Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Rikki Hill is actually Fredrika Stubbs Hill, the daughter of Marion Stubbs Thomas, founder of Jack and Jill. “The Tuxedo Ball is an activity that brings together young people and families each year for a large formal party,” explains Hill, who was a debutante in Detroit before she married physician Dr. Delany Hill, “but the event now incorporates seminars and workshops that help the young participants prepare for graduate school and look for summer jobs, and offers other activities that our young people need to be considering.”

  Sidwell Friends graduate Paul Thornell was both a member of Jack and Jill and a Tuxedo Ball committee member. “I’ve gone to the ball many times,” he explains, “and it has served as a great vehicle for young black students to build a network that will last beyond high school and college. The founder of the group, Dr. Carlotta Miles, came up with the idea in 1986 because she recognized that we all need to be a part of networks—both social and professional.”

  As new organizations, new neighborhoods, and new schools become popular among Washington’s black elite, the older representatives of this group begin to express mixed feelings. While they know of no other city that has such a concentration of old-guard families, they are concerned about how to preserve what makes their city and their group special.

  “Sometimes I honestly believe that segregation was better for us,” says a grandmother who thumbs through a photo album filled with graduation pictures of herself and other family members. “This is me when I was graduating from Dunbar, and here I am again when I finished Howard. Do you notice the difference between these pictures and the ones from my grandkids’ graduations?”

  When the woman lays out the sheets of photographs, some differences are immediately obvious. In the older pictures, the woman is surrounded by a sea of black classmates and older black teachers in elegant graduation robes.

  “Now, look at these,” she says with a trace of sadness in her voice. “These are my grandkids when they finished prep school and graduated from college.”

  The newer, color pictures show a black student surrounded by a sea of white faces. Each photograph shows the same black boy and girl surrounded by white prep school classmates and by white college classmates.

  “Where are my grandkids’ role models? Where is their support system? Where is their tie to our people?” The woman paused. “At Dunbar and at Howard, we had examples to follow and black classmates that we connected with. They were people with background—people we’d know for a lifetime. My grandkids don’t know about fraternities or black roommates. They never even had a black teacher. They grew up in the best city in the country for rich blacks—and I feel like we somehow let them get away.”

  Young Washingtonian Paul Thornell has a different philosophy about where his generation is headed. “Even though my brothers and I attended private schools that might not have been available to prior generations of black people, our involvement in Jack and Jill and our ties to our black friends and important black institutions and causes allow us to be just as involved and connected to our culture as the ancestors that preceded us. We know who we are and where we came from.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Black Elite in New York City

  “Girl, it feels like the end of an era.”

  They came from Harlem, from Brooklyn, from New Jersey, from Washington—from as far away as Los Angeles and from as nearby as Scarsdale and New Rochelle. On this damp fall evening, close to nine hundred people jammed the sanctuary as dozens more lined up outside to make it standing room only at the seventy-year-old white limestone Grace Baptist Church in suburban Mount Vernon, New York. It was a somber event that brought together disparate groups from New York’s black society world. It was the funeral of Nellie Arzelia Thornton, national president of Jack and Jill of America.

  “I can’t believe it. She was just fifty—just fifty,” said a woman who held a sprig of green ivy in her hand as she stood in one of the front pews with the other AKA members and looked over at the Links and Jack and Jill sections of the church.

  As my father and I took an available seat in the back half of the sanctuary, we saw long lines of solemn black women in full-length mink coats, diamond earrings, and white dresses being led down front to view the body and catch a final glimpse of the woman who had united most of us. I could see my mother in the fourth row with her fellow Links members. She could have sat with the Jack and Jill women, since that was the group that had originally brought her and Nellie together, but they had actually become closer friends through the Links chapter they had chartered, along with their longtime friend Betty Shabazz. Although each of the three organizations of women would eventually make its own presentations that evening—the Links with candles, the AKAs with the sorority song, and the Jack and Jillers with flowers—everyone there wanted to say good-bye personally.

  “Why isn’t this in New York? This should be in the city,” remarked a tall, light-skinned woman with a mink hat. She seemed to be in her late sixties. “If they really wanted people to show up, they should have had this at St. Philip’s.”

  “Yes, but she’s Westchester,” remarked a younger woman standing nearby. “She’s not from New York.”

  The tall woman turned back to the younger woman and shook her head. “Not from New York? That’s the problem with you new people. You haven’t been out here a hot minute, and you Negroes act like you forgot where Harlem is. They could have had this at St. Philip’s—or even Abyssinian—and really had people show up. All this suburban foolishness. She belongs in the city—not mixed up with all these West Indians and Westchester wannabees”

  “You know, I kind of agree,” another older woman interrupted. “Not that she’s really one of us, but she is representing Jack and Jill, and a New York church would have been able to really bring the right people in. I’m sure Wyatt would have let them do this at his church.” The woman turned around and looked at the unfamiliar white people and the occasional row of dark faces she didn’t recognize. “After all, the Amsterdam News isn’t going to send Cathy Connors out here to cover a group like this.”

  The tall woman nodded in agreement. She liked Grace Church and its head minister, Franklyn Richardson. He and his wife, Inez, were Boulé people—Links people—her kind of people. And Grace had a strong and accomplished membership. But this was still not familiar territory to her. It wasn’t the Harlem clique, and it wasn’t St. Philip’s. Since my mother and several of our cousins had been friends of Dr. Miriam Weston, wife of St. Philip’s rector, Dr. Moran Weston, I’d long understood the historical significance of the 180-year-old St. Philip’s Church on West 134th Street and the position it once had within the world of old-guard New York blacks.

  “Exactly,” the woman with the mink hat continued. “At things like this, you want to see people. You want to know who shows up. Like the Girl Friends, for instance, are they even here? And the Boulé? How can you even tell? I know she wasn’t from an old family or big money, but they really should have set this thing up right for the rest of us.”

  The younger woman, a suburbanite, shrank back, not quite knowing how to respond—and possibly not comprehending the points that seemed to be so important to the two older ladies, two hard-boiled New Yorkers who saw only one way to do things.

  “And there ought to be a section for the Fisk people—she went to Fisk—and the Washington people,” added the increasingly annoyed woman as she attempted to impose her own form of order on the occasion.

  As I sat there with my father, thinking about Nellie Thornton and her credentials—Fisk graduate, school principal, AKA member, Links chapter founder, Jack and Jill national president, wife, mother of two, owner of a white turn-of-the-century mansion—I thought about how rigid these women might have seemed to an outsider who didn’t understand their world.

  “And what’s this all about?” the woman removed the fur hat as the church suddenly fell silent. She sat back in her pew and grimaced as four young, dark-skinned black girls outfitted in black leotards walked t
o the front of the quiet congregation and stopped just to the right of the casket. After a few moments of silence, music began. The young girls, who seemed to be no more than twelve years old, looked out at the somber audience and began to sway in unison. They swung their heads sadly in circles and then shook their slender bodies to a rising rhythmic African beat. Moving their legs and arms with colorful flowing scarves, they introduced an almost whimsical counterpoint to the harsh, chilling music that played behind them.

  Some of the people in the congregation seemed to watch approvingly, while others—many of the ones I knew—sat looking somewhat astonished, unsure of the course of the evening.

  “What’s with this jungle music?” asked a middle-aged man in front of us.

  “I guess they are children from Nellie’s school,” a woman whispered back.

  “I’m not sure I like this.”

  The woman paused tentatively and then nodded. “I don’t think I do either.”

  The girls in the black leotards shook and shimmied, then bent down toward the floor, still writhing and shaking to the beat of the loud drum.

  “Bringing that African stuff into a church. Did she go here?”

  The woman shrugged. “I heard somebody say something about St. Philip’s.”

  “Well, I doubt that.”

  As I looked around the sanctuary, it became obvious that here was a clash of New York cultures.

  The rules of black society could be no more complex than they are in New York. In southern cities like Washington and Atlanta, there is a core group of old families whose names have dominated the social scene for four or five generations. In those places, family history rather than family wealth is what determines one’s importance. In other cities, like Chicago, Memphis, and Detroit, the elite can often be traced back to old-line businesses like Chicago’s Supreme Life Insurance or Memphis’s Universal Life Insurance. In most of these communities, there is less of an influx of new families with new or different backgrounds.

  But the rules are different in New York. Its sheer size, its black ethnic variety, and its complex levels of wealth have made it a hybrid city for the black elite. With a metropolitan area that is three times more populous than any of the other cities, New York has more than one historically black area of town: It has Manhattan’s Harlem and Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant as well as sections of lower Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, all of which developed independently from the others. And while most of the other cities have black elite populations that rose almost exclusively from American black southern roots, New York has the older southern-born families as well as those old and new West Indians who contribute their Jamaican, Haitian, or Trinidadian traditions to an already complex community of cultures. And because New York is also a financial center, with so many opportunities for wealth that go beyond the traditional black career paths of medicine, law, or family-run insurance and funeral home businesses, there are many examples of individuals who have quickly and recently catapulted themselves into the elite through the financial success of just one generation’s activity on Wall Street or in the fast-moving media businesses.

  The very earliest representatives of black society in New York City had established themselves rather firmly by the late 1800s in the boroughs of both Manhattan and Brooklyn. While they were only a fraction of the sixty-two thousand blacks living in all of New York City, they found their financial success through businesses tied to catering and small restaurants. One example of this was Samuel Fraunces, who ran a tavern and catering business during the late 1700s in the Wall Street area. A black man born in the British West Indies, Fraunces served prominent British and American political figures such as George Washington. Decorated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American memorabilia, Fraunces Tavern still operates today in its original location at Pearl and Broad Streets and serves a clientele made up mostly of affluent white bankers and Wall Street executives.

  Since New York City had no black universities with which to attract or foster a black intellectual community in the way that Atlanta and Nashville did in the late 1800s, New York saw its elite, during this period, grow mostly from successful caterers who served a wealthy white clientele, or from doctors, dentists, and other professionals who served an exclusively black customer base. Among those first wealthy black New York families were names such as White, Bishop, Mars, Lansing, and Van Dyke. Most of them belonged either to Manhattan’s St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church, which was eventually to move to Harlem, or to Brooklyn’s St. Augustine’s Church. Eventally, there would also be a St. Philip’s in Brooklyn that would have prestige similar to the one led by Manhattan’s famous rector Hutchens Bishop.

  As a child growing up in suburban Westchester County—just thirty minutes north of New York City—I discovered how firmly people drew distinctions between the disparate groups and cliques that make up New York’s black upper class. Over the years, relatives, family friends, and new acquaintances have made it clear through their questions and remarks about various other black New Yorkers that there was an “us against them” dynamic at work in this town. It did not matter that we all looked alike. What mattered most was who came first and where we came from.

  Rather than come together as a cohesive group, black New Yorkers have divided themselves into separate cliques—cliques that hailed from the American South, from Jamaica, from Haiti, from Barbados, from Grenada, from other parts of the West Indies, and from Africa. Additional divisions drawn between people are based upon their current geographical residences: Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, Westchester, and northern New Jersey.

  With an overall black population of 2.5 million people—the largest in the United States—in the New York metropolitan area, some believe it would be unwieldy and illogical for all the black professionals in these many communities to come together in the same social and civic clubs. Others say that because of the differences in culture between blacks from the South and blacks from the separate West Indian locales, there are obvious cultural conflicts that make it difficult for these people to interact with ease. What I have noticed over the years, however, is an explanation that is much more distressing. I have concluded that the primary reason for the separate groups is that many members of the various cliques within the black professional class truly feel superior to the others and couldn’t imagine diluting their group with “those Jamaicans from Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant” or “those southern blacks from Harlem” or “those Haitians from Queens” or “those wannabees in Westchester.”

  “The best way to understand New York’s black upper class is to study its origins,” says Dr. Chester Redhead, a New York dentist who was born in Harlem and divides his life between the city, his suburban home in Scarsdale, and a summer house in Sag Harbor. “The original black groups in New York are really the families from Harlem and from Brooklyn.”

  From his dental office in the Riverton apartment complex at 135th Street, Redhead points out the many generations of blacks who have fanned out from Manhattan and Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

  “But don’t ever confuse the Brooklyn crowd with the Harlem crowd,” says William Pickens III, whose family has lived in both places. He agrees that the groups were quite distinct two generations ago and remain so today. “There are different churches, social clubs, cotillions, events, and families associated with each.” Pickens knew the cliques on both sides while growing up in the Brooklyn chapter of Jack and Jill. His mother, Emilie, was a well-known Brooklyn socialite as well as the national president of Jack and Jill in the late 1940s. His father was a New York attorney and the college roommate of poet Langston Hughes. His grandfather was a class-of-1907 Yale graduate who helped found the NAACP. With such credentials, he was part of the groups that were held in high esteem in old New York.

  Although my own parents didn’t arrive in New York until the 1950s, by the time I was born, in 1961, they were fully aware that the important and authentic black experiences were
to be found in Harlem and Brooklyn, where most of their friends lived. They, like many black New Yorkers of the 1950s and 1960s, had chosen to raise their kids in the less-congested Westchester suburbs, but while doing so they found themselves faced with yet another black New York clique to satisfy.

  Like many black families who had moved to the suburban areas of southern Westchester, northern New Jersey, and parts of Queens after the late 1950s, we encountered blacks who looked down on inner-city blacks with no ties to white America. These upwardly mobile blacks—often called “bourgie” because of their bourgeois attitudes—conducted themselves and ruled their group’s “members” with complicated and schizophrenic standards. The rule here was to embrace your black identity but to be sure to balance it with the white American culture as well. Be black, but don’t be too black. Those black suburbanites who were able to master this balance were also able to find a place within the upper-class clique of suburban blacks.

  I remember how schizophrenic our existence was for all of us as we participated in these activities: Friday night parties with the white neighborhood kids; Saturday expeditions to black plays and museums in Harlem with the black Jack and Jill kids; tennis outings at segregated Westchester country clubs with a white classmate’s family; a first date with a black girl from the local NAACP teen chapter; weekend sleepaways with the kids from the white Boy Scouts troop; summertime sleepovers with cousins and black friends from church. It was all a cultural see saw.

  Keeping the groups separate and getting along with both, while also maintaining our distinct black identity, was a skill that the black suburban cliques valued most of all. Mastering this skill was a requirement I had to fulfill if I was going to be accepted by the black New York clique that we referred to as “our friends.”