Model Schools in the Model City explores schools in pursuit of Black educational excellence

Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital
Amber N. Wiley
The University of Pittsburgh Press
$75 

Washington, D.C., holds a place in the collective imaginations of many, and that imagined place takes many forms: capital, seat of power, collection of monuments, eighth-grade field trip destination, home. The city’s ambitions have long been aspirational, with imposing Beaux Arts structures and Neoclassical buildings, heavy in their white marble both in actual mass and perceived importance; in the last century rendered in concrete as a means of economical expressions of grand ambition and large-scale bureaucracy.

The city is also the setting for Dr. Amber N. Wiley’s new book, Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital, which illuminates complicated histories of Washington’s school system and its buildings, specifically emphasizing the rise of Black educational facilities designed to inspire despite longstanding segregationist attitudes and planning policies. Wiley, whose credentials include a doctorate in American Studies, a master’s in Architectural History, and a BArch, deftly weaves together documentation of the district’s tumultuous history to recall, as she writes in her introduction, how:

“Black Washingtonians used public education as a means of racial uplift, in the face of entrenched white resistance and repeated assertions of white supremacy. For Black Washingtonians, it was the school building—a permanent structure, made of sturdy material—that was the physical realization of Black liberation, agency, and the right to exist as citizens of the United States.”

Loosely spanning the period immediately after the Civil War up through the late 1970s, with a present-day epilogue, the book dives deep into records to unearth pieces of history, which, as Wiley stitches them together, reveal the struggles and successes of Black Washingtonians in achieving built monuments to academic greatness as well as a damning pattern of deliberate erasure of that same history by white preservationists. Three schools—the Sumner School, Howard University’s School of Architecture, and Dunbar High School—play significant roles, illustrating the importance of physical structures in holding literal and figurative space for Black Washingtonians to grow and thrive, but only through decades of hard-fought antisegregation battles.

The Sumner School, named after abolitionist Charles Sumner, was designed by Adolf Cluss and completed in 1872, the year after Washington gained its first municipal government. With newfound autonomy and budgets, D.C. opened three post–Civil War schools for Black residents of Washington, among which the Sumner School building is standing today. “The design and erection of the Stevens and Sumner schools, as well as the establishment of Howard University,” Wiley writes, “were all landmarks to Black educational gains during the Reconstruction era.”

The Sumner School’s contemporaneous counterpart for white students, the Franklin School, was also designed by Cluss. Today, both the Sumner School and the Franklin School live on as museums: The latter became Planet Word following a renovation by Beyer Blinder Belle; the former was rehabilitated in 1986 and combined with the neighboring Magruder School into an award-winning, block-wide project that now houses the D.C. public schools archive, designed by Hartman-Cox Architects; Navy, Marshall & Gordon; and the Ehrenkrantz Group (today known as Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn). The continued existence of these two buildings is notable in that, as Wiley attests, buildings of importance to Black Washingtonians were not included by white preservationists in their surveys of “sites of interest,” thereby rendering them vulnerable to demolition and redevelopment under the guise of urban renewal.

Black communities suffered from wholesale displacement in the city’s Southwest quadrant; Black Washingtonians fought to exert more control over the urban renewal process, with activist architects emerging from Howard University to guide local reconstruction lest it be done to them instead of by them. Howard established its School of Architecture and Planning in 1970, and its students teamed with local practicing architects to provide more opportunity for African Americans within the design profession; graduates of Howard University School of Law had already proved instrumental in efforts to desegregate D.C. from the 1940s through the 1960s. “The roots of public school desegregation in the United States were sown at Howard University, and in the segregated Washington public school system,” Wiley writes. Howard’s architecture school arose in the aftermath of the 1968 assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent uprising, but yielded a cohort of professionals eager to shape the city around them.

The work happening in and around Howard University was the foundation upon which Black activist architects built. Within this cultural milieu of urban renewal, desegregation, and later, urban unrest, Black activist architects fought against and worked to leverage federal legislation to gain design commissions for projects ranging from housing to school buildings.

One such building arising from these commissions was for a new location of Dunbar High School, which arrived in 1977, just over a century after the Sumner School. Designed by Bryant & Bryant, two brothers who graduated from Howard University, Dunbar featured split levels connected by a central set of ramps rising 10 stories tall, perhaps drawing reference to Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building at Yale (where the author studied). Bryant & Bryant’s Dunbar replaced an existing 1916 building after a fraught preservation battle; Old Dunbar had been “the epitome of Black excellence in the first half of the twentieth century,” whereas New Dunbar, as the Bryant & Bryant building was occasionally called, would be a symbol of hope enshrined in a modern design befitting its community. “Black architects at Howard and those practicing in Washington,” Wiley explains, “mirrored the modernism of the early to mid-1960s historical milieu: forward-looking, concrete, Brutalist structures that were monumental, announcing their grandeur and durability.” Dunbar was that monument, situating a tower within a low-slung residential neighborhood whose outward views, framed by windows to inspire the students within, included both Howard and the Capitol.

Wiley cleverly creates ties across a century through inclusion of praise for Dunbar from The Washington Post’s architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt, who wrote of the school’s innovative open plan that it was “something that Washington’s public school builders have not dared since 1868 when the Franklin School…was built and won first prize as a model school building at the Vienna Exposition of 1873.”

Although the three schools explored here are case studies in the pursuit of Black educational excellence, they represent just a few fragments of the compelling tapestry Wiley unfurls in Model Schools. Although far too many of the schools discussed in the book have been demolished—including the second Dunbar as well as the first—Wiley’s writing reinforces their legacies by resurfacing them and highlighting their importance in Washington’s history.

Deane Madsen is a Washington, D.C.–based writer and photographer specializing in architecture.

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