The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  As a solitary child, I always loved reading books about big families and cousins who were best friends. But there were so many sisters among the Atlanta Calhouns that the women may have sucked up all the air. They were Southern women, after all, with an endless supply of small talk. The sisters and female cousins, fortunate in their parents, became strong, independent wives, mothers, teachers, social workers, librarians, and physicians. Most would have long-lasting marriages and many children and grandchildren.

  On August 6, 1941, Antoine Graves’ granddaughter, the dimpled, sweet-faced nineteen-year-old Kathryn Brown, was up at three A.M. typing out some verses (a few almost rude) about her cousins and sisters. “The Nutt Family as Written by Nutt No. 5” relied on family slang, inside jokes, and sister-cousin secrets. The tone is teasing, but what is very clear is that these young women clearly enjoyed one another’s company—and their very comfortable, insular lives.

  This is an abridged version of Kathryn Brown’s much longer poem:

  Listen, my dears, and you shall hear

  (And please don’t question what)

  The story of that famous family clan—

  The Graves clan of Nash-Brown Nutt.

  She opens with the older relatives:

  The eldest Nutt in this family of Nutts is a lady frail and dear

  She makes us shout—she makes us scream

  Because she cannot hear.

  The “eldest Nutt” is Katie Webb Graves, Kathryn’s grandmother.

  Mrs. Nellie Brown Nutt is next in line

  And a nutty nut is she

  She has great big eyes (and she uses them too)

  And a family of devils three.

  Kathryn is one of the “devils three” and Nellie is her mother. She soon moves on to herself and her sisters:

  Kathryn Brown Nutt is a tempestuous Nutt

  Who dearly loves a spat—

  Her gaits uncertain, her language rude

  And—well, we don’t talk about that.

  Did Kathryn drink? With so many versions of “Catherine” in the family, Kathryn was pronounced the way it looks—but Catherine Nash’s name was pronounced Cathreen by her sisters and cousins to distinguish between them.

  Kathryn wrote of her sisters, Nellie and Antoinette, the other “devils”:

  Nellie Brown Nutt is a typical Nutt

  Of whose musical prowess we’re proud

  With her bass viol tones and detachable back

  She’ll never be lost in a crowd.

  Another cousin of Lena’s generation, twenty-three-year-old Nellie Brown, a musician, carried her bass viola on her back. Nellie’s namesake mother had accompanied her violinist brother, Judge. In 1942 (about the time that Lena was signing her MGM contract), Nellie Brown began singing and playing the piano in Atlanta clubs. There are photos of Nellie at the piano in the 1940s.

  Antoinette Nutt’s a real smart Nutt

  Tho’ stubborn as Rock Gibraltar

  She cuts up dresses and stumps up shoes

  She loves new clothes and Walter.

  Antoinette Brown was eighteen years old in 1941. She eventually married her beloved Walter Ricks Jr. There is a picture of Antoinette as an attractive young postwar matron with her children, Cynthia, Patricia, and Walter III.

  Kathryn then focused on her Nash cousins:

  Catherine Nash Nutt is a charming child

  As charming children go—

  She sleeps by night and eats all day

  And never mentions Joe.

  Twenty-one-year-old Catherine Nash’s “Joe” was Joseph Frye, her childhood sweetheart. Two months earlier, Catherine had graduated from Spelman College. It was a summer of many graduations—including one for Catherine’s fifty-two-year-old mother, Marie Nash, who earned her master’s degree in social work from Atlanta University. There is a picture of Marie Nash receiving her diploma, posed with her husband, Dr. Homer Nash; her mother, Catherine “Katie” Webb Graves; and her brother Judge’s ex-wife, the famously beautiful Pinkie Chaires Graves. Catherine Nash received a bachelor of library science degree in 1943 from Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

  Next in line comes Helen Nash Nutt

  A Lady trim and elegant.

  If breadth of forehead shows breadth of brain

  She’s really most intelligent.

  Twenty-year-old Helen Nash would graduate from Spelman in 1942 and from all-black Meharry Medical College (her father’s alma mater) in 1945. When she told her father that she wanted to go to medical school, he said, “Don’t.” He did not believe that women should be doctors; one of his many reasons was that he did not believe they could take the sight of battlefield wounds such as he saw in France. But Helen was stubborn—and a man with four daughters is generally programmed to give in. It was wartime, doctors were needed, but the few women who managed to enter medical school were basically forced to choose between families and medical careers. Helen eventually left Atlanta for St. Louis to have a long and successful practice near her pediatrician brother, who shared his own St. Louis practice with one of his five daughters. Helen would have a very happy marriage late in life.

  Of Harriet Nash Nutt we can only say

  Her characteristic is—

  She has gobs of friends and gobs of clothes

  Eczema in summer and Chiz.

  Eighteen-year-old Harriet, also pretty and dimpled, was probably as popular and as free a spirit as Atlanta could handle. Her fiancé, Charles Sumner Chisholm (named for the great Massachusetts abolitionist), known as “Chiz,” had attended Morehouse College and the Pennsylvania College of Optometry. Harriet would graduate from Spelman. Much later, partly because she smoked, drank, and had a passion for gambling, Harriet became Lena’s favorite cousin. As a very attractive widow and sometime high roller, she always had the royal suite gratis when she went to Vegas. Lena was impressed because Harriet went down the Nile, saw the Pyramids, rode on a camel, and sent back witty postcards. Harriet went everywhere, like a nineteenth-century British lady traveler.

  Dorothy Nash Nutt is the youngest Nutt

  And an ambitious Nutt is she

  Wherever the other Nutts are found

  Is where Dorothy is bound to be.

  Dorothy, aged seventeen in 1941, was the youngest Nash sister. She would attend Talladega College, New York University, and the Teachers College at Columbia University, becoming a college instructor and a school psychologist. On September 1, 1960, Dorothy married William Shack in Atlanta. With a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics, Bill Shack was a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley at retirement. When Dorothy retired, she became a calligrapher. Dorothy and Bill had one son.

  In 1941 Homer Nash Jr. was sixteen. He would graduate from Morehouse and Meharry Medical College and have a long private pediatric practice in St. Louis with his daughter Alison and near his sister Helen. One might say, in order for Graves-Nash men to be happy, they had to allow themselves to be surrounded by women—like Homer and his five daughters.

  Now tho’ the Nutts do vary all

  as does inclement weather

  There are some traits—Graves-Brown-Nash traits

  which all possess together.

  They all are vain and very proud

  And, what’s been said before

  When in talk they do engage

  Their voices shriek and roar.

  They wave their arms and stamp their feet

  which makes them look quite frantic

  They chatter like monkeys in a zoo

  And mimic every antic.

  So when you have an argument

  Or a caper you’d like to cut

  Refer yourself with the greatest speed

  To the family of Nash-Brown Nutt.

  And, just as in the movies, the cousins of 1941 became the war brides of 1942. They were all beautiful brides. In August, Kathryn Brown, the pretty amateur poet, became the first Brown-Nash bride. She married handsome Sergeant Neal Kelly of
the U.S. Army. A classic war bride, she had no veil and no long white dress. Kathryn wore a becoming day dress, a flirty hat, a big corsage, and a shyly serene smile. Wearing starched summer tans, Sergeant Kelly looked incredibly happy. They were a very appealing young couple.

  Swift on the heels of Kathryn and Neal, on September 2, 1942, nineteen-year-old Harriet Nash married Chiz Chisholm, then a twenty-three-year-old Tuskegee Airman. Harriet was a student at Spelman. Harriet, a jolly nonconformist, surprisingly chose a traditional wedding with a long white dress, her mother’s Brussels lace veil, and elaborate festivities. Harriet’s daughter, Cheryl, described her mother’s dress and her father’s uniform:

  The dress was long and looks like silk charmeuse, flowing and pooling on the floor … Daddy is in his Air Force uniform. They loved to tell the story of how they met. Catherine … the oldest, was in college and had a party at the house. Mama was given special permission to attend though she was considered too young for college boys. Daddy was one of the Morehouse boys who came …

  Chiz later became another doctor in the family, with a long practice as an Atlanta optometrist.

  The marriage license between Kathryn and Neal Kelly was dated August 4, 1942. In June 1943 baby Elinor Kelly arrived, Nellie Graves Brown’s first grandchild. Elinor’s birthday was June 30 (the same as that of her distant cousin Lena Horne). There is a pretty picture of Kathryn cradling her newborn. But suddenly, on July 20, 1943, there was a certificate of death for twenty-year-old Kathryn. The cause was “bronchial asthma.” It was an enormous tragedy for the family—for her sisters and cousins as well as her husband. Kathryn was buried in Oakland cemetery in the Graves mausoleum. When her father went to war, little Elinor was raised by her grandmother and aunts. There is a photograph of now Lieutenant Neal Kelly and baby Elinor, possibly aged six to nine months old. He wears a strained smile for the sake of the oblivious, adorable baby girl. Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, the great “patriot,” said he would rather “lose the war” than fight side by side with a Negro. Byrd did not fight at all in World War II. Neal Kelly, unlike Byrd, was the real patriot.

  As far as many white Southerners were concerned, World War II seemed mostly to be fought between themselves and the black GIs who had been ordered to the Deep South for military training. Negro soldiers training in the South were subjected to discriminatory treatment throughout the war by military as well as civilian racists. All over the South, it seemed that black GIs could be killed with impunity by white GIs, white officers, and white civilians; racism colored everything in World War II, even scientific breakthroughs. Consider the case of Dr. Charles Drew, professor of surgery at Howard University. He invented the blood plasma bank just in time for the war—but could not donate his own blood because he was a Negro. Blacks could receive “white” blood, but whites could not receive “black” blood because of the Southern rule that one drop of “black” blood made a person black. Despite War Department efforts, the military remained intransigently racist. As far as blacks were concerned, the U.S. military was the most insistently racist public entity in America—worse than the police because the military was almost entirely Southern. In the Southern tradition, rich whites went into politics and poor whites went into the army. Of course, the Southern war against black civilians continued apace. And the state of Georgia still spent three times as much educating white children as black.

  In a victory for blacks, on January 6, 1942, the War Department announced the formation of the first U.S. Army Air Corps squadron for Negroes at Tuskegee, Alabama. It was a victory—although many believed that training black pilots in Alabama meant the army wished them to fail. The following January 1943, William H. Hastie, Negro civilian aide to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, resigned in protest over the continued segregation of training facilities in the air force and army. As the youngest military service, the air force was actually the least prejudiced, and it soon announced a program for the expansion of Negro pilot training. Negroes were now accepted throughout the entire technical training command, as well as the Air Force Officer Candidate School in Miami. In 1944, among the pilot officers training in Miami were one Negro and one movie star. The Negro officer candidate was Percy Sutton, a former Eagle Scout from San Antonio, the youngest of fifteen children, all of whom were college graduates. Their father was an educator and an entrepreneur. One brother became the first black elected official in San Antonio; another became a judge on the New York supreme court; and another spent the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Sutton himself attended Prairie View A&M University, Tuskegee Institute, Hampton Institute, and Columbia and Brooklyn College law schools. But he was “silenced” by the entire Air Force Officer Candidate School from the moment of his arrival—the only communication was in the line of duty or, more usually, in the line of insults. The lone movie star was Clark Gable, who had pulled strings to get into the air force at his relatively advanced age when his wife, Carole Lombard, died in a plane crash during a war bond tour. Gable, who clearly did not give a damn about peer pressure, was the only officer-in-training in the whole school to speak a kind word to Sutton—telling him to keep his chin up and not let the others get to him. (How nice that Gable’s good-guy image was the real thing.) Much later, Sutton became a New York political powerhouse and Manhattan’s longest-serving borough president. Like the black Calhouns of Atlanta, New York, and Chicago, the Suttons of Texas, with their accomplishments and multiple degrees, are a classic Talented Tenth family.

  Between 1940 and 1943 the Negro population of Los Angeles grew 30 percent; of Chicago, 20 percent; of Detroit, 19 percent; of Charleston, South Carolina, 39 percent; and of Norfolk, Virginia, 100 percent. Blacks were leaving the lower South in droves looking for war work—and so were Southern whites. Several Northern cities had an extremely Southern mentality—Detroit, for example, had a strong KKK element. During the war, Detroit had the largest NAACP branch in the country. It also had an acute housing shortage because of all those defense workers and a population that had grown by 350,000 since the war began. It is possible that a few persons of either race appreciated the irony of white racists rioting to get into houses named for Sojourner Truth, the heroic black female abolitionist. In February 1942 a mob of some 1,200 men armed with clubs, knives, and shotguns gathered to prevent three Negro families from moving into the two-hundred-unit Sojourner Truth Housing Project, designated by the U.S. Housing Authority, of which Frank Horne was an official, as Negro housing. The three families’ occupancy was delayed for two months, until twelve families finally moved in with the help of eight hundred state troopers. The federal government was the only protection blacks had against Southern whites, in the North or South, and this may explain why Southern whites so hated the federal government.

  Life magazine had predicted as early as 1942 that Detroit was a racial time bomb. In June 1943 twenty-five thousand white workers went on strike at the Packard Motor Car Company, now producing engines for bombers and PT boats, because three black men were promoted to the assembly line. There was a sort of racist line in the sand. Government laws might force whites to work in the same factory with blacks, but not on the same assembly line. The fervent cry into the loudspeaker of one striker reverberated around the world: “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a nigger.”

  The Detroit explosion was three weeks later, on June 20. It was sparked at an integrated amusement park called Belle Isle by two typically egregious racial rumors concerning the Belle Isle Bridge: one, that a black mother and baby had been thrown off it by a gang of whites; and two, that a white woman had been raped and murdered on it by a gang of blacks. Whites went on a rampage, pulling Negroes out of cars, buses, and movie theaters to attack them. Blacks retaliated by smashing white-owned shops in Detroit’s notorious black ghetto, “Paradise Valley” (what a name), where two hundred thousand people lived in an area of sixty square blocks, and where most of the inhabitants had no indoor plumbing. On the second day of the riot, at the request of Walter White, as w
ell as the mayor of Detroit and the governor of Michigan, FDR declared a state of emergency and sent in six thousand federal troops. The NAACP set up relief headquarters. The riot lasted three days. Thirty-four people were killed—of whom twenty-five were black, including seventeen killed by police. Negroes did not have to live in the South to feel like Southerners. And Axis propagandists had a field day about American hypocrisy—shouting freedom for foreigners but not for their own Negroes.

  In 1944 the War Department announced the end of racial segregation in recreation and transportation facilities at all army posts. The order was widely protested and openly disobeyed in the South as well as in both theaters of war. Racism was worse in the Pacific than elsewhere because of the heavy presence of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, the most Southern (and racist) of the services—West Point graduated its first Negro cadet in 1877 and Annapolis graduated its first black in 1953.

  Lena Horne as the “sweetheart” of the Tuskegee Airmen and “Queen” of the Ninety-Ninth Pursuit Squadron

  Everyone was proud and excited when the Tuskegee Airmen, now the Ninety-Ninth Pursuit Squadron, flew its first combat mission over the island of Pantelleria in the Mediterranean theater. Cousin Harriet Nash had married a Tuskegee Airman, Chiz Chisholm, and Lena was officially “Queen” of the Ninety-Ninth, a title bestowed by members of the squadron. In June 1944 the squadron became part of the 332nd Fighter Group under Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the first black graduate of West Point in the twentieth century. There were no black bomber pilots, but the single fighter pilots of the Ninety-Ninth were the attack and guard dogs of the air in the European theater. They were recognized as America’s best fighter escorts—officially never losing a bomber. The B-25 bomber crew members had the highest respect for the pilots of the Ninety-Ninth, who always seemed to swoop in from out of nowhere to drive off the enemy. “If you didn’t know who they were—you knew who they were,” said one admiring white tail gunner, granting a racial compliment. He meant that they flew “black”—insouciant but dangerous.