First Class

by Alison Stewart

  “I had this radio, the microphone, and I’m standing out there, and the people are coming. And the people are coming. They are really coming. I’m saying, ‘My goodness, this is a big crowd. A lot of folks are going to come.’ And as I’m standing there, this guy is coming toward me, and he looked just like any of the white guys that we have problems with—he looked like a redneck. And so he’s coming right toward me. And so, I say, ‘Sir, I beg your pardon, sir, how did you happen to come to this particular concert?’ He said, ‘I want to hear Ray Charles.’ That blew my story.”

  Back in Washington, a young woman named Norma Holloway (Dunbar 1950) was in law school and on her way to becoming the first black woman justice on the federal bench in Washington and the only woman to serve as chief judge of the court. She presided over the grand jury in the Starr/Lewinsky/Clinton case. Robert Weaver (Dunbar 1925) became the first black presidential cabinet member when LBJ named him the secretary of housing and urban development in 1966. And the following year, an impressionist painting of a handsome black man graced the cover of Time magazine. The only text on the cover, aside from “February 17, 1967,” was U.S. SENATOR EDWARD BROOKE (Dunbar 1936). He was the first black senator ever elected by popular vote and someone considered to have “moved the arc of history.”19

  “I think everything that happened to me after Dunbar—Dunbar had an impact upon it,” Brooke said. Even at ninety-three-years-old, breast-cancer survivor Senator Brooke can clearly recall the Dunbar teacher who sent him on his way toward politics, which hadn’t been his plan at all. Indeed next to his yearbook picture is the caption, “To be a surgeon.” “I always thought I was going to be a brain surgeon. I wanted to be a brain surgeon. Don’t ask me why, but when I was a kid I used to take dead animals up in my attic and sneak them up there and do biopsies and just crazy things like that. And I really had no real affinity for it. No one in my family—my immediate family, of course, was in medicine, but I somehow—maybe because the doctors were the community leaders. They had the biggest cars, and they had all the girls, and medicine was quite something at that time. And the doctor was very well respected in the community. So, maybe some of that had some influence upon my young mind at the time. So, when I went to Dunbar I was taking courses sort of leading to that. But when I went to Dunbar there was a teacher there by the name of Shippen.”

  Billy Taylor, New York City, 1947.

  William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

  Cyrus Shippen taught history and civics. The Yale-educated teacher took a shine to young Mr. Brooke. “Mr. Shippen said to me, ‘You know, you ought not be following with the sciences. You have a mind for civics.’ ” Up until that point, despite his surgical aspirations, Brooke had been more focused on playing tennis than on academics; he was captain of Dunbar’s team. He had just assumed he would go to Howard’s medical school.

  But Mr. Shippen was insistent. “He said, ‘You know, you are a people person.’ And I said, ‘A people person?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ve noticed you with the kids around here. You’re a people person. You get along; you know how to get along with all people. And I just think that’d be a better career goal for you.’ So that, in its way, had a great impression on me and [was] a great inspiration. Now, he was not a counselor or anything like that. He was just teaching civics. And I had taken it as an elective, I think, just because I couldn’t find anything else to take. And I was not a great student—a scholar. You know, I did what I had to do, and I graduated from Dunbar, but I met a lot of people there because we had such a wonderful student body.” And the most important thing—even now in his last years, his voice deep and slow, the senator remembers this: “And he said, ‘I believe in you,’ and that was quite an inspiration to me.”

  Brooke referred to his experience at Dunbar as a bit of a cocoon. He lived in an area so segregated that if you wanted to walk through the next neighborhood you needed a note from a white person. He served in the military and, like those who came before him, was marked by the way the US Army treated its black members.

  Once Brooke was in the real world, he made sure he would find a way to make things better for those who were not privileged. Before he was elected senator, he became the first black state attorney general ever in the United States. He called himself a “creative Republican” who worked on fair housing issues. He said he was a senator for all people, not just blacks. He was out front on women’s issues: Brooke fought hard to change the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of Medicaid money for abortions. Some legislators did not want to include the language that made abortion available “in the case of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is endangered.” He held firm until that clause was included, and to his surprise the portion about the life of the mother was the sticking point.20

  Black activists who were angry that he wasn’t more supportive of the Black Panthers suggested he was an Uncle Tom. Still, Dunbar’s class of 1967 dedicated its yearbook to him. In his later years he was one of the first people to call for a national holiday for Dr. King, and in the 1970s he was the first person to call for President Nixon to resign. And while he was not an activist legislator, he did champion a law against housing discrimination in 1969 that aimed to help the poor find homes. The war on poverty was something the senator chose to address in a commencement speech that year.

  On a May morning in 1969, four hundred graduating Wellesley College students sat eager to get their diplomas. The Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts was full of smart young women, most of whom came from Republican families.21 Brooke, the current Republican senator, seemed like a perfect fit for the occasion. There was a bit of extra excitement at this commencement as well. For the first time in its ninety-four-year history, Wellesley was going to have a student speaker at commencement. The students had requested the opportunity; it had been happening all over campuses in the late ’60s. The chosen speaker would address her classmates after the senator.

  Edward William Brooke III, US Senator (R-MA) from 1967 to 1979.

  US Senate Historical Office

  By this time, the senator was fifty years old, the same generation as many of their parents. He made a nod toward the age gap and then continued to offer some thoughts about the roots of protest and the point of political protest given the tumult of the decade.

  He began:

  I hope you will permit me to offer some reflections on one of the safer and less inflammatory topics of the day: the protest movement in general, and the character and function of student protests in particular. Standing as I do somewhere between fading youth and advancing obsolescence, I hope it will be possible for me to speak both to your generation and to my own.

  And he offered this thought about protesting:

  Potential allies are more often alienated than enlisted by such activities, and their empathy for the professed goals of the protesters is destroyed by their outrage at the procedures employed.

  In short, it behooves the disciples of protest as politics to reconsider the alleged merits of coercive tactics. By now they should be able to see that, apart from being morally insupportable, such methods are politically ineffective.

  And then he concluded:

  This country has profound and pressing problems on its agenda. It needs the best energies of all its citizens, especially its gifted young people, to remedy these ills.

  Let us not dissipate these energies on phony issues or misguided missions.

  Let us not mistake the vigor of protest for the value of accomplishment.

  Let us direct the zeal of every concerned American to the real problems.

  Let us forsake false drama for true endeavor.

  Let us, in short, recognize that ours is a precious community that demands and deserves the best that is in.

  The president of the college took to the microphone and made the long-awaited introduction of the student speaker.

  In addition to inviting Senator Brooke to speak to them th
is morning, the Class of ’69 has expressed a desire to speak to them and for them at this morning’s commencement. There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to whom their spokesman was to be: Miss Hillary Rodham.

  Twenty-one-year-old Hillary Rodham walked to the microphone. She was exactly twenty-eight years younger than Senator Brooke, with whom she shared a birthday—October 26; she was born in 1947 and he in 1919. She had a prepared speech, but first she decided to deliver an off-the-cuff, unscripted rebuttal of the senator’s speech. Miss Rodham began with these words:

  I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That’s a percentage. We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they’re just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective.

  The young woman’s nervy rebuttal of the sitting Senator was written up in Life magazine’s feature on future leaders.

  What happened that day was a pure example of the strange position middle-class, middle-aged blacks found themselves in during the 1960s. The “don’t trust anyone over thirty” mantra meant they got the brush-off from very liberal young whites and very conservative old whites, while experiencing insolence from some young blacks.

  In Washington, DC, the rise of Marion Barry exemplified the moment. He harnessed the grassroots energy of young blacks who felt underrepresented or plain old forgotten by the black middle class. Barry swept into town and made an immediate impression with Pride Inc., a successful campaign to put young, out-of-work, unrepresented black men to work cleaning the streets of their own neighborhoods. Many young men got their first job opportunities through Pride Inc.

  It was a landmark event when LBJ appointed Walter Washington mayor of Washington, DC—he was the first black person to run a major city. Washington was a product of Howard Law School, a longtime government leader, and married to a Dunbar graduate from a prominent Washington family. Yet he was seen as the establishment by some young blacks. He fought off challenges to his power from J. Edgar Hoover. And he had to appeal to racist congressmen still holding the purse strings. When Mayor Washington sent his first budget to Congress in 1967, the head of the appropriations committee in charge of financing DC’s government, John McMillan, a Democrat from South Carolina and an infamous bigot, gave Mayor Washington some watermelon.

  At Howard University, students protested and occupied buildings. They wanted certain concessions from the president of the university, and some called for him to step down for being what they considered to be unresponsive to their current needs. At the time the president was James Nabrit. When Nabrit had first come to Howard as a teacher, he came on two conditions: that he be permitted to do pro bono civil rights work while working at Howard and that he be permitted to start and teach a class in civil rights law.22 Of course, he also successfully argued the Supreme Court case to integrate DC schools. Nabrit was prescient about the social upheaval to come in the late 1960s. He gave an interview to the Washington Post when he became president of “the nation’s largest Negro college.” In 1963 he told the reporter that “the Negro looks at this year of Emancipation centennial and sees how far he is from obtaining rights of first class citizens. He is alarmed, disturbed and angry when he realized that 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation he is still struggling for elemental justice, the right to register and to vote, the right to educate his children along with other citizens, the right to avail himself of public accommodations and the right to live where his income enables him to live.…[He is] tired of excuses, tokenism, and discussion about how far he has come. This mood is not the result of the mood of the leadership but is the usurping mood of the masses of Negroes.”23 He did not suspect, however, that he would be on receiving end of the anger five years later.

  Nabrit’s achievements on the students’ behalf did not seem to earn him any points. The Howard students of that time were just four and five years old when the Brown/Bolling decision was made. Students boycotted classes and occupied the administration building. Jay Greene, a law student who had led demonstrations said, “Students who walk into the administration building are treated worse than a beggar off the street. We seek dignity, respect, and real student autonomy.”24 It sounded a lot like what President Nabrit had said years earlier. Nabrit retired not long after the protests. Protests were bubbling up in the lower schools as students began demanding changes in the curriculum to include Afrocentric courses.

  One Dunbar teacher found himself consumed by it all. Madison Tignor had begun teaching at Dunbar in the 1930s. He adored the written word. Milton was his favorite writer. His son described him as loving the English language and trying very hard to pass that love along to others, sometimes doing it by force.25 He was an avid collector of photographs and carefully arranged pictures in his albums. He wrote small narrations, descriptions, or poems next the snapshots of his beloved family. Under a picture of his wife and two of his sons, he wrote:

  Both Hands Full

  Both hands Happy

  With two young lives

  Facing the Morning of Life

  Madison Tignor was born in 1902 in the house where his mother and grandmother had been born. The home had been built by his greatgrandfather, a master carpenter, who also helped construct parts of Howard University. While proud of this fact, his elders were reluctant to talk about slavery or the past. Their motto was: “The world started with us, and that’s all that matters.”

  Tignor’s mother was a strict adherent of Booker T. Washington’s philosophies, and despite the insistence of other relatives, she enrolled Tignor at Armstrong instead of Dunbar. She did yield to his taking Latin at Dunbar when it became obvious he was going to be valedictorian at Armstrong. Young Tignor was headed to college, and he’d have to help pay for it. Money was not plentiful in his household, and he learned the value and necessity of hard work early on. As a child he took his wagon to Eastern Market, where he would haul groceries for change. As a young adult, he worked in a Library of Congress reading room eight hours a day all through his years at Howard University. He was not of Washington’s affluent black class and had little time for social climbing or clubs.

  As hard as his childhood was, Tignor knew he had it better than those who lived in the alleys near his home. His mother always took him along on church outreach meetings. The ministers would go into the alleys and pray with the folks who lived there. Food and clothing would be distributed to those in need. Tignor’s mother would play on a portable organ while he handed out hymnals.

  Tignor found the segregation of his hometown both absurd and frustrating. At times he made light of it. The family joke, upon seeing signs for “colored” water fountains, was that they knew the water was not colored. He was infuriated that blacks couldn’t use the public toilets in the Capitol Building. And when he worked at the Library of Congress he discovered a separate shelf labeled “colored authors.” He felt the labeling of authors and their works by race was “the ultimate inhumanity” and resolved to do something to change the system.

  That something was to become a teacher. He believed his purpose at Dunbar and the goal of the school was “to create leaders of color in every field of American life.” His students described him as a gentleman, elegant and co
mposed. He restarted Dunbar’s student newspaper and dubbed it the Dunbar Newsreel. He was the advisor to the Correspondence Club, which started out all female except for one round little boy. Tignor was a father of three boys who in the 1950s also went to Dunbar.

  Mr. Tignor was known to do whatever it took to help a child master the English language. One young man of privilege spent a year or two away from Dunbar when his father relocated to Haiti to teach. Mercer Cook remembered, “When I returned to Dunbar, my grammar was jumbled. I had difficulty. He took extra time with me, really helped me.”

  Tignor always came to school impeccably dressed, wearing a well-fitting suit with a pocket square and sometimes a bow tie. He usually had a serious expression on his long face, which was bisected by a small thick mustache. That’s not to say he wasn’t warm. “He had personality and a sense of humor, and he was a good teacher. He was dedicated, yeah. He was very good to me,” Alfred Derricot recalled at his fifty-fifth reunion.

  In the 1960s, after thirty years of teaching at Dunbar, Madison Tignor was offered a new opportunity. He accepted an invitation to become assistant principal of Eastern, the largest high school in Washington. The job meant more money and more responsibility. His sons had graduated from Dunbar and gone off to Yale, Columbia Medical School, and Howard. The time was right.