First Class

by Alison Stewart

  Before 1954, Eastern had been all white. Initially its principal reported that desegregation had not caused any problems. He told the curious press, “In our school, integration is doing well.”26 However, some of the students did not like the new arrangement and took part in a four-day boycott during which white students refused to go to school.

  By the time Tignor moved from assistant principal to principal of Eastern in 1963, the school had flipped from 100 percent white to almost 100 percent black. Principal Tignor, who’d been there through the transition, had taken control when Eastern was in a bit of a crisis. There were some fights at sporting events. The white flight from the neighborhood and the sharp shift in the student body had left the faculty feeling unsettled. Principal Tignor led by example with his old-fashioned belief in discipline and focus. One of his teachers said she felt that his presence really helped calm the school and that he was dignified and conscientious.27

  Tignor told the teachers and the student body of nearly twenty-four hundred that he wanted to reestablish Eastern’s good name. He expected every student to be involved in at least one extracurricular activity. He helped establish new nursing and business clubs, a stamp-collecting club, and even a baton-twirling club. He promised assemblies with noted figures, including Ralph Bunche, the first black person to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He informed his students he expected an improvement in school citizenship.

  Until 1964, his tenure as the first black principal of the largest school in the District had gone well. The seniors in the class of 1964 respected Principal Tignor and would remain close to him throughout their years, nominating him for leadership awards. The freshmen that year were another story. Some of these new students would grow to resent his Old Dunbar ways in just four years’ time.

  In the late ’60s, a group of students calling themselves the Modern Strivers began making demands of Tignor’s administration. The first demands were small—for example, music in the cafeteria. They became bigger: the inclusion of a black history course. By 1967, the list of demands had grown to include freedom to dress as they liked, wear political buttons and publish papers without censorship, organize groups, protest grievances, and listen to classroom speakers free of any prior censorship. The Modern Strivers also sought for students to choose all of their non-required courses. They called this their bill of rights.

  Madison Tignor.

  Courtesy of the Tignor family

  The students also wanted to establish what they called a Freedom School. It would be a school within a school, focused on Afrocentric studies including black history, and offering Swahili as a language course. All through this process, a young teacher at the school named John Lord guided the teenagers; he became their advisor. Lord, a recent graduate of Amherst College, taught English and was white.

  “Black is Beautiful and it is Beautiful to be Black” was the Strivers’ credo.28 They took their handle from the name given to a neighborhood of Washington, the Strivers section, settled in the early 1920s. The formerly white neighborhood had become home to black doctors, lawyers, government workers, and professors who moved in as they made it. Their homes were beautiful row houses with lovely gardens. Originally, the term “strivers” was meant to be negative, as if the people moving into the mixed-race area were striving to get away from less affluent people of color. A respected cultural writer and historian successfully countered this concept and promoted the idea that the blacks living there at the time—citing former residents Frederick Douglass and Charles Hamilton Houston as examples—were pioneers, striving for better things for all blacks.

  The Modern Strivers saw themselves as pioneers on the forefront of a social and educational revolution. Their platform clearly stated, “We the Modern Strivers of Eastern High School, ask not for favors, we ask only for the return of our stolen education. We do not ask for a mountain, not for luxuries, but for a necessity. That necessity is an education, a meaningful education.”29

  The students were referring to two issues. The first was the post-desegregation practice of tracking. The superintendent of schools had introduced ability grouping, and students were funneled into one of four tracks: honors, college preparatory, general, and basic. Basic students were considered “mentally retarded but educable.” In 1962, 99.99 percent of the children in the basic track were black.30 Black children, who had received half—or sometimes just a third—of the time or quality of elementary education available to their white peers, were being shuttled into the lowest two categories. They never got a chance to strive for advanced education because the playing field wasn’t just uneven, it had giant, gaping holes in it. Black activists called the tracking de facto segregation. They argued that segregation had perpetuated the black educational lag and that it wasn’t possible to tell whether a black student’s record was poor because he was a poor student or because he had attended such inferior schools.31 Board of education member Julius Hobson sued the superintendent of schools to abolish the practice, and in 1967 he won. But for students like those juniors and seniors at Eastern High School, it was too late. They’d be stuck in the lower tracks for their whole lives.

  The second issue of “stolen education” was the lack of black history taught in schools. The subject had been a part of both Dunbar and Armstrong’s curricula. The Modern Strivers didn’t just want black history taught here and there; they wanted a whole school within a school based on Afrocentric culture.

  When the students did not get the results they desired, their response made it seem as though they had made a New Year’s resolution for 1968. Every month from January 1968 on, they appeared before the board of education. On February 7, four Modern Strivers told the board that students should have the right to be involved in the recruitment and hiring of teachers and administrators for Eastern High School. They demanded an immediate reevaluation of Eastern’s curriculum, and they submitted a proposal to establish the Freedom School. The leader of the group, a charismatic young man named Greg Taylor, singled out Principal Tignor in his remarks.

  I am a student at Eastern High School. I’d like to read a caption from the Washington Post. This story appeared on January 13th and was about the Eastern students’ protest. Eastern’s principal, Madison W. Tignor, said in this article and I quote: “The students have no right to be disappointed in the school as a whole just because the reading scores are low. They don’t take into account the odds we’re working against…. We have every kind of student at this school. Some come from fine professional homes, but we have many from other kinds of homes, you know.”

  I, myself, come from one of the other homes, my parents are not professional so what do you do with me? Am I inferior because I am not from a professional background? I, myself, believe that it is because you do not want me to be a professional person. Last year I wrote a letter of protest to a faculty member. The faculty member responded to my letter by saying, “You need to go back to the first grade because of the misspelled words. A first grader could have presented it better than you presented it to me.”

  My feeling about what she said was if I’m down and I want to get up, she is going to make it as difficult as possible for me to get up. I am a 19-year-old junior and too old to go back to elementary school, so what do you do? You give the so-called basic student, me, anything just enough to get me out of the way. I have been officially labeled basic since the first grade and I’m still unofficially now. As an example of this, I have been trying to go to college. But this is the program they gave me at the beginning of the year: 1st period, gym; 2nd period, applied math; 3rd period, lunch; 4th period, English; 5th period, U.S. history; 6th period, cooking; and 7th period, wood shop. I have had courses like cooking and woodwork all my life. In place of these courses, I could have taken a foreign language and a meaningful science course to help prepare me for college. But I know the answer now. I must depend on myself and not on the school system.

  The Strivers-Tignor clash was a painful example of h
ow the traditional approach and progressive approach to black self-determination were at odds in the 1960s. Up until then, education, education, education had been the bedrock of advancement. Academic achievement was the way that men and women like Houston and Hayes, Cooper and Terrell, Dykes and Davis had clawed their way up the social and economic ladder and forced the mainstream to accept them.

  But the experiences of the current generation still living in the District were different. The decades of chronic underfunding of black schools by racist congressmen had produced two generations of angry and/or undereducated blacks in DC. But undereducated does not mean stupid or ignorant by a long shot. Students like the Modern Strivers knew and understood what had happened to them in the tracking system. The generation that had had their opportunities scuttled and could not afford to leave DC wanted DC to bend to them. And they were the majority, so why not? They viewed the Dunbar generations as part of the problem. The description of Dunbar and its principles went from the “elite” to “elitist.”

  One school board member, a Dunbar graduate, supported the tracking system, calling it part of the “art of teaching.”32 The men and women who had graduated from Dunbar were recast as the lucky few who were not in touch with what being black in DC in the late ’60s meant. However, it was an odd suggestion that people who had lived through legal segregation that could rob you of your house or your job, and could tell you where to eat and sit, didn’t understand being black. The generations had different fights to fight.

  Principal Tignor was a believer in a classical education. He had his standards, and he wanted the students to reach for those standards. He had done just that. He had come from humble beginnings without a father. He knew hard work was the way to succeed. Some of the suggestions, such as students swapping Swahili for French, seemed counterproductive. The idea of a separate school within a school was untenable. But there was one element of the whole Modern Strivers issue that really angered a normally even-tempered man: Madison Tignor was particularly irked with the student’s advisor, Mr. Lord.

  Gregory Tignor, Madison’s son, is today a retired Yale professor. He can recall his father’s anguish at the time. “I contend it was an era in which whites and blacks sponsored pseudo-freedom among black youth that was only going to be destructive in the long run. These white kids who had fun—I saw them at Yale—they could protest, they could lead…. They were great at it, and then when the stuff hit the fan, they could put on a suit and could go work for daddy. And black people had nothing like that. Now that is the frame of mind my father came from. You have to remember when he was born and what influences he came under. I have pictures of him with Du Bois, who was a hero. That was called radical stuff then. He expected discipline. In that era there was discipline. I mean a teacher at Dunbar got respect. It wasn’t that they demanded it, they got respect.”

  The lack of respect from the students and Mr. Lord was foreign to Principal Tignor. He had gone out of his way to help the young teacher. The Vietnam War was swallowing up young men who were drawn into the fight, and after Mr. Lord arrived at Eastern he asked Principal Tignor to write a letter to the draft board to get him out of service by saying he was a necessary part of the staff at Eastern. Gregory Tignor remembers it well: “I know this for sure. A white teacher came to him and said he was going to be drafted and he would do anything to avoid Vietnam. My father never helped us avoid military service; all three of us were in the military. But he wrote a letter to the draft board saying he was an essential part of teaching. Now draft boards in that era exempted people. The reason I know that is … it happened to me. I was at Yale, and I had a student come to me crying, he wanted me to write a letter saying how important he was as a teaching assistant.”

  But then Principal Tignor wrote a second letter to the Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, draft board on January 31, 1968.

  As a patriotic gesture I am advising that I am withdrawing my request that Mr. John G. Lord Jr. be deferred from the draft. He has been a teacher of English in the Eastern High School on temporary status since September 1965.

  Within two weeks John Lord learned from the draft board that he had been reclassified and why, and he took the issue to the board of education, the teacher’s union, and the press. On March 12, 1968, the students of Eastern High School were asked to report to the auditorium. The students were informed that Principal Tignor was on an “extended” medical leave and the assistant principal would take over.

  The audience responded with a mix of cheers and jeers. The Modern Strivers were in the first row of the auditorium when the announcement was made that Mr. Tignor was not returning. They stood and clapped.

  Just a few days before, four hundred students had walked out of class during last period in support of Mr. Lord. Everyone knew from the accounts in the Washington Post that the teacher’s union had called for Tignor’s removal and the board was lukewarm in supporting him. John Lord had announced in a press conference that he was seeking a reversal of his draft status given what had taken place. When asked if he’d had any previous run-ins with Principal Tignor, he responded, “He once chided me for using the word ‘stuff’ to describe something in class.”33

  After the announcement of Principal Tignor’s leave, students approached the stage with questions. A young woman took to the mic and looked at the Strivers’ leader, Greg. She asked, “Do you think that it was because of you that Mr. Tignor did what he did?”

  “I don’t think it was because of the Modern Strivers,” Greg responded to the girl. “The letter wasn’t a very nice way to handle the situation.”

  A young boy named Dennis took to the microphone. “I’m speaking on behalf of the minority which feels that a school can be run by teachers and administrators alone. It’s hard to get up and speak against a strong group like the Modern Strivers, but as far as I am concerned, you are striving in the wrong way.”

  Another Striver named Roger spoke up, saying, “We never claimed to be the majority. But if you look at the American Revolution or any other revolution, you will see that it is not the majority that compromise it but a hard-fighting minority.”

  “Mr. Tignor brought Eastern through many a crisis,” another student added. “We should stand behind Eastern and we should stand behind Mr. Tignor because that’s what he represents.” The assembly ended, and it was clear Mr. Tignor would not return. He retired early.

  Professor Gregory Tignor said of his father’s last days at Eastern, “He couldn’t cope. I think he just couldn’t cope with what transpired.”

  Two weeks after the assembly, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered and Washington, DC, imploded.

  12 NEW SCHOOL

  BORN IN 1897, MRS. Mary Hundley lived long enough to bear witness to many transformational moments in history. She was twenty-three years old when women got the right to vote. She had lived through two world wars and saw a man land on the moon. In her own life she taught Latin and French at Dunbar for more than thirty years, wrote a book about the school, and was even involved in a breakthrough racial covenant case.

  It is unlikely that Mrs. Hundley ever thought she’d live to see a wrecking ball hit Dunbar High School. But there she was, long retired and nearly eighty years old, watching the city leaders plan the demolition of a school she had witnessed being built, with a school culture she had helped to develop.

  Mary Hundley was not having it. “There is no justification for destroying this famous school that is nationally known for training colored black youth for high education,” Mrs. Hundley said to anyone who would listen—politicians, news reporters, former students. “For years it was the only opportunity for the development of these underprivileged boys and girls to their utmost potential.”1 Hundley’s use of the word “colored,” and her definition of underprivileged were signs of a divide within black Washington that was growing bigger with each decade.

  The District was remaking itself in the 1970s after the explosion of rage, anger, and pain that manifested itself in three days of t
urbulence following Dr. King’s murder. For four days starting on Thursday, April 4, 1968, Washington, DC, was heading full tilt toward self-destruction. When the embodiment of hope was gunned down, a wave of despair flooded U Street. For generations, U Street had been the main artery of black-owned and black-run businesses, surrounded by lovely family neighborhoods full of Victorian row houses. Duke Ellington lived in the area. Langston Hughes did for a time. The Howard Theatre was where black Washington was able to see the best entertainers of the times. U Street was where you could find the barbershop of Gardner Bishop, the man who had joined forces with Charles Hamilton Houston to bring the landmark Bolling v. Sharpe case to its powerful conclusion.

  Within seventy-two hours of Dr. King’s death, U Street was burned out and the stores that were still standing had been looted. Ultimately 6,100 people were arrested, 900 stores were lost, 1,097 people were injured, and 12 were dead.2 The armory at Dunbar was used as a staging area for the national guard. A fifteen-year-old Dunbar student went missing on the first night. He was last heard from when he called his mother to tell her that in the chaos he had gotten her some pantyhose, the kind she liked. His father was later called to identify his body.3

  Lives were lost. Property was lost. And a reason to stay in DC was lost for black Americans who wanted to make a living, send their children to decent schools, and know their kids would come home safe.

  In February 1968, just prior to the riots, the board of education had been following up on a two-year-old request for funds to modernize Dunbar High School. After fifty years of use, including some years of neglect, Dunbar High School was showing its age. The pool was in such bad shape it had to be closed; it was finally repaired only because private donors provided the money. New lighting had been installed in the labs. But these projects were just patchwork measures. The school needed a significant rehab.