Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  There are elite primary schools for blacks as well, and one of the most selective of these is the Junior Academy of Brooklyn, which takes children—mostly from Brooklyn and Manhattan—from nursery school through junior high school. “To gain admittance, students must be recommended either by the parent of a child in the school or by a church or one of the recognized organizations, such as Jack and Jill of America or the Business and Professional Women,” explains Mrs. Dorothy M. Bostic, who founded the Academy in the late 1940s. “Most of our students are the children of professionals. We always have a long waiting list for the earlier grades.”

  For many years, boys and girls who attended such schools as the Junior Academy or Palmer or St. Francis de Sales were sent away to summer camp at the equally elitist Camp Atwater in East Brookfield, Massachusetts. Like Palmer, Camp Atwater had vaguely religious origins and was run by the Springfield Urban League—supposedly for the children of underprivileged blacks in the Springfield area. In fact, it turned out to be something very different, and “underprivileged” children arrived at Camp Atwater in chauffeur-driven limousines from New York, New Jersey, Washington, and Philadelphia. The daughter of the president of Howard University was a camp counselor. Such families as the distinguished Dammonds from New York sent their children to Camp Atwater. (The Dammonds are descendants of Ellen Craft, a heroine from slave days; so fair was Ellen Craft’s skin—she, the family claims, was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson—that she was able to disguise herself as a white man going north for medical treatment and to escape slavery in Georgia. Traveling with her was a “manservant” named William, who was actually Ellen Craft’s husband. They traveled to Boston in first class accommodations, and arrived in time to take part in a mass meeting against slavery at Faneuil Hall.)

  Atwater, under the surveillance of a Reverend and Mrs. DuBarry of Springfield, was strictly run. July was for the girl campers, and August was for the boys. “We all knew each other, and our parents all knew each other,” recalls one alumna of many July summers at Atwater. “I remember one afternoon, coming home from a canoe trip, and seeing all the girls from my cabin in a huddle down by the side of the lake. There was obviously some sort of crisis. It turned out that two little black-skinned girls from Springfield had arrived whom nobody knew. We didn’t know who their parents were. They didn’t look like us, dress like us, talk like us. We were sure they were covered with germs. We made them sleep in the center of the cabin, as far away from our bunks as we could get them.”

  Far more important than where an upper-class black goes to prep school or camp has been which fraternity or sorority he or she joins at college, or which club or fraternal order he or she joins afterward. In fact, black educators have often complained that, in terms of the Greek letter societies, upper-class black parents spend far more time and energy grooming and preparing their children for the social side of college life than they do for the academic side. On most college campuses, the most prestigious sorority is Alpha Kappa Alpha, followed by Delta Sigma Theta, both of which were founded at Howard University. The real reason why Delta Sigma Theta does not have the status of AKA is probably that AKA is smaller; Delta has nearly 250 chapters, while AKA has just over a hundred. To get into AKA on most campuses it is almost essential that one’s mother have been an AKA also, and, preferably, one’s grandmother. As for the Deltas, according to one AKA, “The Delta girls were never quite as respectable.” To counter allegations than they are snobbish and exclusive, the AKA’s point out that their chapters and alumnae organizations raise thousands of dollars a year for scholarships, and to help to support such organizations as the N.A.A.C.P., the Urban League, and the United Negro College Fund. The Deltas, on the other hand, have been cited by the American Library Association for their bookmobile and library projects.

  The oldest black college fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi, was organized in Philadelphia in 1904, and has now come to be known simply as Boulé. Although the original aim of this society was to bring together “an aristocracy of talent,” Boulé quickly became a symbol of all that is snobbish, restrictive, and antiblack in American Negro education. Only the “best” black men were taken into Boulé, membership in each chapter was kept small, and the number of chapters was kept few. To belong to Boulé meant that a man had escaped from the working class, and had entered the bourgeoisie, if not the elite. Two years later, as an “answer” to Boulé’s exclusiveness, Alpha Phi Alpha was founded by eight black students at Cornell. Since then, Alpha Phi Alpha has expanded to membership in the tens of thousands and, because of its size, it has somewhat eclipsed Boulé in social importance on American campuses and in the quality of black business and professional men it has produced. Alpha Phi Alpha likes to boast that it has produced over forty college presidents, dozens of judges, a number of bishops, and that more than half the alumni members in the Philadelphia and Greater New York chapters are doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and men who own their own businesses. (“Better and Bigger Negro Business” is one of the mottoes of the fraternity.)

  Neither Alpha Phi Alpha nor Sigma Pi Phi, however, has had the impact on black businesses that the black fraternal orders have had. As early as 1865, there were black lodges of Elks, Odd Fellows, Masons, and True Reformers in every city in America that contained a significant black population. The oldest of these black societies is the Masonic Order, organized in Boston in 1775 and chartered twelve years later by the Grand Lodge of England under the name African Lodge Number 459. It was founded by Prince Hall, a West Indian, along with fourteen other blacks assigned to a British army regiment. The original purpose of the order was to provide members with mutual aid and protection in times of sickness and “distress.”

  Prior to the Civil War, there were at least two secret societies in existence set up by free blacks in the South—the Galilean Fishermen and the Nazarites. After Emancipation, a proliferation of others came into being, including the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, the Order of Good Samaritans, and the Colored Knights of Pythias. Each had its secret ritual and ceremony, an esoteric handshake and other signals and codes of ethics for its membership.

  The social and political life of the black community revolved around the meetings, parties, conventions and other affairs that took place at these lodges. They were where banquets and wedding receptions were held, where card parties were organized. They were centers of community news and gossip and, it would seem, of interminable feuding among the members.

  These lodges collected large sums of money. There was a seemingly endless variety of dues and assessments—local dues, grand lodge dues, supreme grand lodge dues, initiation fees, grand lodge fees, supreme grand lodge fees, and special fees, plus assessments for building funds, endowment funds, education funds, and special funds. Many fraternal orders also sold such paraphernalia as fraternal rings, pins, tie clips, cufflinks, sweetheart pins and other jewelry, as well as the costumes and other trappings that were put on for special meetings and occasions. It has been estimated that blacks contributed at least $168,000,000 to fraternal orders between 1870 and 1920. Many lodges also sold insurance and endowment policies to their members.

  What the members got in return for their large outlays of cash is worth noting. Obviously, as the lodges and clubhouses quickly became repositories of large amounts of black capital, there were certain dangers, and there were many men who just as quickly lost sight of their orders’ lofty goals, and were led into temptation. For a lodge treasurer to vanish with lodge funds was not unknown, and so it was essential that the man who supervised the coffers be a person of the highest probity and integrity. He had, in fact, to become the town’s leading black citizen, topmost in the pecking order, the equivalent of the president of the town’s biggest bank. Often, he was the town’s leading physician or clergyman (black churches were also collecting large amounts of money).

  The lodges were, in fact, the first black banks, and most of the black banks in America—as well as the black insurance companies-grew directly out of them.
The lodges loaned money to their members, provided savings accounts and depositories for valuables, and offered mortgages. They were kindergartens and training schools in high finance. Because the lodges were, after all, private clubs, not only the treasurers but the general membership were learning how to handle and invest money. The monthly meeting when the treasurer’s report was read was usually unanimously attended. Some lodges went directly into business. The Grand Lodge of Masons of Mississippi, for example, early in the twentieth century bought a thousand acres of timberland and went into the lumber business. During the same period, the True Reformers organized a bank, a chain of retail stores, a hotel, a newspaper, a nursing home for old people, and an all-black community called Browneville. The Independent Order of St. Luke, under the leadership of a forceful black woman named Maggie L. Walker, operated a printing plant, a bank, an office building, a restaurant and restaurant supply house, and a department store.

  The argument, often given, that blacks have not attained a degree of wealth and success because of their “late entry” into the commercial world, is not valid. Between 1900 and 1910 there was an unprecedented black business and building boom, as the members of the various lodges within a city, or in other cities, strove to outdo each other for the good of themselves and the good of the order. In the process, of course, of building larger and larger buildings and acquiring larger and larger properties, many lodges overextended themselves, and many of their enterprises passed quickly into white hands. There was also the apparently insoluble problem of internecine bickering, jealousy, and squabbling. What seemed to be the major black business coup of this period was undertaken by the Odd Fellows of Georgia, under the leadership of a dynamic man named Benjamin T. Davis. In 1912, the Georgia Odd Fellows bought an entire block of land on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, and constructed a five-story office building at a cost of $250,000. The following year, Davis and his group built an auditorium on the rest of the land for $180,000. At this point, however, when things seemed rosiest, the members of the order fell to wrangling. There were charges, countercharges, recriminations, and accusations of alleged mismanagement of funds. The disputes could not be settled, and the order went into receivership in 1916.

  Feuding, mismanagement, lack of expertise, excessive and in some cases conspicuous spending (the earliest black banks went in heavily for costly marble facades, heavy chandeliers, carved pilasters, and ceilings decorated with gold leaf) all conspired to doom many early black enterprises—along with the eagerness with which white men moved in and took over the moment a black business began to founder. And yet the fraternal lodges, and the businesses they spawned and in some cases ruined, taught important lessons. The first black bank in America, the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company, was chartered in 1865, on the initiative of missionary groups and the Freedmen’s Bureau, by the United States government. It was ostensibly a philanthropic operation to help the freed slave enter the economic community, “organized and controlled by white friends of the Negro for his benefit.” It was also designed to encourage black thrift and initiative and, to black men of the period, the creation of the Freedmen’s Bank was as symbolic of their new freedom as the Emancipation Proclamation. No one expressed this better than Frederick Douglass, the wealthy black Washingtonian who became the bank’s last president, when he said, “The history of civilization shows that no people can well rise to a high degree of mental or even moral excellence without wealth.… The mission of the Freedmen’s Bank is to show our people the road to a share of the wealth and well being of the world.” Douglass had been a slave who escaped and made his way to Canada, and then to England. In London, he had been taken up by Mayfair society, where he was something of a curiosity. No one could believe that this courtly, bearded gentleman had actually been a slave, and enough money was raised—$700—to buy him his freedom. He returned to the United States, where he went on the lecture circuit as an eloquent and outspoken Abolitionist. From his lectures and, later, from his Rochester-based newspaper, the North Star, he became a rich man.

  In addition to its supposedly lofty aims, it was generally assumed that funds deposited in the Freedmen’s Bank were protected by the government. To bolster this misconception, the passbooks that were issued to depositors were emblazoned with the likenesses of President Lincoln, General Grant, General Howard, and others whom blacks had come to regard as their saviors, and the bank buildings themselves were draped and festooned with American flags. The bank’s initial capitalization came from hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of unclaimed deposits of black soldiers who had died or disappeared during the Civil War and left no survivors, and in its first year branches were opened in Louisville, Richmond, Nashville, Wilmington, Memphis, Mobile, and Vicksburg. By 1871, there were thirty-four branches, thirty-two of them in the South and, at its peak, the bank had seventy thousand depositors and deposits of $19,952,647.

  The trouble was that, though the bank used black cashiers and tellers—who dressed in high collars, morning coats, and wore red-white-and-blue boutonnieres—and, in some branches, employed black “advisors,” the board of directors of the Freedmen’s Bank was a mixture of financially naïve, though well-meaning, white missionaries, and financially unscrupulous white entrepreneurs who were looking for their road “to a share of the wealth, etc.” The $260,000 headquarters of the Freedmen’s Bank in Washington had a particularly imposing facade of tall brownstone slabs, and was elegantly appointed and furnished within. But behind the closed doors of the directors’ chamber, the schemers were at work—making illegal loans to one another, investing in overcapitalized and speculative ventures, or simply dipping their hands into the till. Later, it turned out that for most of its existence the Freedmen’s Bank was actually controlled by the notorious New York financier Jay Cooke, and by 1872 the bank had been all but destroyed by fraud and embezzlement. As economic conditions got worse in 1873, and Cooke and his henchmen began to see the handwriting on the wall, the directors cast about for a black man to name as president. The most distinguished black of the day was Frederick Douglass, and so the honor was given to him. If worse came to worst, went the reasoning, the blame for the bank’s collapse would fall on a black man.

  Douglass should have known better than to accept the post or at least have done a bit of probing into the bank’s financial situation. Later, he was to say sadly, “I inherited a corpse.” But at the time, no doubt, the offer to be a bank president flattered his ego, and he clearly enjoyed it when, as he wrote, “I waked up one morning to find myself seated in a comfortable arm chair, with gold spectacles on my nose, and to hear myself addressed as President of the Freedmen’s Bank. I could not help reflecting on the contrast between Frederick the slave boy, running about at Col. Lloyd’s with only a tow linen shirt to cover him, and Frederick—President of a Bank—counting its assets by millions.”

  And worse did come to worst, just three months later, with the Panic of 1873. Douglass ordered desperate economies, and even invested $10,000 of his own money in hopes of saving the sinking institution. But it was much too late, and Douglass ordered the bank to close its doors. All across the country the news of the closing of the Freedmen’s Bank struck the black community like a thunderbolt. Weeping and unbelieving, blacks whose savings had been inside lined the streets outside the banks’ locked branches. W. E. B. DuBois said, “Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their special aid.” And the Nation, it seemed, had made no guarantee of depositors’ accounts. In all, over a million dollars in savings were lost by the newly freed slaves.

  It was not until fifteen years after the Freedmen’s Bank debacle that, out of the fraternal orders, banks for blacks were tried again. In October, 1888, the Capital Savings Bank opened in Washington. That same year, organized by the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers, a savings bank by the same lengthy name was chartered, also in Wash
ington. Next came the Mutual Trust Company of Chattanooga, and, in 1890, the Alabama Penny Savings and Loan Company opened in Birmingham. Between 1899 and 1905, twenty-eight more banks were organized by blacks, most of them by fraternal lodges. Most of them, too, went under—through bad management, lack of skill (the president of Alabama Penny Savings, for example, was a clergyman, and the vice president was a bartender), or as a result of the periodic panics and depressions that characterized the era. Some black financial institutions, however, survived.

  John Merrick, for example, was born a slave in Clinton, North Carolina, in 1859. He taught himself to read and write and went to work at the age of twelve in a Chapel Hill brickyard. He also shined shoes in a Raleigh barbershop, taught himself the barber’s skill, and, in his spare time, studied high finance. In 1880, he moved to Durham where, twelve years later, he owned five barbershops and was the personal barber of the tobacco tycoon Washington Duke. Merrick was a frugal man and, at Mr. Duke’s suggestion, he invested every penny he could in real estate. He also noticed the burgeoning business that was involved in the fraternal orders, and in 1883 he established the Royal Knights of King David. Fifteen years later, with a local physician, Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore, he organized the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association. The first few years of the insurance company were difficult, but John Merrick forged on, firing salesmen who were unproductive, hiring new ones that were. Before his death in 1919, Merrick’s company, renamed North Carolina Mutual Life, had $16,096,722 worth of insurance in force. Merrick had organized, in the meantime, a number of satellite companies—the Bull City Drug Company, the Merrick-Moore-Spaulding Real Estate Company, the Durham Textile Mill, and the Mechanics and Farmers Bank. North Carolina Mutual is the largest black-owned insurance company in the United States today, followed by John Johnson’s Supreme Life Insurance Company of America.