Artist in Human Relations

"If you don't behave," Chicago teachers used to warn Negro pupils, "I'll send you to Dunbar." Ramshackle Dunbar Trade School on Chicago's South Side was little better than a reform school. Nobody preened himself on winning a Dunbar diploma, or stood much chance of landing a job with one. Then Clifford J. Campbell came along.

Cliff Campbell was a young Negro from Washington, D.C., a onetime Pullman porter and redcap, whom the depression had sidetracked from architecture into schoolteaching. In 1942, when war industries were begging for skilled workers, the Chicago school board looked around for a man who could perk up down-in-the-mouth Dunbar. The principal at Wendell Phillips High School, where Campbell was dean of boys, gave him a resounding recommendation: "An artist in human relations."

Installed as Dunbar's new director, Campbell promptly fired all 16 teachers as substandard, gathered a white and Negro faculty of 74 to help him build a bigger & better high school. He set up 23 tough vocational courses, begged or borrowed $2,000,000 worth of machines and equipment. School enrollment has jumped from 125 pupils to 1,650 (400 of them Negro war veterans).

Last month, after six years on the job, 43-year-old Cliff Campbell was picked by the U.S. Office of Education's magazine School Life as the answer to a big question: "What Are Good Teachers Like?" And last week, as Dunbar was closing down for a month's summer vacation, 105 of its 118 graduates paid Director Campbell a tribute he liked even better: they got good jobs.

Skills First. Chicago School Superintendent Herold C. Hunt, who thinks Campbell and Dunbar are "amazing," has promised them a new building within three years. Meanwhile overcrowded Dunbar, built to handle only 375 students, makes do with a Hooverville of temporary wooden buildings--and three shifts. Cliff Campbell is the first to arrive every day (by 7:30 a.m.) and the last to leave (after 10 p.m.). Offered better-paying jobs in their trades or at other schools, many of Campbell's teachers have refused.

Because most of Dunbar's students come from low-income homes and many have to leave before graduation, Campbell concentrates on teaching every boy & girl some employable skill in the first half year. In the auto-shop course, a boy learns to grease a car; in the dressmaking course, a girl learns to cut dress parts. Students who stay become skilled craftsmen: some of Dunbar's sheet-metal graduates make $125 a week.

Arts Later. Campbell insists that his students also take academic courses (English, math, science, social studies), encourages them to try music and art. He was pleased as punch last year when an aircraft student won the state oratory contest. Knowing that factory doors don't open so wide to Negroes, Campbell drills his students on writing letters of application and taking job tests, makes them conscious of neatness, work habits and "personality." Best measure of his success: Dunbar now takes only the top 15% of its applicants.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.