Washington, 1900 (File)

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When I was a child, a little thing, on 4 ½ Street, there was a bakery shop where . . . they had ice cream. And we would wait until late at night, when [the baker] was ready to close. We could carry a bowl down, and he'd fill it up because he didn't have electric means of keeping his ice cream.

Dunbar High School in the 1960s (File)

Dunbar High School ~ 1923
Washington

It was almost like a prep school because if you went to Dunbar, you were able to go on to college. In fact, we had teachers who had their PhDs. Because they were colored, they had to teach in public schools. I had a Latin teacher who got her PhD at the Sorbonne in France, but there was no way for her to go into, you know, the Ivy League. Had she been white, she wouldn't have been teaching in a public school. Therefore, you got a first-class education.

Helen Reed remembers growing up in a segregated Washington and being forced to attend black schools, churches and movie houses. "We didn't protest like the people are doing now. . . . We weren't satisfied, but we were accustomed to that," she says.

But segregated didn't always mean substandard, Reed says. She finished Anthony Boine Elementary School in 1919 and received a "first-class education" at Shaw Junior High and Dunbar High schools. Many of her teachers, who had PhDs, weren't able to get jobs elsewhere.

Reed, who grew up in Southwest Washington, was the second eldest of 10 children. She describes a charmed childhood: family trips to Harpers Ferry, W.Va., in their Model-T Ford, mending dolls at the local doll hospital, savoring ice chips from the ice man on a hot summer day and going to the Bakery Shoppe on 4 ½ Street at closing time, empty bowl in hand, imploring the clerk for leftover ice cream.

As a teenager, Reed led an active social life, watching Rudolph Valentino movies at the Lincoln Theater and going to church dances, where she met her first husband, Frederick Saabs.

In 1929, Reed gave birth to Gwendolyn, now a math teacher, and in 1933, she had Frederick Jr., who became a pilot. About 1940, Reed started work as a clerk and tour guide at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where she worked for more than 30 years. She retired in 1974 and remarried. Her son died in 1980, and her husband in 1998.

Young at heart at 91, Reed continues to live an active, independent life - traveling to Las Vegas, shopping and caring for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.