Minton’s grandfather, also named Henry, had arrived in Philadelphia from Virginia in the 1830s and opened a catering firm that exclusively served wealthy whites. This was a business that many of the old black families engaged in during the 1800s. “Many of the most successful nineteenth-century black entrepreneurs, like Norris Herndon of Atlanta, opened businesses that exclusively served a rich white clientele, and these lessons that were learned in the South were copied in the North,” says Atlanta’s Janice White Sikes of the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture. These patterns were copied in the North for many occupations. It happened with barbershops, catering, and tailoring. Then, with the money earned from such businesses, entrepreneurs invested in more respected and profitable ventures like banking, real estate, newspaper publishing, and insurance.
And, as in Grandfather Minton’s case, they merged their businesses and families with others in their small elite circle. One such merger was between Minton and John McKee, a multimillionaire who was also in the catering and real estate businesses, when McKee’s daughter Martha married Henry’s son, Theophilius Minton, an attorney. By the time their son, Dr. Henry McKee Minton, graduated from college, he was already part of a wealthy dynasty.
“But they’re almost all gone now,” says one of the physicians who recently attended the funeral of Henry’s nephew, Dr. Russell F. Minton Sr. “It’s strange, given all the history they had in this town. Russell went to medical school with a lot of us at Howard. He was chief of radiology and head of the hospital here, and his kids grew up here. Way back, they used to be the toast of the Philadelphia cotillion—the big fund-raiser for Mercy-Douglass Hospital. But now, you meet some of these new people moving into Chestnut Hill that don’t even recognize the name. Especially since the kids moved away.”
When one does hear the Minton name today, it’s usually in one of the neighborhoods that are favored by the old guard—somewhere in the Mount Airy or Germantown neighborhoods of North Philadelphia. “Those neighborhoods first opened up for black professionals in the late 1940s,” says Dr. Melvin Jackson Chisum, a physician and member of the Boulé.
As Chisum points out, blacks have, over time, lived all over the city: in the north, west, and south ends. “In the 1930s and 1940s, South Street was a major commercial street when blacks populated South Philadelphia,” says Chisum, who recalls that a major segment of the black elite had ties to South Philadelphia’s Douglass Hospital on Lombard Street. “My mother graduated from Douglass’s nursing school in 1916, during the time of that first major group of black physicians. One of them was Dr. Nathan Mossell, who had been among the original physicians at Douglass Hospital and had been the first black to graduate from the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania,” says Chisum.
As Chisum points out, the Mossell name was an important one at that time. Nathan’s brother, George Mossell, was one of the first blacks to graduate from the university’s law school; and George’s daughter, Sadie Tanner Mossell, became a trailblazer in the legal profession as the first women, of any color, to practice law in the city.
As the south side became more congested, blacks expanded into the west across the Schuylkill River and into the north. The growing “doctor crowd” was found at Mercy Hospital, which was opened before World War II in West Philadelphia. “They had the big-time doctors,” recalls a retired dentist who now lives in the Mount Airy neighborhood. “People like Minton, Eugene Hinson, Nolan Atkinson—practically the whole Boulé crowd.”
“But a lot of my parents’ friends felt that life was really rooted on the south side,” says Boyd Carney Johnson as he flips through his mother’s old class-of-1911 yearbook from the Philadelphia High School for Girls. “That’s where many of their institutions and favorite places were—places like Christian Street, Chew Funeral Home, St. Simons Episcopal, and Mother Bethel. Everyone had some kind of tie to South Philadelphia.” Among Johnson’s family friends were such names as Abele, Upshur, Webb, Sewell, Chew, Anderson, Clifford, and Christmas. “Anderson” was Marian Anderson’s family, who lived nearby during the 1920s and 1930s. “Clifford” was Patricia Johnson Clifford, who was the daughter of Charles Johnson, the first black president of Fisk, and the wife of Dr. Maurice Clifford, who was the first black at Philadelphia General Hospital. “Christmas” was Dr. Lawrence Christmas, a dentist who was big in the Philadelphia chapter of the Alphas. “Patricia Clifford was in a woman’s group called the Stork Club with my sister Pauline. Dr. Christmas was everybody’s family dentist, and his wife, Alice, was a good friend of my mother’s,” explains Boyd Johnson. Two of the Christmases’ daughters, Alice Christmas Mason and Marie Christmas Rhone, went on to become well known in New York society. Alice is a well-regarded socialite and real estate dealer on New York’s Upper East Side who includes Barbara Walters, Connie Chung, and the Trumps among her friends. Her sister, Marie, became national president of the black women’s group the National Smart Set in the 1980s. Today, Marie’s daughter, Sylvia, is the highest-ranking black woman executive in the record industry: She is a graduate of Wharton and the chairman and CEO of Elektra Records, a $300 million division of Time Warner.
Many old Philadelphians feel that the black community’s heyday was in the 1940s, when Raymond Pace Alexander and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander were a young power couple. “Everybody knew Ray and Sadie,” says Boyd Johnson. “Ray Pace and Sadie were not just society people—they were activists,” he explains. “Two incredible lawyers. He graduated from Penn in 1920 and Harvard Law School in 1923.”
“I worked with Sadie when she acted as legal counsel to our sorority,” says Nellie Roulhac. “Not only was she the first black Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania; she was also the first woman to practice law in the state. The two of them touched so many of us.”
Boyd Johnson recalls that Ray Pace Alexander’s sister, Dr. Virginia Alexander, was the obstetrician who delivered him. Dr. Chisum recalls being initiated into Ray’s Boulé chapter in 1966. “Although it was populated by my mentors from the hospital—doctors like Edward Holloway, Russell Minton, Ed Cooper, Lancess McKnight—I knew it was Ray Pace Alexander’s chapter. He was Mr. Boulé and Mr. Philadelphia back then.”
Alexander, who served on the city council, went on to become senior judge of the court of common pleas. “Ray blazed the trail for me in Philadelphia,” says Norman Jenkins, who was named a judge on the same bench several years later.
Other big names in the Philadelphia social circles in the 1940s were Dorothy and Emanuel Crogman Wright. After attending the University of Pennsylvania, she was one of the charter members of the Links and Jack and Jill, and he was the president of the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company. Their daughter, Gwynne Wright, grew up in the Philadelphia Jack and Jill and is a member of the city’s Links chapter. “When I was growing up, this was a very tight-knit community where people knew each other because they went to the same church, belonged to the same organizations, or lived in the same neighborhood,” says Wright, who notes that her Jack and Jill chapter included the daughters of the Alexanders as well as many other children of old Philadelphia.
Jetta Norris Jones remembers growing up in South Philadelphia when her father, Austin Norris, was practicing law and serving as the Philadelphia editor of the newspaper Pittsburgh Courier. “My father came to Philadelphia in 1919 after graduating from Yale Law School, and he quickly began practicing law while simultaneously launching a paper called the Philadelphia American,” says Jones, who lives in Chicago and is a class-of-1950 Yale Law School graduate. “My dad was always certain that he knew everyone in this town. It was that small a community.” A prominent litigator in the city, Norris represented many famous individuals including Marcus Garvey and Father Divine. He, too, knew Sadie and Ray Pace Alexander. “I just joined my husband, Jimmy, at a Guardsmen Weekend in Chicago,” remarks Jones, who graduated from Philadelphia’s Girls High before attending Mount Holyoke, “and we ran into their daughter, Mary. It shows you how tight the
Philadelphia circles really were. It was a nice reunion for both of us.”
During the 1950s, a large contingent of the Jack and Jill, Links, Girl Friends, and Boulé crowd had moved north to the neighborhoods of Germantown and Mount Airy. Germantown High School was already a popular high school by that time. Now that West Philadelphia and the older South Philadelphia neighborhoods were no longer the only available places for blacks to live, some of the black institutions began to pass away. “Mercy-Douglass Hospital closed once there was no longer a concentrated black audience in West Philadelphia,” remembers Dr. Melvin Chisum, who had served on the staff before practicing downtown.
By the 1970s, many members of the elite were completely rooted in North Philadelphia with no ties whatsoever on the south side. Living in Mount Airy, Germantown, and in many of the surrounding suburbs, they began to regularly send their kids to the expensive, mostly white private schools like Germantown Friends School, Chestnut Hill Academy, and William Penn Charter.
“We sent our three children to Germantown Friends and Chestnut Hill,” says Ellie Dejoie Jenkins, who belongs to the Girl Friends and lives in the Mount Airy section, “but the city also now has some great magnet schools at Central High and Girls High. So there’s really no reason why we should feel we need to leave the city in order to find good schools.” Jenkins describes some of the historic parts of black Philadelphia as she sits on the deck of her Martha’s Vineyard summer home with her husband Norman—a Philadelphia judge—and a few friends, including Dr. Valaida Smith Walker, who also belongs to the Philadelphia Girl Friends.
Norman, who remembers practicing law in the same offices as Sadie Alexander, graduated from Columbia University before later being appointed to the court of common pleas. He, Ellie, and Valaida note that most of their friends have roots that go beyond just South Philadelphia today. “Although Mother Bethel is the best-remembered church,” explains Norman, “St. Thomas Episcopal, St. Luke’s Episcopal in Germantown, Mount Carmel Baptist, Grace Baptist, and Zion Baptist are also popular churches among our friends and colleagues.” Valaida also points out that many blacks are discovering that the suburbs are not as alien as they originally thought. “I was born in Darby, where my father was a physician, and he was not in the least bit outside of the black circle,” explains Valaida, who became a tenured professor and vice president at Temple University after earning degrees at Howard and Temple. “We do not lose our connection to the black world just because we live outside the city.”
Valaida Walker’s point is discussed more than one would think. “I was feeling like we were the oddballs when we took our son out of Central High and put him in Penn Charter with a school full of white kids,” says a retired attorney who lives in North Philadelphia, “but then my wife and I started hearing that there were even a couple of black kids at Shipley and the Haverford School out there on the Main Line. We had to draw the line someplace, and we just couldn’t go any whiter than the private schools in the city.”
Today, more and more black Philadelphians are trying to balance their ties to the black community with their desire to move into more spacious areas outside the city. The Main Line suburbs seem to be the final frontier. “Of course, there are many of us living in the suburbs now,” says a retired dentist. “In fact, Nolan Atkinson has been out on the Main Line for years.”
Today, black Philadelphia’s borders regularly extend into the Main Line—old Waspy towns that were shut off not only to blacks but to Jews and other nonwhite Protestants. Today one finds blacks in Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Upper Merion.
“Dr. Atkinson has been in Bryn Mawr for years,” says an elderly woman to a group of friends who have gathered in her living room in Mount Airy. “You know his wife, Frances, who started the Links. Well, her great-grandfather was the first black to graduate from Oberlin College—in the 1840s.”
The group nods with approval.
“That’s right, George Vashon. He was also the first black lawyer in New York.”
The group has a phenomenal grasp of the facts surrounding the people in its circle.
“Yes, the Atkinsons were in Bryn Mawr before even Jews got there,” remarks one of Dr. Atkinson’s Boulé brothers. “In fact, the Atkinson girl, Carolyn, grew up there in Jack and Jill and went to Vassar.”
“That’s right, she’s married to that Thornell man who went to Fisk and Yale Law School. Isn’t he in the Boulé?” asks the hostess.
“Whatever happened to Carolyn and Richard?”
The group looks around the room—certain that somebody has kept tabs on a family like the Atkinson-Thornells.
“Well, I can tell you,” says the lone Washingtonian in the group, “that they live in D.C. He’s teaching at Howard, she heads a school in the district, and all three of their kids went to Sidwell. One of them—Paul—works on the Hill. He went to Penn.”
Several people in the room nod with approval. I happen to know Paul Thornell, and from what he has told me in the past, these facts sound quite familiar. They’ve wrapped up another multigenerational story with no loose ends. It’s a common occurrence in cities that very quickly come together with extended families.
CHAPTER 16
Passing for White: When the “Brown Paper Bag Test” Isn’t Enough
“Excuse me, my name is Sara Lewis. By any chance, are you black?”
“No, I’m not.”
Sara took a good look at the thick lips of the white-looking twenty-two-year-old as a few of us stood there with her in the Harkness Commons student center. There was something about the shape of his head that made her wonder.
“Really?” She asked. “Not at all?”
The student shrugged uncomfortably and hurried past her to the dining hall.
When I was a first-year student at Harvard Law School, there was a male classmate who several of us blacks thought was passing for white. Although most of us would never have found the need—or the courage—to confront the student in the way that our black classmate, Sara, did, this student remained a focus of our attention. For the first few months of our first semester, “Bob” (not his real name) was a subject of conversation when we, as a black group, got together for BLSA (Black Law Student Association) events, or when we saw him entering a classroom or dining hall with a white woman or a group of whites. Although he’d long ago insisted on his white racial background, the rest of us had just taken it as fact that he was a black man in denial. We didn’t need further confirmation.
“What I’d like to know is whether his girlfriend knows,” Clarence asked no one in particular as we sat at an all-black table in the Harvard Law School dining hall.
Several of us glanced over at the “suspect.” He was holding the hand of a slender white woman with blond hair and blue eyes.
Sara rolled her eyes. “Of course she doesn’t know. They never know.”
“Tell me about it,” added Henry, another black classmate sitting at our table. “All white people see is skin and hair.”
A white person sitting at this table would have been mortified to discover how adept and obsessed black people—particularly affluent black people—are at identifying black characteristics and black physical features in people who claim to be white. It is not something that blacks obsessed about as a sort of sport. It is because of our family experiences of knowing relatives or friends of relatives who have made the once-too-common decision to pass for white.
Even though we were never able to get “Bob” to acknowledge his racial background, we did all feel vindicated when a news article proved what we all suspected. Just before graduation, a national magazine ran a story on high-ranking blacks in corporate America. Among the individuals profiled was a high-achieving, self-identified black man who looked very much like a darker version of someone we all knew. He identified himself with surprisingly similar credentials, the same hometown, and the same last name, and we realized what our “white” classmate really was.
Skin color has always played an important role in det
ermining one’s popularity, prestige, and mobility within the black elite. It is hard to find an upper-class black American family that has been well-to-do since before the 1950s that has not endured family conversations on the virtues of “good hair, sharp features, and a nice complexion.” These code words for having less Negroid features have been exchanged over time for more politically correct ones, but it is a fact that the black upper class thinks about these things more than most. This is not to say that affluent blacks want to be white, but it certainly suggests that they have seen the benefits accorded to lighter-skinned blacks with “whiter features”—who are hired more often, given better jobs, and perceived as less threatening.
A study funded by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1995 concluded that whites feel more comfortable around light-skinned blacks than they do around dark-skinned blacks, and hence light-skinned blacks receive better job opportunities from white employers.
It should not be a surprise to learn that some light-skinned blacks have availed themselves of these opportunities. And history shows that generations of blacks with parents in both the South and the North have taken this skin color issue to such an extreme that they have used it not only to dupe employers and landlords but friends and spouses as well. They have internalized the rhyme that some cynical black elite kids have used for generations:
If you’re light, you’re all right
If you’re brown, stick around
But if you’re black, get back.
Having been introduced to disturbing attitudes like this from an early age, it is probably not a surprise that I decided to undergo a nose job soon after graduating from law school. In fact, some of my black childhood friends wondered why I had waited so long.
But telling jokes and altering one’s physical appearance are not the only manner in which some members of the black elite respond to the ongoing fixation on the skin color and physical features of black Americans. Another response has been to escape the black experience altogether by “passing.”
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