Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  “But I saw you walk in with it,” she added in an almost accusatory manner. She knew I was lying.

  I looked at another guest seated next to me. Then I turned back to the woman. Not wanting to embarrass this white bridesmaid in front of a table filled with black guests, I stood up and quietly told her about “jumping the broom,” a tradition that had existed for generations in African American culture. “It started during slavery when blacks were not permitted to have formal church wedding ceremonies,” I explained politely, “so the man and woman would jump over a broom. And that would symbolize the—”

  “Yeah, I know the history,” she said, cutting me off while rolling her eyes, “but do your brother and his wife know you’re doing this?”

  I looked around the room as the eleven-piece swing orchestra began to launch into another number. It was a warm May afternoon in Washington, D.C., and my brother and his new wife had just been married in one of the most ornate hotels in the city, at one of the most formal weddings I had ever attended. Two hours earlier, the wedding party had stood in black tie and tails and pink silk listening to the young couple give their vows in front of an Episcopal priest surrounded by many members of Washington’s elite.

  With the exception of some New Yorkers from our side and some women who had gone to the same Los Angeles private girls’ school as the bride, the room was wall-to-wall Howard and wall-to-wall Washington.

  “How dare that white girl come over here and roll her eyes about our traditions,” I said to a black woman attorney at the table, who had flown in from New York for the event.

  “Tell me about it,” the attorney responded in mock exasperation.

  Almost two hours later, halfway through the reception, I had worked my way around the crowded hotel ballroom, finally getting to converse with the friends and colleagues of my new in-laws. Earlier, at first glance, I had estimated that more than half of the 250 guests—most of them Washingtonians—were white. But after meeting these new faces, it was now apparent that my initial assessment of the group was incorrect.

  As I introduced myself to some of these “white” guests—including the accusatory bridesmaid who had approached me earlier—I discovered that they were, in fact, not white at all.

  “Yes, I went to Howard with your brother’s wife,” said a young attorney who looked as if he were either Italian or Greek.

  “My father is head of surgery at Howard Hospital,” remarked a straight-haired woman with pale skin and hazel eyes.

  “Our mothers pledged AKA together and our fathers are friends from Camp Atwater,” said an older man with straight gray hair.

  There was even a green-eyed guy with nearly blond locks who said to me, “I think we met at a Jack and Jill party a few years ago.”

  Table after table, people revealed their racial identity by the remarks they made and the stories they shared. Only one or two times before had I been surrounded by so large a group of people whose ethnic identities I had completely mistaken. I quickly got the feeling that such scenarios are not uncommon among the Washington black elite. Nevertheless, my new discovery emboldened me to step quickly to the microphone and coax my brother and new sister-in-law into performing the hundred-year-old broom-jumping ceremony in the center of the ballroom.

  The ceremony lasted no more than five minutes, but it turned into a total disaster. For all of us. What had normally been considered one of the few lasting traditions from the pre-emancipation black southern culture was suddenly seen as a hostile and unwelcome gesture.

  “Why would he bring a niggerish thing like that in here?” announced a woman as my new sister-in-law’s dress was just clearing the elevated broom handle.

  “These country-ass blacks always have to drag in this slave history crap,” added an older gentleman sitting just off the dance floor. “Jesus Christ.”

  Welcome to Washington’s black society.

  Feeling defeated and humiliated, I quickly picked up the broom and walked off the dance floor and out of the hotel onto Sixteenth Street, where I waited for fifteen minutes. When I came back in—with the broom no longer in sight, I slunk back to my seat to face the wrath of several new in-laws and their friends. For the most part, the Washingtonians in attendance ignored me. Others patted me on the back. A couple of my brother’s doctor friends thanked me for the dose of black culture in the otherwise lockjawed ceremony and reception.

  What I remember most from that incident was a comment from a light-complexioned blonde woman in a bugle-beaded floor-length gown who spoke to me on her way out.

  “I just want to tell you,” the woman said, “that what you did was very courageous and I appreciate it.” She squeezed my hand in a gesture that caused me to focus closely on her cloudy blue eyes. “Sometimes we have to be shaken up and reminded where we came from.”

  The woman, whom I now presumed to be black, smiled and then walked off in a mist of Chanel No. 5.

  Two years later, I got married in my own formal wedding—this one on Fifth Avenue in New York City. After our 260 guests were transported in a phalanx of black limousines to our Upper East Side reception, and after dancing to Cole Porter and George Gershwin, my wife and I jumped the broom. Members of my family have been doing it for generations—regardless of our incomes or the makeup of our guest lists. We did it because we were proud to be black. We did it because it was one of the few lasting symbolic gestures that paid homage to our slave ancestors. The fact that I would be ostracized or even congratulated for “having the courage” to embrace this tradition still leaves me stunned. Though I have had many since then, it was a Washington moment that I shall never forget.

  When one talks to Marjorie Holloman Parker in her living room at the exclusive Watergate complex, it becomes obvious that her family’s life represents the collision of two high-society worlds: one black and one white.

  She and her family have not only earned the top black Washington credentials but also maintained the ties that make her an important force among the white elite as well. She was the daughter of a prominent minister, and her husband was the son of a successful attorney.

  A former member of the D.C. City Council, Marjorie met her husband, Barrington Parker, when they were both students at the city’s elite, all-black Dunbar High School in the 1930s. After pledging AKA at Minor Teachers College, she went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. After pledging Omega at Lincoln University, her husband went on to graduate from law school. Around the time that Marjorie became the only black board member at the all-boys prep school St. Albans, her husband received a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. “My husband was appointed as a U.S. District Court judge shortly after President Nixon appointed me to the nine-member city council,” explains Parker, who has long been active in Washington’s political and civic affairs. Her credentials and demeanor are distinctly Republican and old guard.

  In addition to serving four years as the national head—or Grand Basileus—of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the country’s oldest black sorority, and spending the last eighteen years as a member of the black women’s group the Links, Parker raised two sons who received degrees from Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Yale. Jason, the elder, worked in the foreign service after receiving his Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies at Princeton and marrying Toni Trent, the daughter of the first head of the United Negro College Fund. Younger son, Barrington junior, is a federal judge, like his deceased father. He gained a great deal of renown as the judge assigned to the famous Texaco employment discrimination and obstruction of justice case involving white executives and black employees.

  “I guess I’ve had a very interesting life,” admits Dr. Parker, a modest woman who has grown accustomed to being surrounded by successful people of every age—whether they are contemporaries of her husband or of her granddaughter, who recently started Yale after graduating from the 143-year-old St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire.

  “My father became the minister at Second Baptist Church in 1917 and remained there for fifty-f
ive years,” she says, “and he always expected his family members to succeed at whatever we pursued. In a place like Washington, you are surrounded by accomplished black people, so I never thought of our family as being unusual.”

  Although Parker’s world includes Watergate neighbors of the stature of former U.S. senator Bob Dole and American Red Cross president Elizabeth Dole, and although she and her family have contributed more to black history than most African Americans, there are more than a few members of the D.C. black elite who would exclude superstars like her.

  “Oh, Marjorie is new,” says a fourth-generation Washington woman who has followed Parker’s career. “She’s not old Washington. Not old at all.”

  “And plus, they always lived in the wrong neighborhoods,” sniffed another matron. “They’re surrounded by white people.”

  Washington is a tough town. From my own experiences and interactions, I am convinced that the old black Washingtonians like it that way. I remember that during the first weeks that I was serving as a White House intern in the Carter administration, I was told by a group of White House staffers that “blacks here in D.C. are real snobbish, so don’t take it personally if you don’t get accepted.” What made this advice shocking was that the White House staffers who offered it were white.

  It was one thing for blacks to be aware of the cliques and elitism in our own community, but for whites to know it was surprising and unsettling. Unlike the whites in other cities, the whites in Washington are acutely aware of the black upper class around them. In this city of 580,000 people, the history of black success stories is obvious. And even whites can tell which blacks are “too new” to be accepted by the black old guard.

  So, as I found out during my White House tenure in Washington, being left out of parties or conversations because one is lacking in Washington lineage is just one of the basic challenges of being black and accomplished in the District. In fact, there are many other reasons to be excluded. For example, many well-to-do blacks are chastised for living outside the black gold coast—a tony neighborhood of fifty- and sixty-year-old brick and stone houses in the upper northwest quadrant of the city—particularly if they take up residence in certain Washington, Maryland, or Virginia neighborhoods that are deemed too white. Among these areas are very expensive ones like Parker’s Watergate, or the million-dollar neighborhood where she and her husband had previously lived, on the west side of Rock Creek Park. Or Georgetown. Or Potomac. Or McLean.

  In a relatively dense city that is 65 percent black, some would suggest that such criticism over choice of a neighborhood is a reflection of a unique and petty Washington-style parochialism. Others say that the neighborhood issue is important, but not nearly as important as the lineage conflict.

  “In this town, you don’t even count unless you’re at least third or fourth generation,” says a physician who grew up as a fourth-generation Washingtonian in the North Portal neighborhood referred to as the black gold coast.

  “People are lying if they tell you anything different,” he adds while walking slowly down tree-lined Kalmia Road and pointing out some of the famous names living in the redbrick colonials and Tudors in this section of northwest Washington. “A lot of the most important members of the old guard in Washington look at three basic defining characteristics: skin color, ties to Howard, and number of generations your family has been here. Of course you’d better be associated with the right social groups and events—Jack and Jill, Links, the Tuxedo Ball, etcetera—and you’d better have some doctors in your family. But even if you’ve got those things, you’ll never be considered an ‘insider’ if you don’t have those basic three D.C. qualifiers. And if you don’t have them, you’re out of the running—just like that,” the physician says with a sudden snap of his fingers, “and there’s nothing you can do to change it.”

  Benaree Pratt Wiley is a fourth-generation Washingtonian who was born in LeDroit Park, attended Howard University Nursery School, and graduated from Howard University before moving to Boston. “Because of Howard and because of the close ties that people have with each other and many of the institutions, Washington really feels like a small town,” says Wiley, whose sister Sharon Pratt Kelly was the first woman mayor of the District.

  “Of course I know Bennie Pratt,” says ViCurtis Hinton, a Washingtonian who raised her kids in the Washington chapter of Jack and Jill during the 1950s and 1960s. “My daughter, Audrey, used to play with Bennie. In fact, I remember when Bennie and her sister both went to Howard, and when Bennie started at Harvard Business School.” A few dozen other residents can rattle off the accomplishments of Bennie and Sharon, not because various members of the Pratt family had been in Washington since the late 1800s but because their kids were all playmates, and these people all went to schools like Howard, belonged to groups like the Links or the Boulé, took cotillion preparation lessons from the same teachers, and recognized each other as members of black Washington’s extended family. Though accomplished in their own right, the Pratt sisters owned the basic three credentials that made them accepted members of the upper-class community. For some members of this city’s old guard, those were the only credentials that mattered.

  The history of blacks in Washington is an interesting one—very different from other southern cities and totally different from northern ones. When slaves were brought to Washington, a large concentration of them lived and worked in the Georgetown area. From there, they built roads and erected many of the government buildings and monuments. In the 1790s, Benjamin Banneker, a free black man, surveyed the city and designed the grid for the city’s main avenues and streets. Banneker’s status as a free black reflected only 20 percent of the blacks in Washington, since the other 80 percent remained slaves until approximately 1805.

  By 1835, as white residents began noting the increasing number of black churches, black-owned businesses, and schools that were patronized by the free black population, white segregationists were becoming alarmed by the power and independence of these free-moving black neighbors. Their racist paranoia caused them to lead an antiblack riot during which they burned and destroyed homes and establishments owned by black Washingtonians. While the incident deprived the black community of their independence and some of their mobility, they did not abandon the District. In fact, by 1861, the year before Washington abolished slavery within its boundaries, there were more than ten thousand free blacks living in the city—representing around 75 percent of that city’s black population and 25 percent of the city’s overall population.

  By 1876, blacks were more than one-third of the population, with some of them gaining the opportunity to work in government jobs and start small businesses. In fact, some of the old guard who live there today can trace their ancestral roots to this early community. It was during Reconstruction—the 1870s and 1880s—that Washington became home to two black U.S. senators and eight black members of the House of Representatives from several southern states. In many respects, the presence of these accomplished black officials in Washington emboldened the well-to-do black community to raise expectations for itself and the people who wanted to belong to it.

  But as whites in Washington and elsewhere feared the rise of this new black electoral power, wealth, and independence, they began implementing strict rules of segregation, removing blacks from many jobs as well as from elected and appointed offices. They established separate “colored schools” and pushed the black residents into separate neighborhoods—many of them in crowded and unsanitary alley housing.

  Those groups of blacks who escaped the alley life and avoided generations of poverty were primarily those whose families had been free for at least two or three generations before emancipation or who might have been light enough to pass or who had amassed great wealth elsewhere or through unusual circumstances like inheritances from white relatives. This first group of families formed the beginning of Washington’s black upper class.

  It has long been said that in Washington, beginning sometime in the late 1
800s, there was a “Black Four Hundred” or, in other terms, a defined group of four hundred elite families which made up the city’s black aristocracy. Bebe Drew Price belongs to a modern version of that group. The oldest daughter of world-famous Dr. Charles Richard Drew, inventor of the blood bank and blood plasma storage, she grew up in a large four-story house on the Howard University campus knowing the children of other important families. Despite her famous father, she insists that nobody among her social group noticed the difference from one family to the next.

  “Of course there were many prominent families on and around the Howard campus, but they were more like an extended family,” says Price, who has seen several generations of her family pass through Washington as well as the prestigious university. “We grew up around some of the most accomplished black families in the world, but because there were so many, it simply seemed commonplace at the time.” Price’s sister, Charlene Drew Jarvis, sits on the city council today and continues to bring the old family name into a place of prominence. As candid as Price is, I venture to guess one reason she believes elitism is not as rampant as others might suggest: She’s very comfortably on the inside and isn’t privy to the aggressive back stabbing that goes on among those who are on the periphery trying to break into the D.C. elite. All her life, she has been a sought-after name among the old guard guest lists and has never been in the position of being an outsider.

  According to Alice Randall, a graduate of Georgetown Day School, “the old elite families in this town appreciate the importance of being rooted—of having a cultural tradition that they value and that they know will be repeated.” Although she married into an old family that is associated more with Nashville and with New York’s Harlem Renaissance—the Bontemps—Randall’s childhood in Washington gave her a real understanding of who the D.C. old guard includes as its own. “There are actually only 150 families that make up the core of Washington’s black elite, and a number of them trace their ties to the city as far back as six or seven generations,” says the Harvard graduate, who spent most of her years in the District before moving to Nashville, where she joined the Links and the Junior League.