First Class

by Alison Stewart

  The new school was an opportunity to hit a restart button for M Street. The Anna Cooper episode had aired some dirty laundry that had been piling up in the colored school system, which was a magnified version of some of the internal struggles at M Street. A teaching position at the school was a prestigious job for a colored woman and even for a colored man. And prestige is often accompanied by politics. For years the colored paper, the Washington Bee, charged that friends of friends were given the best assignments at M Street. Jealousies festered over promotions and appointments often thought to be based on political affiliations rather than merit. At times there were out-and-out feuds. A teacher once received a letter warning him that another educator had publicly called him “a sneak, a menace, … ungrateful and despicable.” The informant described the display as a “most unmanly, ungenerous, and malicious assault upon you, your character, and your record.” But a new high school could erase old drama.

  Identifying the new location of the M Street School presented two challenges. The first was where to put the new larger school. The commissioners and members of Congress wanted to put the new colored high school on Howard University’s campus. Maybe the idea was to keep “them” all together and avoid spending any money to purchase land for the new building. But the Howard location was far from the majority of the colored population, and parents did not want their young teenagers so close to young adults attending college. The colored community fought this with a “flood of protests.” The response was “the strongest protests against a school site ever made in the city.”26 At the last minute, the commissioners agreed to purchase for $44,000 a narrow strip of land on First Street NW between N and O Streets.

  Since the school wasn’t going to be on M Street anymore, the second challenge was that it would need a new name, but that was a tricky prospect. A Du Bois School or a Booker T. Washington High School would incite one sort of protest or another. The names Syphax, Sumner, and Stevens were already assigned to grammar schools. The commissioners considered naming the school after James M. Gregory, the first colored citizen to be presented as a candidate for West Point in 1867 but who was denied by President Johnson. He went on to become one of the earliest graduates of Howard University. John R. Francis was another possible namesake. He was a doctor and educator who set up the first private hospital for Negroes in Washington.

  Ultimately the school would be named for a nonpolitical figure who exemplified all the hopes and dreams of the colored community and who had somehow lived a life that showed education and excellence were key steps in the path to equality. The choice was not a native Washingtonian. He was not someone who had attended M Street School. He was not even alive at the time of the school’s construction.

  At eighteen years old, Paul Laurence Dunbar went to the Callahan Building at the corner of Third and Main in Dayton, Ohio, to apply for a job as an elevator operator. He longed to be a writer but the reality was he needed money to support his dear mother, who had worked all her life as a washerwoman. His father, who had fought in the Civil War, left the family home when Paul was two and died when he was twelve, so over time Paul and his mother, Matilda, developed a strong bond. It was Matilda who wanted him to be named Paul after the prolific New Testament author; perhaps she had preordained her son’s fate. She certainly encouraged him to read and write poetry.

  Both of Dunbar’s parents had been born into slavery in Kentucky, and neither learned to read until adulthood. Matilda recalled to her son that her kindly master had allowed her into the house where, if she was quiet, she could sit and listen to poems being read. Matilda passed along her lifelong love of literature and encouraged her young boy to write poems, something he started to do at age six.

  In school he developed good friendships, even with white youngsters. One of his best buddies was a rascal named Orville, the son of the family for whom his mother sometimes worked.27 Though Dayton had its share of racial conflict, coloreds and whites sometimes lived in the same areas. Ohio was a nonslave state that had hosted frequent stops on the Underground Railroad. By the time Paul reached his teenage years, the law in Dayton deemed colored students could attend whatever schools were in the districts in which they lived. Paul went to a neighborhood school but was the only colored person in his class. Yet he was class president and editor of the newspaper and yearbook. His pal Orville was an average student more interested in tinkering away at projects; he built a printing press at sixteen.

  Paul wanted to make a living as a writer but was turned down for a job at the Dayton Herald.28 Life was not like school—after graduation, his skin color mattered more. He knew he would have to make his own way. When his buddy Orville and his brother Wilbur opened their own printing business, Wright & Wright Printers, Paul asked them to help him start a paper for colored citizens.

  On December 13, 1890, the Dayton Tattler debuted with Paul as editor and Orville as publisher.29 He wrote this greeting to his readers:

  Dayton with her sixty thousand inhabitants, among which five thousand colored people, has for a long time demanded a paper, representative of the energy and enterprise of our citizens. It is this long-felt want which the Tattler now aspires to fill. Her mission shall be to encourage and assist the enterprises of the city, to give our young people a field in which to exercise their literary talents, to champion the cause of right, and to espouse the principles of honest republicanism. The desire which is the guiding star of our existence is that some word may be dropped in our columns, which shall reach the hearts of our colored voters and snatch them form the brink of that yawing chasm-paid democracy.

  The Dayton Tattler folded after printing just three issues. Dunbar had a hard time finding advertisers, and the Wrights could not extend him any more credit. But it was a very happy and productive six weeks for Paul and he appreciated his dear friends’ help. He wrote a poem about Orville, which in a moment of pique and fondness he scribbled on a wall in their shop.

  Orville Wright is out of sight

  In the printing business.

  No other mind is half so bright

  As his’n is.30

  Dunbar continued to pursue his dream as he ferried businessmen up and down in the elevator by day. By night he performed poetry readings around Dayton. The Wrights printed up his flyers and programs. He became known about town as the “elevator poet.” When the Western Association of Writers held its annual meeting in Dayton, one of Paul’s former teachers arranged for him to read some of his work to those attending. It was a huge opportunity to take the stage in front of so many influential scribes.

  His appearance at the event was a success, but Dunbar wasn’t able to capitalize on the goodwill because he wasn’t officially published. There was no work to sell or promote. So the young man making four dollars a week borrowed $125, more than half his annual salary, to pay a publishing house to release his first book. It was called Oak and Ivy and was dedicated to his mother, Matilda Dunbar:

  TO HER

  WHO HAS EVER BEEN,

  MY GUIDE, TEACHER AND INSPIRATION

  MY MOTHER

  THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS

  AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

  If a person got onto an elevator run by Paul Laurence Dunbar, that person likely got off the elevator owning a copy of Dunbar’s book. He had figured a way to pay back his debt: sell copies of his book to the people trapped in the elevator with him for a few minutes. It worked, and it helped Paul’s work go viral, insofar as things went viral in the nineteenth century.

  With hopes of selling some books and finding creative work, he quit his job and headed to Chicago, host to the World’s Fair in the summer of 1893. He found work as a washroom attendant and floor sweeper. He made friends, including a young man named Joseph, a great classical violinist. One day Joseph revealed he was the grandson of Frederick Douglass. After introductions were made, Dunbar was soon working as a clerk for the elder Douglass. August 25 was “Colored American Day” at the World’s Fair, and Douglass was set to speak. It turned o
ut to be the day he gave his famous speech addressing the “Negro problem.”

  Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution…. We Negroes love our country. We fought for it. We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.

  When Douglass finished speaking, he invited the twenty-one-year-old Paul up on stage to recite a poem. Douglass declared Paul Laurence Dunbar “the most promising young colored man in America.”31

  Paul Laurence Dunbar.

  Courtesy of Ohio Historical Society

  Even though the “elevator poet” was now fielding paid invitations to read out of state, the offers weren’t enough for survival. He returned to Dayton and to the elevator job and to writing on his Remington typewriter. He had pieces published here and there. But his dream to make a living as a writer wasn’t realized until his second work, Majors and Minors, was financially backed by two white patrons enamored with his work. Influential literary critic William Dean Howells reviewed Majors and Minors in Harper’s Weekly on June 27, 1894, Dunbar’s twenty-fourth birthday. His life changed immediately.

  By the turn of the century Dunbar’s work had appeared in the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post. He traveled across the country and to Europe, reading to both white and colored audiences. He rode his horse Old Sukey in President William McKinley’s inaugural parade in 1901. He spent one year in Washington, DC, living among the educated colored citizens of the time and working in the Library of Congress, which was segregated at the time, even for a well-known poet. He didn’t like the position and returned home to Ohio a famous man. By this time Dunbar had earned enough money to take a mortgage on a house for his mother in Dayton.

  Dunbar was usually photographed wearing a dark topcoat and starched white shirt and sometimes a white tie. His expression often looked both serene and sad, as if he were thinking about something he truly loved but couldn’t have. Perhaps it was a wife, as he was divorced after four years of marriage. Perhaps it was his health. He survived one bout with tuberculosis but sometimes lost himself to the lure of liquor. The stoic expression he wore in portraits was not unlike the subject of one his poems, “We Wear the Mask”:

  We wear the mask that grins and lies,

  It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

  This debt we pay to human guile;

  With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

  And mouth with myriad subtleties.

  Why should the world be over-wise

  In counting all our tears and sighs?

  Nay, let them only see us, while

  We wear the mask.

  We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

  To thee from tortured souls arise.

  We sing, but oh the clay is vile

  Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

  But let the world dream otherwise,

  We wear the mask!

  His work was unique for the time: the emotions and thoughts of a colored man presented artfully and articulated with truth. This was something that most whites were never privy to nor cared to seek out but which colored people identified with and took comfort in reading.

  Dunbar grasped all strata of colored America circa 1900. He easily moved back and forth between writing his poetry in Standard English and in what has been called a “Negro Dialect.” “We Wear the Mask” is an example of the former while the first stanza of the poem “Temptation” is a good example of the latter:

  I dun got ’uligion, honey,

  an’ I’s happy ez a keing,

  Evahthing I see erbout me’s

  jes’ lak sunshine in the de spring

  It’s not hard to guess which style of his poetry was more popular in the mainstream in the early 1900s.

  A literary review of Dunbar’s work changed his life and ruined it to some extent. Critiquing Dunbar’s work, Howells wrote that he much preferred Dunbar’s “Negro Dialect” poems, as he believed them to be a real reflection of colored life. Howells set the tone for all other critics, who agreed with him about Dunbar’s work. When Howells wrote the introduction for Dunbar’s third work, Lyrics of Lowly Life, he could not have said it more plainly:

  I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in music, in oratory, in several of the other arts, here was the first instance of an American Negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature…. Yet it appeared to me then, and it appears to me now, that there is a precious difference of temperament between the races which it would be a great pity ever to lose, and that this is best preserved and most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his where he studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our English. We call such pieces dialect pieces for want of some closer phrase, but they are really not dialect so much as delightful personal attempts and failures for the written and spoken language. In nothing is his essentially refined and delicate art so well shown as in these pieces, which, as I ventured to say, describe the range between appetite and emotion, with certain lifts far beyond and above it, which is the range of the race. He reveals in these a finely ironical perception of the Negro’s limitations, with tenderness for them, which I think so very rare as to be almost quite new.

  This view haunted and angered Dunbar his whole career, but he wore the mask.

  Paul Laurence Dunbar was an intelligent and gifted man who, despite his original station as the son of slaves, persevered and became the best and the first of his kind in his field. He represented what the founders of the colored high school dreamed for their own children and their race: success through determination and hard work. Not only would the new colored high school in Washington be named after Dunbar, it would also take on one of his poems as its core value, its guiding principle, its mantra, and its official motto. On page eight of his very first book, Oak and Ivy—the one he self-financed through elevator sales—is a poem called “Keep A-Pluggin’ Away” that begins:

  I’ve a humble little motto

  That is homely, though it’s true,—

  Keep a-pluggin’ away.

  It’s a thing when I’ve an object

  That I always try to do,—

  Keep a-pluggin’ away.

  When you’ve rising storms to quell,

  When opposing waters swell,

  It will never fail to tell,—

  Keep a-pluggin’ away.

  If the hills are high before

  And the paths are hard to climb,

  Keep a-pluggin’ away.

  And remember that successes

  Come to him who bides his time,—

  Keep a-pluggin’ away.

  From the greatest to the least,

  None are from the rule released.

  Be thou toiler, poet, priest,

  Keep a-pluggin’ away.

  …

  To this day, ninety-year-old Dunbar graduates can recite those lines by heart.

  Paul Laurence Dunbar never reached his nineties. Dunbar could not escape reoccurring tuberculosis and died at age thirty-three in the parlor room of the home he bought for his mother. It was ten years before the school bearing his name in Washington would open its doors.

  On October 2, 1916, Paul Laurence Dunbar High School welcomed 1,117 students and thirty-five teachers, a month later than expected.32 It almost didn’t open at all. The last payment was made to contractors on July 22, and the building was deemed complete enough, even though plumbing and electrical work were needed well into August. Unfortunately that payment was the last of the money from the previous fiscal year. Congress was about to adjourn without passing a new appropriations bill to free up the funds to finish up the school and, more important, pay for all the maintenance. The school district was short the $10,000 to pay the twenty-nine workers, janitors, and electricians at the colored school. In addition, it seems that in Ashford’s zeal to create an incredible facility, he spent all t
he money on the school building and left little else for desks, lockers, and the like. Dunbar High School needed more money for some of the basics. In a rush measure, on September 1, President Wilson signed a compromise that would get money into the system again, but colored Washington would have to wait one more month.

  The new Dunbar High School lived up to the original plans. Snowden Ashford had done it—the school was majestic. It was a brick-and-stone-trimmed building measuring 401 feet by 150 feet. It sat only about ten feet back from the street. A parapet ran across the top of the building leading to an entrance that was reminiscent of a castle; the two notched towers looked like giant chess rooks, complete with merlons. On the towers were embrasures in the shape of a cross, and between them hung the American flag. There were three floors, and each level had nearly storyhigh windows, twelve panes each, which allowed as much natural light as possible. Two stone staircases, with balustrades, led up to a landing at the front door and into the heart of the school: the armory. The architecture seemed to be a mash-up of Elizabethan and Collegiate Gothic, although the city commissioners officially referred to it as Tudor.33