First Class

by Alison Stewart

  “She was an excellent seamstress, making beautiful clothes, so that I never felt that I was dressed down. I was dressed up because my mother made these beautiful clothes. And books and ballet lessons and all the things that a little girl in Washington, at that time, should have, I had. And my folks did not have a lot of money. They just both worked very hard. During the height of the Depression, my father had three jobs. Sometimes we didn’t see him because he’d go from one, come home, take a shower, and then go.” Though her father had a law degree, he had to moonlight as a maître d’ at a country club.

  Carol had been born in Washington, but her upbringing was fairly southern. She spent a lot of summers with her grandparents in LaGrange, Georgia. Her grandfather Charles Henry Kelley was a Morehouse man who became a teacher and professor. He met his future wife, Frances Goss, when she was a student. Frances was originally from Alabama but moved to Georgia as a child. She only had three months of school a year but her teachers told her she had a good mind and someday she would make a “useful” woman. She always remembered that and wanted to make it come true. By her teenage years she had heard of Spelman Seminary for Women, but her father, a farmer, passed away. Her mother was left to care for the six children and money was tight. In 1890 Professor Kelley came to her community to teach in their school. The brown-skinned, bright-eyed girl showed so much promise that Professor Kelley told Frances’s mother that he would buy her daughter’s books and pay for Frances’s first semester at Spelman. Once she got to school, Frances paid for the rest of her schooling on her own by working as a laundress. When she returned to LaGrange, she and Charles Henry married in 1895 and had seven children. They both worked in LaGrange for forty-two years: he was the principal of the colored Union Street School and Frances taught. Upon their retirement, the city of LaGrange renamed the school the Kelley School in honor of Professor Kelley’s dedication. The superintendent of the LaGrange school system said, “He has been actively identified with all agencies seeking to improve his race. He is considered to be of the best citizens in LaGrange.” To Carol he was her loving yet serious grandfather while Grandma Frances was the sweetest woman Carol ever met. Although Carol was a goody two-shoes, her little brother was a rascal, and sometimes they would get into trouble for climbing a forbidden pecan tree in the backyard. When a whuppin’ was punishment, she was ordered to pick her own switch from the forsythia bush. One of her uncles was to take her out back for a whipping with the branch. He’d just tell her to yell really loudly while he whacked the ground.

  All the Kelley children were sent off to secondary schools in the early 1900s because the system in LaGrange would only take them so far. The boys went to Morehouse, and the girls to Spelman. Carol’s mother, Juanita, had gone to Atlanta when she was just fifteen, accompanied by her big sister Kate. The children all went their separate ways. Kate married well-known theologian Howard Thurman. Uncle Forrest, the faux disciplinarian, was a football star in college whom they called Shipwreck Kelley. He went on to teach phys ed in Marshall, Texas. Carol’s Uncle Charles became a doctor and set up the radiology department at Howard. Juanita met and married one of Charles’s Morehouse classmates, a staid, no-nonsense man named Mayhugh Arnold Graham.

  Mayhugh and Juanita Graham became the proud parents of Carol Jocelyn only twenty-six days after the great stock market crash of 1929. The following years were not easy. He worked in the insurance business and took a beating. Planning for the future, Mayhugh worked while he also attended law school, and he was in the first graduating class of the Terrell Law School in Washington, DC, named after the former M Street teacher and judge. The Grahams had another daughter, Gloria, who died when she was a baby. Juanita’s sister Kate died of tuberculosis, and there was a concern that Juanita had been exposed. She was put on bed rest for a year while Carol’s baby brother was sent to live with his grandparents in Georgia. Carol stayed home and grew up fast.

  With a law degree, her father finally found steady work after the Depression. He became a clerk for two powerful politicians who valued his legal training. Carol would not confirm or deny that he worked for Jesse Jones, chairman of the reconstruction finance corporation who was sometimes referred to as the “fourth branch of the government.” Because of Mayhugh’s hard work, serious manner, and contacts in the government, he was offered a big job, one that would make a lasting impression on his daughter. He would join the National Capital Housing Authority to help run the first public housing units in Washington, DC, the Langston Terrace Dwellings, and his family would live there.

  “When he went into housing, he believed that you should live on the premises, that if [residents] could see that the manager lived on the premises, then they could use that as kind of a role model. But my mother was always very cautious.” She did agree, however, because of the premise of the project.

  Carol’s father was drawn to the optimism of the project, which sought to provide clean community housing for people who had been, up to that point, marginalized. Carol recalled:

  The thesis was that poor people, if given an opportunity to have decent housing, that would be the critical issue which would help them turn their lives around. It sounds so idealistic to me now, but they really believed it. And because there was such a shortage of housing with people, not just poor black people, people coming to Washington for government jobs. Many of them came from good southern families, they just had no place to rent houses. His theory was, if you could put a family with limited exposure [into] good housing between two families who knew more, they could imitate and learn. So the housing people deliberately tried to intersperse— and on some level it worked.

  The city had cleared out all of the alley housing in the 1930s; and as part of the New Deal, public units were put up in the city. They were lovely, modern buildings, finely designed by Hilyard Robinson, a well-known black architect who was an M Street grad. There were small yards and beautiful public art. With only 274 units in Langston Terrace, the application process and tenant selection were important.

  I know when [the tenants] came to live in the project, I remember Daddy used to have meetings. They had what they called the Tenants Council to try to get them to understand what the principle of the whole thing was and how everybody was going to be uplifted, rising tide. But in many cases, when they tried to put too many, and they didn’t have enough of the ones with the middle-class values to intersperse, it went down instead of going up. And that’s what I called, Daddy used to call, “the failed dream.” Because their original dream was that this was going to be a turning point, but all over the country, I don’t think they’ve solved that problem yet.

  Originally the idea was to have a mix of people, and the process was a delicate balancing act. The balance was there for a time, but it ultimately tipped. It got to the point where half of the residents had come from crowded, single-family homes and areas of “disease and delinquency.”2 The Langston Terrace Dwellings became a slum.

  Carol learned important life lessons during her time in public housing. She was friends with all kinds of people and learned to get beyond stereotypes. “I never regretted it, because it gave me a different approach, I think, to people. While many of my friends were what people would have called ‘the elites,’ because I had had that experience with the public housing, and I knew what my father was trying to do in his idealism, I could see both sides of it. And I never felt that I was a snob because of that. I never felt that I was totally in the bubble. My parents brought me up so I could walk on both sides of the street.”

  After years of living and moving from public-housing unit to public housing unit, Carol’s mom, Juanita, wanted a house. She’d taken a job as a stenographer with John R. Pinkett, the big Negro real estate company in town founded by a Dunbar and Amherst alum of the same name. As she was working, a listing came across her desk for a lovely Tudor with a lawn. She fell in love with the house and knew it would be the perfect place to put down roots and plant a garden. And they could afford it. The problem w
as they couldn’t buy it. “In order to buy that house, my father and mother had to get a white couple to do it,” Carol explained.

  So that is exactly what the real estate agent did. They got a friend to look at the place on Evarts Street, and the rest happened quickly, according to Carol.

  “I remember Cliff and his fiancée went to the house, took pictures inside, took the property, and the little old man said: ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see this lovely young couple. Everybody in the neighborhood will be so happy to have you.’ Well—John Pinkett Jr. worked it out…. They sold the house to Cliff, and within an hour [he] sold the house to my parents.”

  The Grahams’ story of breaking a neighborhood color barrier turned out well. They saw their children and grandchildren enjoy that lawn. But things were not so easy for one of Carol’s teachers at Dunbar.

  The young student answered a customary question in language class. “Je m’appelle Carol Graham.”

  The teacher did not miss a beat. “Mademoiselle, you speak French with a southern accent!” That was what it was like to be seated in room 92 and on the receiving end of Mary Gibson Hundley’s sharp tongue. She was strict—very strict.

  Another notable characteristic of Madame Hundley was her keen interest in the students she deemed worthy to be placed in the best schools. Carol’s best pal, Tish, was clearly on her way to being class valedictorian, and Mrs. Hundley wanted to see to it that Miss Young had her choice of schools, including Hundley’s alma mater, Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister school.

  “Mrs. Hundley was really responsible for bringing me to the attention of the Radcliffe Club of Washington. They gave me a book and all that stuff my junior year and all of this helped me get into the place,” said Tish. More than sixty years later, she still had the book, a blue, leather-bound volume of the classic A Treasury of Great Poems. The inscription read, “Presented by the Radcliffe Club of Washington, D.C. To Letitia Young as the outstanding girl of the Junior Class, Dunbar High School 1946.”

  In retrospect, after a career as a teacher herself in Berkeley, Tish had a fondness for Hundley. “She was kind of amusing because she would do things like, my former husband was in the French class she taught, and she’d call on us to translate. Invariably, he would get up and he sounded like Reagan, ‘Well …’ And she’d say with this heavy voice, ‘Don’t fall in it.’ ”

  Mrs. Hundley considered Dunbar High School hers, and her claim to it was natural. In fact, she was the granddaughter of William Syphax, founder of Dunbar’s grandfather school. She had grown up steeped in the history of the colored high school, and her personal résumé was the height of “Dunbarness.”

  After graduating from M Street in 1914 at the top of her class, Hundley was accepted to Radcliffe. But she was not accepted into the dormitories, which were for white girls only. The opportunity was too great to bypass, so her mother accompanied her to Cambridge to look after her; the two shared a small apartment. And it was a good thing, too. Mary worked hard and made friends, but no amount of academic luster can protect a student from a racist professor. One day, young Mary came home and revealed, “A dean demanded that I work as a domestic if I ever had any hope of securing a scholarship.”3 That dean, Miss Bertha May Boody, was trumped by the president of Radcliffe college, LeBaron Russell Briggs, who arranged a loan for Mary.

  Many M Street/Dunbar graduates felt the sting of bigotry when they left the protective cocoon of the Negro Washington school system. When Ed Gray (M Street 1915), went to play football at Amherst, he tackled a white opponent only to have the player get up and angrily call him an “African ape.” The player later apologized and said he lost control because he had been outwitted and outplayed by a Negro. Dunbar teacher and graduate J. Leon Langhorne went to University of Michigan in the 1920s. A white student approached him and asked, “Don’t you wish you were white?” Langhorne responded, “Hell no. Why should I?” Later in his life Lang-horne wrote of the episode, “My family, my schooling, and religion had given me a sense of security and accomplishment. Self-esteem would guide me in confronting obstacles. I was the first Negro to receive a sweater for playing tennis at Michigan. It was a hard struggle but I finally succeeded.”

  Langhorne, like many of the Negro men and women who went to college, found comfort and companionship in the Negro fraternity system. The Greek organizations began with small groups of men and women devoted to scholarship and support. Several of the most powerful of these groups have ties to M Street. Both Nathaniel Allen Murray (M Street 1905) and Robert Harold Ogle (M Street 1905) helped found Alpha Phi Alpha at Cornell in 1906. Two of the three founders of Omega Phi Psi were M Street graduates, Frank Coleman (M Street 1908) and Oscar J. Cooper (M Street 1908). On the sorority side, the Alpha Kappa Alphas count M Street graduates Margaret Flagg Holmes (M Street 1904), Sarah Meriweather Nutter (M Street 1906), Julia Brooks ( M Street 1904 ), and Nellie Quander (M Street 1898) as pioneers of the AKA dynasty. And Vashti Turley Murphy was one of the original members of Delta Sigma Theta. They are all men and women whose names are committed to memory today by their modern-day brothers and sisters. Years ago these fraternities and sororities provided a real haven for Negro students in college and beyond.

  Dunbar’s college bureau was the domain of Mary Hundley. By the 1940s she’d spent her adult life at Dunbar guiding students to certain schools and making sure the colleges couldn’t say no. In one piece of correspondence to an admissions officer she makes the case for reconsidering a girl of prominence whose application had been rejected. The Sarah Lawrence admissions officer wrote back politely declining and adding, “As perhaps you know, Carol Graham, another graduate of the Dunbar High School, also applied to us and the Committee has passed her application…. I hope we will have her at the College.”4

  Hundley kept copious notes about which faculty had gone to what colleges and how many students received Rosenwald grants. She even tracked student IQs. It was her mission, at all costs, to maintain Dunbar’s reputation for placing students in highly selective schools. And often those students were the ones she selected herself. She had her pets and pushed those students she liked and admired toward greatness. Others felt left out. She was a woman to be both admired and feared. You couldn’t argue that she wasn’t accomplished and brilliant. You could argue about whether or not she played favorites.

  By the time she was in her early forties, she was making about $3,200 a year, and her second husband, an art teacher, was making a little bit less. She wanted to buy a new home and found a great place at 2530 Thirteenth Street NW. It was modest, about 1,800 square feet, white brick with a nice front porch. The houses on the street were adjacent, built right up against one another. Sitting on the front porch, it would be easy to chat with passersby or the people next door. That is, unless those neighbors went to court to have you evicted from your new home.

  The Hundleys took possession of the house on January 17, 1941. Immediately, the couple began to fix up the house and would ultimately spend a huge amount of money, nearly $2,000 on it—two-thirds of Mrs. Hundley’s annual salary.

  Three months later, the people who lived next door, Rebecca Gorewitz of 2528 Thirteenth Street NW, and the folks one house over, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Bogikes of 2534 Thirteenth Street NW, filed a lawsuit asking that the Hundleys be removed from No. 2530. The white neighbors said the Hundleys’ ownership was breaking a restrictive racial covenant set in place in 1910. According to the neighbors’ case, colored neighbors were undesirable and destroyed the value of their homes. The Gorewitzes in particular were upset. On one side of their home was a Negro family living in one of the few houses not covered by the covenant, and now on the other side were the Hundleys. They would not be surrounded.

  The original developers of the street, Harry B. Wilson and Harry Wardman, placed a covenant on five of the six houses on the 2500 block of Thirteenth Street NW which provided that the property never be rented, leased, sold, transferred, or conveyed to colored persons.5

  One Great Depression later, the whi
te owners of 2530 Thirteenth Street NW lost the house. A New Deal program created the Home Owner Loan Corporation to take on underwater mortgages, and it absorbed the property. The house was snapped up by a white real estate developer on January 13, 1941, and four days later the deed was conveyed to the Hundleys.

  The covenants were contracts intertwined with the deeds of properties, and the covenants’ terms applied to all future buyers. No amount of education, no amount of money, no amount of prestige within Washington’s Negro community could protect the Hundleys from the embedded racism in the District. The Hundleys needed a good lawyer, so they turned to Charles Hamilton Houston, former valedictorian of M Street, class of 1911.

  Houston’s passion for civil rights began after he graduated from Amherst and went into the army. The legend goes that the racism he suffered in the segregated army, including a near beating, informed the rest of his career. Houston’s purpose in life became legally dismantling the racist underpinnings of America’s legal system. As dean of Howard Law School, he made sure the students who passed through the classrooms at Howard understood the role of the lawyer.

  A lawyer is either a social engineer or … a parasite on society…. A social engineer [is] a highly skilled, perceptive, sensitive lawyer who [understands] the Constitution of the United States and [knows] how to explore its uses in the solving of problems of local communities and in bettering conditions of the underprivileged citizens.

  Eleven months after they bought their home, the Hundleys were told to leave. A judge agreed that the covenant was enforceable. The Hundleys’ deed was declared void. They found a renter—a white renter—while they pursued the case, but the situation was frustrating and embarrassing. One day when Mr. Hundley went to check on the house, the neighbors called the police on him. The Hundleys weren’t even allowed to get the keys from the renter when he was leaving. In a letter addressed “Dear Mollie and Fred,” Houston wrote: