First Class

by Alison Stewart

  “Sure enough,” Joe said, shaking his head when he thought about the scene. The second day they were out there, they had some company. “We were very respectful and we had our pads and our petition sheets, and the local cops showed up—the white cops.” It is a moment in a black man’s life that he is not surprised to experience, being stopped on a public sidewalk by the police—especially then in the nation’s segregated capital. First, the officers rolled up in a shiny black Studebaker, a Metropolitan Police insignia gleaming from the metal grille on the front. For a while the officers watched as the boys asked locals to support their movement. When it became clear that Jo-Jo and Leon were not intimidated by their presence, the officers got out of their squad car and approached on foot.

  “What are you boys doing?” demanded one officer.

  Jo-Jo did the talking. He politely explained their mission and offered nothing more, knowing that the situation could end poorly. One of the stern-faced policemen took out a pad and gruffly asked for their names.

  “Joseph Stewart.”

  The officer wrote it down and turned to Jo-Jo’s friend.

  “L-E-O-N-R-A-N-S-O-M. Leon Ransom.”

  The officer’s demeanor changed quickly. “One of the cops recognized Leon’s name.”

  Leon Ransom was the son of Leon A. Ransom, the NAACP attorney and civil rights crusader. After an awkward silence, the officer flipped his pad closed and said, “All right, you boys behave yourselves.” They got back into their car and drove away.

  “They figured if we do anything to these kids, it’s going to be more trouble than it is worth,” Joe Stewart said, chuckling at the memory.

  At that time Leon A. Ransom, referred to as Andy by his friends, had been on the Howard faculty since 1931. He worked with fellow Harvard Law grad Charles Hamilton Houston, then dean of Howard Law School, and Thurgood Marshall, future US Supreme Court justice. They were all part of a generation of legal minds out of Howard who were on a mission to use the courts to unravel the tightly woven threads of segregation and rip apart legally sanctioned racism.

  Ransom handled some egregious civil rights cases. He appeared in front of the Supreme Court and argued successfully for the freedom of several black men charged with murder in southern states. In DC, however, the problems were less flagrant than the police rounding up forty black males and forcing a confession out of one of them, as happened in Ransom’s case Chambers v. Florida. In Washington, the discrimination, especially for the working class to upper-middle class Negroes, was felt in the schools, workplace, and housing. Litigation and legislation seemed to be the answer.

  Activism was brewing in the city. The wide, stable, and educated middle class was all about achieving better jobs and gaining economic independence. The engine of the movement was an organization called the New Negro Alliance (NNA). The NNA’s founders and legal team were made up of former Dunbar teachers and students, including John Davis (brother of Allison Davis), Kelly Miller, and William Hastie, who went on to become the first black federal court judge. Their first targets were stores that would not let Negroes clerk or serve in any administrative positions, even in Negro neighborhoods. Peoples Drug. High Ice Cream Company. A&P.

  Despite threats from the Klan, the NNA was quite successful in integrating workplaces and empowering young Negro men like the team of Stewart and Ransom. Years later, when seventy-nine-year-old Joe Stewart was asked why, at just fifteen years old, he had participated in pickets like those started by the NNA, he replied, “I was pissed off.”

  Different families approached the segregation and the restriction of personal freedoms in different ways. Some didn’t discuss it—it was just the way things were. Some tried to create a social force field around their children so they would not become infected by thoughts of inferiority or bitterness. James Grigsby, Dunbar ’46, remembers his mother’s sweet way of protecting her five kids from any sort of humiliation: she only took them to outside events.

  My mother would always say she loved parades. And my parents took us sightseeing on Sunday afternoons. But my mother always told us when she was taking us out, “You are not going to go to the bathroom because those public toilets are too dirty.” And so I guess we had to have strong systems. When I look at children that have to go to the bathroom when they go to the store, I realize that it was a way of keeping us from knowing that we were not allowed. That’s why we love parades to this day. But they kind of shielded us. But the first time I really felt segregation was when I went into the service, and it was something about going down to Richmond. You had to eat in the colored sections, and that was just awful. That was awful. We never saw anything black and white in writing in Washington. But I guess our people were so sophisticated they wanted to protect us from that kind of thing. It was like an unwritten thing.

  Living her whole life in segregation, one Dunbar student just had to satisfy her curiosity about her peers. One day she altered her route to Dunbar and chose to walk through a different neighborhood. “I wanted to see what they looked like,” she explained. “I really wanted to see what these white children looked like.”

  When I met her, Yvonne Clayton (Dunbar 1935) was still as sassy as she had been on the day she decided to stroll past the white high school. All her life she had been a voracious reader, and was still getting through one or two books a week. “I read all the time. If you had come in yesterday, my books were piled here. I read my books several times. I just got through reading the Twilight series and Edward Cullen and the vampires. I fell in love with that man! The most romantic story I have ever read.” She was a ninety-two-year-old Twi-hard.

  Yvonne liked a good story, and could spin a good one too:

  This particular day, I thought, “I’m going to walk down Eleventh Street to get to school.” I was curious as to what it would look like to go past Central High School when students were there. So, I started down Eleventh Street. One block, I noticed it was like ten AM and all the students were—well, it was like the point of no return! I could have turned back a half a block and then walked down Sherman…. I said, “No, I’m going to see what they look like.” I had never seen a lot of white children in my life. At any rate, I start down the street, and I suddenly realized that the children are on both sides of the street. OK. I was petrified. I was absolutely frightened to death. The talk about being afraid of us—I was absolutely frightened to death.

  At that point the smile on her face and the gleam in Mrs. Clayton’s eyes made her look fifteen years old again.

  I was frightened that they might say something to me or hit me or, in some way, molest me, not sexually, cause that wasn’t even in my thinking. I was just absolutely … but I said, “Oh, my God, I’ve got to walk.” It was, like, between the boys, someone sitting on the curb and someone leaning up against the walls of the high school. So, I said, “OK, Yvonne. You’re a stupid ——. Just make it to Florida Avenue.” So I started walking. And, I didn’t look left nor right. But, as I closed my eyes, I could see some of the boys are turning around, and I kept on walking. I tell you, I have never been so frightened in my life. When I got to Florida Avenue, I took off like a rocket. And I thank God that I had made it, and I ran all the way to school. And, I tell you one thing: I never did that again. But, that’s the first time I had ever seen more than, maybe, one or two white children.

  Of course, Yvonne couldn’t keep her adventure to herself and had to tell all her friends at Dunbar how she had gotten to school that day and what she had seen.

  “I got to school and told the other students about my experience and they said, ‘You were crazy.’ ”

  Hers is a funny story, but under other circumstances, her decision could have been a dangerous one. One graduate remembered his father telling him never to run, even if he was late. In some eyes, running while black justified the assumption of guilt. Another graduate remembered having to get a note to walk through a certain part of town. And no matter how hard Dunbar students studied or how much of The Odyssey they could r
ecite, they still could not go into Garfinckel’s Department Store.

  And perhaps the most famous—and ultimately embarrassing— example of segregation in the nation’s capital occurred in 1939, when world-famous opera singer Marian Anderson was banned from performing at Constitution Hall because the venue was for whites only. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Ms. Anderson to give a very public concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead.

  The parents and teachers of Dunbar gave students a great gift: self-esteem. The students understood segregation was a tool of degradation and rejected any concept of inferiority. Dunbar students were taught to be the best—and in many cases were the best. They learned Negro history. They saw role models in their teachers and in Negro speakers, businessmen, and scholars. Dunbar drilled into them that they were as good, if not better, than any student in the city, if not the country. Dunbar graduates were armed with excellence.

  “They didn’t have that at my high school in New York, teachers who cared that way.” And for that reason, Jo-Jo Stewart knew Dunbar was the place he needed to be, even if the social nature of the city wasn’t his thing. His track coach, the always approachable Mr. Jacobs, was looking out for him. A common encounter went something like this:

  Jo-Jo: I’ve got a big test tomorrow, and I would like to skip practice so I can study for my test.

  Coach Jacobs: Boy, you go study for that test. That’s the most important thing that you can do … But how come you’ve got to cram so late?

  “He really cared what happened to all of us who were on his teams, and he talked to all of us, and he always enforced the idea that we should be gentlemen in terms of competition, that we should win the right way and that while sports were important to us, the reason we were in school was for education.” When Joe reflected on the experience, he could see the good it did him. He had strong male role models, he ran track, was a class officer. He saw that people cared. But his sense of individuality was at odds with the advice given to young Negro men at the time.

  He [Jacobs] said, “Remember you have to be a credit to our race.” I agreed with it, but it mildly pissed me off that it was a fact that had to be considered. And one of the things that interested me is that some people couldn’t understand why I would be mildly pissed off. Why should that be a consideration? That I have to be a credit to my race? I need to be a credit to myself as an individual because people ought to not be looking at my race, they ought to be looking at me as an individual. I have very strong feelings about that.

  Jo-Jo Stewart also developed strong feelings for a dear friend and girl he met at church, Carol Graham. At the time he was dating another girl in her class, but he and Carol became confidantes. “She was serious. A really good person. I mean, very genuine. I thought she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen … and the best part was that I could talk to her, and she was intelligent. She was so smart, and there was something about her.” They were married for almost fifty-five years before Joe passed away.

  Slated to graduate in 1947, Carol Graham cared about her studies and her two friends. “We were like the Three Musketeers,” her dear friend Letitia “Tish” Young remembered. Under Tish’s yearbook picture, the editors assigned her the description “charming.” She was an elegant, lanky girl with big eyes. The third musketeer was a sparkling, voluptuous gal named Carolyn Cobb. Next to her yearbook picture was printed the word “entertaining.” Next to Carol’s, it read “vivacious.” Tish and Carolyn lived near each other and walked to school together. There they would meet up with Carol, whose family moved around quite a bit. They would remain friends for years, rotating as bridesmaids in each other’s weddings.

  Joe Stewart and Carol Graham, the author’s parents, 1951.

  Back then, Carolyn had the luxury and burden of being the daughter of a legend. Her father, Dr. W. Montague Cobb, was a notable presence in Washington. Although he would refer to himself as “just a printer’s son,” Dr. Cobb was a nationally recognized leader in medicine. His field of study was anthropology and the crossroads of anatomy and racial discrimination. In his lifetime, he was published more than a thousand times. He worked his whole life for integration in national medical organizations.

  Dr. Cobb’s intelligence and ability to weave words were both dizzying and terrifying. A Dunbar graduate himself (class of 1921), Dr. Cobb was the chair of the anatomy department at Howard University. He was a major obstacle for Howard medical students, but he was a good kind of obstacle. He wanted the doctors he trained to be twice as good, because he knew they needed to be twice as good to get half as far. Almost six thousand medical students—two generations’ worth of black of doctors— endured Dr. Cobb’s rigorous classes. Medical students could not graduate until they survived the “Cobb Cadaver Walk,” a final clinical exam on gross anatomy. While the young students dealt with the dead bodies, Dr. Cobb would sit in the corner and play the violin as they struggled through the exam. Carol recalled, “He was a brilliant man, although he taught anatomy, so they all dreaded him because they said he was the toughest professor they had, but he was just showing them that they had to be better. They couldn’t just go out and party on the weekend—they had to be ready to walk through what they call that cadaver walk. You ask my brother.”

  While Carol’s younger brother dealt with Dr. Cobb as a teacher, she knew him as her best friend’s dad. However, even if a young person wasn’t a med student at Howard, Dr. Cobb would test him or her—say, at the dinner table. Like most girlfriends, Carolyn would often invite Carol over to hang out.

  “I would go to dinner at the Cobbs’, and they were very gracious, and her mother Hilda taught—she taught the fourth grade or something like that.”

  Dinner at the Cobbs’ was a bit formal, with a white linen tablecloth laid on the long table in their lovely brownstone dining room. They had a maid, and sometimes Carolyn’s grandmother was there also. Dinner could be going along well and then Dr. Cobb would start firing off questions to the teenage girls.

  “He would sit at the table, and he would just start to ask questions: What do you know about? And I remember he scared me to death.”

  One evening the subject was anatomy. Dr. Cobb trained his eyes on his daughter’s friend.

  “Carol, what is Australopithecus? Australopithecus!”

  The conversation at the table stopped.

  “Oh, Daddy, you know, can’t we have a peaceful dinner?” Carolyn was the only person who could talk to the great Dr. Cobb in such a way. “You are not lecturing—you are not in school!” Carolyn continued. She was like her father in that she had a quick mouth. Carol couldn’t do that as a guest; she had good manners hammered into her.

  “Dr. Cobb, I don’t know …” was all Carol could manage to say.

  This was an unpardonable sin. “But, oh you must know these things!” He would then give a little lecture to the girls. Carol went on to become a biology teacher and became well aware that Australopithecus is one of the oldest forms of extinct hominids closely related to humans. But in Dr. Cobb’s world, it was something a fifteen-year-old girl should know. But even then, Carol knew there was a greater lesson Dr. Cobb was trying to teach his pretty daughter and her pretty friends: you must know things.

  Carol continued to join the Cobbs for dinner because she understood that. “What he was saying is, ‘You have to get beyond your little boxes. You have to think outside the box.’ So I have always had a great deal of respect for him, because he would not be limited.”

  It was a lesson she took to heart. Despite a very conservative home life, she did her best to try new things. She would visit her relatives in Brooklyn when she could. She was able to ride the B&O Railroad for free because her uncle was a Pullman porter. She took part in local events in DC.

  One day she was called to the Dunbar office and told she was going to meet Hazel Markel, “the First Lady of Radio” in Washington, DC. Markel spoke nine languages and during her career reported for NBC and was the White House correspondent for Ra
dio One.1 Carol knew this was a big deal. “She was a brilliant woman,” she later explained, “really ahead of her time.” And now Markel was the news director at WTOP in Washington. “Hazel Markel called the school—which is unheard of, because the school is segregated—and said, ‘I’m going to start a program on Saturday mornings for young people at the different schools, and I think Dunbar should be represented.’ And it was called, ‘Youth Takes a Stand.’ Miss Brooks called me down to the office and said, ‘There is an experiment going on, and we would like you to try it. We think you can handle it.’ ” It was a show on which black and white students got together and talked about current events, live on the radio.

  Carol was a natural. “In the process, Hazel Markel said to me, ‘Get out of the stereotype,’ and I guess I was sufficiently verbal or articulate— I don’t know what the adjective would be—but Hazel Markel was the one who really took a liking to me, and she said to me, ‘We have to do something about you.’ ” Markel suggested that Carol think about going to one of the northern women’s schools rather than staying in Washington and going to Howard or Miner Teachers College.

  Carol Graham began to investigate the options as Markel guided her along. “Sarah Lawrence. Hazel Markel was the one who encouraged me, because she knew of the school, and she said, ‘I think that would be great.’ But, of course, the big problem was money.”

  Actually, there were two problems: money and convincing her conservative father to let his only daughter go to school in New York with the fanciest of girls. She was going to have to be a scholarship student. It was a simple calculation. “I had to keep my grades up.”

  Carol was always perfectly dressed in pencil skirts and peplum tops, her long jet-black hair pinned up and back perfectly, Andrews Sisters-style. She looked as if she came from means, but she did not; her mother made her clothes.