Cardozo, Francis L., Senior High School

About this property

Cardozo Education Campus, formerly Cardozo Senior High School and Central High School, is a combined middle and high school at 13th and Clifton Street in northwest Washington, D.C., United States, in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. Cardozo is operated by District of Columbia Public Schools. The school is named after clergyman, politician, and educator Francis Lewis Cardozo. The Advanced Grammar School for Boys was established in 1877 and then combined with a similar school for girls in 1882 to form Washington High School, the first high school in the city. In 1890, the High School was split into three, with one high school opened in the current Peabody Elementary School building on Capitol Hill and another in Georgetown in the Curtis Building. As a result, the Washington High School became known as Central High School. In 1916, the school moved from Seventh and O to Thirteenth and Clifton. The school's first building was a three-story brick structure; therein lied scientific libraries, a teacher's lounge, a library, an exhibition hall, a military exercise space, and more than a dozen classrooms. Female students outnumbered their male counterparts 2-1. In late 1908, a study hall was established specifically for third-year boys, in hopes that the boys would become more masculine. In 1939, writing on behalf of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia now the District of Columbia State Board of Education, Superintendent Frank Ballou denied a request by contralto Marian Anderson to sing at the auditorium of the segregated white Central High School. As justification, he cited a federal law from 1906 requiring separate schools for the District. Meanwhile, the Daughters of the American Revolution had rejected a similar application. When Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from that organization in protest, author Zora Neale Hurston criticized her for remaining silent about the fact that the Board had also excluded Anderson. "As far as the high-school auditorium is concerned," Hurston declared "to jump the people responsible for racial bias would be to accuse and expose the accusers themselves. The District of Columbia has no home rule; it is controlled by congressional committees, and Congress at the time was overwhelmingly Democratic. It was controlled by the very people who were screaming so loudly against the DAR. To my way of thinking, both places should have been denounced, or neither." Although Anderson later performed at an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial, the Board retained its policy of exclusion. Known locally as "the castle on the hill", Cardozo's building was designed by architect William B. Ittner, a school building architect. The building was dedicated on February 15, 1917.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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