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NEW SCHOOL TIES
Central High was a beneficiary -- and a casualty -- of segregation. Part of its legacy is the question of how, half a century later, the alumni can best remain true to their school
By Eugene L. Meyer
Sunday, December 21, 1997; Page W16
On this sunny Saturday in May, they are honoring Henry Louis Collomb, class of '47, who retired from the Air Force with the rank of lieutenant colonel; Robert C. Lautman '41, who made his career as an architectural photographer; and Nicholas Pistolas '34, captain of the undefeated 1933 football team, then a player at Columbia with Sid Luckman, and then a children's eye doctor. In remarks acknowledging his certificate of distinction, each man explicitly thanks not only old teachers and coaches, but also Central itself for instilling in him self-confidence and the will to succeed. "You had to be something," is how Pistolas puts it. A Central education, he says, placed you in "an upper-class situation."
Central was actually as elite as a public school could be. At a time when the District's schools were the best in the region, Central was the most prestigious of the District's schools, a place that prepared young men and women for accomplishment in business, medicine, the law, the military -- any field worthy of their endeavor. The school had an endless list of alumni luminaries, a roster of legendary teachers, a tradition of winning athletic teams and a magnificent building in Columbia Heights. Even parents from outside the District -- federal employees, who could send their children to D.C. schools for free -- sought out Central for the advantages it conferred.
Today, however, the alumni are looking forward as well as back. At another point, Fred Dunn '42, a retired Montgomery County educator, rises to introduce Andrea Jones, a 17-year-old senior at Cardozo High. The alumni association is awarding her a scholarship of $1,000.
Only moments before, Dunn had explained to her how her school came to occupy the building on the heights, and how his school ceased to be. How the public schools were segregated then, and how Central was reserved for whites, Cardozo for blacks. How the District school board, in the spring of 1950, closed Central and put Cardozo in its building. It was a desperate -- and doomed -- attempt to keep the school system segregated.
With light streaming in through the auditorium's tall windows, Jones stands before a microphone on the floor and tells the crowd that she will be going to Howard University to major in nursing. She introduces her mother, a 1980 Cardozo graduate who is seated nearby. By way of conclusion she adds, "I'd like to say I'm delighted to be in the presence of all you Central High alumni."
As she returns to her seat, the alumni applaud warmly and easily, as if Cardozo scholarships have been a longstanding part of their ritual. In fact, these prizes are only four years old. It took nearly half a century for the Central alumni to come home. In that half a century, Central's past, always formidable, became something both to celebrate and to overcome. Within the alumni association, history died hard.
It was said to be Washington's first high school, but that claim overlooked the creation a few years before of a black high school, the M Street School, which was housed in the Sumner building when it had its first graduation in 1877.
Central opened in 1882 at Seventh and O streets NW as Washington High, and was renamed in 1890, after the District built other schools. With overcrowding came pressure for a new building, which opened in 1916 at 13th and Clifton streets NW, on a hillside that commanded a sweeping view of the city from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. The facility boasted a stadium, swimming pool, rifle range, armory, indoor track, tennis courts, greenhouse, library and the best school auditorium in town. Through the 1920s and into the '30s, Central swelled with more than 3,000 students.
The alumni association was formed in 1904, and over the years grew in numbers and importance. Alumni officiated at the laying of the cornerstone at the "new" Central in 1915. They contributed funds for the library, and to send Centralites to college. They raised money for a three-panel Holy Grail Frieze to hang in the library to memorialize Central's World War I dead. In 1924 the association, with a mailing list of 8,000, was said to be the largest for any public high school in the country.
Central's alumni, moreover, were compiling a remarkable record of individual achievement. Over they years they included FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, actress Helen Hayes, CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood; an ambassador to China and a District school superindent; judges, lawyers, doctors and mid- to high-level bureaucrats by the bushel. Centralites serving in World War II included 29 generals, six admirals and the first officer killed in the Normandy invasion.
"Central High School is more than just a building of brick and stone," rhapsodized the last yearbook. "It is a symbol of the American way of life, a foundation of knowledge, a haven for youth and a challenge for a better tomorrow. Her spirit dwells in the hearts of over twelve thousand Centralites scattered throughout the world."
Central had an unchallenged position atop a "dual" school system that had been operating in Washington since before the Civil War. "We didn't create the segregated system," says Gerry Wagshal, who graduated from Central in 1946. "We found ourselves growing up in it."
Indeed, in the 1940s a kind of apartheid prevailed in the nation's capital. Virtually every public facility in the city -- restaurants, theaters, playgrounds, subsidized housing -- was segregated by law or by custom. Even neighborhood associations were divided by name: Blacks belonged to "civic" associations, whites to "citizens" associations.
After World War II, this entire social order came under attack, especially in the courts, and the school system seemed particularly vulnerable. The change was fueled as much by demographics as by legal action: Even before the war, white families had been moving uptown from the inner city to upper Northwest. As they did so, Roosevelt and then Coolidge high schools were built to serve them, and Central's enrollment consequently declined. Even with the addition of the seventh and eighth grades, the number was down to 1,400 by 1949.
The city's black population, meanwhile, had been surging, in part because of migration from the South. The neighborhood around Central reflected the shift as black families moved in immediately south of the school.
School demographics were also changing citywide. In the 1940s, suburban students were, for the first time, required to pay tuition to attend District schools, and their numbers dropped sharply. With relative suddenness, the District's school system had a 52 percent black majority among its students. Black schools were overcrowded and white schools were under-enrolled.
This shift put the District Board of Education under considerable pressure: To maintain its dual system, it was legally obligated to provide "equal" facilities for both races. Fearful that it would lose a legal challenge on that point, the board played racial checkers, shifting schools from one racial designation to the other, to try to keep up with the demographics.
Cardozo High School, occupying an old building at Ninth and Rhode Island NW, was 756 pupils over its capacity of 1,040 and operating on staggered triple shifts. The football team practiced on a makeshift field between buildings at Howard University. The drama club rehearsed at Francis Junior High, at 25th and N streets NW. Recess was in the streets. Clearly, the board had to provide a bigger building for Cardozo.
Central, less than half full, became a prime target for conversion.
Over the fall of 1949 and winter of 1950, the board held hearings. They were contentious, and polarized largely along racial lines. For the most part, white neighborhood groups, the Central alumni and schools superintendent Hobart Corning (Central '07) opposed the change. So did 1,125 Central students, who signed petitions expressing their opposition. Black neighborhood groups, the NAACP and progressive whites favored it. "CENTRAL FOR CARDOZO," proclaimed a full-page advertisement placed by a coalition of blacks and liberal whites in The Washington Post on December 20, 1949. The next day, real estate salesmen descended on homeowners surrounding Central with offers to buy their homes.
In a letter to its members, the Central Alumni Association warned, "There are certain pressure groups in this area who seem to thrive on controversial issues and therefore would not welcome a workable solution to this most difficult problem." It then offered its own solution: Transfer white Wilson Teachers College to under-enrolled Roosevelt High; temporarily transfer black Miner Teachers College to Wilson; temporarily transfer Cardozo to the Miner campus pending completion of a new high school building for blacks in Northeast.
"It is now time for white people to stand in solid phalanx for their civil rights, the same as Negro people assert theirs," one citizens association representative said at a public hearing on the Central-for-Cardozo proposal. To which the president of the black Federation of Civic Associations replied, "It augurs poorly for American democracy that these people should scream, `Keep Central for white people' when 1,700 children are housed in an inadequate building almost 80 percent overcrowded."
Some whites, however, favored turning Central over to black students -- as a means of keeping the races apart. "Primarily, we want to defend the segregated school system," said a vice president of the white Federation of Citizens Associations. "Will we save one school and lose the segregated system?"
Amid this debate, the U.S. Court of Appeals here, in a 2-to-1 decision, upheld school segregation in Washington, finding no evidence of inequality in the assigning of school buildings or in educational opportunities. It would be four years before the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the legal basis for segregated schools -- not only in Brown v. the Board of Education, but also in Bolling v. Sharpe, a District case that the court had agreed to hear along with Brown.
Still, the District board acted with dispatch. On March 8, 1950, less than a month after its last public hearing, it voted to close Central. "The tragedy that has befallen Central cannot be exaggerated," reported the Central Alumni Record. "Irreparable damage has already been done not only to Central but to the entire community of Washington."
The last day of school for Central was June 9. George Couzzens, who is now president of the alumni association, was a senior then. He recalls an assembly at which students were told that the school would close a week early, and that demonstrations would not be tolerated. Students were directed to clear out their lockers and leave. Rather than being resentful, Couzzens and his buddies were simply happy to be out of school sooner.
Others took it harder. "It was very emotional," recalls Bruna Lenzi Watts, a classmate of Couzzens's. "I remember a lot of us cried. I was angry -- I don't know at whom -- because I would not have a high school to go back to." Central's evacuation was so total that even the books were taken away. "We were busy and sad and involved in helping to clean out," Watts recalls. "I helped teachers pack books."
On September 11, 1950, Cardozo students entered what had been the hallowed halls of Central High. "I remember walking in there," recalls Helen Jones, a member of Cardozo's class of 1951. "It was such a tremendously large building, I felt so lost. There was so much room, you couldn't take it in all in one day. Everyone came early that morning . . . We were so elated, we didn't even go out at lunchtime. We just rejoiced."
The alumni of Central were in mourning, and like the members of an illustrious family, they sought to preserve the artifacts from their ancestral home. Over the summer, the alumni association had set about obtaining the school's trophies and plaques and other memorabilia -- all the tangible symbols of the institution that had defined their passage out of youth. Even the Holy Grail Frieze was removed from the library.
Superintendent Corning went further: He had the building's cornerstone removed and stored in his office closet. This act prompted black groups to call for his prosecution, but ultimately the D.C. corporation counsel ruled, and the school board agreed, that Corning had acted within his statutory authority.
Meanwhile, it seemed that nobody wanted the rest of the Central memorabilia. Three promised rooms to house them at Western High turned out to be one. Some trophies went to the Chevy Chase Community Center; many were kept in the basement of McKinley High. From 1967 to 1987, all the mementos resided in two attic rooms in the Columbia Historical Society's Heurich Mansion near Dupont Circle.
Finally, they wound up at the Sumner School Museum -- the building where the M Street School had once been housed. That is where they rest today: Central yearbooks fill a bookcase, records fill a closet, and the trophies and Holy Grail Frieze grace the Ella Morgan Memorial Room, named after a beloved English teacher. The cornerstone is also in the custody of Sumner, but it sits in a Southwest Washington warehouse.
Through it all, the Central Alumni Association remained strong. There were alumni groups in New York, Boston, Cleveland, eventually Florida and Leisure World. The Washington newspapers were filled with reports of Central reunions. At one such affair, in 1958, 400 alumni turned out to sing school songs and honor various of their brethren, including Realtors, association presidents, a banker and a university professor. At these galas, issues of race were discreetly not discussed.
That changed in 1970, at the 40th reunion of the class of 1930. According to a later account in The Post, Joseph Danzansky, the class "prophet" who became a prominent businessman and was a civic leader until his death in 1979, rose to suggest that Central and Cardozo become one school with one name and one alumni association. Reported reactions ranged from silence to boos.
At another Central reunion in 1979, Eileen Shanahan, then a national economics reporter for the New York Times and a 1940 graduate, rose to receive her distinguished alumni award. While mentions of Central in newspapers were now largely on the obituary pages, Cardozo was receiving citywide renown for its dazzling marching band, and the band had an invitation to the Rose Bowl parade but a shortage of funds for the trip. Shanahan proposed that the alums get out their checkbooks and support the Cardozo kids.
"Well, all hell broke loose," she recalls, "and people stood up outraged and said, `We have nothing to do with them. They stole our school.' Not a single person spoke up in support. I was so mad I purposely left the little plaque they gave me on the table when I left. Somebody mailed it to me. I threw it in the trash and vowed to have nothing to do with Central High School again." In time, it became a vow she would not have to keep.
The changes came in steps, small and tentative, but forward all the same.
In the early 1980s, Charlie Kligman, who in the 1941 yearbook had "willed" his pitching arm to the trophy case, suggested that his fellow alumni fund some scholarships in Central's name at American University, from which he also had graduated. As the alumni raised $100,000 to endow the fund, the issue of race emerged.
"To be very honest with you," recalls Kligman, some people said, " `You're not going to give scholarships to black people.' So we had to fight that element. There were just two or three people, but they were vocal. They thought the scholarships should be just for white people." The opposition did not surprise him. Nor did it faze him. "We outvoted them. We let AU decide it" -- the university, not the association, would decide who got the scholarships. The money would be modest -- $1,000 to $5,000 -- but the gesture was significant. Since 1985, AU has awarded 16 scholarships in the name of Central, including three to minority students.
Also in the mid-'80s, the issue of helping out the Cardozo band came up again. This time, newsletter editor M. Gill Piquette, a 1934 graduate, said if the association didn't do it, she'd do it herself. The board voted to donate $500.
What was happening was not so much a revolution as another demographic shift: With the sheer passage of time, the membership was increasingly composed of people less steeped in the values that they grew up with and more attuned to current realities. To them, Central's closing in some ways "was just something that happened," says Florence C. Marvil, a 1942 graduate, "and then we sort of outgrew it and outlived those who had any ill will."
Marion Bishop Polli, a 1946 graduate, is one of those who was largely indifferent to the closing of Central at the time. But she also says, "When you get older, you think more. I remember when I went into the banking business, blacks were only maintenance people, but we had a very good president and things were beginning to change. He asked two maintenance people to be tellers. One customer said she was going to stop banking there. But I'm glad it happened, because in the course of working with different people, I thought, `We all want the same things -- a decent job, a decent education for our children.' "
So in 1993, when Polli proposed that the alumni association -- which she then headed -- contribute money either directly to Cardozo or to its students, the group was more receptive to some sort of link to the school than it had been in 1979.
"The reaction was kind of draggy at first" on the alumni board, recalls John "Gus" Plakas, of the class of 1940. "There were speakers who said they didn't think they [Cardozo] deserved it. They didn't want it racially. They said it wasn't their school anymore. I said that was not the point, that we're out to help people, we're an educational organization, we have an obligation."
"I felt if we could just touch a few people, let them know that just because we were a segregated school, we haven't forgotten them and we want to do what we can to help," Polli says. "But this wasn't something constantly discussed or brought up or whatever. It's just the passage of time. If anything's certain in life, it is that things change. That's what happened with the board."
She raised the idea first at the May 1993 board meeting. Only the month before, 15 board members had gone to Cardozo to present then-Principal Geraldine R. Johnson with a $1,000 check for her discretionary use. Their reception, from teachers and administrators, couldn't have been nicer. There were hugs and picture-taking.
Over that summer, the Central alumni mulled over the idea of a more regular relationship. When the board reconvened in September, the only question on the table was the form of giving. The vote was unanimous to create the Central scholarships for Cardozo students. After 43 years, a direct link had been forged between the two schools.
On the outside, the building they have in common looks much as it used to. Even an impression of the letters spelling "CENTRAL" remains behind the name "CARDOZO." But so much has changed over the decades, in the school and in the neighborhood.
In 1995, Plakas, a retired printer, thought he'd scout the old school before a planned visit by another group of Central alumni. On January 5, he drove in from his home in Montgomery County. He hoped his trip would allay any apprehension in the group. "I'd just parked the car and gotten out when I heard the shot," he says. It was fired by a 14-year-old freshman just outside the Clifton Street entrance to the school. "I didn't move. There was a second shot." The attack would leave a 16-year-old sophomore dead. "He stumbled through the [school] door. I pulled out of the parking space and left, very disheartened." Still, Plakas returned that spring with his group, and his desire to help the school remains.
Since then, visits to the building have become an annual ritual. Fred Dunn, the scholarship committee chairman, drives down in the spring to deliver applications and returns a month later to pick them up. Then his committee, which includes Marvil and Shanahan among its five members, visits Cardozo for interviews.
Of the nine applicants last spring, two were African American and the rest were Salvadoran, African, Vietnamese. After a while, a member of the committee innocently asked a student how long she'd been in the United States. "My whole life!" answered the startled girl, an 18-year-old African American. Andrea Jones and Suleiman Shifaw, from Ethiopia, were the hands-down favorites. They were honored at the Central reunion last May, and Dunn made the awards at a Cardozo assembly last June.
"Schools change names, schools change purposes," he said in the hushed auditorium. "But our alumni association still has a tremendous feeling towards the people and the building that is here."
And now, the scholarships will not be the Central alumni's only legacy to Cardozo. The alumni know too well that they are nearing the end. The youngest among them is 65. Their membership is 2,200, but shrinking. This is their endgame. There's no more than $50,000 in their bank accounts, but even associations must have heirs.
The Centralites have chosen theirs. When they disband, a few years hence, half their treasury will go to the Sumner School Museum, the former black school that houses their treasures. The other half will go to perpetuate the Central scholarships at Cardozo.
Eugene L. Meyer is a Washington Post reporter. His wife's great-aunt was a 1913 Central classmate of J. Edgar Hoover's, and her grandfather graduated from Central in 1914.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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