“At parties, people didn’t even bother saying the street name,” recalls Primm. “They just said 409—and they expected you to know. The same was true for 555 Edgecombe.”
Standing thirteen stories high on the top of the highly elevated Sugar Hill neighborhood in Harlem, 409 Edgecombe is a large luxury building that had originally been inhabited by Jewish and Irish professional families. With its long green awning that runs to the curb, its large lobby, and its ornate chandeliers, the building is reminiscent of apartment buildings found on Park or Fifth Avenue. Although it is showing wear from the years, the building has historic landmark status, and its wide view of upper Manhattan and ornate cornices still make it an attractive place today.
Edgecombe Avenue’s 409 and 555 “opened up to blacks several years after Strivers’ Row,” says Jane Wright, a longtime Edgecombe Avenue resident. “Even after blacks moved into central Harlem, there were still many whites who stayed up here on Sugar Hill. From the 1930s through the 1950s, there were many famous blacks like Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. Du Bois, and NAACP leaders Walter White and Roy Wilkins living at 409 and 555.”
Other important residential landmarks in Harlem included the Riverton and Lenox Terrace. I grew up visiting many relatives and family friends in those buildings. “The Riverton and Lenox Terrace were built specifically for blacks,” says longtime Harlem resident Percy Sutton. “Because of that, race finally wasn’t a factor in getting an apartment.”
Built in 1947 along Fifth Avenue and 135th Street, the Riverton’s simple, dark-red brick buildings would not turn heads today, but when they were built, this was a choice address for the upwardly mobile. In the early 1960s, the more upscale Lenox Terrace co-op apartments opened across the street. With uniformed doormen and driveways, the development quickly gained popularity.
I first met Sutton, the owner of the historic Apollo Theater on 125th Street and several radio stations, when I was eight years old and spending weekends with my father and uncle as volunteers in his successful campaign for Manhattan borough president. The former New York state assemblyman recalls some of the landmarks that made the community special when he first arrived in 1943. “I first came to New York in order to propose marriage to my wife, and at that time in the forties,” he explains, “the Theresa Hotel on Seventh Avenue was the only nice New York hotel that blacks were allowed to visit or hold functions in.”
The Theresa was referred to as the “black Waldorf,” and many members of black society held their important social functions there.
Other landmarks that have been popular among the group have included such churches as Abyssinian Baptist—headed by two generations of Adam Clayton Powells, now by the more conservative but equally respected Calvin Butts; St. James Presbyterian Church on St. Nicholas Avenue; and at the northernmost—and possibly whitest—edge of Harlem, Riverside Church, which is headed by Rev. James Forbes.
“And Harlem credits the Powells for some important New York institutions too,” says oral surgeon Dr. James Jones.
Before I can speak, he continues.
“And no, I’m not talking about the Adam Clayton Powells. Everybody knows them.”
I nod.
“I’m talking about C.B.”
“C.B.?”
“Yes, Dr. C. B. Powell. Dr. Clilan B. Powell, the city’s first black radiologist.”
A 1917 graduate of Howard Medical School, Powell was a physician who became a millionaire businessman as the president of Victory Mutual Life Insurance Company; the founder of Community Finance, an investment firm; and owner in 1936 of the black paper the Amsterdam News. In addition to receiving appointments from Governor Rockefeller and New York mayor Wagner, he established a charitable foundation and left three million dollars to Howard University when he died in 1978.
“He set his wife, Lena, up quite well with a twenty-five-acre estate, in Westchester,” remarks Cathy Connors.
In addition to the Logans, the Wrights, the Powells, and the Bishops, who governed St. Philip’s Church for several generations under Hutchens and his son, Shelton, there have been many other Harlem families who have established or led institutions. They include the Hudgins family, who played an important role in building both Carver Federal Savings Bank and Freedom National Bank. Working alongside St. Philip’s Moran Weston, family patriarch William Hudgins helped found Carver Federal. He served as president of the bank in the late 1940s. “My father and I felt that black communities needed to establish their own banks so that there is a sympathetic ear for those individuals who are trying to start businesses and families,” explains Alvin Hudgins Sr. when I talk to him during a Sag Harbor summer holiday party. “If we aren’t willing to invest in our own enterprises, no one else will either.”
Several years later, in 1965, Alvin helped to found another bank—Freedom National—which his father, William, headed as its first president. Although Carver continues to thrive as a bank with over $400 million in assets, the demise of Freedom National in the late 1980s is a sore spot for many of the wealthy black investors who supported the institutions. “One of the downsides to being a wealthy resident of Harlem,” says a Harlem native, “is that we end up giving out funding—or in Freedom National’s case, giving out loans—to poor people who can’t afford to repay. Sometimes we have to be as detached and profit-focused as white investors. But that’s hard to do when you want to help your own.”
Today, a third generation of the Hudgins family continues to invest in real estate and work in the securities industry while William, Alvin senior, and their families divide their time between homes in Manhattan, Southampton, and Sarasota, Florida.
The Delany family also had an important name in Harlem beginning in the early 1940s and has been particularly renowned through books and a Broadway production that was based on the family’s experiences in New York. Having Our Say, a best-selling book and a successful Broadway play, told the story of the Delany sisters, two black professional women in their nineties who look back on their experiences as blacks in the early 1900s in New York. One of their brothers, Hubert, was a prominent attorney and judge in the 1930s. Serving as New York City tax commissioner, Delany was a big name among the political elite.
Today, the family name still looms large among New York’s elite. Dr. Harry Delany, chief of surgery at Albert Einstein Medical Center in New York and the son of Hubert, grew up in the glare of black New York’s society parties and columns where his parents were often a major feature. While a student at Columbia University, he met his wife, Barbara Collier, at the 1954 Girl Friends Cotillion—the very night of her debut and of her being selected queen of the debutantes. “Harry just happened to be escorting his mother to the ball, so he had no date to dance with,” recalls his wife, Barbara, who was starting Cornell at the time. They are just one of the couples who met for the first time at the Girl Friends Ball of Roses cotillions that brought together the daughters of the city’s best families.
Today, Harry is a member of the Boulé—as was Hubert Delany—in addition to being the fleet commander of the Rainbow Yacht Club, a group of New York-area black professional men who own yachts and travel together along the East Coast. His wife, Barbara, is now a member of the same Girl Friends organization that introduced them.
“Like Harry, a lot of us met our future wives or girlfriends at the Girl Friends Cotillions,” says Brooklyn realtor Earl Arrington, who, like Delany, was one of the young men selected to be an escort at the Ball of Roses in the 1950s. He, too, is among the group that socializes on the Delanys’ sixty-foot cabin cruiser, the “Barbara D.”
“What I get annoyed about is the lack of credit we West Indians get, when we were the hardest-working blacks in Harlem,” says a retired accountant as we sit in Sylvia’s, the Harlem soul food restaurant on Lenox Avenue. “They used to refer to us as the ‘black Jews’ because of how smart we were and the many businesses we opened.” It is indeed true that people of West Indian extraction have had great success among New York’s elite. Th
ey have included such people as Hulan Jack, the first black Manhattan borough president; Ford Foundation president Franklin Thomas; and federal judge Constance Baker Motley. A longtime member of St. Ambrose Episcopal Church on 130th Street, the popular upscale church for Harlem West Indians, the accountant adds, “For years, these southern blacks in Harlem have been ignoring all the prestige we’ve brought. They treat us like we’re from Brooklyn or something—like we’re outsiders.”
The history of Brooklyn’s black elite does not often get the attention it deserves—least of all from black Harlemites, who consider it a second-tier clique. There are dozens of families and individuals whose careers and accomplishments in Brooklyn can challenge this view, and no two people better represent the high position that black Brooklynites have held in New York’s black elite than the husband-and-wife team of John Procope and Ernesta Forster Procope.
As I sit in the conference room of the Procopes’ Wall Street insurance brokerage firm, E. G. Bowman, I can see photos and tributes to what John and Ernesta have accomplished in American business and in the groups that they hold dear in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Before Procope helped Ernesta turn the company she founded into one of the first successful black-owned firms on Wall Street, John rose through the ranks of the newspaper business to become publisher of the Amsterdam News. “I had been head of advertising for the paper under Dr. Powell,” says Procope, “and before he died, he sold to a group of Harlem people which included Percy Sutton. After I became publisher, Percy ran for mayor.”
“He easily could have been pretentious—but like Percy, he continued to give back,” says Ernesta, a native Brooklynite who has sat on boards of numerous nonprofits, colleges, and Fortune 500 companies such as Avon and Chubb Insurance.
The rarefied world that the Procopes travel in today is a more integrated one than would have been possible for Powell and his wife. Their résumé demonstrates a combination of old-guard black and old-guard white credentials: He’s an Alpha and a member of the Comus Club, the prestigious black men’s group founded in Brooklyn. She’s an AKA and a mentor to many young black professionals on Wall Street. At the same time, they have memberships at the Union League and the Cosmopolitan Club on Park Avenue.
They start each morning with a swim in their pool before taking a private car from their home in Queens to their Wall Street office. This morning, as we sit in their offices with Ernesta’s niece, Jacqueline Forster—a graduate of Miss Porter’s School, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania law school—we talk about the role of black business in developing New York’s black community.
“We were the first minority-owned company to advertise in Fortune magazine,” says Ernesta as her husband holds up a full-page ad from the 1970s. “And we realized that for blacks to truly succeed in business in this town or elsewhere, we needed to reach out to more than just black customers.”
Even though their insurance brokerage firm, E. G. Bowman, was successful in capturing many Fortune 500 clients, its groundbreaking advertisement also elicited a great deal of hate mail from some of Fortune’s white readers.
“This is what we were up against then,” says John as he shows me some of the offensive comments that had been scrawled across copies of the ad and mailed to their office twenty years ago.
“Although Harlem is the most famous black community in New York,” says Dr. Jones, “there has always been another black professional community developing alongside Harlem—and that was taking place in Brooklyn. And believe me, Brooklynites do not like being lumped together with Harlem. They have their own history, organizations, churches, and schools that make them unique.”
Doris Cumberbatch Guinier couldn’t agree more with that statement. “Brooklyn is a distinctive community, and while we all know the various groups and families of Harlem, there are specific ones that are unique to us,” says Guinier, a retired guidance counselor and schoolteacher who was born and raised in Brooklyn.
Guinier is one of those Brooklyn names that are heard at gatherings of socialites, businesspeople, educators, and old families. I always remember hearing it during our summer visits to Sag Harbor. “Doris has all the right credentials,” explains a Brooklyn matron as she points out Guiniers’ summer home in the Sag Harbor Hills section of Sag Harbor, “but her credentials are Brooklyn ones—not Harlem ones.”
“You know Doris’s father, Joshua, was one of the first black licensed undertakers in the city,” said a Brooklynite during the funeral of Dr. Vernal Cave, another well-known neighbor. “And her husband went to Harvard back in the thirties and later ended up teaching at Columbia. That’s Lani Guinier’s father.”
“Doris pulled strings and helped us get our daughter into the cotillion at the Waldorf-Astoria,” says another woman.
“When Doris and Hewart sent Clotilde to that fancy private Ethical Culture School, we thought, ‘Who do they think they are?’ Next thing we knew, Doris had gotten Clotilde into Wellesley—and she was just sixteen! She knew what she was doing.”
“If she wanted, Doris really could have been one of those nose-in-the-air President-Street types. She was on the board of directors of the Y, she went to all the right schools, belonged to the right church, married the right husband, summered in the right place. She even had the right relatives. I remember her godparents on Strivers’ Row. But she’s as regular as can be.”
Guinier could hardly be called regular, because she does have all the “right” Brooklyn society credentials. In addition to being a former president of the Brooklyn Girl Friends and the Brooklyn Links, she was a charter member of both groups—the Girl Friends in 1927, along with her longtime friend Hazel Thomas Gray, whom she still sees in Sag Harbor. “Hazel and I went to Girls High together with Dorothea Mason, and our friend Hazel Bunn asked us to join her in starting the Girl Friends chapter in 1927,” says Guinier, as she unpacks after a two-week stay at her Sag Harbor home on New York’s Long Island.
“And we already knew Anna—because she actually installed us.”
I don’t interrupt because I assume she means Anna Murphy—one of the group’s national founders, who has a summer home on the same street as Guinier.
“So years after I became a Girl Friend, I founded the Links chapter in Brooklyn,” she says, “which was probably the same year—in the early fifties—that my daughter had her coming out, with a group of lovely girls who were going off to the best schools. There was Clotilde, Millicent, Joan, Lynne, Clotilde’s good friend Barbara—”
Once again I don’t interrupt because I assume she means Barbara Collier Delany, who was Clotilde Guinier’s Jack and Jill friend, and who was going off to Cornell.
“—and I think Lorraine and Alma were in the group too.”
I assume Alma is the widow of Ron Brown. I remembered that Alma Arrington had been a Brooklyn child and debutante long before her and her husband’s political life began in Washington.
“There’s always a few links between Brooklyn and Manhattan in any family,” says Ada Fisher Jones to her husband.
“That’s right—Ron Brown and Alma Arrington,” agrees Dr. Jones as he thinks of his former Harlem neighbors. “Ron’s dad was manager of the Hotel Theresa, the most famous hotel in Harlem. Now that was a good-looking family.”
“Believe me, they wouldn’t let you work there if you didn’t look good—and didn’t come from some good family,” adds an attorney whose father and grandfather had attempted to host a party for a group of lawyers in the late 1920s at the Theresa—a few years before the hotel became more liberal with its policies—but had been turned away. “They didn’t like anything darker than white to stay at that hotel—and it was smack in the middle of Harlem. Our St. George’s Hotel wasn’t nearly as bad as those Harlem people were.”
Just as Harlem has its important addresses and institutions, so has Brooklyn established its own distinctive locales. In addition to the Hotel St. George, where most black society dinners and cotillions took place, Brooklynites favored the elite President St
reet with its large homes, as well as Stuyvesant Avenue. The churches that have been favored by the Brooklyn elite over the years have been Concord Baptist, Cornerstone Baptist, St. Philip’s (remember that Brooklyn has a St. Philip’s too), St. Augustine’s, Siloam Presbyterian, and St. Peter Claver’s. And not surprisingly, Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood lays claim to having established the borough’s most exclusive men’s clubs: the Comus Club and the Guardsmen.
“One example when we all pulled together was when we got David Dinkins elected as mayor,” says Dr. George Lopez of Queens when asked if the black cliques in New York ever become unified. “When David was running for mayor in 1989, you saw blacks from all five boroughs, as well as from Nassau County and Westchester, working together on fund-raisers and voter drives.”
A lifelong resident of Queens, one of the less populous boroughs of New York, George Lopez, along with his wife, Mary Gardner Lopez, has been a pillar in numerous black society organizations and activities. A graduate of Howard and Meharry, Lopez is firmly entrenched in such elite groups as the Guardsmen and the Boulé. “Just because we live outside of Harlem and Brooklyn doesn’t mean that we are cut off from the black social and political world,” says Lopez as he sits in the living room of their large white stucco home.
His wife, Mary, agrees. She’s been a society columnist with the newspaper the New York Voice for thirty years, and as a member of AKA and a founder of the Doll League, she has enjoyed their many years in Queens.
“I’m actually from Nashville, but I’ve never felt like an outsider here,” Mary says. I suddenly recall that her maiden name, Gardner, is the same as that of Nashville’s black society funeral home.
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