Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In Beverly Hills, Gordy bought the ranch-style mansion of comedian Tommy Smothers and decorated it in a lavish style that almost, but not quite, defeats his personal style. “Give me a drop-dead house,” he told his decorator, and the decorator complied. “In that house, little Berry almost gets lost in all the mirrors, silver brocade, and gold lamé,” one friend says. The house is the scene of Mr. Gordy’s most opulent parties, and its most arresting feature is perhaps the life-size portrait of the diminutive president of Motown that hangs in the dining room. It depicts a bearded Berry Gordy dressed in full imperial regalia, posing as Napoleon.

  Another friend says of Gordy, “He flashes money like an old-time street person. He’s basically still a street hustler from Detroit.”

  There are some thoughtful blacks who think that there may be a kind of conspiracy—perhaps an unwitting one—among the media, including such publications as Ebony and the Amsterdam News, to overemphasize and overpublicize black money success as a means to keep blacks from advancing farther. “There’s so much printed about successful blacks and ‘black millionaires,’” one man says, “that pretty soon, when we try to get even closer to equality with whites in the business world, white folks are gonna say, ‘What? They want more? Haven’t those niggers got enough already?’” It is true that black business success must be kept in perspective and that, compared with white wealth, black wealth is still very small. Berry Gordy’s Motown is pint-sized compared with Columbia Records. George Johnson’s entire cosmetics company may do a business of $40,000,000 a year, but Revlon has annual sales at that figure for a single feminine deodorant spray. All the black-owned banks in the United States combined would not have assets equal to those of a single branch of the Bank of America or the Chase Manhattan. With his annual check of $5,000 to the Urban League, John Johnson is one of the League’s most important individual philanthropic sources. He could never approach the largesse of a John Davison Rockefeller, who, in his lifetime, gave away more than $600,000,000. In every American black success story, it is important to remember that these men have been successful not as Americans, but as blacks. The share of black money is still painfully, and disproportionately, tiny.

  It is clear that blacks have been most successful in business in the largest cities. Of the one hundred largest and richest black-owned companies in the United States, eighteen are in the greater New York area. Twelve are in Chicago, and eight are in or around Los Angeles. Five are in Detroit, and five are in Philadelphia. Four are in Washington, D.C. It is interesting to note in which business areas blacks have been the most successful. Of the hundred top firms, nineteen are either supermarkets or food distributors or processors. Eighteen are automobile dealerships, led by the Al Johnson Cadillac agency of Chicago—Mr. Johnson was the first black to be granted a dealership by General Motors—or dealers in automotive accessories. Seventeen are construction firms or building contractors. Eleven are publishers of music, newspapers, or magazines, and four are beer or liquor dealers. There are a handful of manufacturers—one of plastics, one of electronics, one of chocolate, and one of sausage. It is also worth noting that, of the top one hundred businesses, only fifteen can boast sales of $10,000,000 a year or more. Sixty have sales of $5,000,000 a year or less. The smallest, a plate glass company in Yonkers, New York, has an annual business of just over $2,000,000, clearly no threat to Owens-Corning-Fiberglas, nor do black businesses control a significant share of the American economy.

  Blacks have tended to do well in business areas that involve sales and services—particularly services to other blacks. They have done less well in manufacturing, with the exception of companies that manufacture black cosmetics. One woman who has been particularly successful in the area of services is Mrs. Freddye Scarborough Henderson of Atlanta, who, in the early 1950s, organized her Henderson Travel Service, the first fully appointed black travel agency in the United States—“fully appointed” meaning that Henderson Travel is licensed to handle domestic, international, and steamship travel. Freddye Henderson, a vivacious brown-skinned lady, got into the travel business almost by accident. She had studied fashion design at New York University and, when she had her degree—the first black woman to earn a degree in fashion merchandising—she went to Europe to look behind the scenes of such houses as Dior, Fontana, and Hardy Amies. She was impressed with the way the tour was handled and decided to try the tour business for herself. She picked Atlanta because it was a center of black money and because black Atlantans have a tradition of culture.

  “Blacks, even those with money, used to feel insecure about travel,” Mrs. Henderson says. “You didn’t know where you’d be welcome, or where you’d be kicked around. The attitude used to be, ‘Heck, I can get kicked around at home for free—why travel?’ But those attitudes have changed.” Mrs. Henderson’s company has achieved a number of firsts in the travel business. It was the first to organize tours to Africa for culture and not just to look at animals. It was the first agency, black or white, to put together group tours to Ghana, beginning in 1957, when Ghana gained its independence, and it was through Mrs. Henderson that Pan-American inaugurated regular flights to Accra. (On a Henderson tour, a Ghana visitor can have the dubious pleasure of visiting an old slave castle and seeing other grim reminders of the slave trade.) Hers was the first black firm to receive the Africa Trophy—in 1972 for excellence in African tour production and operation. She was also the first black agent to reach a million dollars in yearly volume.

  Mrs. Henderson does a lively business in tours from church and professional groups—not only to Africa but to other parts of the world. Winter cruises to the West Indies and the South Pacific are also popular. She has devised innovative tours, such as a trip to Japan with a way stop in the Holy Land. “I try to sell the idea to blacks that travel is prestige,” she says. “Blacks want prestige. Often, they would rather spend money on a trip to Europe or a West Indies cruise than on a house. And when black people travel, they don’t want the bottom line. They want first class.” Mrs. Henderson thinks rather little of Professor Frazier’s criticism of blacks’ conspicuous spending on luxury travel and expensive wardrobes to go with it. “Blacks have always been good-time-oriented,” she says. “Why, when they have the money, shouldn’t they spend some of it on good times—travel, nice luggage, nice clothes? Isn’t that more fun than spending it on some dreary stocks or bonds?”

  Apparently Mrs. Henderson’s philosophy is paying off. She has one client, a black Atlanta lawyer, who spends $25,000 a year on travel through her agency. Another black couple takes their four grandchildren on a different grand tour of Europe every year. Her volume has already reached $2,000,000 a year. Considering the fact that the average white travel agency does about $1,000,000 a year, Henderson Travel is doing double the average. Freddye Henderson’s son Jacob has joined her in the business, where, he says airily, “My main ambition in life is to become a capitalist.”

  With a twinkle in her eye, Freddye Henderson—who does all the right things to get to know the leaders of the black community, such as serving as president of the Atlanta Links—says, “Black travel in this country is potentially a billion dollar business.”

  In recent years, a number of blacks have been given positions of responsibility in white businesses, where, their white co-workers notice, they often seem ill at ease, faintly hostile, even somewhat rude (the black bank teller, for example, who, though beautifully dressed and groomed, chews gum as he works). When blacks work alongside whites, there is nearly always a touch of racial tension in the air. At Saks Fifth Avenue not long ago, a black salesgirl was waiting on a customer who absentmindedly walked off without her change. The girl called after the customer, who returned, thanked her, and accepted her change. A fellow salesgirl, white, said jokingly to the black girl, “I’ll bet you wish she hadn’t heard you.” The black girl was furious, thinking it a racial slur. Most blacks admit that they are still most comfortable in all-black situations. (At schools and colleges, as well as at West
Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy, it is noticed that black students stick together.) White people, too, still feel most comfortable with other whites. “It’s a funny thing,” says one white man. “I don’t feel that I’m a prejudiced person. But there are some blacks I can talk to and, after a minute or two, I completely forget they’re black. But there are others whom I talk to, and the whole time—whether it’s their looks, their speech, or something in their eyes—I’m self-consciously aware that they’re black and I’m white. It’s a kind of chemistry. I don’t understand it.”

  It is a chemistry based on color of skin, and fear. A white visitor to a black doctor’s office on Harlem’s Strivers’ Row asked nervously, at the end of the visit, “Will I have trouble finding a taxi?” A black patient, sensing the white man’s uneasiness, offered to walk with him to Seventh Avenue, and waited with him until a taxi appeared—for which the white man was most grateful.

  On Washington’s Fourteenth Street, a white boy, with a camera slung around his neck, was waiting for a bus. He was approached by a black youth, who said something to him that he didn’t understand. “I beg your pardon?” the white boy said. The black youth repeated the remark, which the white boy still could not understand. What the black was saying was “Gimme that camera.” But the white boy kept repeating, “I beg your pardon? I beg your pardon?” And this innocent tactic worked. The black youth finally shrugged, and walked away.

  Of course the blacks reply, “This could have happened to a black child too—if he was out of his own neighborhood.”

  What, in the end, is the solution to fear? How can such a powerful and yet helpless emotion as fear be dealt with—whites’ fear of blacks, blacks’ fear of whites, and blacks’ fear of other blacks? Fear is at the heart of every busing controversy, every housing dispute, and fear, unfortunately, is something no government can legislate against. It is fear that makes the white executive feel, anxiously, that he should have more blacks on his payroll if only for the appearance of things, and that makes the black employee suspicious of his white employer when he is hired. It is fear that makes the white college professor give a black student a passing grade when, perhaps, he has not quite earned it, and that makes a black student scornful of a teacher who would give him such a grade. Fear causes a black patient to prefer a white doctor when he can afford one. Fear is what has kept George Johnson, already so successful in black cosmetics, unwilling to move on into products for whites, even though he is perfectly equipped to do so. All these fears, of course, are self-defeating.

  These fears are rather like the self-closing doors that Charlotte Hawkins Brown warned about. “Take a firm hold on the knob,” she advised, “turn it gently, pull the door open at least two-thirds of the way so as not to touch either the door or door jamb, pause for just a second to recognize the person who may be looking your way.…”

  Doors can be frightening things. “Do not make the mistake of letting a self-closing door push you into the room,” she wrote. Or push you out of it, she might have added.

  22

  Heroes

  The Old Guard, of course, is less business-oriented, less impressed with the money success of the newer-arrived entrepreneurs. “After all,” says one woman, “Negroes have also made money in prostitution, gambling, the numbers racket, and drug peddling. A lot of these new ‘millionaires,’ I suspect, have rather shady pasts. I know a lot of rich doctors, for example, who, before they were legal, made pots of money performing illegal abortions on poor black women for huge fees. Most of these rich men made their money by exploiting their own race.” The Old Guard tends to look, instead, to the past for its heroes—to men and women like Booker T. Washington, William E. B. DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune—who worked to gain cooperation with the whites in order to win a series of quiet victories for the Negro race.

  The trouble is, no two members of the Old Guard can quite agree on who the greatest black hero of history was. Some champion Frederick Douglass, the great Abolitionist, who was recently honored by having his likeness placed on a United States postage stamp. But others disparage Douglass for having taken, as his second wife, a white woman who took him into the purlieus of white society in Washington, where he seemed to take on rather grand and patronizing airs. Dr. William Edward Burkhardt DuBois and Dr. Booker Taliaferro Washington—the former from New England and the latter from the South, and both with imposingly long names—never did see eye to eye on anything. Many of the Old Guard subscribe to the theories of Dr. DuBois, who wanted to create an aristocracy out of “the talented tenth” of the black population by giving them the kind of education offered at Harvard. But Dr. DuBois’s theories are questioned by some because, in later life, DuBois got his views all mixed up with Marxian socialism. Others lean toward the beliefs of Booker T. Washington, who preached a gospel of advancement through hard work, thrift, and industrial education. Those who side with Booker T. Washington insist that, if the philosophy he laid down during his lifetime had been carried on and forward at Tuskegee after his death, Tuskegee today would be as great an institution as M.I.T.

  Washington’s detractors say that his reputation and success were based on a conciliatory and accommodating attitude toward the white community, that he demeaned himself before whites, that he was guilty of obsequiousness and bootlicking, that he was an original Uncle Tom. And yet Booker T. Washington had to work within the framework of the white social power structure that existed in the South at the time. Had he not been able to ingratiate himself a bit with the white community, to make compromises with it and concessions to it, it is doubtful that the Sage of Tuskegee would have ever been able to create his college at all. One must often “accommodate” in order to survive. Washington placed economic solutions to blacks’ problems above political solutions, and at least one black historian, Lerone Bennett, Jr., accuses Washington of “a fatal misunderstanding of the connection between politics and economics and an equally fatal misunderstanding of the forces of the age.” Mr. Bennett also downgrades Booker T. Washington by saying that he was “only one of several voices of the embryonic middle class [and] … was challenged in his lifetime by several men, notably John Hope and W. E. B. DuBois.” Clearly, Mr. Bennett is a DuBois man.

  But Booker T. Washington himself was one of the great forces of the age. A former teacher at Tuskegee recalls the “almost mystical” power of his presence and his words, and says, “We were all so instilled with his philosophy that everything he said was like the word of God Himself.” His faculty and staff worshipped him. He rode around the Tuskegee campus on horseback, a majestic figure, inspecting everything. He was obsessed with tidiness and cleanliness and, dismounting from his horse during his tours of inspection, he ran his white handkerchief over desktops and bookshelves, checking for dust. He inspected the dormitories and the libraries, the laboratories and the lavatories. In one washroom, fitted out with a washbowl, soap, water pitcher, and towels, he lifted the water pitcher and found it empty. “How,” he asked, “is one expected to wash one’s hands without water?” He often dropped in, unannounced, on Tuskegee classrooms, just to see how his teachers were doing. One former teacher, who worked in Tuskegee’s kindergarten department, remembers how Dr. Washington visited her classroom one autumn morning. He entered the room quietly, as usual, and took a seat at the back of the room. The teacher, as was customary, made no acknowledgment of his arrival, and continued with her class. She had drawn with colored chalks on the blackboard a frond of goldenrod, and then she read to her children a little poem about the pretty goldenrod and how it grew. After a few minutes, Dr. Washington rose and just as quietly departed. But he returned a few moments later with a stalk of live goldenrod in his hand. Gently, he asked the teacher, “Why go to the trouble of drawing a goldenrod on the blackboard, when the real thing is growing right outside the door?”

  He was a spellbinding speaker, with a gift for vivid metaphor. In one memorable speech before a black
audience he held up his hand, spread his fingers wide, and said, “In all things social, we can be as separate as the fingers on a hand. But, as the palm of the hand, we must be as one when it comes to the good of the country.” But he was not pompous, and had a wry sense of humor. He once commented, “Whenever you see a Negro who’s not a Baptist or a Methodist, you know some white man has been messin’ with his religion.” Booker T. Washington’s detractors often point out that while he may have been a great orator and teacher, none of his children amounted to much. The children of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did not amount to much either.

  But Booker T. Washington died over sixty years ago. All the great charismatic leaders—DuBois, Douglass, Garvey, and the three named ladies, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Hawkins Brown—have gone. So has Martin Luther King, Jr. The closest thing to a black leader in recent times has been Elijah Muhammad, but he too has died, and his son, Wallace, who has succeeded his father as head of the Nation of Islam, possesses only a shadow of his father’s electrifying personality and power. There is no single, unifying leader in black America today (to which blacks counter that neither is there a great white leader). Though Berry Gordy heads the leading black business in America, no one would call him America’s greatest black business leader. John Johnson’s magazines influence many black people, but John Johnson himself could not be called a leading force in black American life. It has been suggested that, with the power of his publications behind him, John Johnson could run for President. But Johnson expresses no interest in politics, and his aloof and enigmatic personality make him seem unsuited to it. Who is the Great Black Hope today? If he exists, no one knows his name, or hers.