First Class

by Alison Stewart

  Syphax and Cook and Wormley were part of a group of Washingtonians referred to by the colored newspaper the Washington Bee as the “Colored 400” and often described as “aristocracy” and “black dynasties.”17 These families, actually about one hundred of them, could afford to create their own small, private schools or church schools long before public education became available. Many were like Syphax, not only of African descent but also related to the people who had owned their families during slavery, which is why many of their ancestors could read. These free blacks had been in Washington, DC, as long as there had been a Washington, DC.

  Because they had political savvy, tentative white connections, and in some cases money, Washingtonians like Syphax, Cook, and others were able to use the new laws to finally establish a secondary school for colored teenagers, the school that would one day become Dunbar. Over time the argument would be made that the school was only for some colored children—their children, original free Washingtonians. The newcomers and children of the alleys were barely represented in the early school system. Only about one-third of colored children eligible for schooling at this time attended some kind of school.18 Many resented the class distinctions, a result of color phobia among whites and some colored Washingtonians. The elite social status of these men and their friends, as well as their ancestry, embedded what has become a longstanding, incendiary dispute about color in the history of Dunbar.

  With public money and a little private financial help from the estate of Myrtilla Miner, the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth held its first classes on November 4, 1870, in the basement of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. Its mission was to provide students with “incentive to higher aim and education.”19 At first there were four students: Rosetta Coakley, John Nalle, Mary Nalle, and Caroline Parke. The number soon grew to eleven and by the end of the first year to forty-five; by the end of the fourth year the student body stood at 103.20

  The school’s beginnings were humble. At first, the field of study was, as described by historian Henry Robinson, “hardly more than an advanced grammar school laboring under the disadvantages of an inadequate faculty, overcrowding, and drop outs. But gradually the high school’s curriculum improved through the efforts of principals.”

  A white abolitionist from New Hampshire, Emma J. Hutchins, had been teaching grammar school and was recruited to head the new high school, which was more like a single class. There were no formal graduations in these early days because many of the older students studied only a few years before their roles morphed into that of teachers. Caroline Parke started high school in 1870 and two years later was employed as an assistant teacher at the Preparatory High School with an annual salary of $700.

  After Hutchins returned north, she was succeeded by Mary J. Patterson, the first black woman in the United States to earn a college degree. She had graduated from Oberlin in 1862. Patterson, remembered as a forceful woman, served as principal for nearly twelve years and is credited with laying the foundation for a strong and rigorous course of study. The students were required to master arithmetic, algebra, grammar, German or Latin, geography, history, physics, and geometry before they could graduate. For example, a physics test question posed to students at the colored high school was “What is the distinction between cohesion and adhesion?” A sample task from geography class was “ Name in order the bodies of water through which you would sail going from Chicago to Halifax.”21 The first real graduation took place on June 7, 1877. The graduates were Mary L. Beason, James C. Craig, Cornelia Pinckney, James B. Wright, Carrie E. Taylor, John H. Parker, Dora F. Barker, Fannie E. McCoy, Julia C. Grant, Mary E. Thomas, and Fannie M. Costin. All eleven graduating students participated at the commencement. James Wright gave a speech about the “Elements of Success.”

  For years the high school existed as an entity but did not have a physical, permanent location. After a year in a church basement, the colored high school moved to the Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School for one year. Overcrowding became an issue as growing teenagers were packed into the grammar school building serving smaller, younger students. The school was moved again, briefly using the Myrtilla Miner School, but perhaps the relocation to the new Charles Sumner School was a harbinger of things to come.

  The Sumner School, named for the crusading senator, was beautiful. Although it was an elementary school, it was designed by one of the most important architects in DC’s history, a German-born Marxist named Adolf Cluss. Washington was Cluss’s adopted home, but he did not take on any of the bigotry associated with the town. When he designed a school, be it for colored or white students, his goal was to build a structure that promoted dignity for the teaching profession and inspiration for the students. The Sumner School would also serve as the office for the superintendent and the board of trustees of the colored schools of Washington and Georgetown.

  At its opening in 1872, the chairman of the building committee called the Sumner School “a house that none need be ashamed to enter, and from which none shall be turned away while there is room to accommodate, be they white or black, high or low, rich or poor. If they seek for education, they shall be welcome.”22 But for the local commissioners the growing number of colored children moving through the grades would not be ignored for much longer.

  Financing schools for colored children was not a priority for Congress. The political climate had cooled to civil rights. For most of the colored population in the United States, the last two decades of the nineteenth century were a bleak period. By the 1880s, Reconstruction was a thing of the past, replaced by the Redemption. Southern Democrats, many still angry that their people had not been compensated for their slaves, regained power and used the judicial process to erase the gains of the 1860s and early 1870s. The Republicans who had led so much of the advancement of the colored man were voted out of office. That included the presidency in 1876. President Rutherford B. Hayes was nicknamed “Rutherfraud” because he was awarded the office by agreeing to abandon Reconstruction.

  The legislation of the next decade unraveled the work of the prior two.23 The new balance in Congress continued to roll back the legal clock by choosing not to renew or codify civil rights legislation. So, for example, it once again became legal for private businesses to refuse colored customers. An overwhelming number of Supreme Court decisions during this time obliterated colored rights.24 In 1883 the court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had barred discrimination in public places and transportation in the states. As the historian Rayford Logan wrote, “The last decade of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth century marked the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society.”

  In the nation’s capital, however, a growing and increasingly educated colored population would not be denied. Those who could afford to and had enough foundation in reading, writing, and arithmetic took advantage of the system. The percentage of colored students in the District enrolled in public school was higher than that of whites. While 16 percent of school-age white children went to the public schools, 18 percent percent of colored kids were enrolled. The average colored attendance was 97 percent. Some students traveled up to two hours to get to high school, and the teachers worked zealously. Superintendent Cook reported he needed more space and more faculty. He told the city’s commissioners, “The degree of success attended to the school was large due to an expenditure of energy and labor on the part of its teachers that cannot long be maintained without serious injury to health.” It seemed that almost monthly the Washington Bee would make the case for “a respectable high school” given that “our present [colored] school system is the best in the country.”25 And once a grand high school for white students was established, the colored citizenry put on the pressure. In 1892, the same year in which lynching in the South climbed to an all-time high, Washington, DC, would finally open one of the first academic colored high schools using public funds.26

  “Well equipped” and “roomy” was how ninety-two-year-old R
obert Mattingly remembered his alma mater in the last years of his life. The façade of the three-floor building, designed by the head of the office of the building inspector, Thomas Entwistle, boasted red Philadelphia pressed brick. The footprint of the building was 147 feet long and 80 feet deep and featured one central entrance flanked by two wings on each side. The $112,000 budget, about $2.7 million today, had been appropriated by the US Congress. The gables on the front were a decorative terra cotta, and at the very top of the central entrance are the letters H and S, for high school. H and S—two letters that so many had waited so long for were right there, carved in stone.

  When young Robert Mattingly approached 128 M Street, he arrived with his eighth-grade promotion card in hand. He would find his way to the small gym in the basement, the labs at the rear of the first floor, and the large study hall on the second floor. He also would soon learn the ways of life in high school. There were cliques. One, called the Ravens, claimed devotees of the philosophy of Edgar Allen Poe and seemed “ jovial” but “pompous.”

  As a high school student, Robert’s options were to bring lunch from home, eat in the small cafeteria, or visit Mrs. Seely’s lunch cart stationed at the front of the building. He discovered those who could afford a treat went to Mr. Landry’s lunchroom, where for ten cents you could down a glass of milk and one of three pies: apple, peach, or sweet potato. But most importantly, he would have to decide on a course of study. Built to hold 450 students, the school had three tracks: academic, science, and business. He could study French, German, biology, and political economy, as well as the required four years of English, history, and Latin, two of math, and one of physics or chemistry.27 Robert elected to pursue science.

  “My section teacher was Miss Elizabeth Hunter, a teacher of German. Her control appeared to be somewhat spotty.” After watching some students disrupt the class, Robert went to the principal and asked for a transfer to the academic track. At the time he didn’t know he would one day be a principal in the DC school system. Matting returned to his hometown after graduating Phi Beta Kappa at Amherst College. He was the first of twenty-seven M Street/Dunbar graduates to attend Amherst in the following sixty years.

  On that day, the principal was Dr. Winfield S. Montgomery, the fourth to run the M Street school. Born into slavery, Montgomery graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth and earned his medical degree from Howard. If his academic résumé seems extraordinary for a high school principal, it was—but not for an M Street principal. The school’s lead educators were Ivy League and honors graduates, some of whom had studied abroad and many of whom had graduate degrees. Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard, was principal in 1873. F. L. Cardozo Sr., who had been born a slave, was principal from 1884 to 1896, and earned degrees from Glasgow University and the London School of Theology. At the end of the decade and century, Robert Terrell, another Harvard graduate and a lawyer, led the school.

  Robert Mattingly, as described by his former student and and longtime friend, Madison Tignor. Tignor went on to become a beloved teacher at Dunbar High School.

  Courtesy of the Tignor family

  Why would men and women with medical and legal degrees not pursue careers in their chosen fields? Two words: Jim Crow. Many of these men and women simply would not be hired at universities, hospitals, and law offices. While life for many blacks in DC was better than it would have been in the Deep South, it was hardly a social nirvana. The District of Columbia was still a city struggling with its postwar identity.

  One place this dynamic presented itself was within the school system. The colored high school was doing well—very well. In 1899, several colored students outscored white students in statewide test. This did not please many people. One year later, in 1900, the entire education system would be upended when reorganization left colored leaders no longer in charge of their schools. Since the school system’s inception, there had always been a colored superintendent of schools leading the way and making the decisions for the colored grade schools and high school. In 1900 the position was downsized to assistant superintendent of colored schools, and that position would now report to one white public school authority. George F. T. Cook, a proud man who had led the colored school system for nearly thirty years, resigned.

  The colored community was concerned, with good reason. In this political era, would the new superintendent and board of education care for the colored schools at all? Would neglect destroy what had been built? Would they be told what books to use and how many water fountains each school could have? The new struggle for control played out in a dramatic showdown between the white authorities and one of the most memorable and controversial principals of M Street, Mrs. Anna Julia Cooper.

  4 IT’S THE PRINCIPAL

  NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, THE principal of the colored high school was publicly accused of being ineffective, insubordinate, and disloyal. And night after night, her supporters testified to her strong moral character and academic abilities. Rumors of smoking and drinking at M Street High School, as well as rumblings about illicit romantic liaisons, had festered over time.

  For almost two years, the newly configured and predominately white board of education had been avoiding the thorny question: What to do about Anna Julia Cooper? Someone wanted her gone. It could have been any number of white Washingtonians concerned about her independent streak. Mrs. Cooper also had colored enemies, mainly proponents of the vocational education model. They found her “academics first” philosophy threatening. And she was a colored woman at the turn of the century who had no children but did have two college degrees. She was that rare sort of soul who didn’t seem to answer to anyone or anything but her own moral compass.

  This potent combination ignited a protracted inquisition of Anna Julia Cooper, the emerging powerhouse principal of the M Street High School. She had come a long way from being a newly married girl of nineteen turned widow at twenty-one.

  Anna Julia Haywood was born into slavery in 1858. Of her mother, Hannah, she wrote, “[She] was a slave and the finest woman I have ever known. Though untutored, she could read the Bible and write a little.”1 Anna did not feel the same about her father, however, whom she barely knew: “I owe nothing to my white father beyond the initial act of procreation. My mother’s self-sacrificing toil to give me advantages she had never enjoyed is worthy the highest praise and undying gratitude.” The central advantage was education.

  Precocious Annie Haywood decided at five years old she would be a teacher.2 She learned to read and write a bit, something her two brothers did not. In her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, her intellectual gifts did not go unnoticed. The founder of the Saint Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute, Dr. J. Brinton Smith, extended a scholarship to the bright young colored girl. By the age of nine she was tutoring other students as a “pupil teacher.”3

  Annie Haywood was constantly in search of new academic challenges, easily mastering what was made available to her as a girl. She recalled in her writings, “Well, I found after a while that I had a good deal of time on my hands. I had devoured what was put before me, and like Oliver Twist, was looking around for more. I constantly felt as I suppose as many an ambitious girl has felt, a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.”

  Annie wanted to join the young men in their more rigorous course of study. She pushed and pushed until she was allowed to take Greek, Latin, and mathematics along with the fellows. The eager teenage girl in a room full of boys was something of an amusement to her dear old principal.4 “[He] looked over from the vacant countenances of his sleepy old class of boys for an answer, over to where I sat, to get off his solitary pun—his never failing pleasantry, especially in hot weather—which was to, as he called out ‘Any one?’ to the effect that ‘any one’ to them meant ‘Annie one!’ ” She was always ready with an answer.

  She stayed at the school nearly fourteen years and fulfilled her childhood dream of teaching. There she met her future husband, another teacher, G
eorge Cooper, an Episcopal clergyman seventeen years her senior.

  Married only two years when her husband died, Annie found herself unexpectedly alone. She could continue to teach at a meager salary. For a lesser mind, that would have sufficed, but the same instinct that had led Cooper to demand equal coursework in school led her to the only possible conclusion for a woman with her brain: she set her sights on college, even though those around her believed it was a fantasy for a poor young woman from North Carolina. She wrote, “When at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay.”5

  Despite the lack of support, she gathered up all her energy and asked a few believers to write to Oberlin College on her behalf. Oberlin was founded in the 1830s with an extraordinary philosophy for the time: according to its charter, students were received “irrespective of color.” And that included young Anna Julia Cooper. The year Cooper received her undergraduate degree after completing the “gentleman’s course,” she stayed on to get another degree in mathematics.

  She was teaching in her home state of North Carolina when the call came from Washington. The colored superintendent of schools, George F. T. Cook, wanted to recruit his fellow Oberlin alum to teach at DC’s colored high school. Cook had contacted Oberlin to ask if there were any graduates he should meet and it recommended Cooper; she was the perfect fit. In 1887 she came to the District, moved in with a prominent family, and began teaching math and Latin at M Street for an annual salary of $750.6