Dunbar High School and the World of Black Little Rock

Long before Central High School became a battleground, there was Dunbar High School, and for the Black community of Little Rock, Dunbar was a source of deep and legitimate pride. Built in nineteen twenty-nine on Ringo Street, Dunbar was the first accredited Black high school in Arkansas and one of the few in the South to be fully accredited by the North Central Association during its early decades. It operated from the conviction, shared by teachers and parents throughout Black Little Rock, that academic excellence was itself a form of resistance.

Its faculty held advanced degrees from institutions across the country. Its alumni went on to careers in medicine, law, education, and the arts in numbers that exceeded what anyone measuring the school's underfunded circumstances might have predicted. The school was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the African American poet from Dayton, Ohio, whose work at the turn of the twentieth century had given millions of Black Americans a literature that named their experience.

Schools named for Dunbar appeared across the country in those decades, each one a statement about the aspirations of the community that built it. After the integration of Little Rock's schools, Dunbar became a junior high school and eventually a middle school. The original nineteen twenty-nine building still stands and today houses a magnet middle school.

What it represented, a community's determination to educate its children fully, without waiting for permission from the surrounding society, belongs to the history of this city alongside the confrontations at Central High. The full texture of Black civic life in Little Rock before and after desegregation remains incompletely documented in the public record. This account draws on available scholarship; deeper community histories exist in family archives and oral tradition that have not yet been systematically collected.