The original request in 1966 was for $1.3 million to build a 65,994-square-foot, air-conditioned addition that would include thirty extra classrooms, double the gym space, and install fifteen hundred new lockers to accommodate another twelve hundred students.4 Dunbar was going to be a huge school, as big as Eastern, capable of accommodating twenty-five hundred students. The plan was to spread the financing over two years, 1967 and 1968. There was some concern about building the new addition, as some houses in the neighborhood would have to be sacrificed, but the point became moot. Six months after the riots, the board of education requested funds to replace the 1916 building entirely.
A movement emerged to make the Shaw area around Dunbar a phoenix that would rise from literal ashes. The Shaw Urban Renewal program was launched to rework the neighborhoods that had suffered from the demise of the U Street commercial corridor and all the good things it attracted. The city planning commission created a whole proposal for a post-1968 version of the neighborhoods near Dunbar. The plan tackled parking spaces, affordable housing, and even the width of the sidewalks. The plan also stated that “obsolete schools should be eliminated and sites meeting established standards should be provided. New schools and associated play space and recreational facilities should be grouped as unified campuses to provide richer academic offerings and to provide economies in the use of scarce land.”5
The 1916 building was a remaining piece of connective tissue to Old Dunbar. Many changes had come to the school in the years since legal segregation had been knocked down. The school now served one neighborhood, not the entire city. In the course of fifteen years, Dunbar had become an average public school in the sense that there were smart kids who did well and there were students who didn’t care about their grades. There were students who were dedicated athletes and students who barely showed up. There were the well behaved and the disruptive. There were students from families who valued education and students whose parents did not. It was a general-population school, and all segments of the population were represented.
The change became evident almost immediately. In the fall of 1956 Principal Charles Lofton realized he now had students who had been robbed of a good early childhood education. In 1956, out of 110 new students, 108 came from other school systems, primarily the Deep South.6 Lofton said the students were “ill prepared” as compared to students from Washington’s “old order” homes. But he was hopeful, “Our new students are soon to pick up the ways of old students…. These students need love and affection because nine times out of ten, they aren’t getting it at home. Once our faculty realizes these students aren’t going on to college or professional careers and recognize the fact that they must work after graduation the biggest hurdle is over and we all pull together.”7 Lofton and his team did not lower standards for behavior. An anti-vandalism campaign was started. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was invited to the school to address the students. Dunbar still maintained a dress code: no jeans, and the young men were required to wear ties. Lofton reminded the students of the “thousands who have preceded you.” Lofton did not find discipline to be a problem with some of the new transplants but Lofton did note that there was a problem “of economics.” As the student body changed, so did the teaching staff. One 1962 Dunbar graduate told me she felt that some of the Dunbar teachers were snobby and just didn’t want to teach neighborhood kids so they left for other jobs. Many of the greatest teachers who had taught at Dunbar for decades died in the 1960s. Anita LeMon, who went to Dunbar herself and taught Latin there since 1930, passed away in 1961. Clyde McDuffie, who taught French at M Street and Dunbar, departed this life. Other teachers, like Mr. Tignor, took advantage of new opportunities. Charles Lofton, a Dunbar graduate himself, had been the school’s principal since 1948. He saw the school through the transition but then accepted a promotion in 1964 and left his post. Suddenly, there was a new group of educators on the scene.
The first officially elected school board flexed its muscle and decided that Dunbar was the definition of obsolete. The building in its current form didn’t and couldn’t address the needs of the modern student, and its history seemed as if it belonged to another school. This point—that Dunbar’s days in the superlative category were over—was punctuated during the last week of 1969. At the end of a decade that brought change in how students were grouped, where they went to school, and what their neighborhoods looked like, the Washington Post ran a shocking and enormous headline that offended more than a few people: YEARS BRING CHANGE TO DUNBAR HIGH SCHOOL—“BLACK ELITE” INSTITUTION NOW TYPICAL SLUM FACILITY popped off the front page of the City Life section on Sunday, December 28, 1969. What a way to end the 1960s.
“It wasn’t scary or anything. It was just seriously deteriorated. The trophy case just stopped at 1954,” recalls Lawrence Feinberg, who wrote the article just over forty years ago.8 “The school itself stopped functioning as a selective school. Blacks could go anywhere in the city, but it was no longer a selective academic high school.” He called the change “ironic.” After the reporter had observed Dunbar’s high absenteeism and noisy halls, but generally orderly classrooms, for some reason Principal Howard F. Bolden was extremely candid with him.
Bolden had been the assistant principal at Dunbar for ten years, from 1953 to 1963. When Bolden took the the top post he found the school a different place. He had to deal with crime, specifically drug dealers in the area around the school. One Dunbar student left school at 10:20 AM, walked a few blocks, bought six capsules of heroin, and was back in class and high by 11:00 AM.9 Five years after his return, Bolden felt compelled to tell the reporter, “The old Dunbar was no more like this school than it was like the man in the moon.”10
Bolden was not a favorite of many of the students, including Blanche Heard (Dunbar 1969). She was a cute-as-a-button cheerleader, a class officer, and a budding activist. She organized a sit-in at Principal Bold-en’s door to protest the demolition of the school. She and her friends felt he did not fight for their school, “the castle” as she calls it, and that he didn’t take the student’s concerns about Dunbar seriously.
It was Principal Charles Lofton who had made the announcement to Dunbar students the day the big Supreme Court decision came down. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (Dunbar 1955) was there. “I remember that day because Charles Lofton made me remember,” she said. “There was a gong, and Mr. Lofton said he wanted the attention of every student. He said the Supreme Court of the United States just declared school segregation to be unconstitutional. It was a moment that nobody who was there would ever forget. There were teachers who nearly cried. It was the kind of announcement you’d make at Dunbar and know everyone at Dunbar would understand what it meant to us. The point was, it was one of the great teaching moments of all time, and he understood it.”11
Later in life Lofton reflected on what that day in May meant for Dunbar in the long term. “I wouldn’t want it to go out that I’m not for integration—I am. I’m not for what it did to Dunbar and to students.”12 It is bitterly ironic that three of the key players in dismantling legal segregation—Charles Hamilton Houston, George E. C. Hayes, and Oliver Hill—learned their lessons at a school that became an unintended casualty of necessary civil rights action. The legal arguments that led to the 1954 rulings were compelling and correct—on paper. Fifteen years after Bolling v. Sharpe, the Washington schools were not integrated; they were simply legally desegregated. The “covert” segregation, as some called it, perpetuated the same problems in education.
By this point the tracking system had been abolished for two years and all levels of students were in classes together. It exasperated at least one teacher who would go on the record: “I don’t care what Judge Wright says. How can you teach a class unless you group students?”13 Some teachers were dedicated, and on the flip side were teachers who showed up just for the paycheck. This all played out at a school board meeting when a bright Dunbar senior named Deborah Powell got up to educate the board about what was and wa
sn’t happening in the classrooms at Dunbar.
“Many of the teachers at Dunbar are inadequate. The Dunbar curriculum seems very limited, since they offer only three years of French.” Powell had become upset when she discovered something as she was applying to colleges: one of her top choices required four years of a foreign language. She was out of luck because a fourth year wasn’t even offered. “The number of counselors needs to increase. And board members should have a closer relationship with students by visiting the schools and talking with the students on our own ground.”14
“Miss Powell, do you think that a student representative on the Board of Education would help to begin to communicate some of the problems you have mentioned?” asked a board member.
“Yes, but you, the board members, should come into the school, and meet the students on their own level. It would be a greater benefit.”
“Do you think students should serve on the board?”
“It is a good idea but students who are failing would not likely be placed on the board and that type of student would probably have more to relate but would never have the chance because that student would not have an opportunity to serve on the board.” Several teachers at the meeting agreed with the brave senior, except for one who told the board, “I do not think the children in Dunbar are as dissatisfied as they are in some of the other schools I have visited.”
“The reason so many of the students aren’t dissatisfied,” Powell countered, “is because they did not know why they should be. They do not know how deprived or how remedial their preparation is until they go away to school to find out that they can just get by.”
“Miss Powell,” the teacher responded, “students have to do some things on their own and cannot sit by and wait for teachers to make assignments. They have to learn to read.”
“Yes,” Powell agreed, but she would not back down. “But that requires motivation, and unless a student was motivated, it wouldn’t work. I have been lucky because I have been motivated.”
At this point another board member jumped in with a provocative question. “Miss Powell, do you think students should be involved in the evaluation of teachers and principals?”
“Yes, the students really know a teacher after he or she has been taught for a semester. I would like to evaluate my teachers at Dunbar after four years, if I had the opportunity.”
Dunbar High School was like any other community school—the highs, the lows, and the average. However, average was a concept that was anathema to pre-1954 graduates of the school. The columnist William Raspberry wrote about the change in Dunbar in the 1960s and ’70s: “The idea of academic excellence that Dunbar symbolized has fallen victim to the sort of democratization that achieves equality by reducing everything to mediocrity.”15 Principal Bolden put it in much plainer terms. “Between the Old Dunbar and the New Dunbar, there’s day and night.”
Bolden was reassigned shortly after this article appeared, but he had identified the formation two groups of Dunbarites—Old and New—who would clash over the old and new building.
1971–73
The cover of the sleekly designed submission portfolio was blanketed with pixelated dots that spelled DUNBAR DUNBAR DUNBAR DUNBAR DUN-BAR DUNBAR. There was one line of copy: DUNBAR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL REPLACEMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C. The presentation’s introductory page was an eye-popping orange sheet explaining the need for and scope of the new building. This was followed by forty-three pages of intricate detail about the facility that could be Dunbar Senior High School—no one could ever say they didn’t know what they were getting. And no one really mentioned why Dunbar High School was now Dunbar Senior High School, but there it was in Neutra font on the front of the school.
The well-regarded firm Bryant and Bryant prepared the proposal, knowing that there were two audiences for this project. The introduction began, “Dunbar Senior High School is a historical institution in Washington, D.C.” for audience one. And then for audience two, the introduction continued, “The new demand on education and technological evolution have rendered the facility increasingly obsolete and the quality of program responsibility has been greatly restricted.”
The school board had chosen the firm with input from the community. It seemed like a good fit. Brothers Charles and Edward Bryant had started their own firm in the 1960s and grown it into the largest black-owned architecture firm in the country. Their ultramodern work was on display around the District, and they seemed more than capable of handling the job.
The design presented took into account research by a Dunbar school planning committee, the administrators in charge of building and grounds for the city, and the “architectural convictions” of the firm Bryant and Bryant.16 The sell’s big finish included an explanation of the intermingling of progressive education pedagogy and a progressive building.
“The concept here is a school within a school. It is articulated in a vertical expression, and is urban oriented towards a more intensive use of a restricted site. We firmly believe that this approach to planning will yield a facility which will do justice to its history and in turn be one which the community, the School Board, Washington, D.C., and the architects will be proud to be associated with.” No doubt if an old-school Dunbar graduate had proofread the plan, he or she would have informed the copy writer not to end a sentence with a preposition.
If you looked at the new Dunbar layout from above, the L-shaped complex comprised of hexagonal units looked a bit like a Buck Rogers-style ray gun. From the street level it resembled a bar graph: the length of the school was the x-axis, and the first wing to the left was about halfway up the y-axis. The academic tower in the middle spiked up ten stories high, the tallest bar on the imaginary graph, and then the next section of the school returned again to midlevel on the y-axis. The tall tower was the centerpiece of the school and it consisted of multiple levels and mezzanines connected by ramps. It was a single building complex made up of three components: The southern part of the complex housed the auditorium and art and music facilities. The central portion housed the adminstirative suite, career education area, and what were described as “learning centers” in the high-rise tower. The rest of the building was where you would find the physical education component. Starting at the top was the Penthouse West, then down to the Level Five Mezzanine West, Fifth Floor East, Fifth Floor West, Fourth Mezzanine East, Fourth Floor East, Third Mezzanine West, Third Floor East, Third Floor West, Second Floor East, Second Floor West, First Floor, Ground Floor, Second Basement, First Basement Ground, Basement One, and Basement. The designers claimed it would “present a more pleasant net psychological effect than a conventional space.” The levels were stacked one on top of the other like a big concrete layer cake. In fact, almost everything about the school was concrete. The foundation would be made of reinforced concrete. The interior walls would be precast concrete slabs poured and formed off-site and installed later. The exterior walls called for brownish aggregate concrete, which had an industrial chic look because the smooth outside layer of the concrete had been removed to show a coarse, rough-hewn texture. The entryway floors were going to be a shiny composite material and the rooms carpeted. The doors were to be painted metal, and the roof was terne metal. These were all long-lasting materials if properly maintained. The school looked impenetrable. Given the violence in the area, that was a good thing; however, it did have a lot of exterior doors—ninety-seven of them.
The school would be so modern, so groovy, so contemporary, so thoroughly 1970s, from its architectural design all the way to its educational philosophy. The New Dunbar was designed around the educational concept of the moment: open classrooms. The reform movement had fallen head over heels with the British concept of open learning environments. Rather than the strict, formal model of a classroom, an open concept space didn’t have any official delineated areas so that so-called learning communities could develop.
In theory, without strict walls, teachers and students could work back and forth between thes
e learning communities. Good ideas could flow easily. Students could be put into flexible groupings, which could grow or shrink organically. To accommodate this plan for Dunbar’s academic curriculum, the new school was designed with demountable partitions rather than walls. These were prefabricated walls that could be disassembled and relocated based on the needs of the classroom.
The design made an interesting statement about the times. While the interior was open, the exterior was a fortress, keeping the real world out there in the real world. The architecture critic for the Washington Post, who had seen the plans for Dunbar II, was all for the change it represented. “Its brick and mortar arrangement does away with the confining authoritarian rigidity of the old egg crate classrooms and recognizes the constant in our time is change and that education is a fluid process.” In his review, the German-born critic also expressed fascination with the form of the new building. “New Dunbar is a container that will surely give most promising shape not only to the stagnant fluid of education in our ghettos but also to the life of the neighborhood.”17
Dunbar Senior High School opened in April 1977.
Courtesy of Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives
Dunbar II would be 354,896 square feet and take up 1.5 acres of the new 12.89-acre site. It would be fully air-conditioned, housing close to eighty rooms in different sections including labs, an auditorium, a pool, underground parking, and in a sign of the times, a day-care center. And a really big sports field.
One of the architects’ stated objectives was to achieve “a dignified building located on the main thoroughfare to the Capitol.”18 For this to happen, the school would have to be built in a slightly different location. Bryant and Bryant proposed sliding the site of the building west and a little north, almost diagonal from where the current building stood. It was a radical move that would require completely shutting off O Street and putting the back end of the proposed football field right where the 1916 building had been. It had been a sore point for years that Dunbar did not have a regulation-size football field or stadium, even though the school was growing into a sports powerhouse. A little stadium and field had been constructed forty years before, when alumni raised the money themselves, but by the ’70s the grounds weren’t anything anyone would want to play on or sit in.
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