Mary Bethune was a brilliant fund-raiser, unexcelled at ringing the doorbells of wealthy men she barely knew and coming away with bequests of hundreds of thousands of dollars for her school. She had tremendous presence, and an enormous sense of theatre. She would sweep regally, head held high, to the speaker’s platform, face her audience for a moment, and then say, “Ladies and gentlemen …” and there would follow a long, pregnant, dramatic pause. Then she would say, “I stand before you in all humility.…” The audience would gasp.
She also, no doubt, had an enormous ego. She once told a friend how she handled speaking engagements at racially mixed gatherings in the South. She always came up to the speakers’ table last, so as not to create any embarrassment about where she should be seated. She would then deliver her address. “Then,” she said, “I leave the auditorium during the standing ovation.”
Mary McLeod Bethune was deeply conscious of her own blue-black color—almost obsessive about it. Though she insisted that she thought her color was “beautiful,” she repeated this theme so often that some suspected that, deep down, she had secret doubts. Still, she used her color as a symbol of the purity of her race and, by transference, to the purity of her purpose. She did not have a great sense of humor on the subject of color, or on any other subject, but she did have an ability to deliver pithy comments—some of them, surprisingly, almost antiblack. “Negroes,” she once said, “are not very smart. But they’re very wise.”
She could also express herself in a way that was quite poetic. Charles Turner is a young Atlanta white who directs the United Board for College Development, a facility that develops a variety of programs to aid traditionally black colleges. As a young boy, Turner met the legendary Mrs. Bethune, who died in 1955, and she apparently was taken with him, as he was with her, and he was particularly struck with something she said to him. It was a remark intended for him, as a white, but it might also be taken to heart by blacks—Old Guard and new-rich, fair-skinned and dark—as they struggle for achievement, status, recognition, for parity with whites and for some sort of racial unity in America in the late 1970s. It might even have been an item included in Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s little etiquette book.
Mary Bethune had just come back from a trip to Switzerland, where she had been struck by the beauty of the rose gardens that bloomed along the south-facing shore of Lake Leman. “There were roses of all colors,” she told young Turner. “There were white roses, pink roses, yellow roses, and red roses. There was one variety of rose that was of so deep a shade that it was almost black. And I realized that all roses bloom if you give each variety an equal amount of sunlight.” Looking at him with her arrestingly deep brown eyes, she said, “You’re a young man. You’ve got a long life to live, and a lot of sunlight to shed. Make sure that your sunlight shines on all the roses.”
23
Peeking Ahead
“One thing that can be said for the black upper class,” says one black woman with more than a touch of pride, “is that we’re always nice to our servants.” This comment, with its curious echo of the classic statement of the gentlewoman of the Old South (“We were always good to our slaves”) is an indication of the growing emphasis placed, by middle-and upper-class blacks, on niceness. In addition to a nice house in a nice neighborhood, with nice things to go in it, with nice schools for the children, and nice places to go on holidays, today’s black elite wants nice manners, nice speech, and to be regarded as nice people.
Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which created federal educational programs, extended loans to small businesses, initiated such notions as Head Start, thousands of poor blacks were helped out of ghettos, into colleges and graduate schools, and into the mainstream of the American middle class. In the Nixon years and following, these programs have gradually begun to go out the window, but their accomplishments remain and what they did cannot be destroyed. In the decade between 1960 and 1970, the number of blacks employed in technical and professional occupations increased by 131 percent, and the number of black clerical workers increased by 121 percent. There have been qualitative as well as quantitative changes. There is decidedly a new maturity among the black middle class, and a new sophistication. They have left militancy behind them, have relaxed their guardedness, dropped at least many of the chips from their shoulders in favor of becoming nice, middle-class Americans. Nowhere was the new quality of black life exemplified better than at a recent staff meeting of a large Midwestern hospital, when someone casually mentioned having bought a pair of Gucci loafers. None of the white doctors or social workers in the group had ever heard of Gucci. But a pretty young black nurse had. “Gucci makes a wonderful shoe,” she said.
To be sure, many white professionals—notably doctors and lawyers—complain that the federally funded programs put many blacks through colleges, universities, and graduate schools who were not qualified, and that blacks, in too many cases, were given passing grades and, eventually, degrees that they did not deserve simply because it was the easy way to avoid a racial hassle. This may be true, but it is not the point. The point is that they got their degrees. Now a sifting-out process will take place, and the truly talented will separate themselves from the less talented, the cream rising to the top. From this cream will certainly emerge the black upper class of tomorrow.
As part of the increased maturity and sophistication of this emerging class, other changes are taking place. Black speech is changing, for one thing. As recently as fifteen years ago, for example, it was almost always possible to tell whether the person one was speaking to on the other end of the telephone line was white or black simply by tone of voice or inflection of speech. Today, differentiating between white and black voices is much less easy. The colleges have done this. The new college-educated blacks are also more interested in integrationist conversation than in the African nationalist “rap” of a few years back. Though the mothers and grandmothers of this generation may have preoccupied themselves with such matters as whether one had “good hair” or “bad hair,” today’s educated blacks talk freely and easily about the advantages and drawbacks of black hair texture, even with their white friends and acquaintances. The colleges have also undoubtedly eased the young blacks’ suspicions about whites and whites’ motives and have also caused whites to be less distrustful of blacks. The intangible “differences” between the races, at least on the educated level, have begun to seem much less apparent Already, in most parts of the country, there is much more social integration and intermingling between the races, and this will doubtless increase even further. As this happens, interracial marriages will probably also increase—slowly, but perceptibly.
The black Old Guard—particularly the older people among the Old Guard—may continue to prefer their quiet, conservative lives, their old neighborhoods, and to content themselves with their small circle of “visiting friends.” But the new middle class of educated blacks is already beginning to eclipse this smaller group in economic importance, and to push forward toward business and political success in an important way rather than to view success in terms of the security, honesty, and probity exemplified by the Pullman porter or the government clerk. As the new middle class moves into the new upper class, improving, as it goes, its style, speech, tastes, and niceness, it will not so much expand as solidify, taking on more and more values and attitudes that will seem almost indistinguishable from those of middle-or upper-class whites. This is beginning to happen already, as blacks moving upward are eschewing Cadillacs in favor of compacts and station wagons. In the future, no doubt, there will be a proliferation of black country clubs.
As blacks grow more secure with their new status, black society will cohere and become less divisive and competitive. But stratification within the group will result, as it always has in any upwardly mobile society, and there will always be “certain people” at the top of the social pecking order. And as more and more blacks become successful, the more they will be resented by the less successful and, ine
vitably, the gap between the educated and successful blacks at the top and the ill-educated poor at the bottom will seem wider and more unbridgeable.
In America, social class has always been defined by money more than anything else. Once money comes, manners and social “polish” follow, as a rule, in time. The newly rich of any color or ethnic group are always quick to surround themselves with costly possessions, things, the flashy trappings of wealth—whether they are the late Mrs. Horace Dodge, a former schoolteacher, who bought herself a huge yacht and a necklace of pearls the size of pigeons’ eggs, or John H. Johnson, covering the walls of his closets with fake fur. You get back, as the saying goes, with what you get—though to an older moneyed class this attitude might seem a bit vulgar. As money in families ages, it becomes boring. One grows tired of one’s yacht and lets it sink, as Mrs. Dodge did, into the mud of Lake St. Clair. One begins to underplay one’s possessions, and to distance oneself from one’s wealth, and to cultivate other areas. While the haves try to get away from their money, the have-nots are doing just the opposite. As more blacks become haves, and become accustomed to their situation, they, too, will become more reluctant to flaunt what they have got, and probably take on the quiet ways one associates with the American gentry. In a way, this is too bad because, as a corollary to this, they will also lose what is currently their special vitality, their brash charm, their distinctiveness—that wonderful raffishness—just as the German Jews did when they turned from scrappy peddlers into stolid city burghers with top hats and town houses.
George Johnson has said, “If a black has enough money today, he can live anywhere he wants.” This is without a doubt true, and Johnson proved it by moving peacefully into an otherwise expensive, all-white suburb. But what Johnson overlooks is the fact that his is not the most expensive neighborhood on Chicago’s North Shore. What was a peaceful move to Glencoe might be a somewhat less peaceful move to, let us say, Lake Forest. In matters of real estate, tremors of fear are still felt in white breasts when a rumor circulates that a black family wants to buy a house in an all-white part of town—not fear of violence, but simply a fear that valuable investments will be lost if an area “begins to go black.” Whites have seen too many neighborhoods go downhill when blacks moved in, and have heard too many lurid, often exaggerated, tales of others. What they have not heard are the many less interesting stories of white neighborhoods that have become integrated and remained stable. At the same time, blacks themselves who live on pleasant, integrated streets feel the same sort of fear when a neighborhood is threatened with becoming “too black.” Not long ago, a prosperous young black couple from Mississippi moved into a house on such a pleasant and integrated street in Cleveland where a prominent black surgeon and his wife also lived. The doctor’s wife paid her new neighbor the customary housewifely call, bringing a cake she had baked as a welcoming gift. But in the course of her visit, the surgeon’s wife said, a trifle tersely, “This has always been such a nice neighborhood. I do hope you’re going to keep it that way.” The message was quite clear, and as more and more blacks move to “nice” streets, more and more pressure will be put upon them to keep the streets nice—by their fellow blacks.
To avoid this pressure, it seems likely that as a new black upper class emerges there will be more and more elegant, well-manicured all-black suburbs like Collier Heights on the face of our land. Of course, government efforts to enforce integration, in matters such as busing, will stem this process—which is why so many upper-class blacks oppose busing.
Not long ago, in Cincinnati, Oscar Robertson and his wife were considering buying a house on Grandin Road. Grandin Road is perhaps Cincinnati’s most prestigious address. With the grounds of the Cincinnati Country Club on one side, and the curving Ohio River on the other, the street is lined with imposing hillside mansions with sweeping river views. With the news that the Robertsons might become the first black family on Grandin Road came waves of anxiety and doubt. There was no question that the Robertsons were exceptional people and would make splendid neighbors. Voted the National Basketball Association’s Most Valuable Player, a former cocaptain of the United States Olympic Gold Medal team, a former guard with the Cincinnati Royals and, later, the Milwaukee Bucks, Oscar Robertson was not only eminently respectable, a gentleman, but also a national celebrity. One should be proud to have him in one’s midst. But still, it was Grandin Road. The Robertsons were black. Cincinnati likes to think of itself as a bustling, up-to-date, Eastern town, not a Middle Western backwater, but it still carries a bit of the flavor of the antebellum South. There was a great deal of agonized soul-searching on Grandin Road. People took sides. Hackles rose. Some neighbors stopped talking to other neighbors. People who did not live on Grandin Road called the Grandin Road people bigots and snobs. Grandin Road bitterly denied these allegations. And so it went.
In the end, the problem resolved itself when Robertson decided against the Grandin Road property and bought a house in another part of town. Grandin Road was much relieved. A showdown had been avoided, at least for a while.
Oscar Robertson’s new house is in a fine, affluent neighborhood. But it is not quite as fine and affluent a neighborhood as Grandin Road. For Oscar Robertson, the choice of second-best seemed the most sensible, the most peaceable solution for his family—at least in 1976.
And so the black and white races move tentatively but steadily together, like confluent streams moving slowly from disparate sources toward a delta meeting in the future. Everyone knows that the meeting must take place. Not yet, perhaps. But soon … but soon. From her pink—or black—cloud, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, looking down on the progress of the converging streams since her departure from this earth, must in all likelihood be pleased with what she sees. As an educator, she was a fervent believer in education and its power to “lead out.” As an authority on etiquette and manners, she was an ardent believer in taking things slowly, easily, tactfully. Though many of her views strike blacks today as hopelessly old-fashioned, she was in a sense, a forerunner and an advocate of much of what is happening today. Much could be accomplished, she knew—given patience, politeness, and time. “Keep at it,” she might caution. “But remember that you’re black, and different—a rose of another color, as dear Mary might say—and be smart.”
Image Gallery
Charlotte Hawkins Brown with Palmer pupils
Publisher John H. Johnson and his mother, Gertrude Williams (left)
Mrs. John H. Johnson with Marc Chagall in front of her Chagall painting
Mrs. Lowell Zollar outside her Chicago home
Best-dressed Mrs. Lowell Zollar at the new Chicago Ritz-Carlton
Bettie Pullen-Walker chats with friends at a kickoff party for MsTique magazine given at New York’s St. Regis Hotel in November 1973. Left to right: Jack Scott, president of Ideal Publishing Company; Carole Bartel, writer; and Ms. Pullen-Walker, Chicago publisher of MsTique
A Links dinner in Chicago
At a Links Cotillion
Advertising executive Barbara Proctor with her son
George E. Johnson (left) and Illinois Senator Charles Percy
Mr. and Mrs. George E. Johnson of Chicago, and friends
Ebony Fashion Fair model
The audience at Ebony’s Fashion Fair
The late big-game hunter, Dr. T. R. M. Howard of Chicago
Grande dame Mrs. Mary Gibson Hundley, a descendant of Martha Washington, in her Washington, D.C, sitting-room
Washington’s Mr. and Mrs. William T. Syphax in front of the Lee mansion, which belonged to one of their ancestors
District of Columbia Congressman Walter E. Fauntroy in his Washington office
Strivers’ Row, an architectural gem in Harlem
Socialites Dr. and Mrs. Winston Churchill Willough by in their Washington, D.C., home
Planning New York’s Beaux Arts Ball are (left to right) Mrs. Robert F. Wagner, Baron Theo Von Roth, Robert David Lion Gardiner, Mollie Moon, Mrs. Ralph Bunche, and Marietta Tree (ca.
1970)
New York: Mrs. Mollie Moon being escorted from, a mock champagne bottle at her annual Beaux Arts Ball for the Urban League
The John Wesley Dobbs family of Atlanta, with Mattiwilda Dobbs at center
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Cooke Hamilton in their garden overlooking the Atlanta skyline
Jewel Lafontant in the “white tie and tails” costume she designed when she became the first woman of any color to present a case before the United States Supreme Court
The late Mary Church Terrell and Haley Douglass, a descendant of Frederick Douglass
Jewel Lafontant in her Chicago home
Three generations of Atlanta Yanceys: (from left) Arthur H. (“Aytch”) Yancey, Arthur H. Yancey II, and Asa G. Yancey, M.D.
A Vaughan family reunion in Africa. Jewel Lafontant is back row center
Some of the guests at a luncheon given by the Coalition for a United Community Action in Chicago. From left to right: Bill Berry, Al Johnson, Jesse Jackson, Carl Lattimore, and Muhammad Ali
Mary McLeod Bethune
Name Index
Aaron, Hank, 138
Ademola, Adetokunbo, 121
Ademola, Kofo, 121
Alcés, George, 91
Alexander, George, 90
Ali, Muhammad, 122, 139
Allen, Milton B., 138
Allen, Peyton, 172
Anderson, Marian, 48, 137, 158
Archer, Thersa, 75
Ashe, Arthur, 138, 142
Auchincloss, Louis, 160
Augustin, Peter, 90
Austin, Augustin A., 153, 156
Bailey, Frederick Augustus Washington. See Douglass, Frederick
Certain People Page 27