The M Street School
*M Street School is celebrated on this date in 1870. This high school was created in Washington, D.C. when the city's dual public school system was established.
Initially, Black and white schools were essentially equal. M Street High School initially began as the Preparatory High School for Negro Youth when Congress established it, and "Originally, it was an advanced grammar school with an inadequate faculty, overcrowding, and dropouts. It flourished despite a segregated public school system established within Washington, D.C. by Congress in the 1860s.
Within the District of Columbia, there had been previous efforts by Blacks to establish schools for themselves, as well as attempts by administrators and teachers to educate free Blacks decades before the American Civil War. White Washingtonians, though, "were opposed to educating Blacks, whether free or slave," and even went as far as to force Mary Billings, "a White Englishwoman, who established a school in Georgetown in 1810, to remove all the white students from the school.
M Street School offered students a rigorous academic curriculum and became synonymous with Black achievement in education. It became the famous M Street School in September 1891 when the high school was moved from the Miner Building at Seventeenth Street, between P and Q streets N.W., to a new building on M Street, near New York and New Jersey Avenues. Between 1891 and 1916, M Street School was one of the country's most exceptional, prestigious, and exemplary African American educational institutions ever.
It would later relocate to another site known as Dunbar High School.
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