Alumni Share Memories Of Dunbar High School

The two-story, squarish, flattopped silhouette of Dunbar High School is a distant memory, but the school’s history and legacy has long outlived its building.

In the four decades between approximately 1917 and 1957, Black high school students bused into Shawnee to attend Dunbar from communities including Macomb, Earlsboro, and McLoud.

Dunbar played a formative role in the lives of many of Pottawatomie County’s Black youth, and while the days of educational segregation may seem miles in the past, the school’s legacy continues in the living memory of its alumni.

“It was fun days, learning days, of course, and lots of fun,” Dunbar alumni Betty Young said, “lots of different activities, especially during high school days.”

Called a high school, the building housed all grade levels from first through twelfth.

The first eight grades were on the ground floor, with two grades to a room, and the seventh through twelfth-grade classrooms were on the second floor, Young said.

For some students, the school day started with a bus ride from out of town.

Dunbar alumni Betty Katherine Permetter Falato, said she thought the bus ride from her home in Earlsboro to the Dunbar school was probably about 30 minutes.

Once at school, there were classes to attend, recess to enjoy, and lunch to eat. There was a pep squad and a football team, Falato said.

Parts of the coursework differed by gender.

“We had home economics,” Young said. “And in the classes we learned how to sew, how to cook, how to clean, how to purchase things; we learned about buying things.”

The teachers of Dunbar’s courses faced the challenge of giving students a quality education without the funding and resources needed to do so.

“ There were things that were, I can’t say that they weren’t good, but they weren’t adequate,” Falato said. “Let me put it that way. Like we had good teachers, and the things that we were able to do, we could do them well enough. But there were things that were missing. Like we didn’t have a science lab or anything like that.”

This lack of resources limited the education students could receive.

“It was like a second class school, I mean we had used books, but we knew that, but with the time that it was, you almost couldn’t envision anything different for a long time,” Dunbar alumni Delores Rutledge said.

The faculty rose to the occasion and Dunbar’s alumni spoke favorably of them.

“It was a caring school,” Rutledge said. “You felt the teachers wanted you to succeed.”

Dunbar was a large school compared to the all-Black Douglas Elementary that Falato had attended in Earlsboro.

“By the time my class enrolled in Douglas School in 1945, the school facilities needed refurbishing, and some of the extracurricular activities had been curtailed,” Falato wrote in her book, "Oklahoma’s Brown Decision Test Case: A Participant’s Perspective." “The schoolhouse was a white frame building. There was no indoor plumbing. It had two classrooms, but no library. It had a leaky roof, a useless pencil sharpener, and a warped blackboard that caused teachers to write in wavy lines.”

The Black community in Earlsboro was too small for the taxes raised from them to be enough to fund an all-Black high school of their own, so—forbidden by segregation from attending Earlsboro’s white high school—Falato and her six peers bused to Dunbar instead. There, they joined 23 other students to make up Dunbar High School’s 29-student freshman class for the 1953-’54 school year, according to Oklahoma’s Brown Decision Test Case.

This pattern of traveling to Shawnee for high school eventually shifted in the late fifties as school districts around the county began to desegregate their high schools in the years following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka.

That 1954 ruling declared that the “separate but equal” doctrine used to justify educational segregation was unconstitutional and launched the United States into the process of desegregating its schools.

This process took different forms in the various school districts across Pottawatomie County, according to Oklahoma’s Brown Decision Test Case.

In Shawnee, several Black students attended Shawnee High School for the first time in 1956-’57, including Betty Young.

“It was quite different, of course, it was more students and more classes, different classes, that we didn’t have offered at Dunbar, such as shorthand, biology. We didn’t, we probably had biology, but I know we didn’t have shorthand classes,” Young said. “But it was a pretty smooth transition.”

Several of these students did very well academically at Shawnee High School.

“One of my friends and I made the Honor Roll at Shawnee High School, but when they asked us—they were gonna have a dinner— they asked us if we were going, and we said no,” Rutledge said.

They weren’t permitted to eat at the restaurant where the dinner would be, due to segregation, she said.

“I guess they talked it over with the owner, and we were able to attend, but my stepfather, who was the policeman kept riding around, checking to make sure, you know, that we were okay, that (no one) was gonna mistreat us, and they didn’t,” Rutledge said.

Meanwhile, in Earlsboro, Falato’s parents, the Permetters, inquired about enrolling their children, including Falato, in Earlsboro High School for the 1955-’56 school year and were told to wait until the following year. When they and several other Black students were denied enrollment again in the Fall of 1956, Falato and her brothers, John Earl Permetter and Coyle Lee Permetter, as well as Frances Jean Carr, remained out of school all Fall, as their parents continued to seek for them to be enrolled in Earlsboro High School, according to Oklahoma’s Brown Decision Test Case.

These two families refused to be pressured into signing transfers to attend Dunbar like some other families had willingly done prior to the start of the school year.

When they were denied enrollment at Earlsboro High School a third time, in the Spring of 1957, the Permetters and Carrs took the matter to federal district court, with the support of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF).

In the buildup to the lawsuit, known as Carr et al. v. Cole, “Thurgood Marshall, Roscoe Dunjee, and U. Simpson Tate met at Superintendent Smith’s office at the Earlsboro school campus,” according to Oklahoma’s Brown Decision Test Case.

Judge William R. Wallace ruled in the students’ favor on Jan. 17, requiring Earlsboro High School to permit the students, including Falato, to enroll on Jan. 22, according to Oklahoma’s Brown Decision Test Case.

The Falato children enrolled in the school on Jan. 21, 1957, without further incident.

“Regardless of how the other students felt about that, all of them treated us kindly that first day,” Falato wrote in Oklahoma’s Brown Decision Test Case.

These gradual desegregations spelled the beginning of the end for Dunbar High School, at least as it had existed prior to Brown v Board of Education.