Wendell Phillips Academy High School entrance
The entrance to Wendell Phillips Academy High School, which has a list of high-achieving alumni that includes lawyers, professional athletes and jazz musicians. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ

What’s That Building? Wendell Phillips Academy High School

The Bronzeville school has an extensive list of high-achieving alumni, including singer Nat King Cole, poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the original Harlem Globetrotters.

The entrance to Wendell Phillips Academy High School, which has a list of high-achieving alumni that includes lawyers, professional athletes and jazz musicians. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ
Wendell Phillips Academy High School entrance
The entrance to Wendell Phillips Academy High School, which has a list of high-achieving alumni that includes lawyers, professional athletes and jazz musicians. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ

What’s That Building? Wendell Phillips Academy High School

The Bronzeville school has an extensive list of high-achieving alumni, including singer Nat King Cole, poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the original Harlem Globetrotters.

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At Wendell Phillips Academy High School in Bronzeville, a short bit of music plays just before the bell rings: a snippet of the 1920s jazz standard “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

The song has for more than half a century been the theme music of the Harlem Globetrotters. Although the team’s name suggests they’re from New York, the original squad in 1926 was mostly made up of recent Wendell Phillips graduates.

Harlem Globetrotters display
A Harlem Globetrotters display inside Wendell Phillips Academy High School. The team’s original squad was mostly made up of the school’s graduates. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ

The Globetrotters are not the only talents who came out of Wendell Phillips High School. A partial list of the school’s other notable alumni — not all of whom graduated — includes singers Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington, the comic actress Marla Gibbs of The Jeffersons and 227, civil rights figures Timuel Black and Earl Dickerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines John Johnson.

The list of high-achieving alumni also includes lawyers, professional athletes and jazz musicians. If school administrators ever get tired of playing “Sweet Georgia Brown,” they could play “Fame” between classes.

Wendell Phillips, completed in 1904 on what was then called 39th Street, is a grand Classical Revival edifice of brick trimmed with limestone pilasters and hooded doors. Go inside and up a few steps to the long main corridor, and there’s your first introduction to the illustrious alumni.

photos of notable alumni
Wendell Phillips Academy High School’s hallways feature dozens of photos of illustrious alumni. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ

Along with those already named above are photos of:

*Roebuck “Pops” Staples of the Staple Singers

*Painter Annie Lee, to whose painting Blue Monday Lizzo paid tribute in her December appearance on Saturday Night Live

*Two former Chicago Police superintendents

*Thomas A. Dorsey, the pioneer of gospel music

*George Johnson, founder of Johnson Products, the hair products company.

*George Kirby, a TV comedy star of the 1960s and 1970s.

The pictures of notable alumni number in the dozens, and go into other hallways in the building. On the second floor, there’s a mural showing several of these as well as Maudelle Bousfield, principal of Wendell Phillips from 1939 to 1950. Bousfield was the first African American woman to attend the University of Illinois, in 1927 became the first Black principal of a Chicago public elementary school, and when she moved to Wendell Phillips a dozen years later, the first Black principal of a Chicago public high school.

mural of famous alumni
A mural shows some of the school’s notable alumni, including Maudelle Bousfield, principal of Wendell Phillips from 1939 to 1950. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ

A new $17 million gym addition opened at Wendell Phillips in September. Trophy cases and exhibits there honor the Harlem Globetrotters and other athletes from the school. Outside, the block of Prairie Avenue running up the west side of the school honors Dinah Washington Way, named on what would have been her 90th birthday in 2014.

Why did so many Black achievers come out of Wendell Phillips?

Rashad Talley, the school’s principal and son of a man who graduated from the school, says part of the reason was geography. In the first half of the 20th century, Chicago confined much of its Black population to Bronzeville, and Wendell Phillips was the high school there.

Named for a leading Boston abolitionist, Wendell Phillips High School originally served the children of affluent white families in the mansions and greystones of the surrounding area. As the Great Migration shifted the population, Wendell Phillips was predominantly Black by 1920, 16 years after it opened.

DuSable High School, a mile and a half south on Wabash, initially opened in 1935 as New Wendell Phillips. The name was changed a few years later. Some of the alumni Phillips claims now attended that expansion campus.

Wendell Phillips hallway
A hallway inside Wendell Phillips. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ

Credit for some of the musical greatness of the alumni goes to Capt. Walter Dyett, a legendary music teacher at Phillips and DuSable who has been credited with helping launch Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington and many others.

On top of those factors is people meeting the obstacle of racism and breaking through. Talley said that’s a key reason the pantheon of alumni gets so much attention at Wendell Phillips.

“You have to understand what your past has been in order for you to know the importance of what we speak about now,” Talley said, “and how it propels you to your future.”

He added that he believes it’s valuable for current-day students “to know that there were successful people in the day when specifically for African Americans there were challenges in our society where they were not expected to achieve, permitted to achieve.”

mural inside Wendell Phillips
Rashad Talley, the school’s principal and son of a man who graduated from the school, says it’s valuable for current students to know about successful Black alumni. K’Von Jackson for WBEZ

Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him on Twitter @Dennis_Rodkin.

K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him on Instagram @true_chicago.