Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

Among the first residents of Highland Beach were Washingtonians like poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Judge Robert and Mary Church Terrell, and other black professionals. While not the most prominent of the black elite vacation spots, Highland Beach is the community that enjoys the most interesting place in black history. It was the first Maryland town to be established and incorporated by blacks and was home to famous black political leaders, intellectuals, and businesspeople who built cottages in the community. Interestingly, it has its own mayor and a board of commissioners to handle common municipal matters and local ordinances.

  “There are no more than twenty-five or thirty people living there year-round,” says Washington resident ViCurtis Hinton, who started going there as a child, “but everyone comes back in the summer.” Considerably smaller than the Oak Bluffs crowd, “everyone” is a relative term because Highland Beach consists of fewer than one hundred homes. I found it to be similar to Oak Bluffs in its informality, yet almost identical to Sag Harbor in its density and its parochial attitudes: After all, it is mostly a Washington, D.C., group that runs the community. Historically, the Highland Beach neighborhood has included such people as the Memphis Church family; the recently deceased Robert Weaver, who served as secretary of HUD under President Johnson; and Patrick Swygert, the president of Howard University. Although its image is much lower-key than that of Oak Bluffs or Sag Harbor, the community now attracts many Baltimore, Richmond, and Philadelphia families in addition to a solid core of well-to-do Washingtonians, who actually seem to be in control. “It’s the Nantucket of black resorts,” says a Washingtonian whose family has seen four of its generations at Highland Beach. “It’s small, private, and intimidating to outsiders. And we like it that way.” Less than an hour’s drive from the capital and just five miles south of Annapolis, its location makes it a popular summer and weekend getaway.

  Traveling along the property line of the Hillside Inn resort is a steel-gray Jaguar. It climbs a steep incline covered with a half-foot of icy snow as three of its passengers try not to look over the side of the road, where a fifty-foot drop lies just inches from the unprotected driveway’s edge. “So what’s everyone so quiet about?” asks Judge Albert Murray, who has been driving the treacherous snow-covered roads of the Pocono Mountains ever since the early 1950s when he first opened this black-owned resort in the famous Pennsylvania resort area.

  The Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania have never achieved the popularity among the black elite of Martha’s Vineyard, Sag Harbor, or Highland Beach, but blacks in the Northeast know about the history of Hillside Inn, a small resort hotel owned by retired New York City Judge Albert Murray and his wife Odetta. “My wife had always said that she wanted a place in this resort area where blacks could come for a vacation with the same amenities that whites had,” explains Murray, who had become a wealthy landowner by the late 1950s after graduating from Brooklyn Law School. “We were both very disturbed that the resorts in this area did not allow blacks to stay in their hotels. There was only Archerd Cottage.”

  While there were many top resorts during the 1950s and 1960s, like the Shawnee Inn, which hosted President Eisenhower, the Murrays wanted to offer a luxury resort for blacks as well. Before they transformed the inn into a hotel, it had previously been a boarding house with roots going back to the late 1800s. “Since the Murrays are not society types,” says a returning guest from Philadelphia, “they don’t create the kind of social pressure you feel in Sag Harbor or Oak Bluffs. This is a quiet place that lets you disappear from the gossip scene.”

  “People don’t talk about Idlewild as much as they used to when there were clubs and major entertainers visiting during the summer,” says Detroit attorney Joseph Brown, who has been visiting the Idlewild resort in northern Michigan since he was four years old. “But there is still a loyal group of people who come from Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. In fact each of those cities has an Idlewilders Club that arranges annual parties during the second week of August.”

  A lakeside resort area approximately two hundred miles north of Detroit, Idlewild was a haven for the black elite between the mid-1920s and the early 1960s. During its peak, Motown performers and others like Dinah Washington came to the Phil Giles Hotel, Paradise Club, Flamingo Club, and El Morocco Club to perform. “When integration arrived and opened up resorts and hotels in other areas, Idlewild lost a lot of its popularity,” says a Chicago physician whose family owned a house on Baldwin Road for many years.

  “Today, a lot of us go there for horseback riding, fishing, and a peaceful escape,” says Brown, who has a sixty-year-old cottage on one of the lakes. Brown, who is married to Detroit attorney C. Beth DunCombe, the sister-in-law of Detroit mayor Dennis Archer, remembers when the Idlewild Clubhouse was still in use. “When I was growing up, before we midwesterners started going east to Martha’s Vineyard, the clubhouse was filled from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Now the most loyal followers are the retirees who came back to live and the children whose parents had owned cottages around the three lakes.”

  I am the first to admit that the old guard are somewhat reluctant to see the new black professional families and the new nonprofessional blacks or whites intrude upon the resorts that they carved out on their own three generations ago. Whether it’s because these new visitors are disrespectful of the traditions that preceded them, or because they are new faces and names that fail to share the same college and social club affiliations, the black elite holds on tightly to its history in these vacation communities. Since I grew up with many of these families, I recognize yet disagree with their fear that their extended families are being diluted by people who mock the culture of black society. When I return to Martha’s Vineyard or Sag Harbor today, as I did as a youngster, I do so with a feeling that black people have a history and a stake in our surroundings. It’s a security that I will want my children to experience during their lives as well. But I think that it is possible, and necessary, that diverse groups be able to coexist in these settings.

  New York resident Phyllis Murphy Stevenson says that all of these resorts—the small ones like Idlewild and the big ones like Oak Bluffs—play a role in bringing together the black elite. “I remember riding out to Sag Harbor from the city with my parents in the backseat of our Cadillac in the late 1940s and early 1950s,” says Stevenson, whose parents had a house in Sag Harbor Hills next door to people her mother had known as a child. “It was an exhausting five-hour trip across bumpy, dusty roads, but there was something very special about arriving in a welcoming community that was uniquely our own. When you grow up in a place surrounded by people who feel like an extended family—people who are well-educated and accomplished, people who care about your history and your future—you feel inspired. When a black child spends summer after summer in an environment like this, she grows up feeling as though she can accomplish anything.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Black Elite in Chicago

  “All this was founded by a black man. Jean DuSable.”

  I trudged quietly up South Parkway in the hot sun, staring at the back of my father’s highly polished black wingtip dress shoes as they whipped back and forth ahead of me along the sidewalk.

  “Of course they don’t give him much credit for it—but DuSable was black. That was your mother’s high school—DuSable High School, over on Forty-ninth Street. Named for a black man.”

  The first time I visited Chicago, I was in my early adolescence. It was the early 1970s, and my parents were on one of our week-long “see-the-country-and-embrace-your-black-heritage” vacations. These annual six-or seven-day excursions were usually squeezed into a spring or winter school break, or at the end of a leisurely summer spent in Martha’s Vineyard. Supplemented by readings that my mother and father picked out of the eight-volume, tan-colored Negro Heritage Library books that sat in our den at home, these “black heritage excursions,” or “working vacations,” as I now call them, were deemed a necessity because Mom and Dad feared that my overwhelmingly w
hite neighborhood and school experiences in suburban New York were doing little to inform my racial identity or enhance my black self-image. So, they did exactly what the parents of our other black friends were doing: increased our appreciation of black America by taking us out of our white neighborhoods and bringing us to where the larger black experience was taking place. So, while our white friends were jetting off to the Rocky Mountains, Niagara Falls, or Disneyland, my parents took me and my brother on trips to historic black schools, museums, and communities. From the time I was four or five years old until the time I left for college, we went on over a dozen weeklong excursions to different cities and locales that had special meaning to black America. The South Side of Chicago was one of those destinations.

  Before we had packed and left for the airport, my brother and I had been coached on just about everything “black” about Chicago. We’d been told that this was where Ebony was published; where Afro Sheen was made; where the first black U.S. congressman had been elected; and where Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin the Sun, had grown up and where she based her famous play. And in recent weeks, we’d heard from friends and relatives that this was where “Dr. Odom and Dr. Claiborne—people like us” were being thrown in jail for daring to drive through all-white or mostly white neighborhoods.

  As we walked up South Parkway (now known as Martin Luther King Drive), we took snapshot photos of buildings and storefronts that my parents pointed out. Like most black urban areas of the 1970s, the South Side of Chicago had lost much of the aesthetic polish that it had when the black elite was still living there in numbers. Even though Mom and Dad were telling me about the black professionals who conducted business, entertained, and lived along these streets in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, I was not impressed. By now most had moved to the North Side office buildings and to the more southern suburban Chicago neighborhoods, leaving what looked like an urban, working-class ghetto.

  My lackadaisical mood must have fully captured the attitude of the middle class integrated child who was uninterested in the black struggle that preceded him. I was hearing great stories about important entrepreneurs, socialites, and political figures who came out of the South Side, but all I was seeing were working-class and out-of-work black people standing along Wabash, South Michigan, and Indiana Avenues. A crumbling, all-black neighborhood to someone with my very “white” and very elitist perspective undermined any chance for me to believe that there were once people like me living here. And therein lies the difficulty in teaching middle-class, integrated black children about their people’s past.

  For the most part, the integrated suburban black child equates black neighborhoods like the South Side with poverty and other alien circumstances. Because we know just enough well-to-do black friends in sparkling white city neighborhoods or suburbs, we assume that this is where and how accomplished blacks always lived. Because we are the black children of black professionals living across the street from the white children of parents working at similar jobs and earning similar incomes, we find it incomprehensible that it wasn’t always this way. We divide first by class, and later by race, and conclude that a community that looks worn and urban today would never have included people like us among its residents. It was just illogical that we could have lived with, shopped with, and gone to school with people who had so little in common with us socially and economically: No place exemplified this better than Chicago’s South Side, and because I was one of those post-1960s integrated suburban black kids, I was slow to understand what my parents were telling me.

  We had just left a service at one of the city’s black society churches and I was already beginning to sweat in the new blue suit that my father had picked out for me in the “Paddock Shop” section at Barney’s for this occasion. As we dodged some chips of broken glass along the sidewalk, I thought about the recent incident that had precipitated our trip. Because of my elitist attitude toward this all-black South Side experience, that was where my interest stood. And we had just been talking about it in church. I don’t remember all that was said at the time, but I clearly recall the point of the discussion.

  For years, members of the black elite in Chicago and elsewhere had heard accounts of police brutality against innocent blacks in the inner city, but we too often reacted in the way that some white people react: “That’s too bad about those people,” we would say. We felt detached and uninvolved because “those” people were another group—another class. “Poor blacks are not like us,” we wrongly told ourselves. “They don’t relate to us and we don’t relate to them.” In fact, some upper class blacks even expressed some cynicism, convincing themselves that perhaps these urban blacks had done something to justify brutal police treatment.

  In retrospect, I understood all that the minister and others in the service had been implying. Because of our own class-based narrow-mindedness, segments of the black population often didn’t react to or care about racially biased abuses until one of our own—a black member of our socioeconomic class—had been victimized. Every city’s black elite had one of these pivotal moments when an abuse reached into its own group and shook up an otherwise complacent community of professionals. In the spring of 1972, shortly before our visit there, Chicago’s elite community had experienced its incident.

  For years, ever since the ghettoization of blacks occurred on the South Side around the second decade of the 1900s, white Chicago police officers had been stopping and harassing blacks who dared venture east of Cottage Grove Avenue or north of Twenty-sixth Street, the early boundaries of the newly outlined black belt. However, it wasn’t until two prominent black dentists, in two completely unrelated incidents, were jailed and harassed by the police that the black elite in the city (and elsewhere) became outraged.

  In the spring of 1972, Dr. Herbert Odom was arrested after police noticed that one of the rear lights on his Cadillac was not working. The second arrest took place when an even more prominent dentist, Dr. Daniel Claiborne, suffered a severe stroke while driving along a South Side street. Dismissing his unconsciousness as intoxication by alcohol, Chicago police officers arrested Dr. Claiborne despite his obvious need for immediate medical attention. Instead of taking him to a hospital, they put him in jail, and he died shortly after the incident.

  As the black elite read about these kinds of incidents in their local black weekly papers and in Jet, a weekly magazine that reports such incidents faithfully, they saw their quiet lives being disrupted even more as they ventured into affluent and peaceful white neighborhoods. My own parents saw this in the late 1960s one quiet afternoon when a police squad car attempted to take me and my eight-year-old brother off our residential street; the officer presumed that the red wagon my brother was pulling me in must have been stolen from a house in our white neighborhood.

  “Rich blacks don’t start seeing the light about bigotry and police abuse until it starts happening to their own. It’s not real to them when poor blacks are getting beaten up,” says a South Side physician who knew Dr. Claiborne and recalled how the incident mobilized many of the professional blacks in Chicago. “A lot of us knew that poor blacks in the Ida B. Wells projects, Cabrini Green, and Robert Taylor Homes were being beaten up, but now Mayor Daley and his racist cops were hitting too close to home. There was a reason why—years after integration—the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called Chicago the most residentially segregated city in America.”

  Middle-class and upper-class blacks all over Chicago and elsewhere were talking about what happened to the black doctors in Chicago. It was another issue that justified our visit.

  “This is where your Uncle Telfer’s office was in the 1930s and 1940s.”

  My brother and I stood on the corner of Forty-eighth Street and Wabash and stared up at a row of nondescript buildings that made little impression on me. “Uncle T,” as my relatives called him, was one of Chicago’s first black bail bondsmen. Along with the attorney and real estate broker who rented offices in the small corner building, he w
as a part of the group of black South Side businessmen who were quickly outnumbering those in other northern cities like New York and Philadelphia. A longtime Republican, he was a fan and supporter in the 1930s of his Chicago neighbor, Congressman Oscar DePriest, the first black to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives following Reconstruction. Since Uncle Telfer had migrated north, ahead of many of my other relatives—some of whom followed in the early 1940s, with the rest of the black migration—he warned them that Chicago racism could be as insidious as southern bigotry, but here he could at least use his political influence to give our Memphis relatives access to jobs in the city or admission to the University of Chicago. These were the trade-offs and compromises for us when we came north.

  When he was profiled by Ebony in the late 1940s, toward the latter part of his career, Uncle T owned two apartment buildings and a successful business that put him in touch with a wide variety of people around the “black belt” of Chicago. For years, the article about him and his colleagues—yellowed and faded—remained taped to our refrigerator door, reminding us that getting out of the South and moving to the northern cities made good sense.

  Today, when I return to Chicago, I spend most of my time on the North Side—in office buildings, law firms, banks, hotels, and department stores that seem to reflect barely much more integration than existed during my uncle’s time. But when I go there today, I have few of the personal ties to the black community that my parents have, and almost no connection to the white: I go there as an outsider. I feel outside of the almost uniformly white North Side and feel outside of what is still a uniformly black South Side. As an outsider looking at the lack of integration in both neighborhoods, I would say that the situation hasn’t changed much at all.

  Truman Gibson Jr. and Maudelle Bousfield Evans, two insiders from the black belt, insist that the city changed a great deal during the decades they spent there. As black South Side residents, they saw Chicago in the 1930s become a leader in producing black congressmen. They saw Chicago in the 1940s become a community of black elites who fought amongst each other because of political party labels and patronage. And they saw Chicago after the 1950s become a town of more unified blacks who became equally outraged by the uniform mistreatment they faced under the Daley machine. In the 1960s and 1970s, they saw a Chicago that reluctantly opened up opportunities to upwardly mobile blacks. And in the 1980s, they saw the election of one of their own race and class to the position of mayor.