Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Although Brooklyn’s black community offers a regal history, most New Yorkers will agree that the city’s black society became renowned only when it finally settled in Harlem. In fact, many will also agree that the original roots of Harlem’s black aristocracy can be found in the old families affiliated with St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Once known as the richest black church in the country, St. Philip’s was founded in 1818 and included some of the best-educated, most powerful, and most affluent blacks in New York.

  “My grandmother, Mae Walker Perry, was married at St. Philip’s in 1923 at a very lavish ceremony that was reported on widely because of its cost,” says Radcliffe graduate A’Lelia Perry Bundles, who works as a television producer in Washington. The fifty-thousand-dollar wedding ceremony and reception were hosted by Perry’s mother, Harlem socialite A’Lelia Walker Robinson. Although it was Perry’s mother who had brought social status to the Harlem family through marriages to two physicians, and through an active social calendar, it was actually Perry’s grandmother, the famous entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, who had made the family rich.

  “Madam Walker, originally from Louisiana, had become the nation’s first self-made woman millionaire after turning her cosmetics and hair care firm, the Walker Company, into a national success in the 1890s,” explains great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles. So staggering was Walker’s wealth that she was able to build a twenty-thousand-square-foot stone mansion on an estate overlooking the Hudson River in the affluent Westchester County community of Irvington. It was located in the same neighborhood as mansions that belonged to such white millionaires as Gould and Rockefeller. Bundles, an alumnus of Jack and Jill and a member of the Links, notes that her great-great-grandmother also maintained two Manhattan homes as well—one on West 136th Street and one on Edgecombe Avenue.

  As the granddaughter of the country’s richest black woman and the daughter of a socialite who supported many writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the attractive Mae Walker Perry had Spelman College credentials and the hand of a young Chicago physician—thus becoming the right kind of black woman to be married in a high-profile wedding at the socially obsessed St. Philip’s Church. She defined Harlem society.

  Not only had St. Philip’s been an important institution that attracted the wealthy and socially elite black Episcopalians for its Sunday services, but it had also been a catalyst in getting many blacks to relocate to Harlem permanently during the early 1900s.

  “My parents moved to Harlem the same year that St. Philip’s did,” explains Dr. James Jones, as he relaxes in the living room of his elegant Harlem town house on 138th Street—one of the two blocks that make up the prestigious Strivers’ Row neighborhood. A retired oral surgeon who was among those who interviewed and initiated me when I joined the Boulé, Jones explains that Harlem was actually a middle-class white community before the important black churches arrived. “Black New Yorkers didn’t start off in Harlem,” says Jones. “In the early 1900s, the black community and particularly the black professionals—were found on the West Side of the city—around Fifty-second and Fifty-third Streets.”

  The son of a doctor and a schoolteacher, Jones was born in 1914 and notes that his parents lived in midtown prior to that time. “My father and mother had been living on West Fifty-third Street until 1911, when a black migration started moving north to Harlem.” He and his parents first lived on West 139th Street—not far from where he lives today with his wife, Ada Fisher Jones. “My parents were hard-core New Yorkers, and until they moved to Harlem, most of their life had been spent downtown, where my father’s practice was located and where my mother had gone to Hunter College.”

  Although white Harlem residents initially put up strong resistance to the influx of blacks in 1911 and 1912, there were outspoken and well-connected black ministers like Hutchens C. Bishop, who had been rector of St. Philip’s, and Adam Clayton Powell Sr., minister of Abyssinian Baptist Church, who publicly argued for equal access to housing in this northern community of Manhattan. “St. Philip’s was run by the Bishop family for seventy years, and together they made Harlem a welcoming place for black people,” says Dr. Moran Weston, a 1930 graduate of Columbia University who was named rector of St. Philip’s in 1957. “It had been obvious that blacks in Harlem needed the backing and the organization of a strong black church to establish themselves, their housing, and their voice in this new community. So they were fortunate to have the clout of St. Philip’s.” Fighting against those efforts were several white churches, which voted against the establishment of many of the Harlem churches that blacks were building in the early 1900s.

  Weston, who has held board positions at Columbia University, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Mount Sinai Medical Center, points out that the black church was a major force in developing political and economic power for Harlem blacks of every income group. Between 1910 and 1920, the period in which St. Philip’s relocated to Harlem, the city’s black population grew dramatically—by 66 percent—as blacks from southern states such as Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina moved north for better jobs. Weston himself was responsible for building over twelve hundred housing units for Harlemites. Other high-profile Harlem ministers, including Wyatt Tee Walker, head of Canaan Baptist Church on West 116th Street, continue to be outspoken in their Harlem activities. Walker, who served as Dr. Martin Luther King’s chief of staff and resides in nearby Westchester County, has also developed a record number of residential buildings for the Harlem community. Although I was a suburbanite, I grew up knowing this Harlemite, since his kids were in my Jack and Jill chapter and his wife, Anne, was in my mother’s Links chapter. “The old Harlem community has a rich history, and the churches played a major role in building it,” says Reverend Walker. “Those first churches and residents opened up the community for the rest of us.”

  Because today’s Harlem is seen as the consummate black community, a fourteen-square-mile area that includes blacks of every economic group, it is hard to believe that many parts of it were once off-limits to blacks—even into the 1930s. For even those black elite families, all-white apartment buildings and all-white theaters and restaurants along 125th Street made the historic neighborhood a checkerboard of all-black and all-white fiefdoms.

  “I get mighty annoyed by these West Indians and Hispanics who showed up here in the 1960s and turned their noses up at us native Harlemites,” says a retired attorney who was born in Harlem in the 1920s. “They think this community is just open to anybody who wants it. They have no idea how hard we had to fight white people to earn a place here.”

  This attorney’s remarks reflect some of the resentment that members of the old Harlem elite harbor against the bigoted white residents who came before them and the West Indians and Hispanic groups who succeeded them. In fact, he and others argue that if it weren’t for the old black southerners, there would have been no old black Harlem. Like many blacks who were born in the Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s, he believes that it was those residents who came from the American south who arrived in Harlem and fought to desegregate the neighborhoods that are now open to minorities of every background. While this view gives short shrift to the West Indians who had also arrived in the early years (by 1935, 22 percent of black Harlem was West Indian), this is the basis for some of the resentment that exists between certain cliques among the city’s black elite: the debate over who got there first and who fought for the right to live there.

  “I remember when many parts of Harlem were still segregated,” says my cousin Dr. Robert Morton, who began his career as a surgeon in New York after graduating from Meharry. “Until the 1935 race riot here, it didn’t matter how wealthy you were or how well you dressed. Blacks were simply not allowed to rent in certain buildings, eat in certain restaurants, or go to certain movie theaters along 125th Street.”

  Morton recalls when even Harlem Hospital would not allow black surgeons to operate on patients. “Even though there were many black physicians in the community,�
� he explains, “the only institution that would allow us to perform surgery was the Edgecombe Sanitarium—and that was a building that didn’t even have elevators. Patients had to be carried up and down the stairs on stretchers.”

  Although the March 1935 race riot in Harlem involved working-class residents who were incensed by the treatment of a black teenager accused of shoplifting in a white department store on 125th Street, the results of the unrest had a great impact on well-to-do blacks. In response to the unrest, affluent whites and brokers relinquished their hold on previously segregated well-to-do apartment buildings and town houses, thus making it finally possible for the black elite of Harlem to separate themselves from their working-class neighbors and relocate to more expensive streets and buildings.

  “One of the first important addresses for well-to-do blacks in Harlem was Strivers’ Row, a two-block area on West 138th and 139th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues,” says Cathy Connors, a longtime Harlem society columnist who covered the black elite for the Amsterdam News. As Connors leans over her desk pointing at a Harlem map, her pearl necklace drops gracefully around the collar of her blue suit. “Now that’s where you’d find the wealthiest and best-connected black people over the last fifty years—people like Louis T. Wright and Booker T. Washington’s grandson, and I believe Dr. Powell too,” she says with a wry smile.

  A member of the Links and the Northeasterners, Connors recalls attending many town-house parties along the tree-lined Strivers’ Row with her now-deceased husband, John Connors, the former publisher of the American Express magazine group. “Thirteen-foot ceilings, marble staircases, towering brass and copper chandeliers,” Connors says while thumbing through photographs of social events in various homes over the last thirty years.

  Dr. James Jones lives in one of those million-dollar town houses that Connors points out. “These homes were designed by top architects like Stanford White and built in the 1890s when whites were the primary residents,” says Jones, who bought a house on the street in the early 1950s. “Blacks were still not permitted to buy on these streets even after the wealthiest whites moved out. The realtors decided to keep them empty rather than upset the remaining white residents. I think Dr. Wright was one of the first blacks allowed to buy on this street.”

  I am tempted to interrupt Jones and ask if “Dr. Wright” is the same person as the “Louis T. Wright” that Cathy Connors referred to earlier, but I don’t want to reveal myself as another “bourgie” Westchester black who doesn’t know my black New York history. So I simply say, “Oh, yeah, Dr. Wright.”

  Jones looks at me skeptically.

  “You do know who Dr. Wright is—don’t you?”

  I take a guess. “That would be Louis T. Wright, if I recall correctly.”

  Jones rolls his eyes slightly and breathes out impatiently. “Then I’ll just tell you who he is,” Jones adds without missing a beat.

  In our short conversation, I learn that the Louis T. Wright, who lived in one of the town houses on Strivers’ Row, was the first black physician to join the staff of a New York hospital. A 1915 graduate of Harvard Medical School, he eventually founded a cancer research center at Harlem Hospital. “He was the head of surgery at Harlem,” recalls my cousin Robert Morton, “and he was a role model for a lot of us up-and-coming surgeons who had few mentors and even fewer opportunities.”

  I go back to Connors, and she gives me a piece of advice: “If you want to act like you know what you’re talking about when you talk to Harlemites, there are some key people you’d better know about,” she says. “It’s Dr. Louis T. Wright, C. B. Powell, Arthur Logan—and, of course, the Delanys.”

  “Hmmph, the light-skinned doctor crowd,” says a retired schoolteacher when I repeat the four names. The teacher says she knew Wright’s daughters in Harlem during the 1930s. “So superior—so high-yellow.”

  The schoolteacher’s female companion frowns. “They weren’t all that yellow,” she remarks. “Actually, I always thought Dr. Powell was rather dark. Yes, as a matter of fact, quite dark.”

  “Well, not those Wright girls,” the schoolteacher snaps. “So superior—going off to their private schools.”

  The women recall that the Wright girls grew up in a well-to-do, high-profile family and that both ended up doing what few women—black or white—were doing in their generation. Educated at the exclusive private school Fieldston—one of the favorite private schools then and now for elite blacks—Barbara Wright went off to Mount Holyoke College and Columbia Medical School.

  “And she married that really dark lawyer who was in President Reagan’s cabinet,” adds the schoolteacher. “What was his name?”

  “Samuel Pierce?” I ask, recalling that President Reagan had appointed the New York attorney Sam Pierce as his secretary of housing and urban development.

  “That’s the one,” the teacher says.

  “And her sister, Jane,” adds the friend, “went off to Smith College in the thirties—and when she was done with medical school, she came back and was an internist and then a surgery professor and a dean. They were really an amazing family.”

  “I still say they acted superior,” the teacher adds. “As if Howard and Spelman weren’t good enough for them. What kind of Harlem black sent his kids to Fieldston and Smith back then? Maybe now, but then?”

  As I work my way around Harlem and other parts of the city, visiting with and talking to friends like Dr. Redhead, socialites George and Mary Lopez, Girl Friends founder Anna Small Murphy, and former Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton, I return to the list of important Harlem people that Cathy Connors gave me as soon as I hear one of the names mentioned.

  Arthur Logan?

  “Now, that was one sad story,” someone says at a dinner I attend over on Sugar Hill’s Edgecombe Avenue.

  “Isn’t he the one they named that hospital after?” asks the host. “I think he lived at 409 or 555. He was definitely at a good address—with at least two of his wives.”

  “He was a big-time doctor here in the forties and the fifties,” explains a guest who belongs to the Boulé, “good-looking, rich, and really political. I think he raised a lot of civil rights money too.”

  When I ask what happened to him, the room falls silent. The host of the party runs briskly into the kitchen. The Boulé member turns his back to me.

  Later that evening someone whispers to me that the good-looking, rich, and really political Dr. Arthur Logan jumped off a bridge in Harlem in the 1970s, but I decide to do my own digging because I realize how the jealous New York cliques can revise history.

  Like Louis Wright, Arthur Logan was a high-profile physician who had been educated at white schools and was identified as a member of the light-skinned Harlem elite. Born in 1909, he went to the private Ethical Culture School, a division of the exclusive Fieldston School, then graduated from Williams College in 1930 and Columbia Medical School in 1934. His sister Myra was a New York physician, and his other sister, Ruth Logan Roberts, along with her husband, Dr. Eugene Roberts, was a popular host for black intellectuals and socialites during the Harlem Renaissance.

  “My father was particularly known in Harlem because he was Duke Ellington’s physician,” recalls Arthur Logan’s daughter, Adele Logan Alexander, who was born in Harlem in 1938. “His practice on 152nd Street, the Upper Manhattan Medical Group, was opened in 1953, and the city eventually named a hospital after him.”

  Although she now lives in Washington and teaches history at George Washington University, Alexander grew up surrounded by Harlem’s elite. Like Louis Wright’s privileged daughters, she graduated from the exclusive Fieldston School. She grew up with other well-to-do black kids in Jack and Jill and then went off to Radcliffe before later earning her Ph.D. at Howard.

  When I later talk to the Sugar Hill host who had avoided deeper discussion of Dr. Arthur Logan, I tell her I had the fortune of speaking with his daughter, Adele. The woman’s face suddenly lights up.

  “Well, you do know who sh
e is—don’t you?”

  I nod slowly, suddenly realizing that yet another box is being opened. Even if she didn’t have her facts straight on Dr. Logan, she was on to a story about his daughter.

  “Adele’s husband is Clifford Alexander, and he was secretary of the army under President Carter,” the woman practically shouts. “I bet she didn’t tell you that, did she?”

  Native Harlemites keep up with their neighbors—current and former.

  “Well, my sister used to have such a crush on him. He was this big escort at the cotillions,” the woman adds, as she goes on to explain that Clifford and Adele were both students at Fieldston and were in Jack and Jill together, and both went off to Harvard in the 1950s. She even recalls that Adele’s mother had gotten a master’s degree from Columbia in the 1930s.

  I nod as I recall that Adele, despite her modesty, had revealed some of those personal facts.

  “But we weren’t Jack and Jill material and didn’t have a good address back then,” the woman explains, while still avoiding any discussion of the circumstances surrounding Dr. Logan’s death. “The Logans lived at 505 then, and of course the Alexanders, while not well-to-do, lived in the Riverton.”

  “If they didn’t live on Strivers’ Row, the black elite in Harlem lived at 555 Edgecombe, 409 Edgecombe, Lenox Terrace, or the Riverton,” says Connors, who lives in Lenox Terrace, a set of redbrick high-rise buildings with doormen and awnings, which welcomes such Harlem residents as attorney Percy Sutton, Congressman Charles Rangel, and former New York secretary of state Basil Patterson. Located at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, Connors’s development has a high concentration of second and third-generation black professional families.

  “When I was a teenager in Harlem, there were two important addresses that everyone wanted to have,” says Dr. Beny Primm, a New York anesthesiologist who is also a renowned researcher on drug dependency. “It was either Strivers’ Row or 409 Edgecombe Avenue,” adds Primm, who grew up attending St. Mark’s Methodist Church at 138th Street and Edgecombe.