During recent years, other government, policy, and civil rights people who’ve been accepted into the black elite ranks have been the first black cabinet member Robert C. Weaver, Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander and his wife Adele Logan Alexander, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, Dorothy Height, Sharon Pratt Kelly, Charlene Drew Jarvis, U.S. senator Edward Brooke, Nobel Prize–winner Ralph Bunche, Rockefeller appointee Ersa Poston, Secretary of the Army Togo West, journalist and former ambassador Carl Rowan, Eric Holder, Federal Reserve member Andrew Brimmer, air force officers Benjamin O. Davis Sr. and Jr., and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
Many of these individuals have broken into Washington’s black society despite the fact that many of their early accomplishments have taken place outside of the District. For example, Edelman and Norton—both Yale Law School graduates from the early 1960s—travel back and forth within the oldest and most established black and white Washington circles even though some of the most important activities of their careers took place in cities such as Boston and New York. Edelman, who was the first black woman on Yale’s board of trustees, worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York and for the Harvard Center of Law and Education in Massachusetts before she eventually came to Washington and founded the Children’s Defense Fund. Norton, although born in Washington and now the congresswoman representing the District, received her first high-profile appointments in New York, where she served under Mayor Lindsay and Mayor Beame as head of the Commission on Human Rights, before moving back to D.C. as head of the EEOC in 1977.
“Well, of course we’ve also adopted some of the people who are worthy of being in our crowd,” says a somewhat haughty Washingtonian who claims to have dined at least twice at the home of Andrew Brimmer, a board member at the Federal Reserve. “Most people just think of Brimmer as being a real Washingtonian. But he’s actually from Louisiana—and only from modest means. But frankly, it makes us look good to have him in our group. He’s a Harvard Ph.D., he’s on lots of Fortune 500 boards, he’s got lots of honorary degrees, he was a Fulbright Scholar, he lives in a good neighborhood, and he’s got lots of class.”
Because I know Brimmer’s daughter, Esther, I am somewhat aware of how little she or her prominent father have to do to elicit such praise and adoration from some of their Washington neighbors. I know that they generally operate above the fray, but I wonder if they know or care about how much their family résumé means to the people who dine in their home and claim to “adopt” them.
But just as interesting is the list of accomplished Washingtonians who are not embraced by the group. General Colin Powell is one of these people. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is another. “Is it because they aren’t originally from Washington?” I ask a D.C. native with whom I had worked when Ron Brown had invited us down to work on the 1992 Clinton campaign.
“Absolutely not,” my friend explained. “Remember that Ron was accepted and he wasn’t from Washington.”
I ask if it’s because of their political party affiliation, even though I know that a significant number of the old guard hold onto their Republican status.
My friend shakes his head. “No, they have nothing against Republicans.”
“Then what is the distinction?” I ask. “Why would black Washington accept outsiders like Ron Brown and reject a Supreme Court justice and a serious presidential contender who enjoys national popularity?”
“Sometimes it’s an issue of who demonstrates black pride,” my friend explains, as he shares some of the assessments that his parents and their friends—all old-guard insiders—have made about people like Powell and Thomas. “They don’t like people who are too black, like Jesse Jackson, but they also don’t like people who seem to avoid embracing black people and black institutions.”
Like others whom I speak to, my friend says that while Ron Brown was not from Washington, he long ago aligned himself with black causes such as the Urban League and belonged to black organizations, including the Guardsmen and the Boulé. His wife, a longtime member of the Links, has also been very visible in the black political and social scene. And their kids are too.
“But Powell and Thomas,” says a Washington Boulé member, “have almost nothing to do with black people in this town. They don’t join our groups and don’t attend black events unless they are the featured speakers.”
“And being married to some low-class white woman from God knows where,” adds the Boulé member’s wife, “is hardly going to help Clarence Thomas make a transition into our community. He doesn’t like us and we don’t like him.”
Colin Powell, while not a member of the important black men’s groups and not a graduate of a black college and not a participant in any of the old-line black civil rights organizations, is a more complex figure to dismiss. Although I admire him immensely, some feel differently.
“I keep hoping that Powell will surprise us and suddenly start connecting with the black community,” says a former black congressional aide who grew up in Washington and says that he once admired Powell, “but he’s really just a slickly packaged white guy who has just enough melanin and makes just enough references to his past as a black kid in New York to seem empathetic to black people. He’s like an Ed Brooke, but without the white wife. Instead, Powell’s son has the white wife.”
So, it seems that in this city—a town that is 65 percent black, there remains a black elite community who bend the rules for some and hold the line for others. Whether it’s because of an individual’s marriage outside the race or his or her failure to associate with black institutions and causes, nowhere is the double standard more apparent than in the way that certain political and government figures are embraced or rejected by the city’s black elite.
In the case of educators who are accepted by the elite, the rules seem to be more straightforward. For example, in general, those blacks who fall into the elite group of Washington educators had some tie to, or success at, Howard University or Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School, a school where the best-educated black teachers came because of their dedication to black children and because of the difficulty in getting jobs at northern or southern schools that hired only white teachers and administrators.
Among the Howard or college faculty group have been James and Samuel Nabrit, James Cheek, Mordecai Johnson, George W. Cook, Broadus and Lillian Butler, James and Lillian Lawson, and John and Paquita Attaway.
Dr. Alethia L. Spraggins belongs to a family of educators who have long been tied to the city’s schools. A fifth-generation Washingtonian, she belongs to the Washington, D.C., Links along with her mother, Alice Spraggins. “My mother’s father, Henry Lee Grant, was an instrumental teacher at Dunbar High School and taught Billy Taylor and Duke Ellington,” says Dr. Spraggins, who recently retired as a high school principal in the D.C. public schools. Her mother’s grandfather, Henry Fleet Grant, was the first black music teacher in the entire city school system. Spraggins’s father, Dr. Tinsley Lee Spraggins, was also an educator and was one of the leading figures in black voter registration drives of the South and was recognized by President Lyndon Johnson for broadening his work on a national level.
Others in the Washington schools have included Francis Cardozo,Dr. Winfield Montgomery, Dr. John Washington, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, Eva Dykes, Charles and Thelma Baltimore, and Mazaline Baird.
“And then there are just names you always hear, but don’t necessarily associate with any particular profession,” says a man who belongs to the Bachelor-Benedicts club. “There are last names that when someone mentions them, you just ask ‘Are you of the Pinkett family?’ There are names like French, Epps, Diggs, Latimer, Gregory, Mazique, Moultrie, Wesley, Banks, Dunmore, Gilliam, and Bullock.”
In recent years, one of the biggest rising stars on the Washington social and civic circuit has been Savanna Clark, wife of millionaire urologist Dr. C. Warfield Clark. Because of his long-standing ties and her vigor and personality, the Clarks have become one of those coup
les who live with a foot in two different worlds: one black and one white.
“That woman is everywhere,” remarks a young Jack and Jill mother in a tone of admiration. “Every time I open the Washington Post, I see her organizing fund-raisers for scholarships or balls at the Kennedy Center. She’s like no other black woman in this town.” While they belong to the black society groups like the Boulé and the Links, Savanna Clark and her husband are actually even more prominent in the city’s white society because of their status as multimillionaires who place an emphasis on philanthropy. I first met Mrs. Clark at the Harvard Club in New York after she and Altovise Davis, Sammy Davis Jr.’s widow, had come to New York for the city’s annual Fashion Week.
A charter member of her Links chapter and of the Hillbillies, Clark has degrees from Prairie View A&M and the University of Oklahoma and has held teaching positions at several universities. Although she was not born in Washington, as was her husband, she is a die-hard D.C. supporter—both heading and serving on numerous committees at the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony, the Corcoran Gallery, and many other high-profile groups. Clark is often seen in couture gowns designed by Valentino, Bill Blass, and Chanel, and she gained a great deal of attention when she and her husband used their own resources to give special dinners on behalf of Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and other blacks who had been honored by the Kennedy Center.
“My husband, Warfield, was born here and went to Dunbar, the University of Michigan, and Howard Medical School before he started practicing as a urologist, so he really knows this town,” explains Clark, as she walks into her magnificent home in the Forest Hills section. “Although I am not originally from Washington, I feel that it’s important for me to contribute to this community.”
Not only have the Clarks given to the cultural institutions, but they’ve invested in an eclectic group of black artists and have helped raise scholarship monies for black and other minority students at Georgetown Medical School.
Having just returned from the Chicago funeral of her friend, attorney Jewel Lafontant, Clark sits in her home in the Forest Hills section—a neighborhood on the west side of Rock Creek Park and an area of mostly white neighbors, except for Carl Rowan, Andrew Brimmer, and one or two other black millionaires—and she considers what she and her husband are trying to accomplish.
“It is extremely important for black people to contribute to the social, cultural, and educational institutions that are around us. If we want to have an impact on this city, and if we want to be taken seriously as a people, we have to participate in our own black organizations, but also in other groups as well.” As the Clarks continue to participate in their Links and Boulé chapters, along with the many high-profile white charities, they are helping to redefine the new black elite.
Benaree Pratt Wiley remembers the quiet gentility of the LeDroit Park neighborhood that abuts Howard University. “We moved from LeDroit when I was quite young, but I remember that several of the kids in my neighborhood attended the Howard nursery school with me,” explains Wiley, a Howard University graduate who was the fourth generation of her family to live in Washington. “There is a lot of history in those houses,” she adds.
“When I was little, my mother used to write to her friends in Detroit and tell them we lived in LeDroit Park, but she was lying,” says a third-generation Washingtonian in her seventies. “We actually lived about a block and a half outside the neighborhood, but Mother would say to my dad that she could see the boundary from our living-room window, so we should be able to say we lived there. This was in the early 1930s, LeDroit’s heyday, and everybody important lived there. When we finally moved into the neighborhood, my mother had personal stationery engraved so that the neighborhood’s name was emblazoned between her name and our address.”
Developed by a white Howard University professor, Amzi Barber, who named the forty-two-acre neighborhood after his father-in-law, LeDroit Langdon, the tree-lined residential neighborhood was located just south of Howard University. It is bound by Second Street on the east, Sixth Street on the west, W Street on the north, and Florida and Rhode Island Avenues on the South. This one-square-mile area of private homes was originally inhabited by whites when it was built in the 1870s. Worried by the presence of the all-black Howard University just a few blocks north, the white neighborhood maintained a fence between itself and the school.
Blacks first became residents of the neighborhood in the 1890s, with Mary Church Terrell and her husband being among the first to integrate the white area.
Alberta Campbell Colbert remembers when LeDroit Park was a sought-after neighborhood for blacks. “When I first got married, one of the most desirable neighborhoods for blacks was LeDroit Park. There were these beautiful Victorian structures, as well as handsome brick town houses,” Colbert adds, noting that many of the residents had some sort of tie to Howard University.
Although several of the houses are historic landmarks, many members of the black elite began moving out of the area as desegregation opened up other neighborhoods and as LeDroit lost its cachet to newer sections that looked more affluent.
One of the first streets to be considered a “gold coast” for blacks outside of LeDroit Park was Blagden Avenue, a small street that runs on the east side of Sixteenth Street, just below Rock Creek Park. “We were the original ‘gold coast’ during the 1950s, and we had top-drawer people like William Thompson of the Urban League and Dr. Clarke, who used to have ambassadors when they entertained,” says an eighty-year-old Washingtonian who recalls when she first moved near Blagden, a street that was lined with the homes of physicians and their wives and children. “Our houses weren’t as big or palatial as the houses on the northern end of Sixteenth Street, but they wouldn’t sell to blacks up there when we were looking.”
Since the late 1960s, the term “gold coast” has been used to refer to yet another area on upper Sixteenth Street, Northwest, which sits above Walter Reed Army Medical Center and runs all the way to the Washington-Maryland border. This large neighborhood of early-twentieth-century colonials and Tudors includes the most affluent and best-connected blacks in Washington. Many of the streets are named after trees or flowers, including Hemlock, Primrose, Orchid, Juniper, Redwood, Sycamore, and Spruce. “Ninety percent of the zip codes on my invitation lists for parties are 20012,” says the octogenarian, who left Blagden and now lives in this newer gold coast neighborhood. “We actually call this the platinum coast.”
The elite families who have lived there include doctors like William Matory, Charles Epps, and Howard Hospital’s Linwood Rayford, as well as many judges and lawyers, such as Henry Kennedy; Vincent Cohen; Thomas Williams; and Covington and Burling partner Wesley Williams and his wife, Crowell and Moring partner Karen Hastie Williams, who both recently moved to the Watergate. While members of black society consider this to be “their neighborhood,” it still consists of about 40 percent white residents on many of the streets.
“Everyone lumps us together with the North Portal neighborhood, but as you can see, I don’t live in a 1950s split-level,” says a physician who resents being grouped together with even this very fashionable neighborhood. “I live in a colonial that was built a long time before they even thought about North Portal Estates.” Like a handful of the black elite who live on the upper end of Sixteenth Street, this doctor notes that there are actually three separate neighborhoods in the area.
There is Shepherd Park, which is the furthest south of the three neighborhoods. It runs along the northern side of Walter Reed Medical Center. Further north and over on the western side of Sixteenth Street is North Portal Estates, which features newer houses that were made available to blacks after housing desegregation in the early 1960s. Just to the north of North Portal is the neighborhood known as Colonial Village.
“As anyone can see, I’ve got older, more established houses in my neighborhood,” adds the physician. “You may call us North Portal, but we’re not the same thing.”
When blacks sta
rted moving to the suburbs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many moved to Silver Spring, Maryland. Later they moved to other well-to-do Maryland towns, such as Chevy Chase, Bethesda, and Potomac. “Although Virginia was just as close,” says a woman who moved into a five-bedroom Silver Spring house after living in the District most of her life, “it was pretty obvious that we were more welcome in the Maryland suburbs.” She continued, as she sat across from her bridge partner, who was dressed in a dark-blue silk chantung suit, “Until the mid-1970s, the only Virginia towns that really let us in were Alexandria and Arlington. Arlington has all those Syphaxes. That’s their town, and there’s no point in moving there unless you’re related to them.”
And what about the ritzy McLean, Virginia? “Absolutely not!” says the Silver Spring woman. “People say that’s Bobby Kennedy territory, and that’s good, but the truth of the matter is that it’s Republican territory. So we never move to McLean. Never.”
“I wouldn’t say never,” added the woman in the blue silk chantung jacket.
The woman paused and looked over at her bridge partner. “That’s true. There’s those Robinsons who moved out to McLean years ago. I don’t know what they were thinking. They were light, but they sure weren’t going to be passing for white.”
The woman’s bridge partner gave her friend a frown. “Now, don’t be talking about Jackie like that. She’s one of our own—and that girl faced enough tragedy.”
The Silver Spring woman waved her friend away. “I loved Jackie too, but let’s be honest. That son of hers married white because of that whole McLean mentality. Black people who move to places like that aren’t going to raise children who appreciate their blackness. Now there, I said it. I know I shouldn’t be talking about the dead, but they’re all gone now.”
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