Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School
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L. Garnell Stamps wrote the following for a 1989 Dunbar High School reunion booklet.
The Dunbar story began in a smoke-filled room on the grounds of Virginia Theological Seminary and College. There in historic old Hayes Hall, sixty-nine years ago, Edward A. Bondurant, a city postman; Washington Scott, a carpenter by trade but a dynamic, charismatic, determined individual; and D.N. Vassar, an instructor of Homiletics [i.e., the art of preaching] from Virginia Union University in Richmond, waged the first major assault against the status quo.
“We met to decide upon a course of action to follow in order to show our opposition to the damnable shame of things in Lynchburg.” That quotation was transcribed by the late Rev. F. P. Lewis, a distinguished Lynchburg historian and theologian, from the frayed notes of a dusty old diary which had belonged to Washington Scott. . .
Negotiations, confrontations, and meetings of one kind or another lasted a thousand days. Finally, public school superintendent Edward Carter Glass and School Board chairman R.E. Blackford, acting on orders of the city government and local School Board members, paved the legal way toward the formation of a brand new “colored high school.”
Black community leaders insisted that they choose the name of an honored African-American to grace the front of the edifice.
When Dunbar High School opened, February 12, 1923, it offered not only classrooms, an auditorium and a gymnasium for its students, but a branch of the Jones Memorial Library—with Anne Spencer as its librarian—for the city’s African-American community, young and old. A manual training shop for boys was located in the school’s basement; girls could take cooking and sewing. Since the new school was without a cafeteria, lunches for Dunbar students were prepared by the Home Economics students and served on the school’s lawn! Mrs. Virginia Hughes, who graduated from Dunbar in 1927, remembered that graham crackers and milk could be purchased for a nickel, according to Dr. Leslie Camm. 1
In “No Matter How Long,” Virginia Hughes related this story to O. C. Cardwell:
I remember openly protesting segregation when I realized the unfairness of the schools. At Dunbar High School, the students had to go in the back doors to enter the schools. . . At the White schools, they were allowed to go in the front doors, but we were not allowed to go in the front door. A feeling arose among some of the students that felt this, among other things, was unfair. . . [T]he night of our commencement, we had decided, a few of us, not all, but some persons in the class decided that when we pledged allegiance to the flag, we would end up by saying ‘with freedom and justice for White folks.’ I could see Miss Urquhart who was the [White] principal of Dunbar at the time, when she rose up—with her three hundred and some pound self—and rolled her eyes trying to find out who it was that made that statement.
Two years after Mrs. Hughes graduated from high school, the New York stock market crashed; The Great Depression began. Because economic hardship had so devastated Lynchburg’s African-American community, enrollment at Dunbar during The Depression decreased when many students left school to seek work. The students able to remain in school during the thirties adhered to a strict dress code: coats and ties for the boys, and dresses for the girls. Frustrated by the separate-and-not-at-all-equal conditions at their children’s high school, Dunbar parents raised money for library books, band uniforms and instruments, athletic equipment, and curtains for the auditorium stage. In 1938, Clarence William “Dick” Seay was hired as Dunbar’s full-time principal, the first African-American to hold that position.
A year before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, in 1940, Dunbar became fully accredited; a year later, the West Building was added. In 1942, the high school’s curriculum was redesigned so that Dunbar students could choose from a traditional academic program, a standard high school diploma, or a vocational program. Dunbar’s vocational students built the Amelia Pride Cottage where homemaking classes were taught, in 1949.
Until it was razed in 1979, Dunbar High, the city’s only accredited African-American high school, had elected over three-hundred students to the National Honor Society, boasted championship football and basketball teams, received the highest rating in a state drama festival thirteen times, and its school chorus had been rated one of the finest in the United States.
“One of the most outstanding characteristics displayed by the students at Dunbar was the possession of higher aspirations,” notes W.E. Clark III, who began teaching Science at Lynchburg’s all-Black high school in 1952, upon graduating from Shaw University with a B.S. in Chemistry.
“Higher education meant success to many people in the Dunbar Community. People showed interest in becoming professionally prepared,” Clark continued.
When asked what “separate but equal” meant for him, the former Science teacher wrote in a November 16, 2003 letter:
To me and other teachers in the Science department or in the Lynchburg School system, Separate But Equal meant that Blacks in the city were to live and study in separate facilities. Blacks were expected to satisfy themselves with that which was available to them. If we knew of anything better than was provided, it was alright to ask for it, but not to aggressively seek it. That which was available to us was to be used by us and not shared between the White citizens and the Black citizens.
The idea of
Equal rarely entered our existence. It was well known that our supplies were limited as far as being provided by the Board of Education, but having strong ties with the community in the form of what was known as The Parent Teachers’ Association, supplies were fairly abundant. . . One of the most visible supplies were text books, which were supplied by state mandate. Under this mandated system, text books were issued through a central system and there is memory of seeing books supplied to Dunbar that had been used by students from E. C. Glass High School. . . It was clear to see that nearly everything related to life in the Black community either flowed into or out from Dunbar. Dunbar was for the Black citizens the social center, the information center, the meeting place, the home away from home, and the safe haven for all life. . . 2
Notes, Links
1 “Blacks in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1933 – 1945,“ a thesis by Dr. Leslie Camm; additional information from “Against All Odds: The Success Story of Dunbar High School” by Delano Douglas, found at the Legacy Museum of African American History
2 A November 16, 2003, letter to Patricia Wild
