It is evident that people like the Lopezes don’t see the boundaries between the different boroughs and their cliques. In fact, the very next time I run into them is at a Sag Harbor party attended by Harlem’s Chester Redhead and Brooklyn’s E. T. Williams. There are clearly people who refuse to allow the old divisions to come between them.
At a recent Boulé Christmas party at the Waldorf-Astoria, it occurred to me that more than ever the social organizations are trying to bring together the different New York chapters. If for no other reason, the members like it because it helps in their business networks. At that event I saw Brooklyn’s Don and Saundra Williams Cornwell (Don is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who now owns a string of TV stations; his wife is a corporate attorney) and Manhattan’s Bruce Llewellyn, who went to my high school and belongs to my Boulé chapter. After owning the Fedco Supermarket store chain in the city, he bought the Philadelphia Bottling Company. Also present was Bronxville’s Hector Hyacinthe, who invests in real estate, office furniture, and media businesses. He is a major Republican fund-raiser. He and his wife Phyllis used to host our Jack and Jill parties and meetings around the pool of their Tudor home. After growing up with their kids in Westchester, I was at Princeton with their daughter Sylvere.
Another face I saw was Harold Doley, head of Doley Securities, the first black owner of an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He and his wife, Helena, host many events at their Irvington, New York, mansion, which was originally built by Madam C. J. Walker.
There are also some members of New York’s black elite who do not operate within the most obvious social groups and neighborhoods. One of these people is Upper East Side realtor and socialite Alice Mason, who was born into the prominent Christmas family in Philadelphia. Her father, Dr. Lawrence Christmas, was a successful dentist and one of the founders of the Philadelphia chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest and most prestigious black college fraternity in the country. She and her sister, Marie Christmas Rhone, became New Yorkers many years ago when Marie moved to the West Side of Manhattan and her sister became a successful Upper East Side real estate broker to the WASP elite. Alice’s friends include such top celebrities as Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara Walters, and pianist Bobby Short.
I first met Ms. Mason, a consummate party giver, at one of the famous dinner parties she gives in her East Seventy-second Street apartment. Surrounded by a million-dollar art collection, the elegant Mason and her daughter, Dominique Richard, regularly entertain the most powerful people in business, media, and Democratic politics. They are also a constant fixture in the New York society columns.
While Harlem and Brooklyn were going through their various transitions, there were several communities of black middle- and upper-class families developing in the less densely populated borough of Queens as well as in suburban Westchester and New Jersey.
“Black people had been in the Jamaica section of Queens for many years,” recalls Ersa Poston, an appointee of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who now lives in Washington but who had lived in both Queens and Brooklyn during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. “There were many successful blacks living in East Elmhurst and St. Albans. Later, there were also some of us moving into Hollis and Flushing.”
Like many others, Poston recalls the way in which the more suburban and more white neighborhoods of Queens responded to the influx of blacks into the white areas. “I got to see what blockbusting was all about as brokers kept a tally of what streets had a black family.”
Barbara Collier Delany remembers how some white neighbors responded when she and her parents moved into St. Albans. “I was in elementary school and there were only a half-dozen black families in the town,” explains Delany, who now lives in Westchester with her husband, Harry, a New York surgeon. “One afternoon in broad daylight, someone threw a rock in our window and they had actually tied a note to it telling us to move out. This was in the late forties, but my parents decided to stay.”
Delany, who often found herself blazing trails, was one of the few black students attending the selective all-girls Hunter High School in Manhattan and later made national headlines when, as a student at Cornell University, she became the first black to be offered membership in a white sorority.
Like many others who were raising children in Manhattan, Barbara Collier Delany decided to move to the suburbs of southern Westchester where nice neighborhoods, open space, and public schools were plentiful. One of the richest counties in the United States, Westchester is situated just north of New York City. Its two southernmost cities—Mount Vernon and Yonkers—are today its two most congested cities.
In the 1950s, the two favorite communities for the black professional crowd in Westchester immediately became Mount Vernon and New Rochelle. Both cities had substantial Jewish populations and were considered liberal. Mount Vernon, though not quite as affluent as New Rochelle, had large homes and good schools.
New Rochelle still continues to be a magnet for well-to-do blacks. Among its past and present black residents are American Express president Kenneth Chenault, National Urban League president and former United Negro College Fund head Christopher Edley, former Urban League president Whitney Young, columnist Carl Rowan, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis, as well as many attorneys and physicians.
Other communities in Westchester popular with members of the black elite are Scarsdale and White Plains. A few families are venturing north to the small town of Chappaqua, where actress Vanessa Williams lives and where high-profile surgeons like the Boulé’s John Hutchinson and the Reveille Club’s Bill Curry live. In northern New Jersey, the popular suburbs for black professionals have been Teaneck, South Orange, and Montclair, which happens to be particularly popular among a new wave of black bankers with ties to Harvard Business School.
In all of these New York communities, whether inner-city or suburban, what also remains a constant is the social clubs and their events that connect the many elite residents. Whether it’s the Links, Jack and Jill, the Guardsmen, the Girl Friends, the Fellas, or the Boulé, there is a thread that ties the people from these communities together. Barbara Collier Delany agrees. “Three generations of my family have been in Jack and Jill—and we have lived in three very different parts of New York—Queens, Westchester, and the Riverdale section of the Bronx.” With such organizations, it is almost possible to forget the geographical boundaries between people.
There is a new generation of young, black New Yorkers who refuse to be distracted by Harlem-Brooklyn or southern–West Indian types of distinctions. And they refuse to “dilute” their racial identity in the way that some suburbanites had done as they ran back and forth between white New York suburbs and the black inner city—always hoping not to seem too black or too white.
Like Jacqueline Forster, young black New Yorkers are now taking their experiences in stride without regard to the old black New York cliques. Still in her twenties, Forster lives in Manhattan, even though her family name is best known in Brooklyn. The titles and the boundaries are meaningless to her. She looks at her past experiences in Jack and Jill, in AKA, at Miss Porter’s, and at Cornell not as black experiences or white experiences, not as Brooklyn ones or suburban ones. Instead she focuses on looking for mentors and building her career.
“I knew that I wanted to go into the insurance business since I was seven years old,” says the University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate as she sits across from her aunt, Ernesta Procope, in their Wall Street office. “And I could never find a better mentor than my aunt. We live in a city where there are hundreds of black living legends. No city has more than New York. I’m just happy that I’m getting to know them.”
CHAPTER 12
Black Elite in Memphis
“There were only about thirty students in each graduating class, and most of us went to the same church, lived in the same neighborhood, and were friends with the same families,” says Alma Roulhac Booth as she recalls the other children in her class at the private LeMoyne School in Memphis during
the 1920s. “Because our circle was so tight-knit, Memphis felt like a very small town.”
Alma Roulhac Booth grew up surrounded by other black children of the Memphis elite. Her father, Dr. Christopher Roulhac, had graduated from Howard University Medical School and arrived in Memphis in 1910—a time when the city was populated by a small group of black lawyers, physicians, and business owners on the South Side who all knew each other.
Among Booth’s classmates and closest friends at LeMoyne was Roberta Church, whose family had been the wealthiest and most influential black family in the South during the late 1800s and early 1900s. “Roberta’s grandfather, Robert senior, was the first black millionaire in the South when he opened the Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company and invested in real estate throughout the city,” says Booth as she sits in the dining room of her large gray-and-white colonial home, “and her father, Robert junior, was so prominent a contributor and activist in the Republican Party in Memphis that he was named a delegate to the national convention as early as 1912 and was offered membership at the all-white Congressional Country Club in Washington, D.C.”
Although she does not consider herself as such, Booth is representative of the well-educated, well-connected black Memphis elite. She is the daughter of a physician and schoolteacher and the wife of a successful restaurateur, and her father and brother were both members of the Boulé. She is a charter member and former president of the Memphis Links, a Jack and Jill mother, and a former school principal. A quick peek into her life and activities reveals ties to the most important names and institutions in black Memphis: the Walkers, the Byases, the Churches, the Hayeses, the Hooks, the Riverses, the Ishes, the Pinkstons, the Speights, the Phyllis Wheatley Social and Literary Club, and Emmanuel Episcopal Church.
Because my own parents and many relatives—including my maternal grandmother, who was four years ahead of Booth at the LeMoyne School—were born in Memphis, I spent many childhood visits to the city hearing the same names that Booth knows so well. During those childhood conversations, I learned how whites who were led by Boss Crump had run the Church family out of town in the 1930s because the Churches had become too rich and powerful. I learned how the black elite families were allowed to buy plots in the otherwise all-white Elmwood Cemetery, but were restricted to a particular corner—far away from the white Confederate war heroes. And when one of my Memphis cousins was sent north to attend Phillips Exeter in the 1970s, I learned that this provincial city’s racial atmosphere had not changed dramatically for even the next generation of privileged blacks. Even today, I agree with several of my relatives when they say that this city still has some qualities that make it similar to a small segregated town.
“If we go, it’ll be for five minutes. No lingering. No pictures. And no talking to people out front.”
My brother and I shook our heads in disbelief as our uncle lectured us in the backseat of his car.
Our aunt then leaned into the open window. “And don’t let them sign anything either.”
“That’s right,” he added in agreement. “And don’t write your name down on anything. There’s always some nut out there with a petition or a sign-up sheet—trying to get us to name some landmark after that character.”
My uncle and aunt had lived their entire lives in Memphis, and they strongly resented the fact that their young nephews, visiting from New York, wanted to go see Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. For two weeks, they had challenged our request—never quite explaining, but strongly hinting, that we, as blacks, shouldn’t be seen standing in front of this famous landmark.
“And if I were you, Earlene—” began a neighbor who stood in my uncle and aunt’s driveway as we began to perspire in the backseat of their Buick Electra 225. It was August—sometime in the mid-1970s, before the singer’s death. “I’d get out of there before noon, before those tourists get there. You just may run into one of the teachers from your school. You know how these rednecks love that Elvis.”
The contempt that middle- and upper-class black Memphians have for Elvis Presley—a man they have never met personally—is greater than one might imagine. As an adolescent visiting Memphis during summers away from home, I saw the resentment that my relatives and their black friends had for this Memphis icon. “Uneducated, crude, racist, trash” were the words that were used when we brought up his name. Over time, I learned that the revulsion was directed less at the man and more at the community that had overlooked the black talent that the city had produced for so long.
Today, when I return to Memphis—passing through the streets, looking at Graceland, or more often, at the homes, churches, and storefronts that I had visited as a child with relatives—I am disappointed. I am disappointed because of the lack of vision demonstrated by the white elite who controlled the city throughout much of the twentieth century. There was good reason for my relatives and their friends to resent Elvis and resent so much of white Memphis.
Since the beginning of the 1900s, blacks had been ghettoized—without regard to their income levels—in South Memphis, with whites living everywhere else, including midtown and the eastern side, where upper-income whites resided. My aunt recently showed me a letter that she had been sent by a real estate developer in the mid-1960s advertising an “all-Negro single-family neighborhood” that was being built for middle-class blacks in South Memphis. The language of the letter, written well after the courts had outlawed segregation, defined the almost plantationlike mentality of many white Memphians who, until recently, had no sense of how great their city might have been had they accorded the least bit of meaningful integration or respect to blacks who had the desire and the talent to contribute.
Instead, this small town has a national reputation within the popular culture for two reasons: the life of Elvis Presley and the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Among the well-educated black community, there is no irony lost in the fact that the most celebrated figure in Memphis history is a barely schooled white rock-and-roll star who lifted his musical and performance style from lesser-known black musicians. The feeling that their own people’s talent had been “ripped off” and repackaged in a more racially acceptable form (i.e., white) has left them so resentful that the very idea of visiting his estate and posing in front of his front gates along a bustling, newly renamed boulevard does nothing but add insult to injury.
The irony continues for them when they note that the world’s most respected civil rights leader was a black Nobel Prize winner—a Ph.D. who came out of Morehouse—whose lasting attachment to the town was that he was slain there. He is memorialized at the old Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum), which sits in a desolate section of town amidst old, crumbling warehouses.
“We could have been a Nashville, maybe even an Atlanta,” my grandfather used to say as he drove us down what is now Elvis Presley Boulevard, a busy street that runs north to south through the ironically named White Haven section, an area that was all-white when I was visiting Memphis in the 1960s and early 1970s and has since become predominantly black. Although he loved the town, he used to say, “All we have here are a lot of churches and segregated schools.”
Even today, one has the feeling that this town has dragged its feet in its physical, economic, and intellectual growth, given where it was at the turn of the century as a major commercial center for cotton distribution. But I am well aware that it is not the fault of the people in power today, or even those who have been in power during the last fifteen years. The greatest stagnation was the result of resistance to progress—racial and otherwise—that took place in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when other small cities were growing physically and culturally. For example, in 1960, the population of Memphis was almost 500,000. Twenty years later it had grown only to 650,000, as compared with Nashville, which more than doubled in size during those years. By 1990, Memphis had lost 5 percent of its population. And today, with fewer than 600,000 people, Memphis has little city life and little city development to reverse the decli
ne. What are plentiful are the churches and segregated schools that my relatives were talking about thirty years ago. The churches are either black or white, and the schools are either black public schools or white Christian academies that were created from the 1950s through the 1970s in order to avoid integration. By hiding behind religion, these Christian academies managed to keep another generation of blacks and whites apart.
I am still a devoted fan of Memphis because of my childhood memories and because of the progressive people—both black and white—who I know are working together today; but like its black elite, who were educated elsewhere, I feel it is a town trying to overcome great odds. The thriving downtown that it once had along Main Street—between Beale and Jefferson—was killed in the 1970s when the whites abandoned the increasingly black city, which now is only 44 percent white. There is not a department store within ten miles of City Hall. Big stores like Gerber’s, Lowenstein’s, and Bry’s are all gone now. The area surrounding the municipal buildings, courthouses, and county offices is littered with pawnshops, bail bondsmen, and vacant storefronts. What would have long ago been a well-developed Mississippi River waterfront in any other town is just now seeing walking paths, green grass, and trees. With the exception of a few tall buildings built by the city’s superior hospitals—Baptist and Methodist—and by First Tennessee Bank and Union Planters Bank, one gets the sense that no major company or industry calls Memphis its home. Federal Express is there—several miles out of downtown, near the airport, but the headquarters for Holiday Inn and Cook Industries left years ago.
Even the city’s premier hotel, the Peabody—as plush as it is, by Memphis standards—seems a bit corny and anachronistic. Founded in 1869 and rebuilt in the 1920s, the imposing brick structure attracts tourists to its main lobby each morning for a ritual that began in the 1930s and continues today, seven days a week. At 11:00 A.M. sharp, an elevator door opens on the main floor, and marching in line across the carpeted floor are five trained ducks. Marching in unison to taped music that plays over the lobby speakers, the small ducks waddle toward a small, ornate fountain and pool in the middle of the floor. One by one, they hop up to the fountain and then dive into the pool. The routine is repeated in reverse at 5:00 each afternoon. Since the hotel had a policy of segregation thoughout my older relatives’ lives, it was not until we were teenagers that they permitted us to visit the building and view this amusing event.
Our Kind of People Page 37