The institution that educated Mary Kenner before she attended Howard University deserves attention as a context for understanding how she came to be the person she was.

Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., has a history that is among the most remarkable in American educational history.

Founded in 1870 as the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth — the first public high school for Black students in the United States — it was renamed for the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1916.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dunbar operated as an academic institution of extraordinary rigor and achievement.

The faculty at Dunbar included graduates of Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Dartmouth, Wellesley, Oberlin, and other elite institutions who were excluded from teaching at white universities and public schools by segregation.