Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first African American poets to gain national fame, and his home in Dayton is now a National Historic Landmark and part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. Dunbar knew the Wright Brothers from high school — they were classmates at Central High — and later published a short-lived newspaper on a printing press the brothers built for him.
The house retains its original furnishings and feels remarkably intimate. Guided tours explain Dunbar's life and work, including his breakthrough 1896 collection Lyrics of Lowly Life, which William Dean Howells championed in the introduction. His dialect poems about Southern Black life attracted both praise and the criticism that he was performing for white audiences — a tension Dunbar himself wrote about with great bitterness.