The Dunbar difference has been attributed to the teachers and what it meant to be a teacher there. They were highly educated. For example, Julia Brooks had three degrees. And she was not unusual in the stable of teachers Dunbar attracted. Many Dunbar teachers had graduate and master’s degrees. They should have been teaching at the collegiate level or practicing in their field of study, perhaps medicine or law. Practically speaking, however, these men and women could not and would not be accepted for jobs—even at some of the universities from which they graduated. Some could not get jobs in their professions. One Dunbar principal was a medical doctor. Two were lawyers. “We had teachers who attended the best schools, like Harvard and Yale. They were motivated, and they motivated us to excel.” The teachers also found at Dunbar a level of autonomy and very decent paychecks. The teachers in the Negro schools were always paid on par with the teachers in the white schools. There was a standard pay scale because both the white and Negro system were overseen by the same entity. The good and fair salary attracted talent.
Each year Dunbar had an academic dream team, including:
Jessie Redmon Fauset, Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell. She taught Latin and French at M Street/Dunbar for fourteen years before Du Bois asked her to become the literary editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis.14
Dr. Carter G. Woodson taught Spanish, French, and history at M Street/Dunbar for nine years. While he was teaching at M Street, he earned his PhD from Harvard, the second African American to do so—the first being W. E. B. Du Bois. He is the father of Black History Month. Dr. Woodson believed “if a race had no recorded history, its achievements would be forgotten and, in time, claimed by other groups.”
Haley Douglass, the grandson of Frederick Douglass, taught science.
Otelia Cromwell was the first black graduate of Smith College and the head of the English and history departments at Dunbar.
Teachers and students were often interconnected. For example, Dunbar teacher Angelina Grimké wrote the play Rachel, which is considered the first full-length drama production with a black playwright, director, producer, and cast. One of her favorite students went on to become the most widely published woman playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, May Miller. May was the daughter of Kelly Miller, the lawyer who had testified before Congress and fought so hard to maintain M Street’s academic standing early on.15
The first three Negro women to get PhDs were all connected to Dunbar: Dr. Sadie Tanner graduated from there in 1915, Dr. Georgiana Simpson taught there, and Dr. Eva Dykes was both a Dunbar graduate and teacher. Dr. Tanner received the first doctorate of the three—but how that came to be is a bit of a funny story. Dr. Tanner was first because the University of Chicago held its ceremony in the morning. Dr. Simpson got hers the same day from the University of Pennsylvania, but in the afternoon. Yet Dr. Dykes was actually the first of the three to complete all the requirements and earn the distinction—Radcliffe simply had its official ceremony a few weeks later.
Eva Dykes earned her PhD at Radcliffe in June 1921. An M Street Class of 1910 alum, she taught Latin and English at Dunbar.
Courtesy of the Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Eva Dykes was able to get through Radcliffe on five different scholarships of $500 each and help from her uncle. Her personal life motto was “to do my best in any undertaking whether I like it or not. The satisfaction of doing my best brings a greater reward than the actual accomplishment of my aim.”16 Dykes was a virtuoso pianist by the age of eight. She undertook graduate work at Radcliffe and managed to complete her 644-page thesis despite the fact that she was turned away from research libraries because she was black.17
At Dunbar, Dr. Dykes earned a reputation for being both good and hard. Repeatedly in her evaluations by Dunbar’s principal, she was given an “ES,” which stood for eminently superior. She was a tough presence despite having a dazzling smile and standing all of five feet two. One story goes that Dr. Dykes had a student who would repeatedly stomp into class. He had been in the military. She ignored his behavior for a bit, but then one day told the young man to come back to her classroom at the close of school. She made him practice entering the classroom repeatedly until he could do so silently.18 She knew what it took to be a Dunbar student: she had graduated from M Street.
Dykes and Tanner had both returned to teach a new generation. For some, this work was a matter of helping to build an institution dedicated to excellent education for Negro children. Many of the teachers stayed at the school for years and saw the fruits of their labor. In the school’s first decade in the new building, despite Jim Crow and all its obstacles, Dunbar did something unprecedented and rather remarkable: it continued to send many Negro students to some of the best northern schools, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Syracuse, Amherst, Williams, the University of Illinois, Pratt, Dartmouth, Boston College, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Rutgers, Smith, Morgan, Lincoln, the University of Southern California, the University of Colorado, Wilberforce, the University of Michigan, Bryn Mawr, and Colgate.
Some graduates simply could not afford to leave the District, but a quality education could be had at home. Almost all of these students went on to Howard or Miner’s Teachers College, blocks away from where they had attended high school. Class after class of well-educated Negroes built the economic foundation for a self-sustaining black middle class in DC. Not everyone would be a doctor or a lawyer, but to have a good life in DC they didn’t have to. Dunbar graduates became electricians, messengers, typists, lunchroom assistants, clerks, stenographers, elevator operators, beauty shop owners, firemen, insurance agents, ministers, postal workers, drugstore owners, and teachers—so many teachers, almost a quarter of each class.19 Teaching was an excellent job for a woman, and after the repeal of Rule 45, women no longer had to be unmarried to teach. And then there was Washington’s major employer: the federal government. Working as a clerk or assistant was a pretty good job for a Negro—until Woodrow Wilson came to town.
Woodrow Wilson resegregated government offices almost immediately after becoming president. Within a year of his taking office, applicants were required to submit their photos when applying for any federal civil-service job. Dividing screens were installed in offices, and separate lunchrooms and bathrooms were established. Negroes who held highlevel jobs were demoted. This new layer of disrespect and disruption was something the valedictorian of the Dunbar class of 1920 knew about personally, and it would motivate him to spend his adult life trying to achieve equality for his people.
On June 17, 1920, the first class of students to spend all four years in the new building received their diplomas. The commencement ceremony featured speeches by two best friends, class president W. Mercer Cook and valedictorian W. Allison Davis. Both young men were headed to Williams College, where their buddy Sterling Brown had been for the past two years. Davis had received a full scholarship to the college due to an arrangement the college had with Dunbar: Williams paid the tuition of Dunbar’s top graduate. Cook didn’t need the help as much. His father was a rather famous musician and composer, Will Marion Cook; and his grandfather, John Hartwell Cook, had been one of the first Negro lawyers to practice in Washington and was dean of Howard University Law School from 1876 to 1878.20
The three friends would go onto great things in life. Cook was appointed the US ambassador to Senegal. Sterling Brown rose to prominence as a poet and educator. Allison Davis would one day grace a US postage stamp commemorating his groundbreaking work in anthropology.21 But back in the early 1920s, they were three young men just starting to make their way in an inhospitable world. For Davis, the scholarship was important. Money was not as abundant in his household as it once had been, thanks to President Wilson.
It began with his father John Davis. After returning home from his service in the Spanish-American War, John Davis suffered a huge loss— his wife died of scarlet fever. He was fortunate to remarry and build a life that included thr
ee children, Dorothy, John Jr., and William Allison Boyd Davis. Although John Sr. didn’t go to college, he was extremely smart and worked hard. He was enamored with Teddy Roosevelt and affected a similar look, including the pince-nez spectacles and full mustache.
Government jobs were available to colored Amercians during the first decade of the twentieth century, and a person could do well. Some open-minded whites in Washington could see that working with the colored population was a win-win. For example, the official in charge of the Government Printing Office, a Roosevelt appointee, once said this of his thousand or so employees:
There are 400 Negro employees in the Government Printing Office. Colored persons work in the various departments side-by-side with other employees in harmony and with great efficiency. I wish to declare with all emphasis that any employee of this department who tries to precipitate the devilish stricture of race prejudice will be immediately dismissed and will not again be employed!22
John Davis Sr. worked his way up through the GPO and became the director of a large office with twelve men reporting to him, almost all of them white. His situation was palatable in some ways because he was well known in Washington. He was a big landowner, having inherited a great deal of property from his mother. She had been a cleaning woman with the kind of relationship with her white abolitionist employer that had prompted him to leave her a large part of his estate in his will. She in turn left it to their son, John Davis.
In his own life, Davis professed “total commitment” to being a good father and enjoyed giving his family luxuries big and small.23 For Christmas 1901, he presented his wife with special engraved liquor glasses made for the occasion. Even though John Davis had wanted nothing to do with his own father, he enjoyed his inheritance and the fact that it made him one the largest property owners in Prince William County, Virginia. At one point, he owned two laundries and six small houses.
But perhaps most of all, John Davis loved his farm in Nokesville, Virginia. It was big enough to require staff and farmhands to look after the cows, calves, Berkshire sows, and pigs. Staff looked after the children, Allison, John, and Dorothy. On Sundays, family members put on their best clothes. Father Davis favored a straw boater and bow tie. The women wore high-necked and low-hemmed dresses. The children wore knickers and button-down shirts, their hair combed, even if only for that moment. The farm was where, as a small child, Allison Davis could ride his Irish Mail toy car to his heart’s delight.
After John Davis’s hero Roosevelt left office and one-termer Taft exited the White House, the nation elected Woodrow Wilson, and Davis’s world fell apart. Under the new racist rules, he lost his position and was demoted to a menial post in the same office he had once helped run. His salary was adjusted accordingly; as a result, he literally lost the farm. By April 1, 1914, Davis was auctioning off all his animals and farm equipment. He wasn’t able to reclaim his former position and ultimately lost all his property in order to ensure that his children—including his valedictorian son, Allison Davis—had the best education.
Handsome and smart as a whip, Allison Davis graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Williams with a degree in English. He had ambitions of writing poetry or novels, so he continued his studies at Harvard, earning a master’s degree in English in 1925.
“After Harvard, then there was a job open, a junior professor at Williams, and they wouldn’t hire him,” his son Gordon Davis explained during a conversation at his law firm, Dewey & LeBoeuf.24 The view from his high-rise office was obscured by clouds on that gray March day in 2010. “They wouldn’t hire him. It was a very embittering moment. Just a few years before, he was the star to the faculty, and now they wouldn’t hire him because he was black.” Still, his father remained focused. “He was … dignified. It was almost his first name. He carried himself with a great deal of dignity and restraint…. We had a sense of his importance.”
The same could be said of his youngest son, who is hard to miss. To call Gordon Davis a dandy is far too twee a description for a man who stands nearly six feet six. Today he is very much a New Yorker after four decades in Manhattan, a man who is not afraid to don a velvet blazer or a persimmon-colored tie. For a big and slightly imposing person with piercing green-gray-blue eyes, he speaks with great softness about his father. His office is a three-dimensional scrapbook showcasing small pieces of memorabilia, clippings, photos, and plaques that mark key moments of his life.
Gordon Davis was the superstar commissioner of parks and recreation for New York City who restored Central Park in the 1980s. He was the president of Lincoln Center and is currently on the board of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. He was a running buddy of the late 60 Minutes journalist Ed Bradley. He is quick to show you pictures of his family. His father, of course, but also of his uncle, John Davis, who attended Dunbar and went on to become a well-known civil rights advocate. Like his father, Gordon Davis went to Williams and, also like his father, went to graduate school at Harvard.
After the elder Davis left Cambridge and was rejected by Williams, he went on to teach at a historically black college in the South that had a mostly agrarian course of study but was introducing a few humanities courses. Davis was moved and saddened by how academically unprepared his students were. A friend had warned him about what to expect.
According to his son, “After three years of trying to teach these country people Shakespeare, he said, ‘There is something wrong here.’ ” Davis was witnessing the limiting effect of race and class on educational opportunities in the South. This experience would send him toward the social sciences, specifically anthropology. He went back to Harvard to get his master’s and then earned another from the London School of Economics. He wanted to investigate the source of the belief among all classes of southern whites that Negroes were inherently inferior. The only way to do this was to embed himself in the world of the Deep South. He packed up and moved to Natchez, Mississippi.
Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, along with a white anthropologist and his wife, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, infiltrated the southern community to study what the two anthropologists referred to as a “southern American caste system.” For almost two years, the Gardners lived among the white locals and the Davises lived among the Negroes. The class distinctions were so acute among these southern Negroes that at one point the Davises had to hire a young apprentice to live with the deeply uneducated in place of him and his wife because the Harvard-trained Davises couldn’t assimilate realistically in that particular neighborhood. The anthropologists, who made themselves a human control group, would meet in the cornfields at night to share information. They had to maintain their distance in public because, as they found, there would be no way for an educated Negro and an educated white to ever meet.
Their findings revealed two completely different “caste” systems, each with its own judgments about its own race and other races. In all cases when whites and blacks were seen as one community in “Old City,” as it was called in the book, whites were always considered superior. An unemployed poor white was superior to a Negro doctor. When the groups were considering each other separately, a Negro doctor would never been seen as on par with a white doctor, though he would be thought superior to a poor white by both whites and Negroes. But this Negro doctor would still have to be kept in his place because “uppity” Negroes were the biggest threat to “the correct Negro-white relationship.”
The castes created a code of behavior. The anthropologists found that the whole system of assumed inferiority perpetuated real inferiority. Negroes could only get housing in the worst, dirtiest, most undesirable areas, a sign of inferiority to whites. In citizens’ minds, this was not a sign of racism—it was just the proper order of things. But in this belief, Davis found the answer to his question about why the college students he had taught had a hard time understanding Shakespeare. In the Deep South, the unequal distribution of school funds based on Negroes’ “mental inferiority” was one way the caste system maintained itself thro
ugh the generations. “Inferior” students got inferior schools, but truly, it was the inferior schools that created the inferior students. The two years of study resulted in the book Deep South, a seminal book in modern anthropology.
Davis had a long career examining how race issues affect our societal roles and opportunities. He used his studies to help change thinking about who could learn and who couldn’t. He is perhaps most well known for debunking the IQ test as a measure of intelligence. His work describes a system in which the IQ test merely measured whether or not a student was middle class. “This study had the most practical effect of any of my work,” Davis recalled later. “It led to the abolition of the use of intelligence tests in New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and other cities. This was one time I got what I wanted: a direct effect on society from social science research.”25 His work was cited during the historic Brown v. Board of Education case and was also used in the formation of Head Start.
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