later she recalled feeling that a new day was coming. “This was at the end of the war where we thought we were making the world a better place to live, everybody was … we were essentially dreamers. And it was supposed to be.”

  Looking back on their life together through newspaper clips and personal memories with her dear husband, Crystal Malone Brown had clearly retained some of the twinkle and moxie that had aided her throughout her life and helped her husband be a success. She cheekily suggested that her husband’s life story should be called Brown v. the US Naval Academy.

  10 BOLLING, NOT BROWN

  TECHNICALLY, BROWN V. BOARD of Education did not bring an end to legally segregated schools in Washington, DC. Bolling v. Sharpe, one of the five cases bundled under the Brown umbrella presented to the US Supreme Court, was the suit that made the difference. On May 17, 1954, at 1:20 PM, the Cou
rt delivered two striking opinions in favor of two different anti-school segregation arguments.

  Four of the five individual cases involved South Carolina, Delaware, Kansas, and Virginia. The last was argued by Dunbar graduate Oliver Hill, who graduated number two from Howard Law School behind his buddy Thurgood Marshall. The Warren Court unanimously agreed that separating schoolchildren based on race was unconstitutional based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. The Fourteenth Amendment was the Reconstruction edict ratified ninety years earlier that had been so thoroughly battered by racist state laws and then neutered by Plessy v. Ferguson. It was revived by Thurgood Marshall and his team.

  The long-term plan of the Howard Law School think tank established by Charles Hamilton Houston had reached its desired conclusion—for the states. However, the plan could not apply to the nation’s capital because the District was a federal territory and the Fourteenth Amendment specifically addresses the states and only the states. The Howard scholars had learned this the hard way with a previous case. Defending the District’s children took the Fifth Amendment. Attorneys James Nabrit and George E. C. Hayes (Dunbar/M Street 1911) didn’t mess with the concept of school equality. Instead they went straight to the Bill of Rights and a founding principle of the United States of America: liberty.

  C. Melvin Sharpe was the president of the DC Board of Education in 1950. Spottswood Thomas Bolling, a local preteen, was one of eleven students denied entry to the newly constructed, spare-no-expense facility that housed John Philip Sousa Junior High School. The school had plenty of spaces for students—but only white students. The principal turned the Negro kids away, and all the children were forced to return to severely overcrowded schools. Bolling v. Sharpe became the focal point of the District’s movement toward educational equality. And it worked because two men did not let their differences get in the way.

  Charles Hamilton Houston became involved with the case after he was approached by a local barber who told anyone who would listen that he was wary of a certain kind of DC Negro. Gardner Bishop, known as the “U Street barber,” worked as a civil rights activist and leader of a group of local parents who felt he represented the “regular” working folks. He became well known locally when he led a “sit out” at his daughter’s elementary school to protest the horrible conditions there. Her school was at double its capacity while a white school, closer to their home, was only about two-thirds full.

  Bishop was a South Carolina transplant, not a native Washingtonian, and was not too trusting of Washington’s well-heeled and highly educated Negro community. They didn’t protest in ways that he believed would get much done. Bishop used the term “double Jim Crow” when he described being discriminated against by whites and looked down upon by “upper class” and “highfaulutin” Negroes who were the local civic leaders.1 But Gardner Bishop knew he would need help navigating the legal system at some point.

  He and Houston first met after a public event where Houston was speaking. Gardner stayed and listened and waited for his opportunity to approach the great legal mind. Gardner was hesitant initially, but soon his concerns wafted away. Houston knew of Bishop as well, and of the grassroots work Bishop had been doing around U Street. The lawyer greeted the barber warmly and invited Gardner to his home, and the two men became allies. The Bishop-Houston union was an important one. It was the antithesis of the “us and them” meme that had been festering in Negro DC. Unified, they led a consolidated effort for all children.

  Houston (M Street 1911) was the architect of the fight to end segregation; he has been called the “man who killed Jim Crow.” NAACP defense team: Walter White, Charles Houston, James G. Tyson, Leon A. Ransom, and Edward P. Lovett.

  The author wishes to thank the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for authorizing the use of this image.

  There was one problem, however, and it was something that could only be left in God’s hands. Though his mind was strong, Houston’s heart was weak, and he knew it. One thing Mr. Houston did not leave up to the Lord, though, was the future of the Bolling case. Shortly before Charles Hamilton Houston died in 1950, he made sure Mr. Bishop and his followers were protected. Houston introduced Bishop to James Nabrit, a friend, fellow Howard law professor, and fierce attorney who understood the need for a hard strike at Jim Crow.

  Nabrit was no stranger to the Supreme Court. He and Thurgood Marshall had successfully argued the case of a Negro man denied entrance to the University of Texas School of Law. In an bogus attempt to satisfy the separate-but-equal requirement before going to trial, the university hastily set up a “Negro law school” by leasing the basement of an oil company to serve as a classroom and having one white dean work part time as the “faculty.”2 In that case, Nabrit and Marshall were clearly able to challenge the notion that anything about that “law school” was equal to the one for white students. The US Supreme Court agreed.

  When it came to facilities, by the late 1940s and early 1950s Dunbar was not equal to its companion white high schools. Neither were the other two Negro high schools—Armstrong, the trade school, and Cardozo, for business studies. In 1948, Dunbar was three hundred students past capacity. Armstrong was built for 875 students, but 1,114 were enrolled. Cardozo had it the worst: 1,721 students were attending a school meant to hold only 875. It was nearing double its capacity while a nearby white high school was 60 percent under capacity.3 The Negro junior high schools and middle schools were bursting at the seams as well: five out of six were grossly overcrowded and one was at full capacity. This meant the students were arriving at the high schools with a compromised foundation in the basics.

  The Dunbar Alumni Association approached the white superintendent of schools about the difficulties and how the overcrowding had an impact on the school’s standards. At a board of education meeting it was revealed that there were only forty-five teachers on staff. The alumni felt that sixteen more were needed to save the school’s academic standing. Superintendent Hobart Corning replied, “Dunbar is still doing a good job under very trying circumstances. I would like to say that Dunbar will tomorrow have sixty-one teachers but there is no way anyone can do that.”4 Forty years of underfunding was beginning to show. Dunbar’s facility was becoming shabby. The parents had spent the better part of the late 1940s and the early 1950s trying to get the pool fixed and the filtration system updated. In its current state the pool had to be drained every two weeks.

  Traveling to DC—or even moving from someplace outside Washington—to attend Dunbar had once been worth the trouble. But James Nabrit transferred his son out of Dunbar after one year so that he could attend a private prep school in the North and get a better education.5 Yet there were perils involved in leaving the relative emotional safety of DC. Nabrit’s son had been rejected by another private school because of his race. “Systematic racial segregation shaped our lives,” the younger Nabrit recalled.

  James Nabrit III followed in his father’s footsteps and became a civil rights lawyer. “My father argued a voting rights case from Oklahoma called Lane v. Wilson in the US Supreme Court in 1939 when I was still in the first grade. Is there any reason to wonder why I became a civil rights lawyer and tried to do what he had done?”

  The elder Nabrit was a maverick in many ways. At age fifteen, this son of a Baptist minister dropped out of school and delivered shoes for a year. His decision was the result of a dispute with his father about where he would go to school. He’d spent a lot of his childhood in Georgia being pelted with rocks because he’d had to pass a poor white neighborhood to get to school.6 At sixteen he left home for Morehouse College, where he could finish his high school education.

  As an adult, Nabrit was a striking man, about five feet seven with brown skin, auburn hair, and blue eyes. Although he went to Northwestern University Law School in Chicago, Nabrit set up his law practice in Texas. He was recruited to come to Washington to teach at Howard Law and be a part of Houston’s civil rights dream tea
m. A student in his first class at Howard in 1936 mistakenly remarked upon seeing the new teacher from Texas—who was wearing cowboy boots and a red tie—that “this dude will never last at Howard.” Not only did he last, but Jim Nabrit Jr. would one day become Howard University’s president.

  Nabrit’s cocounsel was an attorney who’d spent nearly his whole life in Washington, except the four years he had spent in Rhode Island while at Brown. George E. C. Hayes had graduated from M Street High School in 1911 and returned to Washington after college to attend Howard for law school. He also taught there and was a member of the District’s board of education during the 1940s.

  Hayes had personal insight into how to argue the case. He and Nabrit chose a different approach than the other lawyers arguing the other cases. Nabrit was tough minded and said they were going to attack segregation, period. Some feared this head-on collision; if it failed, would make Plessy v. Ferguson immutable. But the Bolling tack, while harder to prove, would be the bullet to the head of Jim Crow, if successful.

  While the Bolling case was initially dismissed in the DC courts, it was heard with great interest by the Supreme Court in 1953. Nabrit and Hayes invoked the operating principle of America, the intangible bedrock of liberty. They argued that the children of the nation’s capital were not receiving due process as provided by the Fifth Amendment, specifically the fifteen words that declared, “No person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

  The two men took turns addressing the court for fifty minutes each. Mr. Hayes opened their case:

  The position we are taking with respect to these cases, that segregation, per se, is unconstitutional, and that without regard to physical facilities, without regard to the question of curriculum, and that if, as a matter of fact, there is a designation that one must go to a particular school for no other reason than because of race or color, that that is a violation of the constitutional right; and as this Court has said, wherever the issue is raised with respect to color, then it is upon the Government to show that the reason for it, that there is a reason for it—that there is a reason that is a justifiable reason.