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honors. >> your parents both went to dunbar. your mother was from washington but your father was from new york and his parents as i read in the book, his parents moved from harlem to washington because there was a public black high school. it was, in essence, a magnet school. >> it really was. my dad grew up up in harlem. he and my grandmother moved down. my grandfather worked in the post office which was a good job for a negro at that time so he stayed in new york. so they'd come down on the weekends. the strange thing for my father, he'd gone to integrated schools up to this point. when he got to washington, he asked why am i going past that high school? they said because there he's only one academic high school for blacks in washington, d.c. so it was a magnet school. while he understood that was important and how teachers really cared about their futures and really pushed them to go to college, leer's an interesting statist statistic. in the '50s, 80% of dunbar graduates went to college. he always bristled at the idea
congratulations. it is an amazing book, a beautiful story and beautifully told. tell me why -- i think i know -- but why you wanted to write this history which is really the history of african-american education, at large, across the country in this first public black high school. >> yeah. i was very concerned that the history of dunbar high school was going to be lost because so many of the graduates who could tell about the old dunbar, this elite public high school where the teachers were some of the first to get ph.ds and masters's degrees and thereby taught the next two generations who became the greatest generation of african-americans. i was worried these people would get lost because they're in their 80s and 90s. i with went around the country looking for them, having them tell me their stories to bear witness to this school. i knew i was on to something when i was working leer as an anchor i wrote a letter to senator edward brook within wondered would he ever write me back. i got off the air one day, a voicemail at msnbc said i would