First Class

by Alison Stewart

  Dunbar placed me in a very powerful environment of associated people who had great vision and who were going places. You felt it. I don’t feel that this exists on a wide scale in the regular public schools. At Dunbar, this air of excellence permeated the whole building. Even though no one spoke to you particularly about any event, you knew you were a part of something very powerful. It did have its effect on my life…. I have observed the transition of our children since integration. It appears to me that in my neighborhood we had all levels of people, professionals, laborers, or whatever— middle class, upper class, lower class—we were all together. And so you always had element of people, who you gave a lot of respect. We went into one another’s homes. Played Monopoly. We enjoyed one another, yet there was an overall sense of discipline and purposefulness for whatever you were doing. The way it is today, it appears to me that many of the professional, upper middle class or whatever, have moved out of these neighborhoods. Kids are being impacted by other children who do no aspire to really high levels of living. I see that and I have seen it not only at Dunbar but in many schools.

  Graves articulated what many Dunbar graduates believe: that charter schools and vouchers have depleted DC’s public schools of human capital. The parents, no matter their economic status, who were in the school system fighting for their children’s education are now putting all their focus on getting their kids into charter school lotteries. Their children who, despite their home life or amount of money in their pockets, had the aspirations Dr. Graves described were no longer part of the public school community. Washington, DC, introduced charter schools in 1996, with 160 students attending. Currently 34,673 students—43 percent of DC public school students—attend charter schools.20

  Dr. Graves came and went as he pleased at Dunbar. For over twenty-five years he volunteered in the Dunbar guidance counseling department. He was a bit stooped over by his late eighties, but he could make good time up and down the ramps of Dunbar. He would arrive in the library, folders under his arm, warmly greeted by teachers and the staff. No one said no to Mr. Graves. He’d ask someone to type this letter for him or copy that newspaper article. Yes, Dr. Graves.

  He also served as a walking museum of knowledge about Dunbar. A young special-education teacher approached him in the library. She was very pretty and her hair was wrapped in a colorful scarf. With a light Jamaican accent, she asked about the new school where she would be working. “I read, and I was just trying to learn more. I’m just mesmerized. I’m overwhelmed really.”

  Graves addressed her the way he would any of his students. “You have a right to be,” he said. “All that I’ve been through, all the fifty or sixty years, are the years that helped me emerge, to be the kind of person I am, but they are years also that are gone. They’ve gone by. We are in a different period now. What you are doing and what the people down the stairs are doing is the new day!”

  The new teacher still wanted to know more about the history of Dunbar. “What I want to get these kids to do is to appreciate the history of Dunbar. So many of them—”

  “Don’t waste your time doing that. What you want to do is get them revitalized, energized to be something. The histories are right to talk—that’s what I’ve been doing for all these years.”

  “OK.”

  “It has no powerful effect on the kids today. The kids are trying to make it out of their dire environment.”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t get that over to you enough. No. These are principals who’ve gone from Dunbar who could beautifully state what old Dunbar was like, how beautiful it is. We try to set the tone, and they could articulate magnificently. That is not where you are.”

  “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. OK.”

  “You’re in special ed, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there you go. You’ve got to get those kids feeling good about themselves.”

  “Sure, sure, it’s a different time and—”

  “It’s a different time. So, don’t waste your time. Yeah, touch upon it lightly.”

  “Mm-hmm. Yeah, I did that.”

  “I’m speaking as an eighty-seven-year-old man who’s been through all of that now, see.”

  Originally I had contacted Dr. Graves seeking his permission to cover the Dunbar triennial reunion, a gathering of all the classes dating back to 1928. I wanted to approach it as a fly-on-the-wall journalist. Instead I got a date with an eighty-seven-year-old man who wanted to make sure I did not just celebrate the past. He wanted me to met the new team in charge of Dunbar.

  No one said no to Dr. Graves, which is how I found myself returning from a Dunbar reunion in his rusted-out Toyota as he peered over his thick glasses while making some liberal interpretations of the traffic laws.

  On a bright October day, Dunbar graduates of all ages, shapes, and ambulatory capacities arrived at Martin’s Crosswinds banquet hall in Greenbelt, Maryland for the Dunbar All Class Triennial Gala. Some walked in, some walker-ed in, and some wheeled in, too. It was a Sunday afternoon event, but some of Dunbar’s ladies turned out with brightly colored silks and sequins. The gentlemen were in suits and ties. James Grigsby (Dunbar 1946) sported a bright red sport coat among a sea of crimson, black, and white, the school’s colors. Upon entering the reception area, alumni exchanged hugs and kisses with old friends and shared fond remembrances of those who had passed. The grand ballroom was filled with circular tables, each with a class year displayed on a stand, dating all the way back to 1928. There were white linen tablecloths and silver, carefully arranged flowers.

  There was a lot on the agenda. Several Dunbar graduates were honored for their achievements. Among the honorees was Dr. Harold Freeman (Dunbar 1959), the son of a truck driver, who went on to found the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention in Harlem. He was the director of surgery at Harlem Hospital for twenty-five years. His greatest contribution to the medical field may have been his implementation of the first patient navigator system. Dr. Freeman believes it is a moral obligation to raise health standards for the poor. The navigation system, which has been adopted across the country, helps guide poor and struggling cancer patients too intimated by the system to continue their care. It has doubled life expectancy in the areas where it is used.

  Also honored were Dunbar alumni who had graciously funded scholarships. And of course there were star sightings too. The master of ceremonies pointed out, “In the room, we have a very special guest, a young man with the Dunbar High School. He played football [and other sports; he was a] three-sport all high. He graduated in ’72. He was a quarterback on the football team. He went from playing before two or three hundred friends, family, and classmates to 102,000 people at the Ohio State University, and he was the most valuable player in the Rose Bowl in 1974, and he taught his roommate, Archie Griffin, all he knows about football. Ladies and gentlemen, please greet Cornelius Green. Let him be known by his nickname, Flam!” The same Cornelius Green an old Dunbarite, forty years earlier, had brushed off as a role model.

  Dr. Graves and his date (me) found their place close to the front. He was like a rooster in a henhouse, flirting and laughing with the ladies from the class of 1935: Beatrice, Marion, Yvonne, Therrell, Penny, and Cornelia. Cornelia, who had been valedictorian, was feeling great. “I took one of my, I call them my ‘Michael Jackson pills,’ so I could make it today.” She laughed, but then in all seriousness added, “I only take them sometimes. I don’t want to get addicted.”

  Therrell, the daughter of a prominent doctor who had driven a giant black Cadillac to make house calls, recalled that her father “was a general practitioner. We didn’t have as many specialists in those days. He would go to the house. He would go to you. If you came to the office, it was one dollar. I had the books. One dollar—the name and the one dollar. If he went to your house it was two dollars. He would spend many a Sunday afternoon riding around trying to collect two dollars. Do I remember it? I remember them giving him chickens or something if they could
n’t pay the dollar. It was just, you know, amazing.”

  The announcer was moving things along. “We get to the part where you use these clappers again. I know that you’ve been using them all along. We’re going to do the roll call of the classes by decade, starting with the present and going back to the past. So, we’ll start with the decade of the 2000. Those who are Dunbar graduates from the decade of 2000, let’s hear your clappers.” An uncomfortable silence with one or two claps in the distance.

  “Oh, you have a few.” He hurried along. “Decade of the ’90s. Decade of the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s, ’50s. Wow! It’s nice to have the ’50s here and nice to see you, and I know you appreciate being seen.” The roll call was like an audio representation of Dunbar’s history, the further back the announcer went, the more robust the reaction. “The decade of the ’40s. The ’50s and ’40s are still vigorous, huh? The ’30s. The ’20s. Is this table ’51? Is this table ’51? Fifty-one, the graduates—we got some people there from the classes of 1928, 1929. I think we just stand for them. One of the ladies from the class of ’28 has a yearbook with her, so after the program you may stop by and look at some history. By the way, there is a person from the ’20s who wasn’t able to make it. Her name is Alberta Addison. She is one hundred years old.”

  Dr. Graves, Alison Stewart, and the ladies of the class of 1935, at the Dunbar Gala, October 2009.

  Vince Gray, then the chairman of the city council, was also honored that day for his long career in public service, but was distressed by the disconnect between Old Dunbar and New Dunbar. “You know what really bothered me about that dinner that I went to, lunch or whatever, we went to out there and that was, after you got past about 1975 or ’80, there was almost no alumni. Where are those alumni? There needs to be some outreach to find the folks who are younger at this stage. And I’m not sure that this isn’t a reflection of the comfort zone that people are operating in at this point. You know, from the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, who they were at Dunbar and are comfortable with those folks. We’re not comfortable with the ones who came out in the ’80s and ’90s, so we don’t do much to bring them in. Yet, frankly, it’s obvious there will be a day when there is no more alumni federation if you don’t bring the younger folks. So, I’d like to—I’m reaching back, you know, to accomplish that.”

  A video was shown, a deeply dramatic historical perspective of the high school and its great achievers. When a picture of the 1977 building came into view, a few boos were heard, a general grumble arose, and one lady vigorously put her thumbs down. The Old Dunbar grads still have emotional attachments to the 1916 building. When it was destroyed, some took bricks and pieces of the building, which they display in their homes. One woman has an original cornerstone in her backyard, surrounded by lovely plants and ivy.

  After the film, the director, from the class of 1951, made his way to the podium with something to say. “We all have a responsibility, and we should feel good about this legacy and the pathfinders that have brought us to this day, but if we leave our school the way it is, that legacy will be lost forever. Our young people that are attending the school now will be lost in this fast-paced, moving world. So each of us—I don’t care how old we are, how disabled we are—we have a responsibility to take this video and what we got from this today and continue to work and help our young people be a part of this society, not followers but leaders.”

  Bridging that divide has been a long-term goal of the Dunbar Alumni Federation. It’s one of the reasons it holds this big event every three years. Its officers—James Pittman (Dunbar 1951), Brigadier General Elmer Brooks (Dunbar 1949), and Carrie Thornhill (Dunbar 1961)—tried to walk the fine line of celebrating the past while recognizing the present-day challenges facing Dunbar and its students. Classes are encouraged to sponsor students, not just at reunion time but also throughout the year. Lynettra Artis, class of 2001, is perhaps one of the biggest success stories of alumni involvement. “I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was nine years old,” Lynettra recalled as she crossed her long legs and leaned back on a tufted couch in the lobby of the Henley Park Hotel. She was dressed in a laid-back yet professional outfit because she was due at work shortly. She is an attorney specializing in contract law. She grew up in a single-parent household with a mother who was a legal secretary. “My mother struggled,” is how Lynettra describes the way her mother moved the family from place to place to make sure Lynettra could go to a good school. By ninth grade she was enrolled and on scholarship at a private Catholic school, but she knew it was taking a toll. “Georgetown visitation—too expensive. Bus money, tuition, uniform. I told my mother at the end of my ninth-grade year, I am going to the local school, which was Dunbar. It was a block away.” Her mother was not happy about the decision. She worried about the neighborhood and she worried about her bright child’s future. “I told her I am going to get As anywhere I go, so don’t worry about that. It was better for Mom; she had two other kids to think about. I didn’t need much. I didn’t want much.” Lynettra knew that one of her brothers was on the edge. While she was in law school, he was in jail as a result of his association with a gang. Lynettra never had a problem. She made friends and she made straight As. “Mrs. Hilton couldn’t stand it,” Lynettra said as she smiled, showing off her immense dimples. Her English teacher marched her into the principal office and made her enroll in pre-engineering. “She said it [school] was too easy for me and I needed a challenge.” By senior year Lynettra had the grades and scores to get into college and she zeroed in on Amherst. “Dr. Graves found out where I was applying; he told me to write a letter about why you want to go there and what you want to do with your education. As soon as I wrote that letter alumni came out of the woodwork! I don’t know what I did, I cannot tell you, but that letter was important.” Lynettra had tapped into the connection between Amherst and the Dunbar of yesteryear. One hundred years earlier Robert Mattingly was the first of a long line of Dunbar graduates to go to Amherst. Lynettra’s interests sparked something in the alumni, maybe a call to action to help a young woman who would make something of her opportunity. “It was definitely the Amherst thing. At the time I didn’t know there had been this direct connection for years, but for decades Amherst hadn’t thought about Dunbar.” She could not believe her luck. Money poured in. “Amherst graduates just came out! I asked myself, ‘Is this happening right now?’ Throwing money my way, my mother’s way, so she wouldn’t have to worry about me. It was beyond my dreams. I knew I would have to struggle. I promised her you are not going to pay a dime for college. That is not your worry; worry about the other two. I got a merit scholarship. I did not have to pay. I had food in my belly. I had transportation home for holidays, Christmas, summer. I came out with best college education and had to pay a little, little amount of money.” She enrolled in Howard Law School and was living the dream. “I don’t know if it is true but Dr. Graves used to say that I helped get the alumni excited again.”

  In 2008, the federation awarded close to thirty scholarships to seniors.

  One such scholarship recipient was Sydnee McLeoud, who began to cry when she explained how much the help meant to her. “I’m so grateful and appreciative because a lot of people don’t even get to go to college, or have this help and support. And I am so grateful.” A 2008 graduate, she was in tears thinking about what the scholarship would mean to her and the teachers who helped her apply. “I was blessed to have a teacher, Miss Townsend, Miss Gloria Townsend. She teaches banking and credit, and she saw something in me and referred me to the class of ’36. The scholarship, it was a four-year-plan scholarship to just go—books, schooling, everything just taken care of.”

  The scholarship means a lot to this young woman with serious responsibilities. “I would have had to get financial aid. I know nothing about financial aid, so that’s a big struggle. I actually have a one-year-old son, so this is going to change a lot for him too, because I would like to be a teacher and for him to even go to the school or see Mommy’s
doing something. If he would like to be a teacher or help out in any type of way, it’s all just so great and nice. I can’t tell you, but I’m so grateful.”

  Sydnee, like a lot of students at Dunbar, didn’t really have a sense of the school’s history or any old school alumni. “I did not know that classes did scholarships or anything like this. This is all very new to me. My grandmother actually graduated ’62, and my mother was ’89, I think. I’ve never heard anything about this at all.”

  The generational divide is wide and deep. Time and time again, Dunbar graduates told stories of despair about encounters with young black youth.

  Lonise Robinson, class of 1946, was a devoted teacher in the system for years. “I found that in some of the poorest neighborhoods, those parents were just as concerned about what their children are going to do, and they wanted to cooperate to the fullest. But now it’s a whole new kind of idea out here, now, that they are owed something, and they can come with the clothes and their long fingernails and the weaves and whatnot, and the children are just going to the devil.”

  “And I don’t see how the fellows walk with those pants, with the crotch way down there,” her husband, Floyd, also class of 1946, chimed in. An eighty-something James Grigsby couldn’t help himself one day getting out of the Metro stop in Southeast Washington. He tapped a young man on the shoulder and told him to pull up his pants and have some self-respect. “I know he could have knocked me down, but I had to do it.”

  Then, a big moment at the reunion arrived. The alumni were about meet the team chosen to turn around Dunbar. Many already had their opinions about Rhee, but the new Dunbar administration was still new, just two months into its tenure. A tall, barrel-chested, white-bearded man took to the microphone. The room grew quiet.

  “Good afternoon,” he said in big, booming voice.

  “Good afternoon,” the entire room responded.