Strolling Through D.C. -- Pt 1

If you are determined to have a militaristic country, it is probably smart to be quick about getting the people who will be risking life and limb, the young folk, into the mood, by introducing them to the military early. And actually the discipline of the military is a good and even, I would say, essential thing -- short of falling overboard as in the Marines.

In the segregated school system that existed in the capital city of the home of the brave and the land of the free straight through the 1940's and even later, long after Harry Truman had desegregated the nation's armed forces, there were four senior high schools (grades 10 through 12) available to rainbow students. (As I try to be accurate in my use of language, I use "rainbow" for "black" and "euchil," short for "European Children, for "white.") And in those you could see the same sort of social stratification as that that was responsible for this maintenance of the two separate and unequal systems in the District of Columbia, and it existed not only between these four schools but also within them, at least in Dunbar, the one that I attended.

Dunbar occupied the top rung in prestige, and it was attended by the children who had the best junior high grades and/or the most prosperous parents. It specialized in academics, with an eye strictly set on preparing students for college, usually at Howard University, which conveniently was just a short walk away. But Dunbar students also fanned out to many other and more prestigious (meaning mostly euchil) schools throughout the nation, including the Ivy League. The other three rainbow senior high schools were more modest in their goals. Armstrong, which was right across the street from Dunbar, specialized in technical subjects. Cardozo, a few blocks across town, was the business school, while Phelps, far off in Northeast, taught vocational subjects.

I wanted to attend Armstrong, because that was where most of my friends went, and I figured that Dunbar would be far too hoity-toity for me, but my mother insisted that I go there, because that was where my father, by then early and very sadly deceased, would have wanted me to go.

All four of those schools proudly took part in a program called the High School Cadets. The U.S. Army provided advisors and real life 1902 Springfield rifles (with the firing mechanisms removed naturally!), enough for all the boys, and we were required to buy our own uniforms and take part in the drills, at least for our first couple of years there.

The cadet competition between these four schools was intense and bitter, even more so than in sports, if you can believe it (and if my memory hasn't gotten too enveloped in a golden haze of retrospect!). And in this Dunbar was king. Armstrong, Phelps, and Cardozo could win all the football and basketball crowns they wanted, but the cadets were more important, because they were teams to which every boy could belong and was equally key, even an outsider in every respect like me. And the height of achievement was winning the drill competition, which was held each year just before summer vacation, at Griffith Stadium, the same now long demolished baseball park a few blocks away in which Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Bob Feller in one league and Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Satchel Paige in a different league spent the summers doing their thing. Through the many years before me, the Dunbar smartasses had won the great majority of those competitions, and we thought it preordained that things would forever stay that way.

The D.C. rainbow community then as now was so large and self-contained that it was possible for us to be totally unaware of whether or not the same thing was going on in the euchil community. But I have a vague memory of having seen one or two fair-skinned guys in cadet uniform, and they looked odd, like pale imitations in more ways than one. In our persecuted frame of mind caused by the limits imposed on us by racial discrimination, they even suggested some sort of jibe being poked at us, since it was easy to think of the high school cadets as being purely a rainbow institution. Because it wasn't one of their traditions, surely those more privileged folk couldn't possibly have invested drilling with as much pride and flair, could they?

One of those fair-skinned near contemporaries was Pat Buchanan, the conservative columnist. (For what it's worth I entered the world and D.C. seven years in advance of him.) Though he lived in another, more prestigious part of D.C., Georgetown, for some reason he crossed town to be educated in high school close to Dunbar and Armstrong, at Gonzaga, which was run by Jesuits. I walked past that school quite often, on my way to and from Union Station, but I had no reason to take special note of Gonzaga, and so the impression I retain is just of a very grim-looking and strangely silent, high-walled place, like a Knights Templar fortress set in the middle of Jerusalem. (Yes, reader, as one of the strange results of Jim Crow -- and at my mother's expense -- I didn't ride anything as pedestrian as a bus or trolley to school. For much the greater part of that distance I caught a train. Not a subway train either -- that was still years from existing -- but a train train -- an unusual story that awaits another day.) But Gonzaga was a Catholic school, and they didn't have cadets. How sad for Buchanan -- because if he had gone through that essentially democratic experience, he might not have been so happy to expose himself to the colossal degradation later of becoming a speechwriter for R. Reagan.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of this thrilling story. Surely you want to know how it all came out!