Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  To help itself out of a mare’s nest of financial problems, and recapitalize itself, the bank has managed to raise $3,000,000 in new capital—by turning to the Ford Foundation for $1,000,000, to Atlanta Life for another $1,000,000, and the balance from a number of other small black banks in Georgia as well as from MINBANC, a federal agency that has guaranteed half of the sum borrowed in capital notes, and another half in stock. Since January 1975, the bank has had a young and energetic new black president named I. Owen Funderburg, who is determined to do his best to turn the bank’s fortunes around. A native of Monticello, Georgia, Mr. Funderburg graduated from Morehouse and from the business college of the University of Michigan. He has a solid banking background, having started as a teller at the Mechanics and Farmers Bank of Birmingham, where he rose to the position of cashier and a member of the board of directors. In 1966, he left Birmingham to become executive vice president and chief executive officer of the Gateway National Bank in St. Louis, where he was also a member of the board. One of the things Mr. Funderburg hopes to do is to change Citizens Trust from a bank that dealt only with black customers into a bank that will deal with the entire community. “Blacks used to subscribe to the motto, ‘Don’t put your money where you can’t work,’ but now that rallying cry no longer works, since blacks can work anywhere,” says Mr. Funderburg. If he can turn Citizens Trust into a bank with a racially mixed clientele, he will have accomplished a considerable feat. Since Citizens Trust is universally known in Atlanta as “the black bank,” one wonders whether whites can really be persuaded to be depositors or borrowers. But Mr. Funderburg insists that he knows Atlanta. Though he was not born there, he grew up in a small town nearby, where his father was a country doctor, and he visited the city often as a young man. In Atlanta, Funderburg has many friends and a number of relatives. On the plus side, he points out that the bank’s shiny new building is now more than ninety-five percent rented, with a number of prominent white tenants, including several government agencies and the offices of the Atlanta Bell Telephone Company.

  And yet Owen Funderburg was distressed when, in the summer of 1975, Black Enterprise—the monthly black answer to Business Week—published a list of the thirty-eight largest black-owned banks in the country (led by George Johnson’s Independence Bank of Chicago), and Citizens Trust did not make the list. Funderburg wrote a complaining letter to the magazine’s New York publisher, Earl Graves, who printed a correction in the next issue of the magazine, saying that with the bank’s stated assets and deposits, it should have been listed in eighth place. Mr. Funderburg shows the correction to visitors.

  And as news of the bank’s woes has crept into the newspapers, more black depositors have begun pulling out. “I wouldn’t put my money in that bank,” says a black Atlanta taxicab driver with emphasis. And there is a persistent rumor in Atlanta that, in the end, the Citizens Trust will be absorbed by the Citizens-Southern Trust Company—a white bank.

  19

  “King’s Wigwam,” and Other Unhappy Memories

  The segregation era left deep psychological scars on the blacks of the South, and the old people remember it best. Mrs. Edward Miller is a tall, dignified lady in her early seventies, with fair skin and softly waved gray hair, who lives in a large brick house in southwest Atlanta not far from Peyton Forest. The wife of a prominent architect, who has designed a number of Atlanta’s churches and university buildings, Mrs. Miller is a woman with a healthy distrust of taking things at face value. Though she agrees that blacks in Atlanta are infinitely better off than when she was growing up, she wonders how sincere white Atlantans really are when they say that they want black people to continue to advance. “People here say things that they don’t really mean,” she says.

  She remembers, for example, when the last white family on her street sold their house and moved away. The man was a minister, and he repeatedly told his neighbors that he liked the street and was happy living there. He often told his black neighbors how proud he was to be in this lovely neighborhood, where black families took care of their houses, their spacious lawns, gardens, and boxwood hedges. He told them how happy he was so often, in fact, that some of his neighbors, including Mrs. Miller, became just a bit suspicious. When the minister’s house went on the market, he gave the neighbors some excuse about having to move to California to care for an elderly sister. Nobody quite believed him.

  And in the days when the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was struggling to effect radical changes for blacks throughout the South, Mrs. Miller recalls that a white friend said to Dr. King, Sr.—whom most people in Atlanta call Daddy King—“I think your son is going too far.” Dr. King replied, “Have you ever heard my son preach?” The man said, “No—I’m afraid he might convince me.” “And that was a white man speaking,” says Nina Miller.

  Mrs. Miller’s father was the late Cornelius King, another great patriarchal figure in Atlanta. Cornelius King was no relation to Martin Luther King and, in fact, there is an enormous social gap between the two King families of Atlanta. “We knew those Kings,” Mrs. Miller says, “and in fact our house was a stone’s throw from theirs, and I went to kindergarten with Mrs. King, senior. But we weren’t visiting friends. After all, Daddy King was nothing but a little old Baptist preacher, and Ebenezer Baptist Church was not the sort of church that families like ours attended. Not in the same category at all. It wasn’t until his son became so famous that anybody paid any attention to those Kings.” Many in black Atlanta society feel that the Martin Luther Kings used their famous son to climb socially, and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., has not made herself popular in the city. She is “too full of herself,” they say, and blacks mock the way Coretta King has of speaking, theatrically, of “Mah Husband.” Behind her back, Coretta King’s nickname has become “Mah Husband.”

  “Everyone thought the sun rose and set on my Papa,” says Nina King Miller. “He was a true aristocrat. He made something out of nothing.” Cornelius King’s father had been a slave, but his mother was a Cherokee Indian. One of his grandfathers, furthermore, was a white Irish missionary who had been sent West to convert the Indians. “And so what does that make me?” Mrs. Miller asks. “I’m part Irish, part Indian, and part Negro. I’m certainly colored, but I’m not black.” Like many others of her generation and caste, Nina Miller dislikes and disapproves of the word “black,” and looks forward to the day when it will go out of fashion. Cornelius King grew up in the Indian territory of Oklahoma, where his Indian mother owned some property. There he met the daughter of Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, who was traveling in the territory, and married her and moved to Atlanta. “Bishop Turner thought the world of Papa,” Mrs. Miller says. “He regarded him more highly than he did his own two sons, both of whom were drunkards.” Cornelius King’s wife lived only a few years in Atlanta before she died. Then he married Mrs. Miller’s mother, a Spelman-educated Warrington, Georgia, girl. “My grandmother was white, or at least you couldn’t tell her from white. It was something we never talked about,” Mrs. Miller says. “She may not have had much education, but she was a perfect lady. Even when she was very old and in a wheelchair, she wouldn’t be wheeled out to the porch without her hat and gloves on, and the little black velvet ribbon tied around her throat.”

  For a while, Mr. King worked as a machinist. Then he worked for an Atlanta law firm, as a detective. From there, he moved to the Department of the Interior, and, in 1895, was a member of the Henry Dawes Commission on Indian Affairs, and went into Indian territory again as a liaison man. Mrs. Miller has a picture of him in his elaborate Indian headdress. There was a brand of tennis ball called “Indian King,” and Mr. King, with his Indian looks and his Indian headdress, posed for the picture that became the company’s trademark. Back in Atlanta, Mr. King worked for a number of years as the steward of the Atlanta Athletic Club, “where he got to know who was who in Atlanta. All the top white businessmen in Atlanta knew Papa. He was eminently well respected.” He was so well respected, in fact, that white busine
ssmen helped him establish his own real estate business on Auburn Avenue, where he prospered. Mrs. Miller’s brother runs the family business now.

  “Papa was a very good provider,” Mrs. Miller says. “We always had the best of everything, and we were very protected. We lived in a big corner house on Auburn Avenue. I remember that when I was in the fifth grade we were the first family to have a furnace, and we were among the first to have electricity. We always had a laundress. My mother and Grace Hamilton’s mother both worked for the Gate City Free Kindergarten, which was a charity school for less fortunate Negroes.” Growing up in Atlanta in the early 1900s was a cozy and secure experience for little girls like Nina King, surrounded as she was by doting parents, grandparents, and family friends, and free from any real financial worries. On weekends, the family and visiting friends gathered in the Kings’ parlor for tea and talk while the children were sent upstairs or into the yard to play. Everyone played the piano, and there were musical Sunday afternoons after church where everyone played and sang or listened to the old wind-up Edison gramophone. Birthday parties were great occasions, with homemade blueberry ice cream and cakes with candles, all manner of cookies and other sweets. Little girls dressed up in white dresses with crinoline underskirts, and tied pink satin sashes about their waists, and the boys wore suits with Eton collars and wore black patent-leather shoes with silver buckles. There were games—musical chairs, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, in-and-out-the-windows—and story-telling hours. At bedtime, children said their prayers and thanked Jesus for all the beautiful presents they had received that day.

  As Cornelius King’s real estate business continued to prosper, he purchased a summer home for his family in the country at Kennesaw, Georgia, and forty-five acres of surrounding land. Here in the piney hills the Kings began spending each summer, while Papa stayed in Atlanta during the week and joined his family in the country for weekends. On his land, Cornelius King built a spring-fed artificial lake and a tennis court. All the young people—Nina King had an older sister and two brothers—played tennis. Because the house was large, there were nearly always a number of weekend guests consisting, again, of family and friends—the Hamiltons, Yateses, Murphys, and Townses. In fact, the idyllic little retreat became so popular with the Kings’ Atlanta friends that the real estate, man in Cornelius King made him decide to put his summer place to a use that would turn a profit. He built a number of small summer cabins in the surrounding woods and glades and offered them for rent. Black Atlantans flocked out to Kennesaw in the summertime, taking Mr. King’s cabins for a weekend or an entire month, and before he knew it he was operating a small, select black summer resort. He built an outdoor dance pavilion and hired a piano player to play for dancing on weekend evenings. He christened his place “King’s Wigwam.”

  Then, all at once, a terrible thing happened. Bertram Hamilton, Henry Cooke Hamilton’s brother, had come up to “King’s Wigwam” to visit Nina King’s brother. Both boys were tall and slender and were superb tennis players and, for an entire weekend, the two youths were hardly ever off the court. The Kings and their friends had always assumed that they got along well with their white neighbors in Kennesaw. There had been no friction, no unpleasantness of any sort. The Kings and their friends shopped at the white stores in town, and had always been scrupulously prompt about paying their bills. And so, when what happened happened, it seemed like a horrible dream, and Mrs. Miller’s eyes still cloud over when she thinks about it. Bertram Hamilton was accused of raping a white girl in the village.

  The sheriff came, and the Ku Klux Klan. Terrified, the family telephoned Cornelius King in Atlanta. He urged them to get out of Kennesaw as quickly as possible, and back to Atlanta. That night, Bertram Hamilton was smuggled out in the trunk of a car, and everyone made it safely home. That was over fifty years ago, but none of the family or their friends has ever gone back to Kennesaw. Cornelius King put “King’s Wigwam” up for sale—the house, the land, the lake, and the little dance pavilion. It was sold at a great loss. Today, Nina King Miller is half convinced that the rape allegation was part of a plot on the part of the Kennesaw whites to get her father’s property. She hopes this isn’t true, but it might have been. Such things, in those days, happened often in the South and, if it was a plot, it succeeded. She tries not to be bitter, and to look upon what happened all those years ago in the most charitable light. “I know that it’s hard, for people who have led hard lives, to see another person, particularly a colored person, have a little success,” she says. “Perhaps that was it. It was a poor, sharecropping town. It may have been difficult for them to see us there, having such good times as we did. All people are not alike.” Still, when she thinks about it, her eyes cloud over.

  “Some of the myths about the South in segregation days were not true,” says Donald Hollowell, a young Atlanta lawyer and regional director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with a territory covering eight Southern states from Kentucky to Florida. “But some of the facts were more brutal than most people ever knew.” Hollowell, who successfully defended Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was threatened with prison in 1960, has specialized in defending blacks accused of such crimes as rape and murder, and is credited with having saved a number of men from Georgia’s infamous chain gang. Rape is the charge black men in the South dread the most. White women who have dallied with black men and who have the misfortune of becoming pregnant frequently charge “rape” in order to protect themselves in the eyes of their families and friends, and Southern judgments in these cases can be swift and harsh. In one such case, a fifteen-year-old boy was charged with rape on a Saturday and sentenced to die in the electric chair the following Wednesday. In four days’ time, however, Hollowell managed to get the judge’s decision reversed, and to save the boy.

  Hollowell himself has been subjected to numerous indignities because of his race. A native of Wichita, Kansas, he was a high school dropout who later managed to earn his high school diploma through a correspondence course. He then completed three years at Lane College on a football scholarship and, in 1941, as a Regular Army reservist, he was ordered to report for military service at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. At Fort Oglethorpe, he discovered that he was the only black at the induction center. Segregation was just as strict in the United States Army as it was elsewhere in the South, and Private Hollowell was ordered to eat in the kitchen. He refused. He was then told that he could eat with the prisoners and this, it turned out, had certain advantages. “I had a table to myself, with a whole pitcher of milk, and a whole pound of butter,” Hollowell recalls. “I was eating better than anyone else on the base.” Still, he was barred from the day room and the post movie theatre and, to his amusement, was told that he could not play Ping-Pong. The latrines were another problem. At Fort Oglethorpe, a white base, there was no provision for a “colored” toilet. When Holowell entered the latrine to shower and shave, he was confronted by a group of fifteen or twenty angry white recruits, brandishing razors and knives, who ordered him to leave. When Hollowell explained to the company commander that he would, if the commander wished, use the lawn in front of company headquarters as his toilet, he was given a private bathroom.

  The idiocies and hatred of segregation went on and on, and yet Hollowell was able to emerge from the United States Army as a first lieutenant. He finished college on the G.I. Bill, and went on to Loyola University to obtain his law degree. He met and married an Atlanta girl, and decided to settle there. “There was culture and tradition among blacks of the South,” he says, “that had not had a chance to develop among blacks in the Northern cities. Blacks here had been forced to do for themselves, and those who had done it had done well. There was a kind of survivalist elite here. I decided that if a black lawyer could do a good job he could make it here. I’ve fared as well as any other lawyer around, and I’ve been here for twenty-four years. It wasn’t all easy. There were state laws that ran contrary to federal laws, and that I’ve helped change. There were judges who were unfai
r. There were some setbacks, but there was also some cooperation. There could have been chaos. But, as bad as it was, there was a resolution in the end.”

  While all this was going on, there were other Southern blacks among the “survivalist elite” who were quietly and purposefully working for reforms, and were doing so without slogans or marches or demonstrations—or much fanfare. When John Wesley Dobbs reorganized the socially, and politically, important Masonic Lodge, he made it a rule that no one could join the Masons of Atlanta unless he was a registered voter. When the men of a nearby county begged to be excepted from this rule—since county laws, in defiance of federal law, denied blacks the vote—Mr. Dobbs agreed to make an exception in their case. Word of this reached the newspapers, much to the embarrassment and ire of the white worthies of the offending county, who preferred to have their attitudes and practices kept out of the press. A sheriff from the county in question appeared at Mr. Dobbs’s door one night with a summons. Alone, and at great personal risk, Mr. Dobbs drove out to the county courthouse to defend charges of creating unpleasant publicity for the county. He was, fortunately, given a scolding and a reminder to “keep in your place,” and nothing more. Because he was aware that his life was in danger most of the time, Mr. Dobbs always carried a gun. At one point, he was arrested for carrying a weapon, even though he had a perfectly valid permit to do so. Similarly, Grace Hamilton’s father, Mr. Towns, on his way to the Atlanta courthouse to pay the poll tax that was required in order to vote, spoke to each black person he met along the way and urged him to do the same. “Your ballot is your weapon,” he used to say. When this unwelcome activity was noticed by the whites, he too was threatened. Still, he persisted, and survived.

  Public pronouncements had to be made with great care. Bishop Turner, Cornelius King’s father-in-law, who used to preach in favor of blacks returning to Africa, once declared, “The United States flag is just a dirty dishrag to the Negro.” For this slur, he had to go into hiding for a while. In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard was the local surgeon and president of the Mound Bayou Mutual Life Insurance Company. Though there was no chapter of N.A.A.C.P. in Mound Bayou, Dr. Howard often spoke to fellow blacks about the value of voting, of education, and of achieving economic advancement. By 1955, segregation had been outlawed by the United States Supreme Court, but Mississippi was dragging its Deep Southern heels in terms of doing anything about it. Mississippi’s governor, Hugh White, called a group of one hundred black leaders in the state together, and the theme of the meeting was to be “Mutuality of Interest.” It was to the blacks’ and the whites’ mutual interest, the governor suggested, that the state proceed slowly toward compliance with the Supreme Court’s directive. In fact, it might be to the mutual interest of all concerned if actual integration were to be postponed indefinitely. Some black leaders, more timorous about the effects of integration than others, tended to go along with Governor White and to say “We don’t think it’s quite time to end segregation.” But the blacks elected Dr. Howard to be their spokesman, and Dr. Howard held a different view. In Jackson, Dr. Howard stood up before the governor and said, among other things, “Black boys are fighting and dying in Korea for liberty and democracy, but here in Mississippi we don’t know what liberty and democracy mean.”