Through the Generations

The story of Georgetown Day School is best told through the lives of the families who have walked our halls since the very first chapter. Here, we feature three such lineages—the Pinketts, the Perlmans, and the Hills. For them, GDS is more than an alma mater; it is a shared inheritance passed down through generations, linking the pioneers of the 1940s to the students of today.

The Pinketts

While all of GDS’s founding families demonstrated remarkable vision, the involvement of the Pinkett family provided a bridge to Washington’s Black community that was vital to the School’s mission and success.

John Randolph Pinkett Sr. was a prominent figure among the small group that decided to incorporate the School in 1945. By then, he was already an influential businessman; in 1932, he had founded what would become one of the nation’s oldest and most successful Black-owned real estate and insurance firms.

John R. Pinkett Inc. was a vehicle for social progress, known for constructing the modest homes that granted many of the city’s Black residents their first opportunity for home ownership. Because of this reputation, Pinkett’s endorsement of GDS carried immense weight. He was a respected elder whose presence signaled to a segregated city that the School was a place where Black families could truly belong.

Pinkett’s grandson, John R. Pinkett III, became the first Black student to attend GDS. His enrollment began a multigenerational legacy that has seen about a dozen of John Sr.’s descendants pass through the School’s doors.

The Perlmans

Judith (Perlman) Martin, the syndicated columnist and author also known as “Miss Manners,” started attending GDS just a few years after the School’s founding. She was in second grade back then and has written about how the GDS of the 1940s was “not to everyone’s taste.”

“My brother took one look at the pupils sprawled on the floor, wearing jeans and calling their teachers by their first names, and marched thankfully back to public school, where none of this would have been allowed,” Judith wrote in a book dedicated to GDS’s 75th anniversary.

But when it came time to send her own children—Nicholas ’84 and Bina ’88—to school, GDS was the obvious choice. “It was that the school had retained—the founders' deep principles, which had openly defied the prevailing prejudices of the time—that made me want my children to go there.” she wrote.

Helen Perlman, Judith’s mother, joined the teaching staff in the late 1950s. Aside from Nick and Bina, three of Helen’s other grandchildren also graduated from GDS: Penny ’86, Sarah ’90, and Jacob ’94 Perlman.

The Hills

In the spring of 1947, Julia Hill walked to her mailbox weighing a familiar worry: where to send her son, Dulany, for junior high. She ran into a long-lost friend who was teaching at GDS and walked home repeating one name like a mantra: “Aggie Inglis”—the Head of School.

That encounter, detailed in a 1975 letter to the School, launched a GDS connection spanning generations. Dulany thrived at the Grasslands campus, and Julia “retired” into a second career teaching GDS drama in the 1970s. From there, the family legacy grew: Julia’s grandchildren, Ralph ’79 and Julia ’81 Cunningham, were followed by Ralph’s sons, Henry ’16 and Julian ’21. A fifth generation carries that legacy today: her great-great-grandchildren, Paloma ’27 and Carter ’29 Evans.

“It’s a special place with lots of different voices that are all equally respected,” said Ralph, a DC architect, who served on the GDS Board from 2004 through 2006 (the last two years as Chair).

Ralph maintains that the GDS of his day remains unchanged in spirit, just as his Uncle Dulany (now 89) insisted in a 1978 interview. “The physical plant is certainly different,” Dulany said. “But there’s certainly a lingering of that Georgetown Day feeling.”