Our Kind of People

Lawrence Otis Graham

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061870811
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Now a TV series on FOX starring Morris Chestnut, Yaya DaCosta, Nadine Ellis, and Joe Morton.

"Fascinating.... [Graham] has made a major contribution both to African-American studies and the larger American picture."— New York Times

Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha's Vineyard. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group.

Author and TV commentator Lawrence Otis Graham, one of the nation's most prominent spokesmen on race and class, spent six years interviewing the wealthiest black families in America. He includes historical photos of a people that made their first millions in the 1870s. Graham tells who's in and who's not in the group today with separate chapters on the elite in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Nashville, and New Orleans. A new Introduction explains the controversy that the book elicited from both the black and white communities.

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of the Black Upper Class

Bryant Gumbel is, but Bill Cosby isn’t.

Lena Horne is, but Whitney Houston isn’t.

Andrew Young is, but Jesse Jackson isn’t.

And neither is Maya Angelou, Alice

Walker, Clarence Thomas, or Quincy Jones.

And even though both of them try extremely

hard, neither Diana Ross nor Robin Givens

will ever be.

All my life, for as long as I can remember, I grew up thinking that there existed only two types of black people: those who passed the “brown paper bag and ruler test” and those who didn’t. Those who were members of the black elite. And those who weren’t.

I recall summertime visits from my maternal great-grandmother, a well-educated, light-complexioned, straight-haired black southern woman who discouraged me and my brother from associating with darker-skinned children or from standing or playing for long periods in the July sunlight, which threatened to blacken our already too-dark skin.

“You boys stay out of that terrible sun,” Great-grandmother Porter would say in a kindly, overprotective tone. “God knows you’re dark enough already.”

As she sat rocking, stiff-lipped and humorless, on the porch of our Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, summer home, she would gesture for us to move further and further into the shade while flipping disgustedly through the pages of Ebony magazine.

“Niggers, niggers, niggers,” she’d say under her breath while staring at the oversized pages of text and photos of popular Negro politicians, entertainers, and sports figures who were busy making black news in 1968.

Great-grandmother Porter, the daughter of a minister and a homemaker, was extremely proud of her Memphis, Tennessee, middle-class roots. While still a child, she had worn silk taffeta dresses, had taken several years of piano lessons, and had managed to become fluent in French. Her only daughter had followed in her footsteps, wearing similarly elegant dresses, taking music lessons, and attending the private LeMoyne School a few years ahead of Roberta Church, the millionaire daughter of Robert Church, the richest black man in the South. She often reminded us that one of her sisters, Venie, then grown and married, had lived for years on Mississippi Boulevard next door to Maceo Walker, the most affluent and powerful black man in Memphis. Great-grandmother was proud of many things, such as being a Republican like the Churches and most other well-placed blacks in those early years. Like all blacks in racist southern towns in the early 1900s, she despised the insults, the substandard treatment, and the poor facilities that the Jim Crow laws had left for blacks. But like many blacks of her class, she was able to limit the interactions that she and her family had with such indignities. Rather than ride at the back of the bus and send her daughter to substandard segregated public schools, she and her husband bought a car and paid for private schooling. For my great-grandmother, life had been generous enough that she could create an environment that buffered her family against the bigotry she knew was just outside her door.

Even though it was 1968, a period of unrest for many blacks throughout the country, Great-grandmother—like the blue-veined crowd that she was proud to belong to—seemed, at times, to be totally divorced from the black anxiety and misery that we saw on the TV news and in the papers. In public and around us children, her remarks often suggested that she was satisfied with the way things were. She often said she didn’t think much of the civil rights movement (“I don’t see anything civil about a bunch of nappy-headed Negroes screaming and marching around in the streets”), even though I later learned that she and her church friends often gave money to the NAACP, the Urban League, and other groups that fought segregation. She said she didn’t think much of Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin or their loud Baptist music (“When are we going to get beyond all this low-class, Baptist, spiritual-sounding rock and roll music?”), even though she would sometimes attend Baptist services. She was proud when a black man finally won an Academy Award, but was disappointed that Sidney Poitier seemed so dark and wet with perspiration when he was interviewed after receiving the honor.

An outsider might have looked at this woman and wondered whether she liked blacks at all. Her views seemed so unforgiving. The fact was that she was completely dedicated to the members of her race, but she had a greater understanding of and appreciation for those blacks who shared her appearance and socioeconomic background.

Disappointed and disillusioned by how little she saw of herself and her crowd in the pages of Ebony magazine, Great-grandmother looked up and once again focused her attention on me and my brother.

And then she thought about her hair.

Stepping back inside the house for her ever-present Fuller brush and comb, she was, no doubt, frustrated by the fact that her great-grandchildren were several shades darker than she, with kinky hair that was clearly that of a Negro person.

My brother and I noted her disappearance into the house and thus once again ran out of the shade and danced around the sand- and pebble-covered road, breathing in the sunshine and the fragrance of the dense pine trees that rose from the layers of sand and brush.

“Young men—young men,” her voice called from the rear bedroom, “you aren’t back in that sun, are you?”

“No, ma’am. We’re in the shade, ma’am,” my eight-year-old brother, Richard, called back with complete conviction as he stopped just out of my great-grandmother’s range of vision, thrusting his bare brown chest and oval face into the ninety-six-degree July sun, boldly willing his skin to grow blacker and blacker in defiance of her query.

Even at age six, I knew the importance of class distinctions within my black world. As I moved quickly to the safety of the shade, beckoning my brother to protect his complexion from the blackening sun, I gave legitimacy to my great-grandmother’s—and many of my people’s—fears. At age six, I already understood the importance of achieving a better shade of black.

Unlike my brother, I already knew that there was us and there was them. There were those children who belonged to Jack and Jill and summered in Sag Harbor; Highland Beach; or Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard; and there were those who didn’t. There were those mothers who graduated from Spelman or Fisk and joined AKA, the Deltas, the Links, and the Girl Friends, and there were those who didn’t. There were those fathers who were dentists, lawyers, and physicians from Howard or Meharry and who were Alphas, Kappas, or Omegas and members of the Comus, the Boulé, or the Guardsmen, and there were those who weren’t. There were those who could look back two or three generations and point to relatives who owned insurance companies, newspapers, funeral homes, local banks, trucking companies, restaurants, catering firms, or farmland, and there were those who couldn’t. There were those families that made what some called “a handsome picture” of people with “good hair” (wavy or straight), with “nice complexions” (light brown to nearly white), with “sharp features” (thin nose, thin lips, sharp jaw) and curiously non-Negroid hazel, green, or blue eyes—and there were those that didn’t. I had a precious few of the above, while many I knew and played with were able to check off all the right boxes. In fact, I knew some who not only had complexions ten shades lighter than that brown paper bag, and hair as straight as any ruler, but also had multiple generations of “good looks,” wealth, and accomplishment. And, of course, I also knew some black kids who could claim nothing at all.

It was a color thing and a class thing. And for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together. Since I was born and raised around people with a focus on many of these characteristics, it should be no surprise that I was later to decide—at age twenty-six—to have my nose surgically altered just so that I could further buy into the aesthetic biases that many among the black elite hold so dear.

During my youth, it was often painful for me to acknowledge that I had one foot inside and one foot outside of this group. I never quite had enough of the elite credentials to impress the key leaders in the group, but my family and I checked off enough boxes to be embraced by a segment of this community. Sometimes I knew where I was lacking and sometimes I didn’t. For example, I knew that my complexion was a shade lighter than the brown paper bag, but that my hair—while not coarse like our African ancestors’—had a Negroid kink that made it the antithesis of ruler-straight. I knew that we lived in the right neighborhood, summered at the right resorts, and employed the right level of household help, but that we had not attended the right private schools or summer camps. While my grandparents owned businesses and property that brought them and their children an unusually high standard of living, none of them had gone to the right schools. My mother was accepted by the old guard’s most exclusive women’s social club, but my father belonged to a fraternity that the elite group considered to be “distinctly middle-class.” My brother and I grew up in the country’s most exclusive black children’s group, yet we were never invited to serve as escorts in the best debutante cotillions.

But whether it was mainly the skin color, the hair texture, the family background, the education, the money, or the sharpness of our features that set some of us apart and made some of us think we were superior to other blacks—and to most whites—we were certain that we would always be able to recognize our kind of people.

The characteristics of the black elite have roots that can be traced back almost four hundred years to when slavery began in this country. When the first Africans arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, neither the white Dutch or Portuguese slave traders nor the white American plantation owners had any knowledge of, or interest in, the tribal and cultural differences between the Mandingo, Dahomean, Ashanti, Mbundu, Ewe, or Bantu blacks who were brought from different regions of Africa. They had no knowledge—or interest in letting the rest of white America know—that these blacks had come from established villages where they were already skilled in crafting iron, gold, leather, silver, and bronze into tools, artwork, and housewares, and where they were already weaving clothing; speaking different languages; growing tomatoes, onions, and fruits; raising livestock; practicing different religions; and establishing laws, banking mechanisms, medical treatments, and various other cultural traditions. The Ivory Coast, Guinea, the Gold Coast, and other areas of West Africa were simply profitable ports of call for the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, British—and later, American—slave traders and shippers who captured, dehumanized, raped, and sold more than fifteen million men, women, and children on blocks at boat docks up and down the East Coast of the United States. To the traders, a sale at an average price of $500 per man and $250 per woman or child (these South Carolina 1801 prices eventually rose as high as $1,300 or $1,400 by 1860) made the business of human bondage a profitable one that required no conscience and no need to draw cross-cultural connections.

Prior to 1442, when the Portuguese first arrived in West Africa to capture blacks and begin the four-hundred-year period of black slavery, Africans had their own class distinctions that were based on tribe, locale, and the individual tribal member’s assigned role in his community. All those distinctions became moot in the New World.

When black slaves arrived on many southern plantations, they were ultimately divided into two general groups. There were the outside laborers who worked in the fields harvesting rice or tobacco, cutting sugarcane, picking cotton, or building roads and structures. Included among this outside laborer group were those slaves who worked at smelting iron, digging wells, and laying bricks. Many slaves built the very plantations and buildings around which they worked. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and George Washington’s Mount Vernon were both important homes built by slaves. And, for the most part, throughout the South, these outside laborers lived in windowless, unfloored shacks, or in structures close to their owners’ livestock.

The second group of slaves were those who performed the more desirable jobs inside the master’s house: cooking, cleaning, washing, and tending to the more personal needs of the owner’s family around the home. While these laborers were also slaves, with no more or fewer rights than the outdoor workers, the distinctions between the slaves in the field and the slaves who served as butlers and “mammies” in the house were not at all subtle. The terms “house niggers” and “field niggers” grew into meaningful labels as generations of slaves in the master’s house gained more favorable treatment and had access to better food, better work conditions, better clothing, and a level of intimacy with the owner’s family that introduced the house slave to white ways, minimal education, and nonconsensual sexual relations.

As the caste system among the slaves was gradually instituted by slave owners and their families, the slaves themselves came to believe that one group was, indeed, superior to the other. The plantation owners began to place their lighter-skinned slaves in the house, thus creating an even greater chasm between the two groups—now based on physical characteristics, not just random assignment. Because these lighter-skinned blacks were perceived as receiving greater benefits and a more comfortable lifestyle, resentment among the darker-skinned field slaves only grew. “Although it was illegal to educate slaves,” explains history professor Dr. Adele Logan Alexander of George Washington University, “it was far more likely that the house slave would learn to read, be introduced to upper-class white traditions, be permitted to play or interact with white family members than would a field slave. In fact, slave-owning families found they could run their homes more efficiently when their house slaves were more knowledgeable and educated.”

Not surprisingly, both whites and “house niggers” came to consider the dark-skinned “field niggers” to be less civilized and intellectually inferior.

Since many white slave owners established clandestine and forced sexual relations with their female house slaves, the mulatto offspring (who were also assigned slave status) extended the size of the house slave staff. In fact, it was to the owners’ benefit to mate with as many of these female slaves as possible, for each new child was a new slave. While none of these illegitimate offspring had any more rights than the unmixed African slaves, they became a part of a growing phenomenon of lighter-complexioned house slaves who separated themselves even further from the field blacks.

“It is evident that the fixation on skin color by both upper-class whites and blacks derives from the fact that light-skinned blacks were given a favored status by white slave owners from their very early interaction during the slavery period,” explains Professor Alexander. In her book Ambiguous Lives, Alexander explores her own family’s roots in Georgia as free, light-skinned blacks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The phenomenon was not limited to southern blacks. Although the South was the most notorious for its use of slaves, blacks were owned and used as slaves in the northern states well into the 1800s. For example, although Pennsylvania was the first state to establish a law abolishing slavery, with its 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, the weak terms of the act allowed some blacks to remain enslaved until 1850, when the Federal Census ultimately found no slaves living in the state. Over time, then, the caste system took on a third dimension: free blacks versus enslaved blacks. For example, in Pennsylvania, the Federal Census of 1790 reveals that of the 10,274 blacks living in the state, more than one-third of them were slaves, with the remaining group labeled as “free blacks” or “free people of color.”

There were many arguments used by white government officials, religious leaders, and highly esteemed landowners to justify the continued enslavement of blacks in North America. Just as they had done when attempting to enslave the Native Americans, the white population insisted that Africans should be enslaved because they were not Christians—and so long as they did not embrace such religious tenets, they needed to be ruled by civilized whites who did. Upon the conversion of some of the blacks to Christianity—and after a certain number of years of indentured servitude—a very small percentage of slaves were set free, thus creating a population of free blacks in North America. This practice of freeing slaves was sporadic and was ultimately halted in the South. In fact, it was as early as the 1660s, in Virginia, that blacks would legally be made slaves in perpetuity. Many white landowners and government officials elsewhere quickly came to agree with this decision as they realized how much the economies of their communities had benefited from the free labor.

While their numbers were inconsequential, free blacks in the South became an elite group with a status somewhere between their enslaved brethren and white citizens. For example, in the state of Georgia in 1800, there were 1,019 free blacks, and by 1860 that number had grown only to 3,500. In the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, out of a population of 40,522 people, close to 14,000 were black slaves, and only 3,200 were free blacks. Free blacks in the South were generally required to carry papers proving that they were not slaves and were required to register annually in their counties, listing their white guardians. However, they were permitted to work for money and to own property, thus creating the first opportunity for blacks to establish their families with some moderate wealth. The nucleus of the black elite was formed around these families.

One of my first encounters with an early pioneering family in the black upper class was meeting members of the aristocratic Syphax family from Virginia. I had grown up hearing my father tell me about their family history, as one of his father’s business associates had known several family members. Talking to Evelyn Reid Syphax at a Links meeting that my mother had brought me to, I learned one way in which some black families—including her own—gained wealth and a place among the upper class. “My family had owned fifteen acres of the land where the Arlington National Cemetery now sits,” Syphax explained as she recounted the history of her family, which can be traced back to Maria Custis, the mulatto child of First Lady Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who owned the mansion that sits on the cemetery today. “Custis fathered Maria with Ariana Carter, one of his female house slaves,” explained Syphax, a well-to-do, retired real estate broker who lives in Virginia, “and when Maria asked her father, who was also still her owner, for permission to marry Charles Syphax, a black slave who worked for her father, he released both from slavery, gave her a wedding in the mansion, and offered her and her new husband fifteen acres of the Arlington estate. That mansion and the surrounding property—minus Maria Syphax’s fifteen acres—was later given by Custis to his white daughter, Mary Custis, who eventually married Confederate soldier Robert E. Lee—thus making the house a famous building in the southern state.”

On my first trip to Washington with my family in the late 1960s, I remember my parents remarking that the Syphax story was evidence that a black family’s genealogy could be as relevant to our country’s history as any white family’s that I might read about in school. The fact that the Syphaxes were still residing in the community today made their story even more real to me at that age. Since that time, the Syphax family has continued to gain wealth through other real estate holdings and through bus...