She watched the world around her with the slightly tilted perspective of someone who is always, at some level, asking whether this is really the best way to do it.

She was also an excellent student, and in 1931 she graduated from Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.

Dunbar was one of the most significant schools in African American educational history — a public high school with an extraordinary record of academic achievement despite the crushing constraints of segregation.

Founded as the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth in 1870, Dunbar had over the following decades produced an astonishing list of graduates who went on to distinguished careers in law, medicine, the sciences, the military, and the arts.

Graduating from Dunbar in the early 1930s was not simply completing high school; it was emerging from an institution that had demonstrated, across more than sixty years, that African American students could excel at the highest levels.