Frederick Dumas, first L.A. County director of Head Start preschool program, dies at 92

Frederick Dumas, a school administrator who in the 1960s was the first director of Operation Head Start in Los Angeles County and who co-founded an organization to push for equal treatment of minority teachers and students in Los Angeles schools, has died. He was 92.

Dumas died Dec. 15 of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease and old age at Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center, said his daughter Diann Dumas.

The federal Head Start program to help impoverished preschoolers came to Los Angeles in January 1966. By June, Dumas was refereeing meetings of parents who protested tightened eligibility requirements and cutbacks in the Head Start budget that reduced classroom supervision.

“This is a cause where fairness has been ignored,” Dumas told the parents, according to a 1966 article in The Times.

When he resigned from the post in August of that year, he partly blamed the difficulty he had trying to secure approval of a $17-million budget that would have allowed Head Start to run year-round locally.

Two years later, Dumas co-founded the Council of Black Administrators and served as its first president.

Owen Knox, another co-founder, said Dumas’ intent “was that all children receive the best Los Angeles Unified had to offer. He worked diligently at that, sometimes at risk to his own career.”

While representing the organization, one of the first issues Dumas brought before the school board was the poor staffing of inner city schools.

Often, his activism spilled over to his living room, where he held Saturday sessions in which he taught black teachers how to take the principal’s exam, his daughter recalled.

Frederick Joseph Dumas was born Feb. 13, 1916, in New Orleans to Frederick and Letitia Leona Dumas. His father died when he was an infant, and his mother worked as a seamstress and raised two children in the segregated South.

“We sat behind screens on street cars, drank from separate fountains . . . and [were] made to wait in stores until whites had been served,” Dumas recalled in a family history.

In 1941, he received a bachelor’s degree from Xavier University in New Orleans and three years later earned his master’s.

During his first year of teaching public school in Louisiana, he organized a group of teachers who successfully sued the New Orleans board of education, seeking equal pay for black teachers, his family said.

He married Annette Montegut in 1943 and went into the Army, serving as an intelligence officer at the segregated base in Tuskegee, Ala.

In 1949, he moved with his family to Los Angeles and taught elementary school before becoming a principal in the L.A. Unified School District. After resigning from Head Start, he returned to the district as an administrator and supervised schools in the San Fernando Valley from 1970 until he retired in 1977.

In addition to his wife and daughter Diann, Dumas is survived by children Daphne, Frederick, Roland, Jennifer, Lisa and Richard; a sister, Audrey; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Services will be private.

Instead of flowers, the family requests donations to the Fred Dumas Scholarship Fund, Council of Black Administrators, 3870 Crenshaw Blvd., Suite 217, Los Angeles, CA 90008, or Xavier University, www.xula.edu.

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