“Some things have changed here,” admits Patsy Campbell Petway, “but we can pretty much find the people we grew up with. Even if places like Brown’s Hotel and Dr. Price’s pharmacy are gone, there are enough institutions and events that have remained constant—like my AKA chapter, which still has its debutante ball at Christmas. Of course, now it’s grown so big that we have it at the Opryland Hotel.”
But Patsy Campbell Petway doesn’t get caught in the past. She doesn’t let the changes slow her down. Whether it’s dinner with sister-in-law Rose Busby, a fund-raiser that’s she’s attending with Bill McKissack and her two sons, or an event that her Girl Friends chapter is arranging, she’s moving. On the afternoon that we spoke she was on her way to Aspen, Colorado, for the wedding of her godchild, Kimberly Webb, an attorney who grew up in Houston and was marrying Douglas Qualls of Memphis. “Kim is the daughter of Hildred Webb, one of my best friends from Tennessee State,” she explains as she reminds me that I had dined with Hildred and Kim in New Orleans, along with Patsy’s childhood friend Aaronetta Pierce, at the last Links convention that my parents had brought me to.
“You remember Kim from Wellesley. You met her when you were at Harvard. And her brother, Johnny, went to church with you last Easter.”
I nod with immediate comprehension as I recall that Hildred’s husband, John—a Houston surgeon—is in my fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi Boulé, and he had hosted me during a recent tour of Texas.
Once again, Patsy reminds me of how small the circle really is.
NEW ORLEANS
“There are the uptown Dejoies and the downtown Dejoies, and from what I hear, the only time they speak to each other is at funerals,” explains a member of the New Orleans chapter of Jack and Jill after I meet her in the dining room of Dooky Chase, a black-owned restaurant popular with the older families of New Orleans. The woman has spent the last twenty minutes attempting to tell me how complicated it gets when you try to rank the impact of certain black families in New Orleans.
“Many families—including my own—aren’t as in as the Dejoies, the Haydels, or the Tureauds,” she says, “but even when you do find people from an important family, you have to determine which branch they are from because there are so many ways to label family relatives here: by the ward they come from, by their black or Creole heritage, by the whole downtown-uptown-back-o’-town distinctions. In some of the families, there is a black group as well as a white group. It’s hard to keep it all straight. But if you don’t, people get very offended.”
This is the kind of pressure I was feeling as I was on my way to have lunch at the Martha’s Vineyard summer home of Ellie Dejoie Jenkins. Although she doesn’t use such terms to identify herself, Ellie Dejoie Jenkins is clearly a “downtown Dejoie,” and I didn’t want to make the mistake of forgetting that fact. Her family is old New Orleans, and she has all the right old-guard credentials.
“I don’t like to get caught up in all those ridiculous distinctions,” says Jenkins. “If others do, that’s their business.”
Ellie is a slender, small-boned, light-complexioned black woman. It seems to be well-established that the wealthy Creoles and the aristocratic blacks who come from her background live in downtown New Orleans, while the working-class blacks and upper-class whites reside uptown and the working-class Creoles stay in “back-o’-town.”
“You have never seen class warfare until you’ve come to New Orleans,” says a member of the Boulé who grew up in the city and has known the downtown Dejoie family for years. “There are the rich blacks and the blacks who worked in service for the whites, then there are the rich whites, and then there are the Creoles—who might be very, very poor and uneducated, or there’s the group of Creoles who are rich and who may be either white-looking or black-looking. It was not uncommon to find three branches of the same family living as three different racial or ethnic groups. Historically, there was so much mixing in that town, you find people with relatives of every shade.”
Ellie Dejoie Jenkins’s grandfather was a physician, and her father, Paul Hipple Vitale Dejoie, was a successful businessman and a member of the elite Old Men’s Illinois Club. When Ellie was growing up in the elite downtown section of New Orleans, it was rather obvious that there were two branches of the Dejoie family. Although the branches did not always get along, they were all people with money and influence. “My family owned the Louisiana Life Insurance Company, the Louisiana Funeral Home, and the Dejoie Flower Shop, so we grew up knowing many of the businesspeople in New Orleans,” explains the attractive woman as she sits with a couple of friends and her husband, Judge Norman Jenkins, on the deck of their summer home, a contemporary masterpiece that is surrounded by woods. “There was another Dejoie that owned the Louisiana Weekly newspaper—but that’s a long story because my immediate family had ties to that before as well.”
Knowing the uneasy relationship that many old New Orleans families have with various branches, I know enough not to press Ellie. She is gracious and diplomatic about “the other Dejoies” even though there are others who are not when the subject is raised. I already know about one other Dejoie—C. C. Dejoie, who had been publisher of a black newspaper, the Louisiana Weekly. In black New Orleans society, it is not in good taste to ask people about the ancillary branches of their families. It is also not in good taste to ask people who are mixed with black Creole or white ancestors to tell you whom they most closely identify with.
As her small white poodle, Precious, hops into my lap, I ask Ellie about some acquaintances I had known in her native city. I also ask her about the city’s first black mayor. “What about Ernest Morial’s family? They were contemporaries and in the same crowd as your parents, right?”
One of Ellie’s visitors tries to answer the question first. “Hardly. Ernest just happened to marry well.”
Ellie, who is very protective of the important families of New Orleans, raises her hand to stop the flow of negative remarks before they get started.
I realize I will have to get my information elsewhere, because Ellie is an unqualified fan of the Morials.
“Ernest Morial was a brilliant judge and politician, but he was from a working-class family,” says a third-generation Dillard alumnus who admires the family that produced the city’s first two black mayors. “But ‘Dutch,’ as we called him, got great connections by marrying into the Haydel family when he met Sybil.” Ernest Morial, who was elected mayor in 1977, according to this self-described fan of the Morials, was actually not from the elite downtown section. “He was from the working-class ‘back-o’-town’ section.”
The Haydels have long been a powerful, well-to-do family in New Orleans. “I grew up with Sybil Haydel and knew her quite well when she married Ernest Morial,” explains Ellie Dejoie Jenkins. “Her father, C. C. Haydel, was a physician, and his wife was a good friend of my mother, Thelma, and my aunt Pearl, who were all in the Gloomchaser’s Club together. Everyone in our crowd was proud when he and his son got elected mayor. We feel like an extended family.”
While Ellie is talking, I overhear one of her friends remark that Atlanta mayor Andrew Young was originally from New Orleans, and that his mother was also a Gloomchaser—as was Mrs. Alfred Dent, wife of the president of Dillard University.
“Well, Sybil’s family were all great supporters of Ernest,” continues Ellie, “and he served on the court of appeals, then as mayor, and we were all thrilled to see his and Sybil’s son get elected mayor a few years ago. They are a talented family.”
Although Ellie now lives in Philadelphia, her ties to New Orleans are strong and old. Like many of the elite blacks and Creoles of color, she went to a Catholic private school, Xavier Prep, and then to Xavier University. She also has a master’s degree from Columbia. She is a member of the Girl Friends. Her childhood friend, Sybil Haydel Morial, is a member of the Links. Sybil’s brother, C. C. Haydel Jr., is a physician who belongs to the same New Orleans Boulé chapter as their late father.
Following in the footsteps
of their parents, many of the middle-aged men and women in the old guard belong to the national black groups as well as to the groups that are uniquely New Orleans. New Orleans Link Viola King belongs to a group called the Merrymakers. “We are a bridge group of thirteen women that started fifty-seven years ago,” says King who graduated from Southern University and includes Sybil Haydel Morial among her friends.
“Many of us belonged to clubs that grew up around the Mardi Gras festivities,” says Harold Doley, who grew up in New Orleans and can trace his paternal ancestors back to 1720 in Louisiana. “My father’s group, the Illinois Club, was started in the 1880s, and one of its big activities was putting on an annual cotillion for the daughters of many of the old families.”
Like Ellie Dejoie Jenkins, Doley also attended Xavier University and the private, all-black Xavier Prep before that. Growing up in a relatively small city, where even the Catholic schools were racially segregated, they both felt that their community was a small and intimate one. They both knew the doctors who worked at Flint-Goodridge Hospital, they both ran into friends on St. Bernard Avenue downtown or in the neighborhood surrounding elite Eastover Drive and in the “Sugar Hill” section near Dillard, and they both were part of the elite who had ties to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and Central Congregational Church.
The first black individual to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, Doley now runs an investment firm that has offices in New York and New Orleans. He is also the owner of Villa Lewaro, the twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion that was built by Madam C. J. Walker after she became the first woman millionaire in 1908. He is one of the many black New Orleans success stories that became famous elsewhere but still holds tightly to his native city. “Few people realize that Andrew Young and Bryant Gumbel are from New Orleans,” says Doley, who met Gumbel many years ago at a childhood birthday party and remembers when Young was a student at Dillard and later joined Central Congregational Church as assistant pastor.
“Even if we later move to other cities,” explains Doley, “the culture of black New Orleans is so strong that we end up returning to the community or finding others around us who share these roots.”
TUSKEGEE
Although Tuskegee, Alabama, is a relatively small city with a population of less than two hundred thousand, the community played an important role in the development of the black elite. Not only did the increasingly well-endowed college, Tuskegee Institute, attract a talented faculty, but the area also served as the training ground for thousands of black dentists and physicians. The town remains a place with fond memories for many of the people whose family names, like Dibble, Tilden, and Branche, are associated with it.
“The Veterans Hospital in Tuskegee was one of the few places in this country where black physicians could receive training in surgery,” says Dr. George Branche, who grew up in Tuskegee while his father, Dr. George Branche Sr., worked as a neuropsychiatrist at the hospital. “My father started working there in 1924 after he had attended Lincoln University and Boston University Medical School,” recalls Branche, as he and I are leaving our monthly meeting of the Westchester Clubmen, a forty-year-old social organization of black professional men.
Branche remembers growing up on the grounds of the hospital with his sister, Martie, and his brother, Matt, who was eventually to attend Boston University Medical School. His brother Matt is in my Boulé chapter and his son, George, grew up with me in Jack and Jill before going off to Princeton.
“There were several Tuskegee families who lived on the grounds in an area we called ‘the circle,’ and they were all doctors tied to the Hospital,” recalls Branche as he remembers how much that rarefied environment protected him and other children from the very segregated world of Tuskegee’s town outside these gates. “We were protected from the bigotry of the town in so many ways. We went to an elementary school on the grounds and had a swimming pool and tennis courts there as well. We also grew up seeing many famous black people like George Washington Carver and General Benjamin Davis and others.”
Among the other families living on “the circle” with the Branches were the Tildons and the Dibbles. Toussaint Tildon, a psychiatrist and the director of the hospital during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, was a class-of-1923 graduate of Harvard Medical School. More than two generations of black physicians point to Tildon as their role model and mentor; they either trained under him or were invited to become a part of the growing institution.
“Everybody knew Dr. Tildon because of the stature he brought to the hospital,” says Dr. James Norris, a New York plastic surgeon who was in charge of surgery at the V.A. hospital in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “He, Dr. Dibble, Dr. Yancey, and Dr. Branche were all important figures in both the medical and the social communities.”
Tildon’s four children were among the kids that George and Matt Branche remember from their childhood. “Hortense Tildon, Ann Dibble, and others of us still run into each other,” says George, who was later to avoid the segregated Alabama schools when his parents sent him north to attend Boston Latin School.
Hortense’s daughter, Margaret Calhoun Williams, recalls growing up in Tuskegee but not being fully aware of her family’s history in the community. “I knew that a lot of people knew my grandfather, but it wasn’t until I was much older and moved away that I got a sense of the impact he had on so many doctor’s careers,” says Williams, who remembers that although she did not grow up on the campus like her mother, she did not really encounter the town’s segregation in the way that others might have. She was in Jack and Jill as a child and went away to boarding school at Northfield Mount Hermon in the ninth grade. “Several of the Dibble children also went to my school,” Williams recalls.
The Dibble family’s history at the V.A. hospital began with Dr. Eugene Dibble, a class-of-1919 graduate of Howard Medical School who was chief of the hospital surgical section. He and his family also lived on the circle. His daughter, Ann Dibble, is a graduate of Fisk and sits on the board of several major corporations, as does her husband, Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan. Like their childhood neighbor Hortense Tildon, Ann Dibble and her brother Eugene Dibble sent their children to Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts.
“I was in the Tuskegee Links with Mrs. Branche,” says a former Tuskegee resident who knew many of the families with ties to the hospital, “and I have to say that place produced some amazing histories. Not that Ann Dibble’s background wasn’t interesting on its own, but her first husband was Mercer Cook in Chicago, and his lineage was also interesting. His father, Mercer senior, graduated from Amherst in the twenties, and got a Ph.D. from Brown in the thirties. He was a professor at Howard and ambassador to Senegal. You can’t beat families like that.” The former Tuskegee resident also points out that although they are living in different parts of the country, virtually all of the Branches, Tildons, and Dibbles are members of the Boulé and the Links.
Another magnet for talented blacks in the small community was Tuskegee Institute, which had grown increasingly wealthy through the connections that its founder, Booker T. Washington, had with well-connected white philanthropists at the turn of the century. With his growing endowment, he was able to hire the best professors for his university. “Booker T. Washington asked my father-in-law, Robert Taylor, to come to Tuskegee and design the campus buildings,” says Marian Taylor of Manhattan. “Robert had graduated from MIT in 1892 as the first black graduate and the valedictorian in the area of architecture, and Mr. Washington had seen some of his work.” Marian is married to Taylor’s son, Edward, who belonged to the Boulé, and she points out to me photographs of the historic buildings that he designed. In total, he is responsible for forty-five structures on the campus, including the chapel, the science building, and many dormitories.
New York surgeon Dr. James Norris points out that the John Andrew Hospital, which is affiliated with Tuskegee Institute (now called Tuskegee University), was also a major center for black doctors. His father, Dr. Morgan Norris, was an intern
at the hospital after graduating from Howard Medical School in 1916. “Although the surrounding town was extremely segregated, the campus of the V.A. hospital, John Andrew Hospital, and the college was an oasis for the black intelligentsia,” remarks Norris. “People like Asa Yancey went there and set up important internship programs that allowed blacks to enter fields of medicine that were closed to blacks in hospitals throughout the rest of the country, including the North.”
Norris also recalls that even after his own father left Tuskegee and was later serving as a trustee at Hampton, he would return to Tuskegee’s medical community for regular medical seminars. “It is remarkable to think of how much the institutions in that small town changed black America.”
LOS ANGELES
There is a city park named after his father. Dozens of local charities have been supported by three generations of his family. Others in his community point to him when they talk about one of the nation’s oldest black insurance firms.
Ivan J. Houston is a member of one of Los Angeles’s most prominent black families. A lifelong resident of the city, he is an accountant and the former chairman of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, a firm which his father founded in 1925, and which is now the nation’s third largest black-owned insurance company. As a well-respected business leader and adviser to L.A.’s corporate elite, Houston has sat on the boards of such companies as Metromedia, Pacific Bell, Kaiser Aluminum, and the First Interstate Bank of California.
Our Kind of People Page 48