By Hannah Kintzel, Museum Experience Leader & Emily Kubota, Curator
Most people in Lynchburg today only know of one principal of the famed Dunbar High School: C. W. Seay. This is understandable, considering that Seay served for more than 30 of the school’s 50 years–and given Seay’s strong leadership and popularity. However, Seay was in fact the third principal of Dunbar, following William F. DeBardeleben and James W. Mozee.
In the early 1920s the Lynchburg school board funded the construction of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School for Lynchburg’s Black students at the behest of the local Black community. Although the all-white Lynchburg High School had its own independent principal, Dunbar had two: a supervising principal, who was white, and a building principal, who was Black. This arrangement was typical of the Jim Crow South, where many all-white school boards and superintendents sought to retain control over exactly how their Black students were educated and exactly what they were taught.
William F. DeBardeleben (pronounced “duh-bar-duh-LAY-ben”) began his career in Lynchburg as principal of Jackson Street High School, Lynchburg’s first high school for Black students. When Dunbar replaced Jackson Street and opened in the fall of 1923, DeBardeleben was appointed its first building principal.
DeBardeleben was born in 1883 in South Carolina and held multiple degrees from Lincoln University, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. He only served as building principal of Dunbar High School for one school year, resigning in the summer of 1924 to take another teaching job in Washington, D.C.
James W. Mozee was the second building principal at Dunbar High School. Mozee was born in Platte County, Missouri, in approximately 1862.[1] He attended Lincoln Institute in nearby Jefferson City and graduated in 1887. Mozee moved to Lynchburg, where his wife was born and raised, around 1908 and taught at Payne and Dunbar Elementary Schools through the 1920’s. He was appointed building principal at Dunbar High School in 1930 and served through the 1937-1938 school year. He retired in 1939 after teaching for one final year at Dunbar High.
DeBardeleben and Mozee’s careers as the first two building principals at Dunbar are sometimes overshadowed by the school’s well-known first Black supervising principal C. W. Seay. However, without the pathway paved by his predecessors, Seay may not have accomplished all that he did at Dunbar. Located on Twelfth Street, the school is still in operation as Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School for Innovation and serves sixth through eighth grade students.
POSTSCRIPT
In the fall of 2021, Old City Cemetery’s annual Candlelight Tours, featured James W. Mozee, as portrayed by Dee Brown. Tour attendees were surprised and saddened to find that there was no gravestone for Mozee in his family plot next to the stone of his wife, Lelia Perkins Mozee. Several patrons said they would donate to a campaign to raise funds for Mozee’s gravestone. The Cemetery was able to raise the necessary funds through community donations, and on Juneteenth 2022, a new granite and bronze marker was unveiled over Principal Mozee’s grave.
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[1] Date listed on death certificate; however, the state of Missouri did not require birth certificates until 1883. Mozee was most likely born into slavery.
