Dear Newcomer,
We are very happy to welcome you to Dunbar High School. The fine traditions of Dunbar and the achievement of her alumni are a challenge for you to emulate. Through the years, Dunbar has sent forward a host of young men and women who have become worthy citizens of this great nation. We feel that you are fortunate in being assigned to this school, and we hope that your days here will be happy and fruitful. This little booklet is given to you as a guide during your first days at Dunbar High School. Keep it and consult it frequently for you will find it a valuable aid in orienting you to this new experience.
11 ELITE VERSUS ELITISM
“YOU DON’T WANT TO go to that place. That’s a horrible place. They don’t allow Negroes in that place.”
“Well, I’ve been accepted, so I am going to do it and take a chance.”
Dr. James Bowman’s friends were warning him about the perils of accepting a medical residency at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago. But Bowman, Dunbar 1939, was keen on taking advantage of the opportunity. He had interviewed with and wowed a highly respected pathologist, who then personally offered Bowman the position. At the time, Bowman couldn’t have known that he would one day become an internationally recognized pathologist in his own right and an expert on inherited diseases. Back in the early ’50s he was a rare breed: a young Negro doctor entering a specialized field.
His friends remained unconvinced. “But you know you have to go in through the back door of the hospital. You cannot walk into the front door of the hospital.”
“Well,” Bowman responded, “that’s absolute nonsense. If I’m a resident there, I’m going to walk through the front door.”1
And he did. On his first day, Bowman walked down Indiana Avenue and into the main entrance of the hospital. He looked around, and people were looking right back at him, mostly Negro cleaning staff, janitors, and maids who stared at the bold young man calmly walking down the hall. And just like that, James Bowman integrated a hospital. He was the first and, for a long while, the only Negro resident at the institution. While making just $100 a month, he had to commute to the hospital because Negroes were not allowed to live in resident housing.
After completing his residency, Dr. Bowman made a bold decision: he left the United States. He had been offered positions in Chicago, but was dismayed that they paid lower salaries than for his white counterparts.2 “I was only going to make ten thousand dollars and my colleagues were going to make twenty-five thousand? You’re going to take advantage of me? Good luck. So we decided to leave the country.” It was the principle, not the pennies. “My wife and I decided that we were not going to go back to anything that smacked of segregation.”3
Dr. Bowman accepted an offer to become the head of pathology at a newly opened hospital in Iran. The Nemazee Hospital was named after a rich and powerful Iranian, scion of a family comparable to the Rockefellers or Carnegies.4 It was in Iran that Dr. Bowman began to study the link between genetics and blood. He went all over the country taking samples and doing research to help find the root cause of specific blood diseases. Much of the time he worked in-country and was followed by the shah’s security operation. This came in handy when he and his assistants were returning from a research trip in a remote community and got lost in the desert in the middle of the night. The government watcher who had been surreptitiously tailing them was kind enough to approach them and lead them back to the city.5
The Bowmans had been keeping up with the civil rights activities in the States by listening to the radio. The movement was of interest across the world. Dr. Bowman remembers hearing “Little Rock, Little Rock, Little Rock …” being discussed in Russian and Farsi. Apparently his young daughter also heard these conversations over the years. One day his little girl, who had been born in Shiraz, looked up at him and asked, “Daddy, what’s a Negro?”6 Dr. Bowman knew at that moment it was time to return to Chicago with his wife and young daughter.
“That is what he says, yes.” Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama, has heard this story before. She has that look of amusement and mild irritation common to those whose parents repeatedly tell stories that are embarrassing, yet funny and true. “I don’t remember, but I’m not surprised at all by that. My parents have said that that was the reason why they came home, because they didn’t feel like I had any black identity. Because they [Iranians] didn’t distinguish between white Americans and black Americans. We’re all Americans.” It was something the Iranians were able to do that many in the United States could not.
Jarrett’s office in the White House looked like almost any other office of a prominent executive, with wooden chairs around the conference table and the all-knowing assistant about ten feet away, just outside the door. Her days were scheduled in increments, and she was all business. Yet her voice was warm when she spoke of her father.
While Jarrett didn’t remember asking the “Negro” question, she did remember the first time her father told her about Dunbar.
“I was a very young child. Dunbar was critical in my father’s past, to his life’s path. He gives it full credit for having been educated—he, together with his colleagues—at a world-class level. Anytime I would ever say anything that was grammatically incorrect, he would say, ‘As Dunbar High School taught me …’ and then he would correct me. And he’s a big believer in, ‘Do not be lazy with grammar’; ‘Do not be lazy, period.’ Certainly don’t be lazy in how you speak. And, I think that, as a young child, I remember him telling stories about Dunbar High School. And, really, to this day, just gives it an enormous amount of credit for the shaping of his life.” That life led him to be a pioneer in hematology and a professor at the University of Chicago as well as the director of the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center at the University of Chicago. He was keen on education and spent years as the medical school’s dean of minority affairs.
Bowman’s yearbook superlative was “enthusiastic,” and he was voted “Most Energetic.”7 His energy and love of his school were apparent when, at age eighty-eight, he traveled to Martha’s Vineyard to join four other 1930s Dunbar graduates for a Chautauqua about the school’s history. Martha’s Vineyard had for years been a haven for black Americans, a place for friends and family to reunite.8 Most important, it was a place of relaxation for people who lived their days working hard to stay upright in the mainstream. As one historian put it, the Vineyard was a place for black Americans to “carve out niches … a place to celebrate with friends and not have to explain a damn thing.”9
Regularly on the island there are lectures and happenings highlighting African American culture, including Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute’s annual event. On an August day in 2010, the audience at the high school on the small island was filled with curious history buffs, Dunbar graduates, and their families, who had come to listen and honor the octogenarian and nonagenarians on stage, including Dr. Bowman.
Jarrett’s father, sporting his usual bow tie and suit, told the audience, “We were always told, almost brainwashed, that you can do it and when you leave here you can compete. That’s the most important thing. And we believed it. When you get out, you can compete with anybody.” Bowman was making the point that Dunbar’s children were never, ever made to feel inferior to or less than anyone else. It was a perverse benefit of the times. He explained it this way. “One of the advantages of segregation: we were there in a closed world. We couldn’t communicate with the other side. We couldn’t go to theater downtown. We couldn’t go to a restaurant but we believed we shall overcome.”
John King Rector III (Dunbar 1939) and Harold Nelson (Dunbar 1939) spoke of their families’ involvement in the school. “Then there was the school unity,” Rector recalled. “All the people I knew went to Dunbar. That is what it was. It was a community.” Harold Nelson got a big and knowing laugh from the audience when he added, “My mother kept saying, ‘You are going to be somebody.’ The other part of being somebody is ‘You will never embarrass me.’ ”
The two women on the panel both went to Smith after graduating from Dunbar. Laura Cole (Dunbar 1930) sweetly recalled her days at Dunbar as “time and treasure,” while Professor Adelaide Cromwell (Dunbar 1936) displayed her well-known frank and funny side. She let loose memorable one-liners about the boys’ dean of discipline, remembering that “he was not underemployed,” and about local politics, which she called “chicanery in secondary education.” She once returned an interview request letter sent for this book corrected in red ink. Wearing her white hair in her signature two braided buns on either side of her head, Princess Leia-style, she was unfiltered in her thoughts about Dunbar: “They took care of the student…. Some felt there was predjudice on the basis of color … there probably was a little of that. But when you get down to the truth it—it was the brains of the child that counted. The teachers put their faith and hope on the intelligent students, students who came from simple homes. A lot of the parents had modest jobs. Regular jobs. Government jobs. It created a stability. It allowed people to plan.”
Such a simple idea, the ability to plan and have dreams for one’s own life was one of the many gifts from Dunbar that, Mr. Nelson reminded the audience, needed to be paid forward. “Walter Smith was the principal for twenty-three years. During that time he tried, he emphasized service, redefining what service was. It was all determined because you were receiving this phenomenal black education, you were supposed to take it and use it and promote something else for someone. It was not just enough for you to receive it. You had to take it, build on it, and pass it on.” Dr. Bowman summed it up this way: “One thing about Dunbar students was determination, stick-to-it-iveness. Keep pluggin’ away.” The same was true of Dr. Bowman into his late eighties.10 Ms. Jarrett was amazed her father made the trip, because he had not been well.
“He took pride in the fact that he could go to this school and receive this world-class education. And his father was a dentist, and so they lived reasonably well. Obviously, DC wasn’t as bad as if he went further south. But their neighborhoods were segregated. But, he also grew up with a sense of right and wrong and so, for example, [when] he went to his residency in Chicago, he walked in the front door of the school as a resident. ‘I am deserving.’ ”
By the 1960s and on the national stage, Dunbar’s alumni were breaking ground that had yet to be broken, propelling the civil rights movement and climbing political ladders. Dunbar graduates were creating the school’s legacy. Dr. Bowman used his expertise to influence and change a governmental policy of random and indiscriminate use of genetic blood-sample testing in black communities. Other noted scientists include Dr. Herman Branson (Dunbar 1932) who codiscovered the alpha helix, the basic structure of protein, while working with Linus Pauling. Pauling won the Nobel Prize for his work, but there are those in the scientific community, including one University of California professor, who went on the record as saying Dr. Branson was as pivotal as Pauling in the groundbreaking work and should have shared in the glory. Dr. Linc Hawkins (Dunbar 1928) was the first African American on the technical staff at Bell Labs, where he coinvented the polymer cable sheath, the plastic tubing that insulates all underground phone wires to this day. Dr. James Henderson (Dunbar 1935) was a noted plant physiologist, and Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville (Dunbar 1941), who earned a PhD in mathematics, helped write the orbit computations for NASA’s Vanguard and Mercury projects.
The Chambers brothers, Andrew (Dunbar 1950) and Lawrence (Dunbar 1948) were on their way to becoming great leaders in the army (Andrew) and the navy (Lawrence). Lawrence was the second black graduate of the naval academy, right after Wesley Brown. He would gain international fame as Admiral Chambers, who commanded a ship that saved three thousand Vietnamese during Operation Frequent Wind, the largest helicopter evacuation in American history. He made a gutsy choice to push millions of dollars of equipment off the aircraft carrier in his command so that a plane carrying refugees could land.
In the business world, Naylor Fitzhugh (Dunbar 1926) was on his way to becoming a legend. He went to Harvard at age sixteen and then on to the Harvard Business School, becoming one its earliest black graduates. Yet even with two Ivy League degrees, he could not get a job with a company, so he returned to Washington to teach business at Howard. He finally had an opportunity in 1965 to join Pepsi, and he changed business forever. He developed campaigns for specific consumers and became the man who invented target marketing. Large corporations sought his counsel for the rest of his career.11 He was called the “father of black business.”
In the arts, Olga James graduated from Julliard, appeared on Broadway, and was a lead in the film Carmen. Ellis Haizlip (Dunbar 1947) became a concert and TV producer, known for his Emmy Award-winning variety show Soul! He had originally been asked to create “the black Tonight Show” but chose instead to present something not yet seen on television. He described it as a “meeting place for black ideas and black talent with undertones of New York’s Apollo Theater.”12 Dunbar graduates in the arts had a unique opportunity in the 1960s to use their talents and their education to advance civil rights. Two became famous worldwide: Elizabeth Catlett and Billy Taylor.
Given her mind and memory, which both remained sharp well into her nineties, it is no surprise Elizabeth Catlett remembers liking Dunbar because it was an “intellectual place.”13 Her genius was expressed through finely sculpted metal, stone, and wood, or through her intricately detailed linocuts and prints, in which each line adds something to the story the pictures want to tell. The young woman born in DC’s Freedman’s Hospital in 1915, Elizabeth Catlett (Dunbar 1931), became one of the most acclaimed, if not the most acclaimed, female African American sculptor of the twentieth century. She was the chair of the art department at Dillard and taught at Hampton. She was a celebrated artist whose work in the 1960s demonstrated her strong sense of social justice. “I was politically engaged before I was an artist,” she replied when asked how politics affect her work.14 Her piece Black Unity is made of mahogany wood. On one side are lovely serene faces; on the other side a strong fist punches toward the sky. Her bronze statue Target is a bronze bust of an African American man surrounded by a metallic crosshairs. She created posters for Angela Davis’s Freedom Movement. By the ’60s, she had moved to Mexico. After being arrested for protesting with railroad workers and her continued political activity, Catlett was deemed an undesirable alien by the State Department. Catlett adopted her husband’s home country of Mexico and became a citizen, working on her own and socializing with “Diego and Frida.” She stayed in Mexico for the rest of her life “because I was just a person. I wasn’t a black person. They accepted me as a person.”
In the United States she both observed and experienced struggle as an outspoken black woman. “I was ignored as a woman and experienced prejudice as a black person.” Once, as a professor of art in New Orleans, she was not allowed to take her class through the front door on a field trip to the museum. When she graduated from high school, she applied and was accepted to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology, but the school rescinded its scholarship offer once it learned she was black.15
Instead she stayed home in DC and went to Howard, where she was influenced by James Porter, the father of African American art history. Later, when studying art at the University of Iowa, Catlett was mentored by Grant Wood, painter of the iconic American Gothic. He advised her to create from what she knew, her real experience. As a child she would spend the summers with her maternal grandparents in North Carolina, where she was struck by the poverty of sharecroppers who worked so hard. “The nasty thing about it: the owners. The owners took part of what they grew. When they had all the plants, corn, and cotton, then the owner would come and run their hounds on the land, let rabbits close, trampling the crops. No respect for anything. That was my impression.”16
It was far from the world of books and art in DC, but in Catlett’s mind the sharecroppers were the dignified people. She always felt the grace of the women she saw working in the fields should be ce
lebrated. She was able to catch their beauty and strength in a series of linocut prints called I Am the Negro Woman, which depict women working in fields, in homes, and with their children. Perhaps her most famous image is The Sharecropper, a three-quarter linocut print portrait of a strong-jawed black woman wearing a large straw hat. She gazes out with a serene but determined look on her face. It was recently described as “a graphic masterpiece” and was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.17 Her work is in the permanent collections of major US art museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Smithsonian in her hometown of Washington, DC.
“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” which became an anthem of the civil rights movement, was written by the brilliant jazz musician Billy Taylor (Dunbar 1939). “It really is one of the best things I ever wrote,” Taylor recalled in his expansive apartment in the Bronx. The white paint on the walls was barely visible because every inch was covered with striking art of and for African Americans. And of course there is a piano. “And it was most useful,” said Taylor of his composition, “one of the most used. Because it’s [also] been used by the women’s movement. Dr. King used to ask me—he couldn’t remember the title of it.” Taylor smiled as he remembered back fifty years. “He’d say, ‘Billy, play that piece, that Baptist piece that you always play for me.’ ” Taylor’s life as celebrated musician, director of the jazz series at the Kennedy Center, and television personality was not on his mind at that moment. He was reliving in detail working with Dr. King to raise money for the 1963 March on Washington.
Elizabeth Catlett’s The Sharecropper, 1952.
© Catlett Mora Family Trust/Licensed by VAGA, New York , NY
“I went to several places for Dr. King. I was in Alabama with Dr. King.”18 A fund-raising concert had been planned, and the roster for the event was stellar: Joe Louis, Ray Charles, and Frank Sinatra. “We had had a problem, and because it was a mixed concert, they would not allow us in Alabama to do a mixed—so they said they refused to let us have the town hall, or wherever we were going to play. So we had to makeshift; we had to get another [location]—we had a school athletic field, and quickly built a makeshift bandstand.” When it came time to get to the concert venue, the local police had another idea. “Now, we are in a rented bus that can’t go any faster, I mean, if you are pushing it, it wouldn’t go any faster than twenty-five miles an hour. And the guy gave us a ticket for speeding. And I mean, just little things. And so that was the kind of atmosphere we were in.”
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