1619, the First Official group of enslaved africans reached at jamestown, virginia. 1865, the legal abolishment of chattel slavery. Shortly thereafter, an estimated 500 freedom schools, to show the premium that stolen africans placed on education. 1870, the Preparatory High School for colored youth, now called Dunbar High School, was formed. 1890, the first mohawk conference on the negro question. How to educate these now free stolen africans. That is quoted by rutherford b. Hayes. Having deprived them of their labor, liberty, we have no excuse for neglecting them. I highlight the premium stolen africans placed on education before enslavement and afterwards, as well as the struggles we faced to get quality education in the face of insurmountable odds. To ensure highquality education that reflected us, in the book you will read the names of great race men and women of their time. As well as other prominent figures of stolen african history to come to the halls of Dunbar High School. Written with an intimate knowledge of the material, from firsthand accounts by gathering oral history as well as documented research, and most importantly written in narrative format were the people struggles and triumphs of this historic institution directly into the readers hearts. I will go ahead and declare that Allison Stewart has done the alumni and her parents proud with the telling of this important story. She first caught my attention as a vj on mtv. She was on abc world news tonight, ill be at 12 00 to 6 00 in the morning. She must be a night owl like myself, i guess. Radio one npr, pbs, and now she is right here. I now bring to the podium, the former vj, the news journalist, the wife, the mother, the could have been model and now author, Allison Stewart and her book, first class the legacy of dunbar, americas first black public high school. [applause] allison thank you for that lovely introduction. My name is Allison Stewart. My mom was in the dunbar class of 1947. My dad was in the dunbar class of 1946. My grandfather was in the m 1950. Street class of 1950. If you are from washington, d. C. , then you have heard about Dunbar High School. If youre not from washington, d. C. , the story might be unfamiliar to you. I do want to introduce it to folks. What is so important about it . The story goes Something Like this. Dunbar high school was a place where highly educated and engaged teachers who had the highest expectations for their students, and as a result they went on to college. 80 of dunbar graduates went to college in the 1950s. They excelled in a wide range of fields from business to education to the sciences and arts. I could be talking about and over or exeter or any of these schools, but one of the reasons that Dunbar High School was so spectacular and the story is spectacular is because Dunbar High School was a segregated high school. It produced some of the greatest africanamericans and americans. So many firsts came from Dunbar High School. The list is so long, i have to stretch out. I will give you a few. The first black graduate of the Naval Academy. The First Black Army general. The first black federal judge. The first black president ial cabinet member. You see where i am going with this. Billy taylor, just musician. Even more important, but as important, all these boldfaced names where the hundreds of teachers who came out of Dunbar High School who spanned out into washington, d. C. And into the south uncovered School Systems with the fantastic basis of an education. How many people have Dunbar High School graduates who are parents or aunties. I was looking for people to interview for the book and i was looking to talk to some people. I realize Valerie Jarrett father went to dunbar. This is one of the story she told me. This sums it up for people. About the first time she heard about Dunbar High School from her father. She said, i was a very young child. Dunbar high school was critical in my fathers path in life. He gives it full credit for having been educated with his colleagues at a worldclass level. Any time i would ever say anything that was grammatically incorrect, he would say, as Dunbar High School has taught me, and then would correct me. He is a big believer in not being lazy in grammar or how you speak. I think that as a young child, remember him telling me stories about Dunbar High School and just get it in an honest amount of credit for the shaping of his life. One of the great benefits of working on this book im writing this book, the reason i wanted to write this book initially is that i would grow the story for my parents and for my uncle, cousins, who all went to Dunbar High School and i thought it was an incredible story. I was fascinated with the idea that we had angrily educated africanamericans still living in a segregated city, that you coulds beak french fluently, but some person in a store would not let you come in and buy a coat. I just thought that was a bizarre contradiction. One of the great benefits i thought was that i could actually talk to people who had experienced this first hand. I realized i was in a bit of a race against time because the people who could there witness to what happened at Dunbar High School were all in their 70s, 80s, 90s. So, i told the story before if you heard it, if not, its funny. I decided i was going to do it. I started writing query letters to get interviews, and i really did not have myself together, so i sent out a few and i got one back corrected from a dunbar graduate. [laughter] alison so that was a clue about what i was doing. I was very lucky to have that happen early. I was always very happy. I was working at msnbc. I came back and checked my voicemail and it was senator ed brooks. He said i would be happy to talk to you about Dunbar High School. That is kind of the challenge in the easy part. The difficult part about writing a book like this is my protagonist is a building, the school, the thing. How do you bring that to life . As i talk to graduates and read from research, i realized that Dunbar High School had a spirit and a soul. I wanted to see what the school was like. It the first time was 2006, there must be history at the school, yearbooks, so i was working in washington, d. C. And said im going over to Dunbar High School to check it out. Somebody said Dunbar High School has an awesome football team. And i said, yeah, but what about all the great academics . When i got to the school, i understood why he didnt know. I went to the school that was built with that brutal architecture. Nobody started me. Journalism says walk like you know you belong and keep going, so i did that. I noticed there were picture frames up on the wall in cheap, plastic frames tilted and cracked with ed brooks picture and it was really very sad. There was a cabinet that had some old, faded photographs, one was dr. Charles a true he was a kid holding a basketball. They were feted and not behind protective glass. It struck me, oh, my god, this might actually be lost if somebody does not write this down, something, someone needs to record the history. For a while i thought well should i contact Michael Lewis or one of these fantastic writers. I said, no, i am going to do it, why not . That is how i started my journey. One of the things that is interesting, which i learned a lot and researching this. I spent they know me at the how her library like you wouldnt believe. One of the things i found so interesting about washington, d. C. , which i had no idea, maybe you folks do, is washington had good schools for colored children in the 19th century. I say this in the introduction of the book that i use the length of the era, colored, negro, black, africanamerican, and this is interesting, one of the editors of my publishers of this is making me really uncomfortable. I said, good, that is the point. It shouldnt make you feel a certain way. But washington had very decent schools. They were small, private, werent churches, word homes, because unlike in the south as marshall mentioned in the south where it was something illegal to teach someone a colored person to read, it was a colored person i went down to South Carolina to read the slave transcripts and a woman remembered dont getting caught with a pencil or pen, because that was as bad as killing your master. Even though there were going to be Public Schools provided for colored children, they were going to stop them from learning. That was an amazing, amazing thing, and i really feel like it is one of the cornerstones of why the school was able to be established. You had learning going on in the district. So after the civil war, the local leaders realize that we have to do something with all these free colored children, and there were i dont give you too many details, but there were a group of three black men is other opportunity. They said if were going to get past the Grammar School level, this is the time to do it. So they were able to establish a high school, a Preparatory High School for colored youth, and they werent given to a building, so they went to the basement of a church with four students on november 4, 1870, and that was the first day of class. Here is Something Interesting that we started realizing that Dunbar High School was about a spirit and the soul. There wasnt a physical building. The school traveled from building to building in and out of Grammar Schools, and in the course of that, the people who were the teachers and the principles began very early on establishing it as a place of academic rigor. Among the first three principles was the first black graduate of harvard and the first black woman in the country to get her fouryear degree, mary j patterson. She was very instrumental and started a strict academic curriculum. The teachers at Dunbar High School over the course of the old Dunbar High School, as people caught were great intellects, the first blacks to go to competitive schools, yale, harvard, and when they graduated they could not get jobs. They cannot teach and universities. If they got masters or phds they connected because of the jim crow laws. So many came back and taught at dunbar. Im sure many of you heard stories about people having a High School Teacher with a phd in math and the languages, at the competition story, the first two earn all her credits for a phd at radcliffe. She graduated at Dunbar High School and got her phd at radcliffe, even in the process when she went to the south you can knock it in a certain libraries. They were not n. She still managed to complete it. That was the kind of teaching course that was at Dunbar High School. It also attracted people who had degrees in law. There were the medical doctors. One of the principles was a lawyer. When someone asked him why he was teaching he said it he like the paycheck. [laughter] alison the reputation of the school really grew. It became a way of life to be at Dunbar High School, and there was a certain code of behavior and certain things were expected of you, and one of the things that i love to reading more than anything in my research with the handbooks. They have instructions on how to behave. Im going to read a little bit from the handbooks. Im going to lead up to it. Being a dunbar student was a way of life. The program was a given. It was the reason why they went to Dunbar High School and would excel. The school had a latin motto. The words formed a halo around a woman and a rope with a book in her lap and it was embossed on every yearbook. New students were informed that to be at Dunbar High School they had to have a serious purpose to succeed. To achieve those ends, students were canceled on how to behave. They were given a handbook and asked to read and consulted regularly. The handbook might make a libertarian uncomfortable. The student handbook instructed students not to gossip and i have good manners, sleeping eight hours a day with the windows open. There were even guidelines on how to pick friends. Girls and boys who fail and lessons who are unsatisfactory and lessons who are unsatisfactory in department or careless in their habits should not be chosen as companions. [laughter] alison the way the administration sought, when a student chose to comment to dunbar and stay there, he or she was a representative of dunbar wherever that student went. Two pages of the student handbook were devoted to how to act in public. Im walking down the street, avoid loud talking, boisterous laughter were familiar actions. If you desire to converse with a friend, dont loiter. Leave the street corners for traffic. For conduct that social affairs, students were told always greet her host and hostess is upon entering the halls. If the function is a dance, remember the fall suggestions, boys as girls. Thank your partner and escort her back to her seat. Do not leave her in the middle of the floor. Girls, remove wraps before dancing. To not accept an invitation with anyone with whom you are not inclined to hear it come chewing is in bad taste. Avoid it. [laughter] alison they meant business. Every victory for the school is hardfought, from getting the buildings to maintaining the curriculum. The school was under constant fire to roll back. At one point it was suggested that they exchanged Robinson Caruso for shakespeare so it would be easier for the negro children to understand. There was an effort to roll in some of the technical aspects, business aspects, but the principles, students, and Community Fought hard to continue to keep dunbar primarily a academic school. This was to protect the students. This was to prepare the students for an inhospitable world that they knew they would be going into. That meet read a little bit more from Valerie Jarretts father. I got to go to an event at Marthas Vineyard that celebrated dunbar graduates. They had five graduates from the 19 servers from the 1930s on stage, including Valerie Jarretts dad. Sporting his bowtie and sue told the audience, we were told that you can do it, and when you leave here, you can compete. That is the most important thing, and we believed it. When you get out, you can compete with anybody. John king and Harold Nelson spoke of their families involvement in the school. Then there was the school unity rector. All the people i knew went to dunbar. That is what it was, a community. Harold nelson got a big laugh from the audience when he added my mother kept saying that you are going to be somebody. The other part of being somebody is that you will never embarrass me. [laughter] alison this really struck me as something that i take for granted in my life, and im sure most people my age take for granted in our lives. Adlai cromwell said the gift of dunbar was, the teachers put their faith and hope on the intelligent students, students who came from simple homes. A lot of parents and modest jobs, regular jobs, government jobs. It created a stability, but allow people to plan. I thought what a simple idea to be able to plan your life. You have been given this education, can think about what it is that you want to do, dreams, hopes, aspirations, and have a very basic stable middleclass. We talk about that now still. The ability to plan. It always struck me. I mentioned that a lot of the students, and the teachers were not shy about this, letting them know that when they got out into the world outside the cocoon, the bubble, that they had been so protected from anybody telling them that they were lesser. People in the outside world but negroes were intellectually and socially inferior good that is what segregation was about, right . A lot of men felt that when they enter the armed forces, because it was not until 1948 the truman integrated the armed services. I mention the first black graduate of the Naval Academy was commander brown. I got to spend a lot of time with him and his wife. He has since passed away. He told me one of the questions i ask all of the graduates was when was the time in your life that you knew that dunbar had served you well . And you give me an instance. He was at the academy. He chose not to room with anybody at the academy because he knew it would be nothing but trouble. Several had been gone and then hazed out. So this was interesting. Brown was not that concerned about the academics he felt confident in his training, especially after witnessing some of his classmates. When i went to the academy, i noticed there were a lot of guys with straight as in high school who were not doing so well. I concluded that a lot of them were not challenged because the schools were not competitive. He observed that a lot of the cadets had poor time management skills. What dunbar did for me was taught me how to study. I learned to get to the meat of the assignment. As a high school student, brown worked afterschool until midnight as a male clerk to support the family. His father was a truck driver. My family didnt have any money or political drag. I had a very limited time to stu