Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The Montague Cobbs trace their family history back to William H. Montague, who was born in Georgetown in 1820. He later migrated to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he made a tidy fortune as a manufacturer of black hair preparations and cosmetics. In the Panic of 1873, however, he lost his business and returned to Washington where, in spite of his early success, he could find jobs only as a laborer and watchman. But his son, who had started work as a messenger in 1884, had, by 1900, risen to the position of assistant tax assessor for the District of Columbia, an unusually high post for a black man in those days. He married the wealthy daughter of a man named Cobb, who owned a job-printing shop, and their son, in European fashion, was named W. Montague Cobb. Dr. W. Montague Cobb today is a distinguished anatomist, professor of anatomy at Howard University, and editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was Dr. Cobb who, several years ago, conducted a study which revealed that the graduates of Dunbar High School, his alma mater, more than held their own in Ivy League colleges against graduates of the finest New England private schools.

  Then there are the R. Grayson McGuires, owners of one of the most successful black funeral homes in Washington. Founded by Mr. McGuire’s father, McGuire’s has been offering, as its slogan states, “Distinction at Its Finest” since 1912. The McGuire family’s roots in Washington go back four generations, and a McGuire was in the first graduating class at Howard, while another owned the first black pharmacy in the capital.

  But the old families, and their institutions, are being eclipsed by the newer group. The annual December Debutante Cotillion, for example, which the Old Guard Bachelor-Benedicts Club and The Girl Friends co-sponsored, was more or less abandoned in the 1960s when it was accused of Uncle Tomism. One of the most prominent of the newer-rich families are the Winston Churchill Willoughbys and, typically, they are not native Washingtonians. Dr. Willoughby is a dentist who was born in Trinidad and who came to Washington, after a sojourn in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1935. In 1975, the District of Columbia Dental Society named Winston Willoughby “Dentist of the Year.” Anselee Willoughby is from South Carolina and was brought to Washington by an ambitious mother who sent her to Howard University, in hopes that she would meet a Howard medical student, which she did, and marry him, which she also did. Winston Willoughby is tall, dark, slender, and handsome, with a small black moustache and, though he is dark-skinned, his racially mixed Trinidadian ancestry (one of his great-grandfathers was a Lord Willoughby) is responsible for the fact that seven of his brothers and sisters live in New York as white people. His wife is dark, slender, pretty, and vivacious. The Willoughbys live in a large house on Colorado Avenue, where they have become very social. It all started several years ago when Winston Willoughby began to get patients from the Australian Embassy. Soon he was the pet dentist of the “Embassy Row set,” and his patients now include diplomats from most of the African nations, and some of the non-African ones as well. The next step was when the attractive Willoughbys began to get invitations to embassy social events.

  Anselee Willoughby sits in her spacious drawing room today, spreading out scrapbooks of clippings of her current social doings like any professional society woman anywhere. She has been pictured in Vogue and in the New York Times, and her name and photograph appear regularly in the Washington papers. She is up to her ears in charity work, toiling for the District of Columbia Mental Health Association, for the Meridian House Foundation, and for crippled children. She organized the Women’s Year for foreign students and diplomats. She is on the Women’s Committee of the Washington Performing Arts Center. In 1974 she chaired the S.O.S. Ball for the benefit of drought-stricken African nations, where she succeeded in getting Mrs. Nixon to give a tea at the White House (and in getting herself photographed being hugged by Mrs. Nixon). The President himself came to the ball, which netted close to $70,000, which was distributed to the thirsty African countries for food and clothing.

  “We were the only private people invited to the last official Agnew party,” says Anselee Willoughby. “The Elliot Richardsons have had us to dinner. We’ve been invited to Nancy Kissinger’s party in honor of the Kaundas from Zambia. Every year, we give a party for the Australian Embassy—Sir James Plimsoll is a patient of my husband’s—and this year’s theme was ‘An Australian Night in Trinidad.’ I’ve entertained for the Argentine Embassy. I entertain all the time. I usually do a buffet dinner for fifty with a tent in the garden, or seated dinners for fourteen in the house. Once a year, I have a big surprise birthday party for my husband in the summer. It’s a surprise because he never knows where it will be held or what the theme will be. I invite all the Senators, diplomats, cabinet officers, and visiting dignitaries. We mingle with all societies here. They’ve started calling me the black Perle Mesta!” In 1972, for all their social activities, the Willoughbys became one of the first two nonpolitical black families to be listed in the Washington Green Book, considered to be a much more important guide to who is who in the capital than the Social Register. The other family, the William Beasely Harrises, are also non-Old Guard. Both Harrises are lawyers, and Mrs. Harris, who was United States Ambassador to Luxembourg between 1965 and 1967, is dean of the Howard University Law School. (The Green Book points out that it has always listed all ranking government officials and diplomats stationed in the capital, regardless of color; the Willoughbys and Harrises are, however, the first civilian black families to make the little book.)

  And, of course, at an economic level much lower than the Willoughbys’ are the black activists, militants, and revolutionaries, crying “Black Power Now!” and chanting about Africanism. “It’s sad,” says Mary Gibson Hundley, sitting in her tiny parlor surrounded by her Syphax heirlooms. “It’s the ignorant people who yell about Africa. What happened was that the cotton-pickers were replaced by machines, and so they flocked up to big cities like Washington. They were illiterate and poor. They have no idea, no comprehension or understanding, of what we’ve been doing here, quietly, peacefully, but steadily, for years. They have no idea of what people like Mary Church Terrell did in breaking segregation in restaurants, or what my husband and I did when we succeeded in breaking the restrictive covenant in housing. They have no idea of how to let white people be their friends. When Fred and I were fighting our court case, our strongest support came from a white Radcliffe graduate on the school board. They’ve no idea what Dunbar High School has been doing for more than a hundred years. Or what Grandpa Syphax did. We’re proud of what we’ve done—but they simply have no idea.”

  As though to prove her point, when Mrs. Hundley’s kinswoman, Orieanna Syphax, ran not long ago for election to the powerful District of Columbia Board of Education, she lost. The Syphax voice is no longer wanted.

  And, though Anselee Willoughby graduated from Dunbar, she doesn’t bother attending the sentimental reunions of Dunbar alumni, nor does she particularly care what happens to the old school building, which will, in all likelihood, be razed. Nor is she a Link. “My mother was,” she says offhandedly. “It’s an old ladies’ club.” Nor has she heard of Mrs. Hundley. “Who is she?” she asks. “Is she someone I should know?”

  12

  South of the Sudan

  Blacks who are descended from slaves who worked on the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas tend to think of themselves as several cuts above those who toiled for planters farther south, in Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This somewhat tenuous assumption is based on the theory that when blacks arrived from Africa or the West Indies at such slave ports as Charleston and Newport News, the planters of those states had first choice of the lot, and naturally picked men and women who seemed strongest, healthiest, brightest, and best-looking. Other Southern cities were then offered the remainder. For this same reason, descendants of slaves in Cincinnati consider themselves superior to those from Louisville, while Louisville looks down on those from Memphis, and Memphis looks down on Natchez. Again, it is assumed that as the slave boats made their way southward down the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers, stopping at river ports along the way to display their wares, the upriver slave-buyers were offered the best selection. When the boats reached the Mississippi delta, only the dregs of each shipment were left. Since it was not economical to ship these people north again, these leftovers were often sold at bargain prices.

  In the slave trade, of course, family ties were ripped apart, and it is commonly assumed that no black Americans today know anything of their African antecedents. But this is not entirely true, and a number of American families have elaborately traced their ancestry back to tribal Africa, where they have found interesting and in some cases distinguished relatives. There is the extraordinary Vaughan family of Camden, South Carolina, for example. A man who took the unusual name of Scipio Vaughan was born around 1784 in the Owu district of Abeokuta, which is now a city about forty miles north of Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. He was a member of the Egba family of the Yoruba tribe, who were noted warriors, and it is claimed that he was related to the tribal chieftain, or king. This is possible, because many tribal leaders sold into slavery various of their relatives who displeased or threatened them. Scipio was captured and sold around 1805, and became the property of Wilie Vaughan, a Camden planter whose surname he assumed.

  Scipio was an artisan of unusual talent, a skilled ironmonger who became famous throughout the Carolinas for his beautifully crafted wrought-iron gates and fences. He married a Cherokee Indian woman, who bore him thirteen children, and, over the years he endeared himself to the Vaughan family. When Wilie Vaughan died in 1820, his will stipulated that an equivalent to wages of “my negro man Scipio” be set aside for the education of Scipio’s children, and added, “Should Scipio survive the first day of January 1825, my will and desire is that he shall be freed and have the use of his time thereafter: That he shall also have his carpenter tools and one hundred dollars at that time.” It is not clear whether or not the terms of Mr. Vaughan’s will were carried out to the letter. Scipio’s name did not appear on the census of Kershaw County as a free man until 1850, and he may have voluntarily remained in slave capacity for Vaughan’s widow, Sarah. His name had disappeared from the census by 1860, indicating that he had died in the years between. Two of his sons, however, used to tell of a deathbed scene at which Scipio made the young men promise to leave the South and “its oppressive laws against colored men,” and return to their ancestral home in Yorubaland. The two men, first Burrell Churchill Vaughan and then James Churchill Vaughan, with money saved from doing odd jobs, purchased their freedom and sailed for Liberia.

  Burrell remained in Liberia, where he married and established a branch of the Vaughan family. James, however, joined a band of Baptist missionaries and traveled southward to Yorubaland and joined the family he had never known. It was not easy for the young alien, who spoke a foreign tongue, bore strange American Indian features, and practiced a religion called Christianity, and it is likely that James Vaughan felt himself a part of the African culture and yet remote from it and, perhaps, a bit superior to it. Though he was a carpenter by trade, he was also a self-styled man of God, and preached his Baptist faith in various outposts in Ijaiye and Ogbomosho. He fought on the side of the Egbas in the Yoruba civil war that was then raging, but married a princess from the Benin tribe, whom he renamed Sarah. The slave trade was still flourishing on Africa’s West Coast, and kidnaping was a constant threat. Still, James Churchill Vaughan was able to establish the first Baptist church in Nigeria. His property was plundered twice—first by the “Ibadan dogs of war,” and again by members of his own Egba tribal family, when an attempt was made to drive all Christians out of Abeokuta, where his father had been born. He and his wife walked for three days to Lagos with James carrying their tiny son on his back. In Lagos, his first home was destroyed by fire. Though he was now penniless, he started over again as an ironmonger, and gradually branched out into the hardware business. He eventually owned two stores, which sold palm oil, coconuts, ivory, and other products to the growing European market. By the 1880s, James Vaughan was a rich man.

  Vaughan made two visits to his American relatives in South Carolina, and a ninety-two-year-old cousin, Mrs. Bessie Boykin Rayford, who was then a little girl, remembers the excitement when “the African” returned, the second time, in 1889. “He wore a jacket of several different colors with a top hat to match,” Mrs. Rayford recalls. “The whole town, both black and white, turned out to see him, and there was a parade for him down the main street of Camden.” Back in Africa, Vaughan continued to correspond with his American cousins. He also sent gifts, including small canvas bags of gold coins to his niece, Harriet Josephine Carter.

  When Vaughan died in 1893, he was buried under a tall, imposing monument of imported Italian marble in Lagos’s Ikoyi cemetery, and his two sons, who had been educated in Europe, took over the business. His daughter, lyrically named Aida Arabella, also educated in Europe, married a Lagos lawyer named Eric Moore. In 1922, Mrs. Moore decided that it would be nice to invite her American cousin and namesake, Aida Arabella Stradford, to visit Africa, and offered to send for her at the Moores’ expense. Mrs. Stradford was unable to make the trip, but she sent her sister Sara in her place, and thus a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter of Scipio Vaughan met on the African side of the Atlantic. Soon afterward, Mrs. Moore brought her daughter Omotunde to the United States to be entered in a private school, and there was another family reunion. The African and American branches of the Vaughan family have remained in close touch over the years, and, since Scipio’s descendants have been prosperous on both continents, there has been a good deal of jetting back and forth between the United States and Lagos.

  Aida Arabella Stradford never got to Africa, but she became the family’s chief historian and genealogist of both the American and African branches, working with the Kershaw County Historical Society, from family Bible records, inscriptions on old tombstones, and questionnaires to fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation Vaughans all over the world. Before she died in 1972, she completed a biography of her great-grandfather Scipio, in which she wrote: “I have related some of the facts concerning my family tree, not only because I regard it as interesting, but also for the purpose of proving that while genealogical trees do not flourish among us, nonetheless, there are some of which we may be justly proud.” Mrs. Stradford’s daughter is the Chicago lawyer Jewel Stradford Lafontant, who became the first woman United States Deputy Solicitor General.

  Mrs. Lafontant was also the first woman attorney of any color to present a case before the United States Supreme Court, and that occasion presented her with an unusual problem. Lawyers presenting cases before that august body have always, by tradition, worn white tie, striped trousers, and tailcoats. Mrs. Lafontant consulted with various males in her profession, but none of them had the slightest idea of what a woman in that position might wear. One actually suggested that she appear before the Supreme Court in a long white evening gown. In the end, Mrs. Lafontant solved the problem herself by designing an outfit of her own. It consisted of a slim-cut skirt of gray-and-white striped material, with a hemline just below the knee; a modified tailcoat; and a white blouse with a white jabot at the throat. The justices complimented her on her appearance.

  “Mother was always talking about our African relatives,” Mrs. Lafontant recalls, “and as a small child I knew that Africa was not all a jungle, and I was very proud of my African cousins. But when I mentioned them to my friends, nobody believed me.” In 1956, Mrs. Lafontant met one of her several-times-removed cousins from Lagos, when Mrs. Ayo Vaughan-Richards visited the United States. Mrs. Vaughan-Richards, another of Scipio’s great-great-granddaughters, is Nigeria’s principal nursing officer and the hostess of her own Nigerian television show. Married to a white architect whom she met while studying in Scotland, Ayo Vaughan persuaded her husband to add her name to his with a hyphen.

  Ayo Vaughan-Richards and Jewel Lafontant became friends, and Mrs. Lafontant repaid the visit in 1964 when she went to Africa for the
first time. “I was so excited about going to see my people,” she says, “that I cut my hair and wore it natural. When Ayo met me at the airport, she cried, ‘Cousin Jewel! What happened to all of your lovely hair?’ I told her about ‘black is beautiful,’ and about hair. ‘Of course black is beautiful,’ she said impatiently, ‘but why do they have to do that to their hair?’” Mrs. Lafontant has revisited Lagos several times and, in Lagos, Mrs. Vaughan-Richards says, “We’ve kept in touch through the years. But I have a commitment to persuade all of our relations in the states to come home. Those who have visited us had tears in their eyes when I showed them the graves of their ancestors.”

  If all the Vaughans and Vaughan-connected families in the United States did return to Africa, it is estimated that a migration of some 115,000 people would be involved, as the descendants of Scipio’s remaining eleven children have proliferated across the American countryside. Today, there are Vaughns as well as Vaughans, and they are all considered to be in some way, however dizzyingly, “connected.” When the question was asked if jazz singer Sarah Vaughan was part of the family, “Probably” was the reply. In Lagos, the descendants of James Churchill Vaughan have been equally prolific and have become bewilderingly interconnected with the great tribal families of Nigeria. Ayo Vaughan-Richards’s maternal grandfather, for example, was Chief Taiwo Obowu, who is buried in a huge mausoleum in the heart of Lagos. There is a street in Lagos called Vaughan Lane. Lagos Vaughans have exotic names like Kehinde, Adeyinka, Lawunmi, and Apinke, and there are also titled Vaughans. Lady Kofo Ademola, wife of Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, the former chief justice of Nigeria, is a Vaughan cousin. She was the first Nigerian woman to graduate from Oxford. The “oldest living Vaughan” in Lagos is said to be Michael Ayo Vaughan, seventy-seven, a retired banker, and, in the present generation, James Olabode Vaughan, supply and distribution manager for the Mobil Oil Corporation, who is forty-seven, is another of Scipio’s great-great-grandsons. James Olabode Vaughan has black skin, but his half-brother, James Wilson Vaughan, a London-based film-maker, has the features of those on the head of an old American Indian nickel—a “throwback,” it is assumed, to his Cherokee great-great-grandmother. All Vaughans can recite the inscription that is carved on all four sides of James Churchill Vaughan’s marble tomb in Lagos: