Living in a Class Apart
BY LAWRENCE OTIS GRAHAM
The separate world of America's black elite
I grew up thinking that there were only two
types of black people: those who passed the "brown paper bag and ruler
test"–skin no darker than a paper bag, hair as straight as a ruler–and
those who didn't. In other words, those who were members of the black elite, and those who
weren't.
My maternal great-grandmother, a well-educated, light-complexioned,
straight-haired Southern black woman, would visit us in the summertime and discourage me
and my brother from associating with darker-skinned children or from standing or playing
for long periods in the July sunlight, which threatened to blacken our already too-dark
skin.
"You boys stay out of that terrible sun," Great-grandmother Porter
would say. "God knows you're dark enough already."
As she sat rocking, stiff-lipped and humorless, on the porch of our
Massachusetts summer house in the historically black Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, she
flipped disgustedly through the pages of black magazines that only profiled athletes and
entertainers. Why were there no profiles of the accomplished black attorneys, physicians,
business people, and educators–blacks whom she admired and emulated?
The daughter of a minister and a homemaker, Great-grandmother Porter was
extremely proud of her Memphis upper-middle-class roots. As a child, she had worn silk
taffeta dresses, taken several years of piano lessons and learned fluent French. Her
daughter had followed in her footsteps, wearing similarly elegant dresses, taking music
lessons, and attending the private LeMoyne School just a few years ahead of Roberta
Church, the daughter of Robert Church, the richest black man in the South.
Disappointed and disillusioned by how little she saw of herself and her crowd in
the pages of these black magazines, Great-grandmother looked up and once again focused her
attention on me and my brother.
And then she thought about her hair.
Stepping back inside the house for her
ever-present Fuller brush and comb, she was no doubt frustrated by the fact that her
great-grandchildren were several shades darker than she, with kinky hair that was clearly
that of a Negro person.
My brother and I noted her disappearance into the house, and once again ran out
of the shade and danced around the sand- and pebble-covered road, breathing in the
sunshine and the fragrance of the dense pine trees that rose from the layers of sand and
brush.
"Young men, young men," her voice called from the rear bedroom,
"you aren't back in that sun, are you?"
"No, ma'am. We're in the shade, ma'am," my 8-year-old brother,
Richard, called back as he stopped just out of her range of vision, thrusting his bare
brown chest and oval face into the 96-degree July sun, boldly willing his skin to grow
blacker and blacker in defiance. But I knew the importance of class distinctions within
the black world, even at age 6, and so I moved quickly to the safety of the shade,
beckoning my brother to follow. I already understood the significance of achieving a
"better" shade of black. Unlike my brother, I already knew that there was us and
there was them.
The "us" included those who were in Jack and Jill, the ultimate
membership-by-invitation-only social club for black children, and who summered in Sag
Harbor, N.Y., Highland Beach, Md., or Oak Bluffs. Their mothers graduated from Spelman
College or Fisk University and joined elite sororities and social groups, like the Links,
founded in 1946. Local Links chapters allow no more than 55 members each, and today the
club has more than 10,000 members nationally including such women as Children's Defense
Fund head Marian Wright Edelman, former Spelman President Johnnetta Cole, and former U.S.
Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary. Others joined the Drifters and the Smart Set. Or the
Girl Friends: Founded in 1933, the club's black-tie cotillions are among the most
sought-after tickets on the black elite social calendar.
Fathers, who were dentists, lawyers, or physicians from Howard or Meharry, would
join groups like the Boulé, which admits professional men who have distinguished
themselves in their professions. Dating back to 1906, its early membership included W. E.
B. DuBois, and chapters have since been established in major cities, initiating such men
as Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, Urban League President Hugh Price, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas
Wilder, and American Express president Kenneth Chenault, as well as most presidents of
historically black colleges.
Entrance into these clubs is exclusive, and even education and financial
achievement do not guarantee membership. Vernon Jordan, the powerful Washington attorney
and friend of President Clinton, is a distinguished alumnus of Howard University's law
school. But he did not become a member of the Boulé until he married his second wife,
Anne Dibble, a member of the prestigious Dibble family of Chicago and Tuskegee, Ala.
Some families I knew could look back two or three generations and point to
relatives who owned insurance companies, newspapers, funeral homes, local banks, trucking
companies, restaurants, catering firms, or farmland. They made what was often called
"a handsome picture" with "good hair" (wavy or straight), "nice
complexions" (light brown to near white), "sharp features" (thin nose, thin
lips, sharp jaw) and hazel, green, or blue eyes. I had precious few of the above, while
many of my friends were able to check off all the right boxes. Some not only had
complexions 10 shades lighter than that brown paper bag, and hair as straight as any
ruler, but also had multiple generations of "good looks," wealth, and
accomplishment. And, of course, others who had none of these at all.
It was a color thing and a class thing. And for generations of black people,
color and class have been inexorably tied together.
Out of slavery, a new elite
The history of the black elite can be
traced back almost 400 years to when slavery began in this country. When the first
Africans arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Va., in 1619, neither the white Dutch or
Portuguese slave traders nor the white American plantation owners had any interest in the
ethnic and cultural differences between the Mandingo, Dahomean, Ashanti, Mbundu, Ewe, or
Bantu blacks who were taken from the Ivory Coast, Guinea, the Gold Coast, and other
regions of Africa.
Slaves were divided instead into two general groups: the outside laborers who
worked in the fields harvesting rice or tobacco, cutting sugar cane, picking cotton, or
building roads and structures; and those who performed more desirable jobs inside the
master's house: cooking, cleaning, washing, and tending to the personal needs of the
owner's family around the home. While these laborers had no more or fewer rights than the
outdoor workers, the distinctions between the slaves in the field and the slaves who
served as butlers and mammies in the house were not at all subtle. The terms "house
niggers" and "field niggers" grew into meaningful labels as generations of
slaves in the master's house had access to better food, clothing, and work conditions.
"Although it was illegal to educate slaves," says history instructor Adele
Alexander of George Washington University, "it was far more likely that the house
slave would learn to read, be introduced to upper-class white traditions, be permitted to
play or interact with white family members than would a field slave. In fact, slave-owning
families found they could run their homes more efficiently when their house slaves were
more knowledgeable and educated."
The plantation owners soon began to place only light-skinned slaves in the
house, thus creating an even greater chasm between the two groups, based on physical
appearance, not just random assignment. Because these lighter-skinned blacks were
perceived as receiving greater benefits and a more comfortable lifestyle, resentment among
the darker-skinned field slaves only grew. Meanwhile, both whites and house slaves came to
consider the dark-skinned field slaves to be less civilized and intellectually inferior.
It was a prejudice that would carry over into this century. "The fixation
on skin color by both upper-class whites and blacks derives from the fact that
light-skinned blacks were given a favored status by white slave owners from their very
early interaction during the slave period," explains Alexander, author of Ambiguous
Lives, a chronicle of her own family's roots in Georgia as free, light-skinned blacks in
the 18th and 19th centuries.
But even before emancipation, free blacks in the South–few as they
were–became an elite group with a status somewhere between their enslaved brethren
and white citizens. Generally required to carry papers proving that they were not slaves
and to register annually in their counties, listing their white guardians, they were
nevertheless permitted to work for money and to own property, thus establishing the first
opportunity for freed blacks to accumulate some moderate wealth. The nucleus of the
present-day black elite was formed around these families. "My family had owned 15
acres of land where the Arlington National Cemetery now sits," says Evelyn Reid
Syphax, a member of a prestigious black family, who traces her lineage back to Maria
Custis, a slave and the mulatto child of first lady Martha Washington's grandson, George
Washington Parke Custis. The land was a wedding present from Custis to Maria, and the rest
of Custis's property–the mansion and the surrounding property–were later given
by Custis to his white daughter, who would marry Robert E. Lee.
The road to the top
The rise of the black aristocracy relied heavily on access to education.
Religious groups like the American Missionary Association began to make a college
education possible for some blacks around the time of the Civil War, establishing
secondary schools and colleges like Fisk in Nashville, Hampton Institute in Virginia, and
Tougaloo College in Mississippi. By the 1870s, not even a decade beyond slavery, handfuls
of blacks were attending the earliest established black colleges like Howard University,
Fisk, Atlanta University, and Morehouse College–all founded in the 1860s–and
later Spelman, founded in the 1880s for black women. These are still among the schools
that the old-guard black elite today consider to be the most appropriate for their
children–who do not attend Alabama State, Tougaloo College, or other schools that are
state-sponsored or populated by poorer students from the Deep South. Some predominantly
white schools are also on the roster. Although Oberlin College in Ohio was famously
abolitionist and admitted blacks during the 1800s, upper-class blacks today prefer
more-selective schools, like Harvard or Wellesley.
During Reconstruction in the Southern states, where there were now large groups
of free men and women, black men began to run for seats in the U.S. Congress. In 1870,
Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black elected to the U.S. Senate, and between
1870 and the late 1890s, nearly two dozen blacks served as members of Congress. While
elected office did not promise wealth or acceptance within the white social structure, it
did bring a lasting prestige to certain family names, like Terrell, Pinchback, and Grimke,
in Washington; Minton and Purvis in Philadelphia; and Wheeler and Williams in Chicago.
Although some families also gained prominence with positions in important church
congregations or universities, careers in medicine, dentistry, and law were a much more
common path to success, as was entrepreneurship. In most cities with large black
populations, black funeral-home owners formed a core part of the elite, along with the
founders of local black banks, insurance companies, and newspapers. Wealthy and
influential Atlanta families like the Herndons and the Scotts, for example, can point to
Atlanta Life Insurance and the Atlanta Daily World, respectively, as the source of their
wealth and influence.
The black elite in every major city and suburb has its own churches, too.
Despite earlier affiliations with the Baptist and Methodist denominations and the larger
number of blacks who currently make up those congregations, "the black upper class
has most often been associated with the Episcopal Church," says the Rev. Harold T.
Lewis, the author of Yet with a Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition
in the Episcopal Church and rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh.
High Episcopal and Congregational churches were appealing because of their
well-educated clergy and small numbers of members. The Congregational Church's popularity
also grew from the support the denomination had given to the American Missionary
Association's efforts to establish secondary schools and colleges for Southern blacks in
the late 1800s. But it may also be true, as some blacks assert, that the upper class just
isn't comfortable with the open display of emotions typical of the Baptist and African
Methodist Episcopal churches.
A culture defined
The first American woman to become a self-made millionaire was Madame C. J.
Walker, a black woman who made her fortune developing hair-care products and cosmetics in
the late 1800s. In addition to building homes in Indianapolis and Harlem–and a 20,000
square-foot stone mansion that still stands near the Hudson River in Westchester County,
N.Y.–Walker used her millions to help the NAACP's antilynching campaign. Members of
the black elite have historically given generously to charities like the Urban League, the
United Negro College Fund, and the NAACP. But while today most of these successful people
will still write checks for the NAACP, they do not consider the organization part of their
social circle in the way they would have before the 1960s. "We'll see what Myrlie
Evers can do with it, because she has a lot of class, but that NAACP is a bit too grass
roots for people like us," explains a Chicago matron as she sits in her large home in
the city's Hyde Park neighborhood. The woman holds a master's degree and belongs to
several boards and elite black organizations. "The NAACP did wonderful things for us
in the South–and up here too, and I'm happy to give to them because they help all of
us, but you don't find a whole lot of professional blacks socializing among the NAACP.
We've got our own groups."
She pulls out her family photo albums. There are pictures of gatherings at the
Ink Well, a mostly black section of one of the Martha's Vineyard beaches; of relatives
playing tennis at a summer home in Idlewild, Mich.; and snapshots from a black-tie
debutante cotillion. "My friends have degrees from Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, and
Meharry," she says. "Why would I be socializing with some caseworker or mailman
who goes to NAACP events? I'd have as much in common with them as a rich white person has
with his gardener."
But even though upper-class blacks may quietly point out which blacks are (or
are not) "our kind of people," in the company of whites or nonupper-class blacks
they either hide their wealth or apologize for their success. One Atlanta surgeon who is
worth several million dollars and descends from a long line of doctors prefers to be
referred to as "working class." His fear: "I worry that the larger black
population will think that I'm looking down on them." There is a guilt and an
ambivalence among some of the black elite who worry about being accused of not being
"authentically black." Their clubs, schools, cotillions, and activities have
taken them far away from the rest of black America.
Still, as a child going to Jack and Jill weekend excursions, fund-raisers,
black-tie dances or backyard tennis parties, I was introduced to a national network of
black children who grew up smart, ambitious, well-to-do, and proud of their black
heritage. "I grew up in Jack and Jill during the 1940s," says New York resident
William Pickens, whose mother, Ellie, was a national president of the group, and who
eventually married a Jack and Jill alum in the 1960s. "It was a tight circle who all
had a lot in common. Our fathers were lawyers or doctors and our mothers had gone to
college together. This was where we were expected to find our friends and dates." I
know exactly what Pickens means. While I was an undergraduate at Princeton, I dated women
at Harvard, Brown, and Mount Holyoke, all of whom I knew through Jack and Jill. Armed with
Jack and Jill's Up the Hill annual yearbook, I had a coast-to-coast directory of boys,
girls, and parents who were just like me. "Maybe there was something elitist about
creating a group that catered to the concerns of well-educated and affluent people,"
says Portia Scott, who grew up in the Atlanta Jack and Jill and whose family owns the
Atlanta Daily World newspaper group, "but why is it OK for well-educated whites to be
ambitious–and then not OK for blacks?"
Even though the Jack and Jill kids were, in general, a bit wealthier and far
more cynical and sophisticated than my well-to-do white friends in my neighborhood, I felt
a lot more secure around the Jack and Jill kids. I felt I knew where I stood with them,
even the ones whom I didn't like and who didn't like me. If a white kid at school didn't
invite me to a birthday party or bar mitzvah, I didn't know if it was because he didn't
like me, or if it was because he and his parents didn't want a black person at their house
or at their club. If someone didn't want to trade sandwiches in the lunchroom, I wasn't
sure it was because he didn't like tuna fish, or because he thought black food would
poison him. These are real incidents that happened to me–and 30 years later, they
still hurt.
While some outsiders–both black and white–dismiss our rituals as
bourgeois or as being solely "white aspirations," members of the black elite
still feel proud of our traditions: a summer camp expressly for elite kids (the
75-year-old Camp Atwater in Massachusetts), boarding schools for students of old-guard
families (Palmer Memorial Institute, in the South, and Northfield Mount
Hermon, which is
also attended by some children of the white elite, in the North), social clubs, summer
resorts, colleges, fraternities, churches, neighborhoods–and specific streets within
them–even funeral homes and cemeteries just for us.
Pride and guilt both thrive among the black elite; a pride in black
accomplishment that is inexorably tied to a lingering resentment about our past as poor
enslaved blacks and our past and current treatment by whites. On one level, there are
those of us who understand our obligation to work toward equality for all and to use our
success in order to assist those blacks who are less advantaged. But on another level,
there are those of us who buy into theories of superiority, and who feel embarrassed by
our less-accomplished black brethren. We've got some of the best-educated, most
accomplished, and most talented people in this community–but at the same time, we
have some of the most hidebound and smug. And adding even further to the mix are those of
us who feel we need to apologize to the rest of the black world for our success, and for
being who we are.
Copyright
Newsweek.com 1998 ©
OTHER GREAT STORIES AND RESOURCES FROM US NEWS:
How to keep elite
colleges diverse
: An Army-style prep school for minorities. (12/29/97) How to keep elite
colleges diverse: An Army-style prep school for minorities. (12/29/97)
The martial melting pot:
How the military encourages and promotes blacks without lowering its standards. (12/23/96)
The making of a hip-hop
intellectual: Deconstructing the puzzle of race and identity. (11/4/96)
Information on historically
black colleges from .edu
The Two Nations of
Black America. This Frontline
special addresses the growing gap between the black middle class and the underprivileged.
A Struggle from the
Start. This online exhibit includes an interesting section on Connecticutt's black elite from 1863-1890,
commonly called the "Talented Tenth."
Sigma Pi Phi, also known as the
Boulé, admits professional men who have distinguished themselves in society.
The Links Inc. This
traditionally black women's social group currently has 10,000 members in 267 chapters
spread across 40 states, Germany, and the Bahamas.
Camp Atwater, founded in North
Brookfield, Mass., in 1921, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Palmer Memorial
Institute educated African-American children from 1902 to 1971.
BOOKS ON THE BLACK UPPER CLASS (From Amazon.com)
Other
Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 by Adelaide M. Cromwell
Certain
People: America's Black Elite by Stephen Birmingham
Philadelphia's
Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787-1848 by
Julie Winch
The
Wedding: A Novel by Dorothy West
Gerri
Major's Black Society by Gerri Major and Doris E. Saunders
HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES
The National Pan Hellenic
Council was organized in May 1930 at Howard University. It includes four
African-American sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha,
Zeta Phi Beta, Delta Sigma Theta, and Sigma Gamma Rho. The four
black fraternities are Kappa Alpha Psi, Omega Psi Phi, Alpha Phi Alpha, and Phi Beta Sigma.
Black Enterprise opens a window
onto the African-American entrepreneurial class. The magazine recently ranked its choices
for the Top 50 colleges for
African-Americans.
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