A00281 - The Demise of Dunbar and Black Rednecks and White Liberals Revisited
While watching the US Open Golf Championship and seeing the Pinehurst No. 2 golf course torture the best golfers in the world for a full four hours, I added two more biographies to my Amherst College Biographies blog. The two names that were added were Charles Hamilton Houston, Class of 1915, and Frances Morse Dent, Class of 1916.
By now, most folks know that Charles Hamilton Houston was the legal architect of the effort to dismantle Jim Crow and to desegregate the public schools in the United States.
Houston would not live long enough to see Brown v. Board of Education be decided, but his protege, Thurgood Marshall, was the lawyer who won the case and who would one day serve on the United States Supreme Court.
As for, Frances Morse Dent, he is little known, but he too was a lawyer.
noted for his legal work in the case of Sipes v. McGhee
which was the companion case to the Shelley v. Kraemer case
in which the United States Supreme Court held that racially restrictive housing covenants cannot legally be enforced.
As a lawyer, for me, this was interesting stuff. But what intrigued me more was the fact that both Charles Hamilton Houston and Francis Morse Dent came from the same high school, Dunbar High School. And in reading about these two Dunbar alumni, I came across this article
Remembering Dunbar: Amherst College and African American Education in Washington, DC Amherst College and African American Education in Washington, DC from Amherst in the World on JSTOR
|
I encourage you to take a look at the article and look at the Dunbar alumni who became Amherst College alumni and who actually went on to change the world.
And then I encourage you to read about how the success of the Dunbar alumni in desegregating public schools in the United States appears to have led to the demise of Dunbar High School as a premiere educational institution
and to pay particular attention to the remarks made by Thomas Sowell
"According to economist Thomas Sowell's 2015 appraisal, this all changed after the landmark United States Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education that ruled for integration of public schools:
"For Washington, the end of racial segregation led to a political compromise, in which all schools became neighborhood schools. Dunbar, which had been accepting outstanding black students from anywhere in the city, could now accept only students from the rough ghetto neighborhood in which it was located. Virtually overnight, Dunbar became a typical ghetto school. As unmotivated, unruly and disruptive students flooded in, Dunbar teachers began moving out and many retired. More than 80 years of academic excellence simply vanished into thin air."[10]
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Fairfield, California
June 17, 2024
Comments
Post a Comment