First Class

by Alison Stewart

  When Professor Kelly Miller was allowed to speak, he also questioned the wisdom of the current structure, under which the colored superintendent could not oversee the schools. Professor Miller also used the opportunity to call out Director Hughes as no one had before. He told the committee, “The director of high schools made certain broad statements offensive to the colored pupil.” In just a few years, the colored schools were at the mercy of a power structure that did not believe in the students. Hughes would go onto to write a letter directly the congressmen repeating that the M Street students were “not ready” for the same curriculum and books as the white high school. He said that “weakness was clearly shown” and that M Street “purported” to have the same standards. He did not mention that at the time the District spent forty-one dollars per pupil at M Street and sixty-five dollars per pupil at its white counterpart, Central High School.

  Just as Anna Julia Cooper wrapped up her fourth year as principal, the composition of the District’s board of education would change yet again. The seven-member board would be expanded to nine members, three of whom would be women. Three members (one woman and two men) would be colored.31 In an effort to assure independence, the new legislation made judges of the Supreme Court of DC responsible for the board of education appointments. The director of schools position was eliminated, and a new superintendent would be appointed: Percy Hughes.

  Late that summer the newly constituted board of education took over. Representing colored Washington were new member Dr. O. M. Atwood and returning member Mary Church Terrell. Would Terrell, a well-known, politically connected civil rights advocate, be an ally of Cooper’s? They’d been at Oberlin together, and Cooper had succeeded Terrell’s husband as the principal of M Street.

  Among the board’s first assignments was reviewing all of the teachers in the system and making recommendations. In late August the board of education appointed 1,475 teachers, both black and white. Only four educators were not invited to return to their posts: John Love, a teacher at M Street School and Cooper’s foster son; C. J. B. Clarke, M Street’s assistant principal; Mary Nalle, one of the first four students at the original high school in 1870; and Anna Julia Cooper.

  After leaving M Street, Cooper founded a small college/night school for working-class colored adults in Washington, continuing her great fight to teach the most neglected. She and Mary Church Terrell both continued their activism, but they ceased to be close after Cooper lost her job while Terrell was on the board.32

  Cooper left DC for a time and went on to earn her PhD at the Sorbonne in Paris. At one point she even returned to M Street once again to teach Latin. She penned a dramatic poem in honor of the school that referred to it as a “radiant star” that taught, “truth, brotherhood, and temperance” to all. Later in her life she would recall the events surrounding her leadership at M Street as “the Washington School upheaval of 1906…. The legal experts of D.C. found it expedient to promulgate a new doctrine, that reorganization of the school system involved the reappointment of all teachers—a thousand in a day. Thus it happened that the principal of M Street High School and several others were ‘overlooked’—not put out but left out of the shuffle, so to speak, just a simple little matter of ‘move along Joe!’ ”33

  In 2009 after her 105 years on this earth and 45 years after her death, Anna Julia Cooper was honored on a postage stamp for her lifetime achievements—and if you look on pages twenty-six and twenty-seven of the most recent US passport, you will see a quote from Cooper. She is the only woman quoted and her message is as true today as it was the day she said it: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

  5 BRICKS AND MORTARBOARDS

  IN THE FALL OF 1906, the newly configured board of education had a problem on its hands: overcrowding. White students from the academic high schools were being farmed out to the technical and business schools. M Street’s building had been over capacity for a decade. The situation was just as some whites had feared it would be: ambitious colored Americans were finding their way to DC, dreaming of government jobs and a better-than-decent public education system. As a result, the overcrowded school system was becoming the norm, but conditions were getting dangerous.

  The student body at M Street was nearly 50 percent larger than the building’s stated capacity. At its peak there were 983 students in a school meant to accommodate 450 to 500 bodies.1 M Street teachers sometimes taught two classes at once to get the job done.2 It had been a problem for years. Before resigning, Superintendent Cook told the city commissioners that at M Street, “the degree of success attended to the school was largely due to an expenditure of energy and labor on the part of its teachers that cannot long be maintained without serious injury to health.”3 The building hadn’t aged well and was too antiquated to support an extension. M Street also suffered from an inferior campus. It did not have a gym or a yard or a real cafeteria like its white counterparts Eastern High, Western High, and Central High.

  Plessy who?

  Within four months of taking office the new board of education president, Captain James F. Oyster, walked into the House appropriations hearings, run by the DC commissioners, and said he needed money.

  I am on the committee for building and repairs and I certainly appeal to you, gentlemen, to be as liberal to us in view of those conditions as you possibly can. If you could make a tour or inspection of the difficulties we have to encounter in locating rooms and buildings for the accommodation of scholars, I think you gentlemen would have empathy for us.4

  Oyster was always addressed as “Captain,” a title from his days as a commander of the National Rifles, a white DC militia company is which he was considered a pretty good shot.5 The Oysters of Washington were a family of means, so prominent that, when the captain’s seventy-six-year-old brother, George, died four months after his wedding to a twenty-six-year-old woman who then sued for a sixth of the estate, the story made the New York Times.6 George Oyster was an art collector, a horse breeder, and DC’s dairy and eggs commissioner.7 That was fortunate for the Oyster family because they were big in butter—the best-known butter merchants in the city, according to the Washington Bee—and their advertisements insisted their product was a “Diamond Brand,” strictly pure and delicious, not to mention lucrative.

  Captain James F. Oyster, one of five Oyster siblings, was the businessman in the family. He helped establish Washington’s first chamber of commerce and served as its first vice president. He was the commissioner for the board of trade for a time. But most often his name appeared in the paper during his tenure as the president of the board of education.

  Clearly a man so busy needed an escape, a quiet place in the country. When he and his wife bought a lovely plot of land in Maryland, they commissioned a prominent architect, Appleton P. Clark Jr., to create their little haven away from the city. With a thirty-five-foot-wide hall that spanned the entire width of the mansion, a foundation of white quartz, a formal portico, and nine bedrooms, the Oyster’s vacation house was described as “one of the handsomest summer homes near Washington … a ‘conspicuous ornament’ to the landscape.”8 It still stands today as the Mansion at Strathmore, a home to the arts with an event space interested parties can rent for about $1,000 an hour.

  The captain, a big barrel-chested man with a substantial mustache, a man who expected the best of, well, everything, took it upon himself to tour the District schools when he assumed office. He did not like what he saw. The captain publicly pointed out what he believed were problems with fireproofing, rubbish disposal, coal consumption—you name it. Looking after the city’s buildings, including the schools, was the job of Snowden Ashford. His title, city building inspector, described his duties perfectly. Buildings were his business, not that of the president of the board of education, although Captain James Oyster thought otherwise.

  Oyster was fifteen years older and at least fifteen pounds heavier
than Ashford, although they were equals in the facial-hair department. Ashford was also a native Washingtonian, a trained civil engineer, and an architect. When a local reporter asked Ashford about the board president’s visits, he said: “Education would no doubt be served much better if the board of education were to devote its entire attention to education and leave the matter of buildings to those whose training has made them authorities on the subject.”9

  It was the beginning of a fractious relationship that would have a direct impact on the new colored high school. While Oyster and Ashford were marking their territory, the DC commissioners had successfully made the case for money to build two new high schools. Congress, which held the purse strings for the District, commissioned a study that found what locals already knew. According to the report, the District’s public schools needed to be larger, and manual training schools, playgrounds, and gymnasiums were needed.10 The Congressional report also stressed that the neighborhood school model was the way to go—for the white students at least.11 Every effort should be made so that white students could walk to a well-equipped local school and socialize with their neighbors.

  For the colored students it was a different story. When it came to high school, colored kids had to get from wherever they lived to the academic M Street or its neighbor up the road, the technical/trade school Armstrong. As a colored student, if you wanted to go to high school, you had to travel. Unintentionally, the formation of the colored system, which was not set up to be advantageous, created two magnet schools.

  Congress set the budgets for the District’s two new high schools. M Street, the colored high school, would get $550,000 for a new building. The white high school, Central, was allocated $1.2 million. The white high school would get an athletic field and a stadium, but when M Street’s extracurriculars came up during the appropriations meeting, the commissioners balked.12

  COMMISSIONER JUDSON: On page 137 in line 14, I see that there was included the item for the construction of the new M Street High School the words, “The construction of an athletic field and the construction of a stadium.” I ask that those words be stricken out. The school board inserted those words.

  REPRESENTATIVE TAYLOR (R-OH): That language is carried in both of the items there.

  COMMISSIONER JUDSON: Yes but it should be included only in the item for the Central High School.

  That one line item, that one decision, would have serious repercussions sixty years later. At the time the lack of athletic accommodations was an injustice; in the future it would lead to a dramatic turn in education in the District.

  The municipal architect’s office would have—should have—worked closely with the board of education to help plan the new schools. And that might have been the case if the new municipal architect had not been Snowden Ashford. Ashford had been elected to this new position, an important one, and he would oversee all the building designs in the District. A group of assembled government officials voted unanimously for Ashford to get the post. Well, almost unanimously. There was one hold out: Captain James Frederick Oyster. Simply put, Oyster did not like Ashford’s attitude.

  During Ashford’s nomination process, Oyster wrote letters to the US Army Corps of Engineers and accused Ashford and his colleagues at the building inspector’s office of “falsifying themselves in their official capacity in order to cover up defective work for which they were responsible.”13 The letter was so nasty that the head of the US Corps of Engineers wrote back immediately to the entire board and said he “bitterly resented’’ the implications and “malicious” insinuations.14 Oyster clarified his position: he really didn’t have a problem with the Corps, just Ashford. It was on.

  “It is nothing personal,” Oyster told the press when he displayed his disappointment at Ashford’s nomination, “but in the Board of Education’s view a better man could be named.”15 Oyster promoted the idea of hiring someone well known, with a high-end aesthetic. First he suggested Appleton P. Clark Jr., but there was not enough money in it for Clark. He declined the nomination, saying he couldn’t afford to give up his lucrative private business designing, among other things, summer homes for wealthy businessmen.

  When Oyster couldn’t stop Ashford from getting the municipal architect’s post, Oyster tried to make it go away with a little help from his friends. Six months after Ashford was in place, a friend of the Oysters (who happened to be a congressional representative) introduced a bill that would create a new position: Superintendency of Buildings and Supplies [sic]. The legislation proposed that the new position would be filled by the board of education and would oversee the physical needs of the schools. It would essentially eliminate the need for a municipal architect. Although he never fully admitted to or denied the rumor that he helped author the legislation, Captain Oyster acknowledged that he believed it would “have great benefit.” The Washington Herald described the move as a “new turn to an old feud.”16 The bill did not pass.

  Both men could be prickly. They were quick to challenge each other at commissioners’ meetings. Ashford often answered questions with questions, no matter who was asking. Oyster once asked that the room be cleared of all onlookers, only to be informed that the proceedings in progress were public hearings. The tension escalated, reaching its height in 1911, just as the final decisions were being made—or not being made—about the new colored high school.

  For almost two years the men sparred publicly, using the local press as their boxing ring. The subject matter could be trivial. Oyster called for Ashford’s dismissal because of the kinds of desks he had purchased. The move was not successful, as the headline from the February 2, 1911, Washington Herald trumpeted: NO EVIDENCE TO SUSTAIN CHARGES. About two months later, Ashford tried a passive-aggressive tactic to taunt Oyster: failing to inform the board of education when he temporarily shuttered two schools for structural problems. The Washington Times titled its account of that skirmish BOARD OF EDUCATION AND ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT CLASH AGAIN.

  “Absolute folly!” Oyster was unequivocal in responding to Ashford’s decision to remove furnaces from two schools without first consulting the board. Ashford also called for and got an investigation into the board’s duties charging “that irregularities and gross carelessness marked the conduct of the local schools.”17 The board was ultimately vindicated.

  Ashford intimated more than once that Oyster’s business pals were getting kickbacks on things like coal sales. At one point he told a congressional committee that he thought the board of education should be suspended and a new organizational flow created—one that would give the municipal architect more autonomy, of course.18

  In his acceptance remarks following his election to a fifth term as president of the board, Oyster charged Ashford with “inexcusable and expensive blunders,” claiming to have found $39,000 in unnecessary expenses. He promised to pursue the issue all summer. On August 17, 1911, the Washington Times devoted three columns to the rift with the headline, CAPT. J. F. OYSTER SCORES ARCHITECT. The next day, the paper ran another two columns of copy on the subject, capped with the headline, ASHFORD REPLIES, “I DID MY DUTY.” The atmosphere was so poisonous the Washington Times editorial page took both men to task in the summer of 1911.

  But Oyster had another card to play: the race card. The design of the new colored high school, the one with the national reputation for churning out scholars, was still unclear. Oyster had a good relationship with the colored citizens of the District. Given the uncomfortable relationship between the education-seeking colored community and the white leaders in charge of the schools’ curriculum over the past decade, a reception was held in Oyster’s honor at M Street in appreciation of his support for improving the colored grammar schools and high schools. How could he cement his position as the colored intellectuals’ friend?

  Oyster had an idea. He decided the new colored high school should be designed by the prominent educational architect of the time, not just a local. Oyster announced at a board of education meeting in November 1912 th
at he would pursue William B. Ittner of Saint Louis, Missouri. Ittner was considered a visionary, and he transformed the way schools were built. The Ittner Plan shunned block-like brick warehouses with little light and instead introduced expansive, naturally lit, well-ventilated structures.19 He was one of the first people to connect environment with the ability to learn. From 1898 to 1915, Ittner designed fifty public schools, for both blacks and whites, in Saint Louis.20 He earned international attention when the World’s Fair was held in Saint Louis and people from all over saw the innovative work he was doing.

  Oyster tried to convince the board to sign on to Ittner’s service for the colored high school, claiming the design would bring with it the “the promise of unparalleled excellence.”21 And perhaps the best thing about William Ittner, at least from Oyster’s position, was that he was not Snowden Ashford. Oyster wrote to Ittner on November 6, 1912. He heard back almost immediately, but had to report to his colleagues that “it was improbable to secure Mr. Ittner.”22 Ittner was building eight schools in the country at the time. He had already signed on to design the new white high school in DC, the one with twice the budget allotted for the colored high school. The two schools were slated to open at the same time, separate and the colored school one-half as equal.

  With the clock running out on financing and the colored board members wanting a new school soon, it became clear Ashford would lead the project. Oyster resigned from the board of education before construction even began.

  The one thing Oyster and Ashford seemed to have in common was a professional desire to be fair to the colored students. During his tenure, Ashford was adamant that all the money appropriated for the colored schools went to the colored schools.23 Ashford had designed the Alexander Crummell School, a colored elementary school, and oversaw improvements at the Congress Heights School.

  For this new school, Ashford would have to raise his game. The stated goal was to create a “dignified brain factory.”24 Everyone would be watching: colored Washington, white Washington, Congress, and who knows who else in the forty-eight states. After his fierce public battle with Oyster, this was a chance to erase any doubt about his skill or intention. The first plans Ashford presented were deemed “too ambitious.”25 His second plan was accepted in March 1914. The design was regal, truly. The building was fashioned after London’s grand Hampton Court Palace, once the home of Henry VIII. The plans called for tapestry brick for the main structure and limestone and terra-cotta for the trimmings. According to projections, the school would hold twelve hundred students. The timeline was to start construction in the fall of 1914 and complete construction by the spring of 1916, however the contractor’s bid was not accepted until early 1915. As seems to be the case with all construction, the project started late.