Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Yates is old Atlanta. She’s fourth-generation. She’s Spelman College. She lives in the right neighborhood. She’s earned the right graduate degrees, held the right jobs, and married into the right family. She even belongs to the right literary club—one that includes a small and elite group of black Atlanta’s old-guard women who have met once a month, without fail, for eighty-nine consecutive years. Yates is the real thing, and she knows where the bones are buried.

  But there are many new wealthy blacks in Atlanta who wouldn’t know that. Some of the new black money that has landed in Stone Mountain, in Guilford Forest, in Buckhead, or in Dunwoody wouldn’t know about the Yates family, or the bank or the drugstore they founded. They wouldn’t know about the book party that was just given for Julian Bond’s mother, Julia, or about the recent funeral services held for Eloise Murphy Milton, or about the medical contributions of Asa Yancey or the business accomplishments of the Blayton family. They wouldn’t know that the Herndon mansion, which overlooks the city of Atlanta, was built in 1909 by a black millionaire in the insurance business. They wouldn’t know the old names of Rucker, Aikens, Harper, Cooper, Dobbs, and Scott. In fact, many members of the new elite don’t live within the city limits. They are not among the 260,000 blacks that make the city only one-third white. The new black elite are on the outskirts of old Atlanta—both geographically and socially.

  According to a third-generation Jack and Jiller who grew up in the town, “The only old names that mean anything to the new transplants are Martin Luther King and Andrew Young—and we consider both of them to be new.”

  “It’s not that Atlanta natives don’t appreciate outsiders,” explains Ella Yates, a native Atlantan who graduated from Spelman College before later going on to earn a law degree as well as a master’s from Clark-Atlanta University. “It’s just that we want people to express an interest in what so many generations contributed to the community.” After returning from the funeral of a family friend, Eloise Murphy Milton, at First Congregational Church, Yates remarked how much the church, the mourners, and Mrs. Milton’s passing had reminded her of old black Atlanta. “Having been the first black director of the Atlanta Fulton Library,” she explains, “I am very conscious of the city’s black history.” Her husband’s father, Clayton Yates Sr., was a major part of the city’s black history, and a lot of his work was performed in concert with Eloise Milton’s husband. They were involved in some of the most important business deals of early-twentieth-century black Atlanta.

  Several months before she died at age ninety-nine, I had the chance to meet Mrs. Milton. She talked about the Atlanta Links, which she helped charter in 1953, as well as the businesses and projects that her husband had launched with Clayton Yates, Ella’s father-in-law, in the 1920s and 1930s, “My husband, Lorimer, and Clayton Yates were partners in almost every project they pursued, including the reorganization of Citizens Trust Bank in the early thirties and the opening of the Top Hat Club,” said Milton, pointing out that the bank still operates with several branches in the city. “They also opened the Yates and Milton Drugstore when there was a growing number of black businessmen in the city.”

  “Although I was clearly more involved with social organizations, I grew up in a family that was always in business,” explained Milton, who attended Atlanta University and Oberlin College. Two prior generations of her family had already run businesses. A city school was even named after one of her ancestors. “My grandfather, David T. Howard, was an undertaker, and my parents owned a grocery store on Decatur Street. None of them were major businesses, but they were successful.”

  Like many in this group of elite women, Milton vastly understates her family’s success and contributions. Although her grandfather was born a slave, his business was actually successful enough to make him among the six richest blacks in the city by 1896. He was also a major benefactor of Big Bethel A. M. E. Church.

  Milton lived a life that was different from that of many Atlanta blacks, and she remembers spending some of her years on her grandfather’s farm in north Atlanta. “He owned a great deal of land in what we considered the country. It was nowhere near Auburn Avenue or where the rest of the black community lived at the time.”

  It is not until I speak to my Aunt Phyllis (the AKA die-hard), who is close friend of Mrs. Milton’s daughter Eleanor, that I learn how unusual Milton’s grandfather’s wealth really was. I discover that the David T. Howard farm was located in what is now called Buckhead (the whitest and most affluent section of Atlanta) and it abutted the land of the Woodruffs, the family that founded Coca-Cola.

  “Remember, we’re talking about the early 1900s. My mother grew up in a completely different environment than most black Atlantans,” explains Eleanor Milton Johnson, who is one of Milton’s two daughters. “Because of the great exposure that she and her family gained through their wealth, Mama made many progressive decisions that would not have been considered by other blacks. And my father, Lorimer, who graduated from Brown University in 1920, was just like her in that regard. So it was not a surprise that I ended up at Mount Holyoke College in the 1940s when most of my Atlanta friends were attending Spelman and Morehouse. My sister, Betty, graduated from Mount Holyoke too—but only after first going away to the Northfield boarding school in New England.”

  The Howard-Milton family is only one example of black success in the community. Another representative of this group is the Jackson-Wiltz family. Yvonne and Teresa are both daughters of prominent Atlanta physicians. Both of their mothers joined the Atlanta Links and the Inquirers Literary Club. Both of their fathers joined the Atlanta Boulé. Both women were raised in Jack and Jill by parents who attended Friendship Baptist Church and who socialized with other black professionals who lived in southwest Atlanta.

  Yvonne Jackson Wiltz and Teresa Wiltz are mother and daughter, and in many ways their life experiences appear to be identical, a common pattern among old-guard Atlanta families who value certain traditions. But experiences that appear to be repeated generation after generation in these families are actually being changed greatly by a city that has grown from a segregated small town to a thriving metropolis where the old black families are now interfacing with families who are not from their race, their class, or their city.

  “When I was growing up in the Atlanta Jack and Jill, it was much different from the Jack and Jill my daughters were raised in,” says Yvonne Jackson Wiltz who recalls that the Jack and Jill of the 1940s was operating in a segregated city where the activities remained in the black community and where everyone knew everyone else’s family. “All of our activities were focused on people’s homes because few public facilities were available to us. We swam in each other’s backyard pools or played in each other’s playrooms and living rooms. By the time my daughters joined, we were exposing them to the High Museum and Fox Theater downtown—places black people were not welcomed before. And what was also changing was that we were finally meeting new families who had not grown up in Atlanta.”

  Even though Yvonne and Teresa’s world in Atlanta was primarily a black one, socially, their academic experiences also reflected the changes that integration brought about. Yvonne, as well as her parents, Ruth and Marque, went to black colleges. “My mother went to the private laboratory high school on the grounds of Atlanta University before she went to Atlanta University for college, and my father went nearby at Morehouse,” explains Yvonne, who attended Spelman College. She met her husband, Philip, before he entered Howard Medical School.

  Teresa, on the other hand, attended the Westminster Schools, Dartmouth College, and Northwestern University School of Journalism—all predominately white institutions. When she was attending the expensive private Westminster Schools in the Buckhead section of Atlanta with the governor’s son and other children of wealthy white families, the school’s racial makeup was about the same as the population in its surrounding north-end neighborhood. “Out of two hundred students, only about four of us in my class were black. And we all knew each
other,” says Teresa, who is now a features writer at the Chicago Tribune. Not surprisingly, the black students in her class were all children of doctors—including Shanta Sullivan, the daughter of Dr. Louis Sullivan, who was President Bush’s secretary of health and human services.

  And while Teresa’s Jack and Jill experience was, in fact, different from her mother’s, her Jack and Jill playmates came from the same famous Atlanta families: former mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young both had daughters in Teresa’s group. “I remember when a lot of us in the chapter helped Paula campaign for her father when he ran for Congress,” adds Teresa. Such activities were commonplace among Teresa’s crowd.

  But as old and established as the Jackson-Wiltz clan is in Atlanta, there are still families among the elite that would say they are not quite old enough. Like Washington, D.C., Atlanta has people in its old-guard black community who scrutinize neighbors, marriages, and family credentials so closely that even some who have been in the city for four generations are still considered new.

  “Black Atlanta is a very closed society if your family has been here less than three generations,” says a Harvard-educated attorney who arrived in the city over a decade ago. “I grew up in Jack and Jill, and my parents are professionals, but there’s a group here that wants nothing to do with new people like me. When I first got here, I’d go to these business events where I’d meet guys my own age, and it was like they were talking in code,” says the attorney. “I’d be hearing last names of people I didn’t know. And when I asked who they were, people would look at me like I was from outer space. And the women were even worse. It got to the point where I had to start reading the society columns and go to the library to get history books on Atlanta.”

  A New Yorker who is a friend of the attorney agrees. “I just keep my mouth shut at these events. I was at First Congregational Church a couple of years ago and this group of older women I met scared me to death. When I mentioned that my mother had gone to Spelman around the same time as they were there, they all looked at each other as if to say, ‘How can that be?’ Then one of them asked me, ‘Why don’t we know her?’ When I told them she moved to New York and pledged Zeta after graduating, they completely lost interest in our conversation.

  “And when people around here ask you, ‘So, who are you?’ or ‘Who are your parents?’ they want more than just a name. They want to know how many generations of Atlanta you represent, what year your grandparents graduated from Spelman and Morehouse, which literary club your great-grandmother belonged to, what street in Collier Heights your parents lived on in the sixties, and who in your family goes to Friendship Baptist Church.”

  Ella Gaines Yates believes that this characterization is not entirely true. She belongs to one of the old families that appear in the Atlanta history books, but she also has the experience of living in places outside of Atlanta. This has provided her with the perspective that is often missing in old families who have stayed rooted in one place.

  “Atlanta has certainly changed since my parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation,” says Yates, who spent time working in Virginia after being appointed as the state librarian by the governor. “There is a certain worldliness that is brought to a community when respectful outsiders relocate there. I think people in this city can appreciate that. I just think that the old guard wants to be assured that Atlanta’s black history is not being forgotten or ignored. After all, many of our older neighbors are doing some fascinating things here.”

  Among the neighbors Yates refers to are the Yanceys, a family that truly personifies the black doctor elite in Atlanta. Accomplished, affluent, well educated, and philanthropic, the Yancey family has ties to Morehouse, Spelman, the Atlanta School Board, Howard University School of Medicine, the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital, Meharry Medical School, Delta Sigma Theta, the Boulé, Jack and Jill, Links, and the elite First Congregational Church.

  Dr. Asa G. Yancey Sr. was born in Atlanta, and like his two brothers he also became a physician. Educated in the Atlanta public schools, he was valedictorian of the city’s Booker T. Washington High School. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1937 and then from the medical school at the University of Michigan in 1941. In spite of his and his two brothers’ accomplishments in the medical field, and the fact that three of his four children are physicians, Yancey abhors using the term “elite” to describe him or his family. “We do not refer to ourselves as upper-class or middle-class. We consider ourselves to be sound, hardworking African Americans, and we are not unique in Atlanta. This city has lots of accomplished families who have distinguished themselves in different professions.”

  “Asa Yancey is a very modest man, but what people should know is that there are a lot of black doctors in the South who would never have become surgeons if it were not for the programs that he started for us,” says an Atlanta surgeon who was trained in the first black surgery program in Georgia.

  Modesty notwithstanding, Yancey is similar to another group of successful blacks of his generation whom I interviewed in other cities, and whom I found to dislike the “upper class” label. Many of these individuals—most of them male, southern, and over the age of seventy—spoke out strongly when I suggested that they were members of an elite or of a successful minority. Having grown up around my paternal grandfather, who was equally disdainful of accepting such a label or of other blacks who accepted it, I came to understand that there were at least a couple of reasons for this response.

  For one, like Yancey and my grandfather, all of these men had grown up as witnesses to the worst examples of southern racism. They had grown up in settings where, despite their educational or career accomplishments, they were obliged to display false modesty and obsequious behavior in the company of whites. Even when my grandfather was an adult in Memphis operating a successful trucking and hauling company and transporting products for Kellogg’s and other companies during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, young and old white business clients called him by his first name while he was required to call them “Mr.” or “sir.” Even when I was a child growing up in the 1970s, I would see him sometimes accidentally slip and say “Yes, sir” or “Thank you, sir” to a white restaurant waiter or gas station attendant. Taking on this inferior role in a white-dominated Jim Crow South required one to remain humble, hide one’s intelligence, and disguise one’s academic and career success because much of it could be stripped away if one was perceived by whites as acting “equal” or “uppity.”

  And from the black community’s perspective, it was easy for black men in the South—particularly successful ones—to be thought of as “selling out” or becoming an “Uncle Tom.” So the natural response for any black man who wanted to maintain respect in the larger black community was to eschew the labels or signs of success. Just as my grandfather did, and as older men in Atlanta seem to do, Dr. Asa Yancey makes consistent references to his ties to the ordinary, more mainstream black community. It is clear that he wants it known that even if others consider him to be part of an elite, he is not one who will ever embrace the term—even in a city where so many of the newer well-to-do blacks are proud to show what they have accomplished.

  But in spite of his reticence, most blacks—and many whites—in Atlanta already know of his accomplishments and his position among the elite. After completing his own surgery residency at the Howard Medical School under Dr. Charles Richard Drew, the well-known black physician who developed blood plasma storage and blood banking, Yancey spent two years in a gynecological surgery residency at Meharry and then became chief of surgery at the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital. It was there that he established the first accredited surgical graduate medical education program for black surgeons in the state of Alabama.

  “Before he came to Tuskegee,” says a former student of Yancey’s, “there was no place in the whole state where blacks were allowed to train for surgery.”

  Yancey then returned to Atlanta in the late 1950s. “After I got ba
ck to Atlanta and became chief of surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital, I realized that there were just too many black doctors here who had no way of getting training for surgery, so I helped start Georgia’s first accredited graduate program for the training of black surgeons.” Several years later, he began an affiliation with Emory University School of Medicine, ultimately becoming a professor of surgery and a partner in the Emory University Clinic. In 1984, he became clinical professor of surgery at Morehouse Medical School. His new programs in Tuskegee and Atlanta affected a whole generation of black doctors.

  For the last thirty years, the Yancey family has also had a significant involvement in public and private education in the city as well as the state. They are shy about telling me this, but Asa and his wife, Marge, have both held seats on the Atlanta Board of Education. She has been a Spelman College trustee and was the first black woman to sit on the board of regents of the University System of Georgia. A native of Detroit and a graduate of Wayne State University, she had been a schoolteacher before moving to Atlanta. “I first joined the board of education in 1982,” says Mrs. Yancey, who is also a member of the Atlanta Links, “and then Governor Harris appointed me in 1985 to the board of regents. It’s important that black people be represented on these boards because our children’s education affects their future and our community’s future.”

  The Yanceys are so well respected in the Atlanta community that it is not unusual to find photos of their various family celebrations on the front page of the Atlanta Daily World, as happened when Asa senior and Marge recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.