First Class

by Alison Stewart

  According to Gordon Davis, “He was an extraordinary scholar, but did not seek the limelight the way some public intellectuals do now.” For example, when the elder Davis accepted a position at the University of Chicago, he was breaking ground—yet he remained stoic. “When my father attained tenure in 1948, he was the first black to obtain tenure at any white institution—college—state or private.” But it wasn’t simple. He was the first black professor at the University of Chicago, a deeply segregated city.

  “They voted him on the faculty committee, but the debate was whether or not he would be able to teach. So he was on the faculty, but the issue was, Could he teach?” recalled Davis’s son and namesake, Allison Davis, sitting in an office on South State Street in a building that had once been the headquarters for the Overton Hygienic Company. In the 1920s the ornate space had housed black businesses and banks and one of the largest producers of African American cosmetics. As time passed, the city built one of the worst housing projects across the street, and the Overton building was abandoned for forty years until it was later redeveloped. (Perhaps this is why my cabdriver insisted I take his card and call him when I needed to leave and then waited for me to get inside the building before he pulled away.) The building is part of Davis’s portfolio; in addition to being a former civil rights advocate and lawyer, he is now an über-connected real estate developer about whom many have an opinion. This area, Bronzeville, was on its way up before the crash of 2008.

  The Allison Davis stamp was issued on February 1, 1994 by the USPS.

  Allison Davis is also well known for having an eye for talent. Subtle clues around the office remind visitors that he was Barack Obama’s first boss out of law school. “He came and saw us after his junior year, second year of law school. We all had lunch. It was not just a meeting. I mean he was something special.” Davis went on to become one of Obama’s biggest fund-raisers. “The next year, he came back and said he was going to work for Sidley, which is a huge law firm, which is where Michelle had worked. But I think he must have been there a week or two before they probably asked him to write a memo as to why their client was not culpable in an employment discrimination case, and he said, ‘Can I come over there?’ The only condition was we had to pay for his bar review course.”

  Davis and his brother grew up in Chicago. Because of their race, they did not live where the other professors and their families did. They lived on the west side of Cottage Grove Avenue, a strict dividing line between white and black Chicago. “Growing up, we lived with that ambiguity, that funny trick race plays on you in America. If we went to one side of Cottage Grove, the white kids beat us up. On the black side, that wasn’t our neighborhood, the black kids would beat us up,” Gordon revealed.

  Both of Davis’s sons are so light skinned that for those unfamiliar with very fair black people, they could easily be mistaken for white, and often are. Both self-identify as black and always have their whole lives. Gordon Davis recalled to a New York magazine writer that when he was playing basketball for Williams, one day he was trying to get a ride to a game. A car full of upperclassmen pulled up, and he hopped in. One said to him, “I hear we have a pretty good nigger on the freshman team.” His response: “Yes, that’s me.”

  It was a strange twist in their lives that their father’s work revealed so much about the power of skin color and its effects on educational and life opportunities. It is an irony not lost on either son. Allison Davis was a consultant for and made a cameo appearance in the movie The Human Stain, which is about a black professor who pretends to be white for much of his life. In the movie, Davis is on screen for about two minutes portraying a racist railroad car diner, a white man who is so rude and demanding he causes the heart attack of a Negro waiter. The scene is a flashback to an earlier event in the main character’s life. The colored waiter was actually a Negro doctor by day who was moonlighting for money to help his family, including his son, the passing-for-white protagonist in the film. “That’s when I kill the father.” Davis chuckled, “There are so many ironies in the movie. The college scenes are in fact shot at Williams. The first scene with Nicole Kidman is really the Williamstown post office. There’s a plaque honoring the issue of the [Allison Davis] stamp in the background. And … I’m an irony.” The irony was this: a real black man plays a fictional white racist who causes the death of a black man who is the father of a black son who passes as white.

  The issue of color within the black community is as complicated as that last sentence.

  7 CHROMATICS

  THE FOLLOWING EXCHANGE HAPPENED during a recent cab ride from Union Station after giving the driver the address 1301 New Jersey Avenue NW:

  “Oh, you’re going to Dunbar High School. You know, you had to be light-skinned to get in there.”

  “Oh, yeah? How do you know that? Did you grow up in DC?”

  “No, I’m from Long Island. That’s just what I heard.”

  If something is said long enough it becomes part of the mythology of a place. The specter of intra-racism stalks Dunbar’s reputation: Dunbar High School only allowed light-skinned blacks to attend. Only the children of black doctors, lawyers, and elites could go to Dunbar. Neither is quite accurate, but there is truthiness at the source of those claims.

  There was never a paper bag taped to the front door of Dunbar High and used as a basis for turning away anyone darker than the tan sack. Unless dark-skinned students only showed up on the days when pictures were taken, then there are thirty-one years’ worth of yearbooks offering visual proof that all of Dunbar students were not “light, bright, and damn near white.” And files full of parental contact sheets dispel the myth that all Dunbar parents were affluent doctors and lawyers. Plenty of parents had indeed done well financially and professionally, but many others held several jobs just to make ends meet.

  “Dunbar wasn’t a school for the elite,” maintains West Point graduate and one-time deputy assistant secretary of defense H. Minton Francis, Dunbar 1941. “Students from all economic classes and parts of the city went there. Brains were recognized, not money.”1

  Still, conversations with Dunbar graduates almost always touch upon color. A good portion of the alums downplay any such classist or color-struck behavior, or at least say they didn’t partake in it. One member of the class of 1935 put it this way:

  Anybody could go. We had students whose parents worked as domestics in rich people’s homes. It made no difference. But, everybody— anybody—could go. And then school was compulsory until you were sixteen, so we were all going to school. You know, we’ve done ourselves a whole lot of disservice because we put a lot of emphasis on color and hair. Like, one will say, “There’s no bad hair. If you got hair at all, it’s good hair.” I had a big argument with a lady, and when they do that, I get my yearbook. I said, “Now look at these pictures.”

  But it was quite a different reality for Dunbar students who experienced something profoundly unpleasant—or felt thoroughly unwanted— because of their looks or where they lived. The depth of the hurt was made very public by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Colbert King (Dunbar 1957), in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post Magazine, “The Kings of Foggy Bottom.”

  I remember my first day at Dunbar like it was yesterday. The class was biology. Our teacher, a very proper, fair-skinned woman, asked us to state our names and identify the junior high schools we had attended. Many of my new classmates had come from Banneker Junior High, the school for folks on the Hill situated across the street from Howard University. The teacher seemed to recognize several of the students as sons and daughters of men and women in her social circle. When those students identified themselves, she nodded approvingly.

  My turn. “Colbert King from Francis Junior High.” She looked as though she had encountered a bad odor. After class, I compared notes with Benjamin Riley, another student enrolling in Dunbar from nearby Terrell Junior High. He thought he had received the same snub.

  It is not that the light-skinned elite at
Dunbar openly ridiculed those of us who dared to try to make it or that our efforts went unrecognized by the teachers. But for the most part, they weren’t going to invite us into their social swirl.

  King’s piece points out an important part of high school that has nothing to do with official school policy or academics: social roles. It is well documented that for a long time black Washington high society was color- and status-conscious. Your test scores at Dunbar, no matter how fantastic, might not have translated into invitations to parties. A teacher might have shown another student more interest because of his or her ties to an old colored Washington family that had been in the District for decades. Sam Lacy, the great sportswriter, hated his time at Dunbar. He considered himself “one of the masses,” and Dunbar a club for the privileged. He left Dunbar his sophomore year to go to Armstrong. where most of his friends were enrolled.2

  College English professor Leroy Giles (Dunbar 1947), said of the issue, “It was legend in the ghettos where I came from: the dark-skinned Negroes were separated from light-skinned ones at Dunbar High School. Such was not true literally, but symbolically it was true, for professionals tended to be light skinned and their children hung out together.”

  Some graduates remember being turned away from outside social functions because of their skin tones. Floyd Robinson, a former star football player at Dunbar, adores his alma mater. He is handsome in his old age, and his white hair stands out against his dark skin. “We had a lot of clubs, and these clubs discriminated. There were some people they wouldn’t let in these clubs, and it’s just the way it was. Some of the discrimination wasn’t all based on color.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” his wife, Lonise, chimed in. She also went to Dunbar and is active in a class alumni group. “It had to do with the kind of social thing—”

  “It was both. It was both,” insisted Floyd. “There were some girls who could just get away with things.”

  “I think that, you know, while that was so, it goes back to slavery.”

  It is an old truth. Slaves and servants who worked in the fields did not get the same treatment as those who worked indoors. Luxuries such as learning to read were often reserved for those often lighter-skinned people who worked in the house. And those who worked in the house were often the offspring and/or lovers of the white plantation owners or employers, some of whom saw to it they were educated, even a little bit.

  Once emancipation arrived, the newly freed light-skinned servants and slaves had a long head start on education and all its advantages. The founding fathers of Dunbar were all free colored men who had some white ancestry and as a result had been afforded education. Their education and connections gave them the ability to negotiate the establishment of the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, Dunbar’s “grandfather” institution.

  It is most likely that the earliest students at the Preparatory School were descended from mixed parentage and prominent families. The academic rigors of the school required that students be able to read, and at the time, those students were children who had received some elementary schooling. In certain circles in the late nineteenth century, skin color meant access. It was an outgrowth of colorphobia that was normal among whites at the time. Take the case of Anita Hemmings, who was technically the first black graduate from Vassar College. Only Vassar did not know her race until days before her graduation in 1897. While most in her class thought she was just a “pronounced brunette,” as one person described Anita, her roommate had suspicions. The girl’s father hired a private investigator who discovered the truth. After she begged, the school chose to let her graduate—but Vassar did not admit another black woman for more than forty years. Truthfully it hadn’t thought it admitted a black woman in the first place. And that is why people chose to pass. It was a sad and often self-hating way to get a better job, a better home, or a better education.

  However, in the eyes of the law what you looked like did not matter. If you had “one drop of Negro blood in you,” that was enough. The fancy name for the one-drop rule is hypodescent, and at the turn of the century it was the legal measure. In Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia, a Negro was defined as a person with “any Negro blood however remote the strain.” In Arkansas the definition was a little more descriptive: a Negro was “defined in relation to carriers visible and distinct admixture and concubinage.” While in Florida and Mississippi a Negro would be “all persons with 1/8th or more Negro Blood and teachers and pupils must be the same race.”3 When Homer Plessy tried to ride in a Louisiana train car designated for white riders, arguing that he was by his calculation only one-eighth Negro, he was arrested. The Supreme Court case that bears his name, Plessy v. Ferguson, sealed the deal that blacks and whites were to be kept separate all the time, no matter what shade a person might be.

  Still, there were those who were color struck. The 1926 novel When Washington Was in Vogue cleverly reveals how much attention was paid to color within the black community. The book’s love story is told through a series of letters from a man newly arrived in Washington. The author, E. C. Williams, was the principal of M Street from 1909 to 1916, right up until the new Dunbar High School building opened. Throughout his tale, the book’s main character describes the various women he meets along the way.

  Now you will want to know about the belle of this particular set. Well she is a “peach” and no doubt. She has a handsome face, a fine color, pretty hair, a striking figure and vivacity plus. For sheer physical beauty, Tommie Dawson is quite her match, though you could not get many people in that crowd to admit it, for Tommie’s undisguised brownness would disqualify her at once.4

  Miss Clay was quite as stylish as Caroline. She would be a pretty brown girl if she would stop trying to be white. She was bleached several shades lighter as far as her face was concerned. I noticed first that her neck was very dark brown.5

  Manufacturers took advantage of some people’s desire to appear lighter skinned by marketing creams that would ostensibly do the trick. Negro newspapers often ran advertisements for Dr. Palmer’s Skin Lightening Cream, featuring the tag line CHOOSE YOUR OWN COMPLEXION. The skin cream, called ARTRA, promised “a lovelier lighter skin tone for you.”

  Many very, very fair-skinned blacks—people with green eyes or red hair—self-identify as black. The head of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955 was Walter White, a black man who looked white. He was so fair that when someone once asked him his race and he said Negro, the person answered, “Are you sure?”6 Walter White experienced the destruction that any kind of racism causes. In his autobiography he recalls when his own father, also fair skinned, was critically wounded in a car wreck and taken to a hospital. The whole family rushed to the scene. White’s darker-skinned brother-in-law, the first to reach the hospital, identified the man on the stretcher as family. The attending hospital workers were shocked at their own mistake. “Have we put a nigger in the white ward?” one asked.7 The hurt man was then taken out of the nicely appointed and well equipped facility and wheeled across the street to a dilapidated building for colored patients. Had Walter White arrived at the hospital first, instead of his brother-in-law, the ignorance of the hospital attendees might have worked to their family’s advantage. Walter White’s father died two weeks later.

  White could have passed for white. Many people chose to do so in search of easier lives, better places to live, steady jobs, or more desirable schools. The DC Board of Education regularly received complaints of colored students trying to pass as white. In the fall of 1904, representatives of the Kenilworth Citizens Association asked the board to attend to the following four items:8

  Providing water for the building before school opened.

  Completing a fence around the yard.

  Providing a teacher for the 7th and 8th grade.

  The children of John Colvin, a colored man, have been attending the Benning School, a white school, and should be transferred to a colored school.

  The first two were referred to the Committee on Building, Re
pairs, and Sanitation. The other two were kicked up to the superintendent, who in turn kicked item four back to the board. When the board asked Mr. Colvin for a response, Colvin maintained that he was white, his children were white, and they could attend that school. The board put the burden of proof on the Citizens Association, which quickly presented affidavits from people who swore they knew that Mr. Colvin was colored. Colvin demanded to see the papers and wrote this response to the board:

  I most respectfully state that I am a white man and married to a white woman. It is true that I have some Indian blood in my veins, but none of the African. I have never associated to any extent with colored people, or been known as a colored person. The names of the person who have signed letters and made affidavits in this matter are entirely unknown to me, except as to one. I further most respectfully state that I am willing, if the Board desires to produce affidavits or letters as to my wife’s, my children’s, and my associates, and also as to the nationality of my wife and myself.

  With that the board closed the matter but informed the principal in the school that it was his duty to transfer out any colored student enrolled in his school. The Colvins eventually had to take their children out of school and move because of harassment.

  The Colvins may or may not have been passing. It is possible John Colvin may not have known whether he was black. A popular story among the Dunbar set tells of a woman in Connecticut who didn’t know her father was black until after his death, when she found his Dunbar yearbook.

  Five years after the Colvin investigation, a more infamous case involved a little girl named Isabel who was barred from elementary school because someone informed a teacher she was “colored.” Seven-year-old Isabel had blonde hair and blue eyes. Unlike the Colvins, Isabel’s father didn’t completely deny any African ancestry. As a younger man, after all of his family had died or left Washington, he had simply moved to a white section of town and assumed life as a white Washingtonian.9 He married a white woman, and they sent their daughter to a white school. However, because he kept his name and his job with the Government Printing Office, people in other parts of DC knew of his earlier life. When confronted by the school principal and the board of education, he explained that his daughter was the fifth descendant of the marriage between a white man and an octoroon, and she was white as far as the family was concerned. As the New York Times put it when they covered this story, CHILD 128TH NEGRO BARRED FROM WHITE SCHOOL BY AUTHORITIES.10