History of Paul Laurence Dunbar Senior High School
Paul Laurence Dunbar is the first high school to serve African-Americans in the United States. Dunbar High School defied the odds and in the process changed America. In the first half of the twentieth century, Washington D.C’s Dunbar High was an academically elite public school, despite being racially segregated by law and existing at the mercy of racist congressmen who held the school’s purse strings. The school’s well-educated teachers developed generations of high-achieving African Americans, groundbreakers that included the first black member of a presidential cabinet, the first black graduate of the US Naval Academy and the legal mastermind behind school desegregation.