Mary Kenner graduated from Dunbar in 1931, in the era when the school’s extraordinary academic tradition was fully operational.

The education she received there — whatever specific subjects she studied — was an education in the possibility of achievement, in the expectation that Black students could and should excel at the highest levels, and in the existence of a tradition of Black intellectual achievement that extended back through the school’s history to its founding.

This is the educational context in which her inventive mind was shaped.

She did not learn to invent at Dunbar, but she learned — through the school’s culture and through its faculty — that excellence was both possible and expected.