First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School
About this audiobook
Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, defied the odds and, in the process, changed America.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Dunbar 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. These enormous challenges did not stop the local community from rallying for the cause of educating its children.
Dunbar attracted an extraordinary faculty: one early principal was the first black graduate of Harvard, almost all the teachers had graduate degrees, and several earned PhDs—all extraordinary achievements given the Jim Crow laws of the times. Over the school’s first eighty years, these teachers developed generations of highly educated, high-achieving African Americans, groundbreakers that included the first black member of a presidential cabinet, the first black graduate of the US Naval Academy, the first black army general, the creator of the modern blood bank, the first black state attorney general, the legal mastermind behind school desegregation, and hundreds of educators.
By the 1950s, Dunbar High School was sending 80 percent of its students to college. Today, as with too many troubled urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students struggle with reading and math. Journalist and author Alison Stewart, whose parents were both Dunbar graduates, tells the story of the school’s rise, fall, and path toward resurgence as it looks to reopen its new, state-of-the-art campus in the fall of 2013.
About the author
Alison Stewart is an award-winning journalist whose twenty-year career includes anchoring and reporting for NPR, NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News. She got her start covering politics for MTV News. Stewart is a graduate of Brown University.
Adenrele Ojo is a native Philadelphian who currently resides in Los Angeles by way of New York. She is a wearer of many creative hats: actress, voice-over artist, writer, producer, and photographer. Adenrele is a theater baby (daughter of the late founder of The New Freedom Theatre in Philadelphia, John E. Allen Jr.) who received her BA in theater from Hunter College in New York and honed her skills at the William Esper Studio, studying Meisner under the auspices of Maggie Flanigan. No stranger to the stage, a few of her theater credits include August Wilson's Jitney (NJPAC); Bronzeville (Robey Theatre Co.); Joe Turner's Come and Gone (nominated for an L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Award for Featured Actress); and The Ballad of Emmett Till by Ifa Bayeza, directed by Shirley Jo Finney, which won the 2010 L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Award & the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for Best Ensemble. She moves from stage to screen in such feature films as Within; Family; Elevate and Bathroom Vanities, a don't-judge-a-book-by-it's-cover comedy about one woman's unforgettable experience in a ladies' bathroom, directed by Christopher Scott Cherot (Hav Plenty and G), which Adenrele starred, cowrote and produced under the umbrella of her production company, NeW YiLLy Entertainment. Ojo's voice can also be heard on many audiobooks, which she has been recording since 2007 and for which she has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards. Some of her works include Katie Couric's The Best Advice I Ever Got, Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill, The Mothers by Brit Bennett (AudioFile Best of 2016 Fiction), Weapons of Mass Seduction by Lori Bryant-Woolridge, Oprah's Book Club 2.0 pick, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis, The Healing by Jonathan Odell, Unforgivable Love by Sophfronia Scott and Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan. When she is not recording, you can sometimes find her directing authors, celebrity actors, and other audiobook narrators.
