Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Brown, who belongs to the Atlanta Links and Atlanta Girl Friends, was such an unabashed Spelman supporter she sent both of her daughters there. “My daughters, who are both physicians now, like their father, feel that they received the kind of foundation that only a college specializing in training the nation’s smartest black women could provide,” says Brown.

  One cannot overestimate the influence that was wielded in the city by the five prestigious colleges located there. Among the many alumni who graduated from these schools are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman; former U.S. surgeon general and current Spelman president Audrey Manley; former secretary of health and human services Dr. Louis Sullivan; Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett; and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier.

  Many of the people who graduated from these schools remained in the city as its future leaders. Among them are the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, who graduated from Morehouse. Many other prominent political and civic leaders have ties to the colleges there. One of them was Grace Towns Hamilton, a politician and civic leader who came from a family of achievers in both politics and education. Elected in 1965 as the first black woman in the Georgia legislature, she had previously been named as head of the Atlanta Urban League in the 1940s. Hamilton’s father, George, had been a professor at Atlanta University and an active member of the NAACP. Her grandfather had served in the state legislature and her husband, Henry, was a member of the faculty at Morehouse.

  Another prominent Atlanta native who claimed ties to the city’s universities was NAACP executive secretary and Crisis magazine editor Walter White. A 1916 graduate of Atlanta University, White eventually became an adviser to presidents Roosevelt and Truman. His father was a graduate of Atlanta University and his family was a respected name in the black community. “Walter’s sister was the maid of honor at my mother’s wedding,” remarks Eleanor Milton Johnson.

  Clearly the most famous man to come from this community was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who grew up on historic Auburn Avenue in the 1930s and 1940s. His family’s church, Ebenezer Baptist, also located on Auburn, was pastored by members of his family for nearly one hundred years. A graduate of Morehouse, King was a member of the Boulé, and at age thirty-five he was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. After his death, his wife, Coretta Scott King, remained in Atlanta, where she and their children have established foundations and programs to commemorate his life and work in civil rights.

  Although he was not a native Atlantan, one of the city’s most prominent intellectuals was Dr.William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a longtime member of the Atlanta University faculty. A native of Massachusetts and a 1895 Ph.D. graduate of Harvard, W. E. B. Du Bois quickly established himself among the elite when he was teaching at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 and then again from 1933 to 1944. It was he who used the term “talented tenth” to describe the black intellectuals who were graduating from top schools and entering professional life. Although he was an early member of the Boulé and a friend of many of the most accomplished blacks in the nation, Du Bois had conflicts with a large segment of the NAACP leadership, causing him to break with the organization during the late 1940s.

  Included among the oldest and most respected grandes dames of Atlanta society are Ruth Thomas Jackson, Ann Murray Cooper, Marge Harper, and the recently deceased Eloise Murphy Milton. Not coincidentally, they are all founding members of the Atlanta chapter of the Links. “This is the original chapter of the Links,” explains a woman who stood in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, as her husband gave the keys to his car to the valet. “There must be two or three other Links chapters in this town,” the woman adds after describing the significance of these four women and the contributions they had made through the Links and their other activities, “but we always make sure to come to the Atlanta chapter’s events.” As the woman glides across the carpet with her husband, headed to the silent auction to be held at the chapter’s annual brunch, she comments on how jealous she is of Ann Cooper’s legs; she greets a friend from One Hundred Black Men; she blows a kiss to Portia Scott, Juanita Baranco, and two or three other attractive women who are all members of Atlanta’s young elite crowd; and she gives a big hug to Dr. Hugh Gloster, former president of Morehouse College.

  Other grandes dames and female members of the establishment in Atlanta have included Harriet Chisholm Nash, Julia Bond, Alice Holmes Washington, Belle Brooks Dennard, and Grace Towns Hamilton. These are people my Atlanta friends have met over the years, and they have always been the names that people mention at old-guard events. Many of them have belonged to the Links; Girl Friends; Jack and Jill; the sororities; the literary groups such as the Utopian Literary Club, the Chautauqua Circle, and the Inquirers; or the many bridge clubs.

  “My mother was very active in the Chautauqua Circle for decades,” remarks Eleanor Milton Johnson, referring to her mother, Eloise Murphy Milton, and the monthly literary group that gathered at each other’s homes or at restaurants. “They invite speakers to discuss news or social issues in addition to literary subjects.”

  What link all of these individuals more than anything else are the old neighborhoods that once served as the core of the black community. Auburn Avenue is probably the historic center of the old black Atlanta neighborhood. Affectionately referred to as “sweet Auburn,” this northeast street is a national historic site district and includes commercial establishments, as well as the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, Big Bethel A. M. E. Church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Atlanta Daily World office, Mutual Federal Savings and Loan, the Herndon Building, the Henry Rucker Building, the headquarters of Atlanta Life Insurance, and many other businesses and historic sites. The Auburn area is located on the eastern edge of downtown Atlanta. By 1918, there were nearly one hundred black-owned businesses and professional firm offices located on the street.

  Hunter Street (now known as Martin Luther King Drive), which is located on the west side of Atlanta, is another important street in black Atlanta’s history. A nine-mile street that runs from downtown and goes out west past the Atlanta University center and into the suburbs, Hunter became the main part of middle-class black Atlanta’s commercial establishments—with certain parts of it also serving as a beautiful residential section for the black elite. Beginning in 1922, black businesses such as Amos Drug Store, Parks Shoe Rebuilders, the Crystal Theater, and the Broadnax Building opened on Hunter Street. Other businesses that established themselves there were Sellers Brothers Funeral Home and Citizens Trust Company.

  In these black neighborhoods, the black establishment found the institutions which they would anoint as their favorites. For example, the old guard chose three favorite funeral homes for their families. They were Ivey Brothers, Sellers Brothers, and Haugabrook’s. Their favored cemetery was Lincoln Memorial in northwest Atlanta. Their favorite college hangout for years had been the Waluhaje. Their favorite place for outdoor gatherings was on the golf course of the New Lincoln Country Club, which was established in the 1930s.

  The residential section of Hunter Street was a prestigious address for blacks in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, the old Atlanta families who live there refer to it as Hunter far more than by its new name, Martin Luther King Drive. Among its residents have been Theodore M. Alexander, founder of the insurance firm Alexander and Company, and many members of the Scott family, as well as many doctors like the Jacksons and the Coopers. “One of the reasons why so many members of our family happened to live on Hunter,” explains Portia Scott, “is that my uncle bought many of the lots during the depression. After years went by, he either gave or sold different lots to our family members.” Portia remembers growing up on the street along with friends who were in her Jack and Jill chapter. “Since we were growing up during segregation in the 1950s and couldn’t go to certain public recreational facilities, I specifically remember the kids on our street who had big backyards and swimming pools—like the Alexander family—because this is wher
e we as kids were socializing.”

  The old black elite residential neighborhoods include the Hunter Hills section along the old Hunter Street, as well as the Collier Heights section, which is situated in the northwest part of the city. Homes on streets like Engle Road, Skipper Drive, Waterford Road, Old Know Drive, and Woodmere Drive were built during the late 1950s and early 1960s and are located between Collier Road and Bankhead Highway. Over the years, these homes, many of which were designed by black architects, have attracted people like Dr. and Mrs. William Shropshire, Dr. and Mrs. Asa Yancey, real estate developer Herman Russell and his wife Otelia, and many other prominent Atlanta families.

  Even though Atlanta had an overwhelming number of well-educated, well-to-do black families, the city drew clear lines around where blacks lived and conducted their business. As much as these families did to give their children a feeling of confidence and pride, it was difficult to shield them from the fact that whites gave them second-class status when it came to living and socializing where they wanted. Of course it helped that the five colleges provided access to educational and cultural activities on the weekends and that groups like Jack and Jill ensured an introduction to a core group of professional parents and their children, but it was impossible to avoid the obvious racial divisions that the city’s leaders allowed and encouraged.

  There was no division as obvious as the Peyton Wall, which was erected in 1962 around the borders of a well-to-do southwest neighborhood in Atlanta. After middle- and upper-class blacks had begun moving to the nicer residential neighborhoods at the far western end of Hunter Street in the late 1950s and early 1960s, white residents began discussions on ways to keep the blacks from buying in or even driving through their residential subdivisions. White residents living in a neighborhood known as Cascade Heights were able to get the city to approve the building of a brick wall at Peyton Road and Harlan Road as a way to establish a literal line that blacks were not to cross.

  “The Peyton Wall was one of the most blatantly racist and offensive gestures that was offered to us in the sixties in Atlanta,” remarks Ella Gaines Yates, who lives in the neighborhood that the wall had been built around. “And what was so mean-spirited about it is that it was backed by the city’s officials.”

  Eventually, blacks were able to buy in the Cascade Heights area established around the Peyton Forest neighborhood in the early 1960s.

  “It’s hard for people to imagine today how separated blacks and whites had been in this town,” says Portia Scott, “We were not even allowed to join the Girl Scouts when I was a child. They only allowed white girls to join. I’ll never forget when Philippa Brisbane’s mother, Kathryn, integrated the Girl Scouts by organizing a troop for the black girls in the fifties.”

  As the 1960s brought blacks to the city’s southwest neighborhoods, many whites left for the suburbs. And just as the residential housing patterns changed racially, so did the public schools and the commercial shopping areas. Lisa Cooper, an Atlanta attorney who grew up in the southwest section of the city, remembers how the racial makeup of her high school changed during the 1970s. “When I entered the eighth grade at Southwest High School in 1969, the senior class was approximately 90 percent white,” recalls the Duke University graduate, “but my eighth-grade class was 95 percent black. The grades in between further demonstrated that the school was getting blacker with each grade, as the years progressed. You could see it in the yearbooks and in the classrooms. Whites were leaving that part of the city to such an extent that by the time I was a senior in 1974, all the grades were almost completely black.”

  Cooper, who worked for the state attorney general’s office before her current position with a federal judge, grew up as a typical child of the Atlanta black professional class. Her father, Dr. George Cooper, is a Kappa who attended Morehouse and Meharry Dental School. Her mother, Carolyn Cooper, is a graduate of Fisk and belonged to one of the old-guard bridge clubs. Lisa grew up in the Cascade Heights neighborhood and, after pledging AKA at Duke, attended law school at the University of Georgia. In spite of her sheltered upbringing, the separation of the races was always evident to her at Southwest High School.

  “While there were never any major conflicts,” explains Cooper, “everybody knew where the lines were drawn. My class did not see the problems in the way the class of 1969 and class of 1970 do. Those two classes often have separate reunions based on race. Since those two classes had large racial splits, I’ve heard that they have black class reunions and white class reunions. My class was interesting because although there were almost no whites left by my senior year, it was a white classmate, Michele Belloire, who was voted ‘Miss Southwest’ for the year. It got a lot of attention in the press, but I think it showed that the black students were open-minded enough to see beyond color and vote for someone they actually liked.”

  Cooper also remembers that during her years in high school, the popular place to shop in the southwest part of the city was Greenbriar Mall. “By my generation, Auburn Avenue and Hunter were no longer popular shopping districts for young people,” says Cooper, “but going to Greenbriar or going downtown was commonplace for blacks who lived in the southwest part of the city.”

  By the time Teresa Wiltz’s generation came along six years later, the racial balance in the southwest end of the city had changed even more: There were virtually no white residents, students, or shoppers on that side of town. “And the good stores that used to be in the southwest were all gone by the time I was in high school,” explains Wiltz, whose family has been in the city for several generations. “Many of us went north to shop at one of those malls, or we went downtown.”

  During the last twenty years, a younger generation of black professionals have been moving to the city’s suburban areas—places like Stone Mountain, East Point, College Park, and, if they are particularly wealthy and want to remain inside the city, Buckhead. They have also been attracted to such upscale developments as Niskey Lake and Guilford Forest.

  While the suburbs don’t seem to offer the black cultural activities that exist around the Atlanta University center, there are chapters of the Links and Jack and Jill serving these growing communities. And as the black families continue to move there, the racial attitudes awaiting them are changing. “It’s amazing when I think of how much things have evolved even on the outskirts of this city,” says Joy San Brown, who lives inside the city. “I remember when they were burning crosses on people’s lawns in Stone Mountain. And now, it has become a very popular place for black families.”

  Like many other cities with a black elite in its urban or suburban neighborhoods, Atlanta has a number of churches that the wealthy and well-connected call their own. One of these has long been the First Congregational Church, where one finds many of the black Atlanta doctors. One of its most famous ministers was Henry H. Proctor, an 1894 graduate of Yale School of Divinity. Given its popularity among the black doctor crowd, the church was the site of the founding of the National Medical Association. President Taft’s visit to the church in 1898 was another event that enhanced the prestige of the congregation.

  With members such as former mayor Andrew Young, one still finds that Atlanta’s elite has a special fondness for First Congregational Church. Other popular houses of worship are Friendship Baptist Church, which was founded in the 1860s and is considered the oldest church in black Atlanta; St. Paul of the Cross; Ebenezer Baptist; Wheat Street Baptist; and Big Bethel A. M. E. It is at these churches that the old guard meets the new members of Atlanta’s black elite.

  As my brother discovered when he was graduating from dental school in the 1980s, Atlanta’s black community can look very different if you’re new in town. Regardless of your academic and business credentials, the old elite is pretty much set in stone. Where there are greater possibilities for social mobility is among the new elite that has been establishing itself in great numbers since the 1970s. The best-known link between old and new was brought about by the city’s first black mayor.


  Before Maynard Jackson was elected vice mayor and mayor of Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s, he and his family were well known in Atlanta society. Jackson’s mother, Irene Dobbs Jackson, was from a respected family that had been deeply involved political activism. The mother of the city’s first black mayor, Irene was one of six sisters, all of whom attended Spelman College. Her father, John Wesley Dobbs, was a founder of Mutual Federal Savings, a grand master of Georgia’s Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, and an organizer of many political groups in the city. One of her sisters, Mattiwilda Dobbs, became an opera star and performed throughout Europe and the United States.

  “The Dobbs family was already on the map here,” says a third-generation Atlantan who remembers when Maynard entered politics, “but it was really Maynard who really shook up the establishment and made them realize he could bring the old and the new together. When he ran for vice mayor in 1969, it was before the old politicos were ready to anoint him. Even with his family’s background, there were still people who turned on him. But as history has proved, he showed them all.”

  Although he is from an old New Orleans family, Andrew Young is another important force in Atlanta political circles. As a former congressman from the district (elected in 1972) and a former mayor of the city, he has been a prominent voice in the city since his early days of working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was credited with managing a large part of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. His brother, Walter, is a well-known dentist in the city.