Watchung Booksellers Author Event - Alison Stewart, "First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School"

Please join us at Watchung Booksellers for this exciting event featuring Alison Stewart, author of First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School.

First Class combines a fascinating history of Dunbar, the first U.S. high school for African Americans, with an unflinching analysis of urban public-school education today. Author Alison Stewart explores an underrepresented and largely unknown aspect of black history, while also opening a discussion on what it takes to make a public school successful. During the school's first 80 years, Dunbar attracted an extraordinary faculty, including the first black graduate of Harvard, lawyers, doctors, and PhDs. These instructors would go on to develop generations of highly educated, successful African Americans. Today, as in too many failing urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students are barely proficient in reading and math. Alison Stewart - whose parents were both Dunbar graduates - tells the story of the school's rise, fall, and possible resurgence as it looks to reopen its new, state-of-the-art campus in the fall of 2013.

Alison Stewart is an award-winning journalist whose 20-year career includes anchoring and reporting for MTV, PBS, NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News.