As of 1954, when Chief Justice Warren declared that separate schools were inherently unequal, all-black Dunbar High School sent a higher percentage of its graduates on to college than any white public high school in Washington. As far back as 1899, when the same tests were given in Washington’s four academic high schools at that time, this same all-black public high school scored higher than two of the three white public high schools.
Although most of its graduates went to local colleges, some were already beginning to go to some of the leading colleges in the country at the end of the nineteenth century—and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Over the period from 1892 to 1954, 34 of these graduates were admitted to Amherst College. Of these, 74 percent graduated from Amherst, and 28 percent of these black graduates were Phi Beta Kappas. Among other elite colleges from which students from this high school graduated Phi Beta Kappa during that era were Harvard, Yale, Williams, Cornell, and Dartmouth.
Among the graduates of this high school—known by various names over the years since its founding in 1870, including Dunbar High School since 1916—were “the first black who” had a range of career achievements. These included the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. at an American university, the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the first black tenured professor at a major national university, and Dr. Charles Drew, who won international recognition as a pioneer in the use of blood plasma.
Clearly, racially segregated schools were not inherently inferior. There is no question that most black schools in the South at that time, and many in the North, had inferior educational outcomes. And no doubt inferior resources supplied to black schools had a role in these outcomes, though not necessarily the sole role or the most important role.
In any event, the crusade to racially integrate public schools, during the decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, generated much social turmoil, racial polarization and bitter backlashes, but no general educational improvement from seating black school children next to white school children.
One of the painful ironies of the racial integration crusade was that Dunbar High School’s 85 years of academic achievement came to an abrupt end, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To comply with that decision, Washington schools were all made neighborhood schools, so that Dunbar could no longer admit black students from anywhere in the city, as it had before, but only students from the particular ghetto neighborhood where it was located. Dunbar quickly became a typical failing ghetto school, with both academic and behavioral problems.
