Paul Laurence Dunbar Paul Laurence Dunbar was born June 27, 1872 in Dayton, OH. His mother Matilda, was a former slave and his father Joshua had escaped slavery and served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Calvary Regiment during the Civil war (online). Joshua and Matilda separated in 1874. Dunbar came from a poor family. After his father left, his mother supported the family by working as a washerwoman. One of the families she worked for was the family of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Paul attended Dayton’s Central High School with the two. When Matilda was a slave she heard a lot of poems by the families she worked for. She loved p