When it came to elite public schools for black society, no school could out-perform Washington, D.C.’s Dunbar High School, which, prior to 1915, had been known as “the M Street School.” During its heyday from 1900 to the 1950s, the school sent a large number of students to Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges. Among its graduates were attorneys William Henry Hastie and Charles Hamilton Houston, who went on to Amherst; Judge Robert Terrell, who graduated from Harvard; and historians Rayford Logan and Carter G. Woodson.
“My husband, Frank, was in the same class as Senator Edward Brooke,” says Alberta Colbert, who recalls the significance of Dunbar High School when she was attending Howard University. “There was a very large contingent of Dunbar graduates in many of Howard’s different departments.” Because of Dunbar’s prestige and the inability to get job offers from white universities in the North, many of Dunbar’s teachers were black scholars who had received advanced degrees at northeastern universities and used Dunbar as a training ground or waiting spot before they went on to college teaching positions at universities like Howard, Fisk, Atlanta, Morehouse, or Spelman.
Other well-known public schools popular among the old black elite during this same period were Booker T. Washington High in Memphis, which was headed by Dr. Blair T. Hunt in the 1930s and 1940s; DuSable High School in Chicago; Girls High School in Brooklyn; Central High School in Philadelphia; and Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta. Following the increased integration of school districts and the breakup of prestigious black high schools in the middle to late 1950s, the black elite left many of these schools, concluding that private day schools and boarding schools were the best solution for their children.
Whether they were using certain public or private schools, cotillions, day camps, or other special activities, the black elite have always been focused on providing their children with the kind of experiences and environments that prepare them for lives that will always be slightly different from those of whites or other blacks that they encounter.
Today, many black professional parents are discovering that their children can usually find acceptance among the black elite even if they don’t check off all the boxes.
As the daughter of a physician who belonged to the Boulé and a mother who belonged to the Girl Friends, Paquita Harris Attaway says it was not out of the ordinary for her to have spent summers in Martha’s Vineyard, attended Camp Atwater, belonged to Jack and Jill, and debuted at the AKA cotillion in the 1950s. “In my generation,” explains the Washington, D.C., resident, “it was both common and expected that we would be tied to these institutions and events.”
As I consider Attaway’s experience and her ongoing ties to prominent black organizations, I wonder if the kids of today’s generation are going to feel equally rooted to the other members of black elite society if the black boarding schools, camps, and cotillions continue to die out or become irrelevant. Even though I did not personally participate in many of these institutions, I had family and friends who did—so I was left with the pride that one receives in knowing that people of your race have some respected traditions that are repeated generation after generation. By having that knowledge and by having some close and some distant ties to those traditions, it kept me optimistic that one day I could play a greater role in that community.
CHAPTER 4
Howard, Spelman, and Morehouse: Three Colleges That Count
“There is probably no group of alumni more loyal than Howard alumni,” says Washington resident Bebe Drew Price, who grew up on the Howard campus when her father, Dr. Charles Richard Drew, was a professor there in the 1940s.
As a college sophomore, I found the same to be true. I visited the campus for the first time during Howard’s biggest weekend, the annual homecoming. It was the biggest multigenerational gathering of black professional families that I’d ever seen. And I was met by folded arms.
“So I understand you go to one of those white colleges.” This father had welcomed me into his daughter’s home earlier that afternoon, but now stared at me blankly from his seat at the head of the dining room table.
I waited for someone to save me, but no one did. “Yes, Princeton,” I answered.
“Well, I guess you’ve been told this is a Howard family. Three generations—all Howard College, law school, and medical school. Everybody went to Howard.” The man paused and looked around at the nine other people sitting around the table. “Yes, all of us Howard. And proud to be black.”
I quickly looked over at the friend who had invited me for the weekend of festivities, but she quickly dropped her head. She wasn’t going to weigh in after her father offered the strange remark. I was also left without words. As we sat in the silence of that beige dining room in an upper Sixteenth Street house, I was simultaneously impressed and offended by the loyalty this man exhibited toward the school. For me, his remark underscored an attitude that pervades many black elite families: If you don’t have ties to Howard, you’re a little bit inferior. And if you didn’t go to a black college, you’re off the radar screen altogether.
Today, one of the complexities that are beginning to face more and more upper-class black children is choosing between black and white colleges after they have spent the last twelve years of their lives getting accustomed to being one of a handful of blacks in a predominately white suburban public or private school. Some parents are surprised or offended that their kids aren’t following in their footsteps, but others have resigned themselves to the idea that their children’s integrated childhood experiences will have a lasting effect on the child’s future decision to abandon traditions and institutions that had been accepted and taken for granted only one generation earlier.
My brother and I were part of a wave of students who had been raised during the 1970s in white neighborhoods and predominately white public and private schools, somehow splitting our values between what whites felt was important and what our family and other blacks felt was important. Some of those values—college selection, for example—were overlapping among our black and white friends. Given that fact, it was expected that we would have selected white colleges. Our white friends were doing so, and the greater percentage of our black friends—except for some third-or fourth-generation Howard legacies—were also heading to white schools in the Northeast. My best friend from across the street had gone away to Groton for boarding school and was heading for Yale, like his four older siblings. So little interest did we have in southern schools like Howard or Morehouse that neither my brother nor I even sent away for a black college catalog. In fact, not only did we have older cousins from the South who had come north to attend white boarding schools and colleges like Brown, Harvard, Tufts, Wellesley, and Columbia but we were also surrounded by older Jack and Jill friends who were headed for white universities.
Today I recognize that although I had many relatives who had gone to good black colleges a generation before me, I had chosen a school on the basis of what was respected most by my white classmates and white neighbors. As the only black student in my honors classes and in my neighborhood, I was convinced that my college selection was going to reflect not only on me and my family but also on the entire black race, as it was viewed by white onlookers. I had endured sufficient skepticism from white neighbors that I was compelled to select a school that held the greatest universal appeal. Not surprisingly, this was to be a northeastern Ivy League university. Some would say that such a mentality—one that continually sought white approval—is yet another inevitable response to growing up in a mostly white school environment, and I am not sure they would be wrong. But I would also argue that my black friends from Jack and Jill—the black kids I most identified with—were making the same choice and were therefore a part of my decision-making process.
The decision to attend an Ivy League college was, therefore, in my eyes, a race-neutral decision. It was just a part of my quest for universal approval—and that included approval from people of all colors. But the decision to attend Princ
eton, in particular, was probably completely based on race. Brown University in Providence had been my first-choice college. My tennis partner from high school (he was white) and my best female friend, whom I knew through the NAACP (she was black), were planning to attend Brown. Just before high-school graduation, after I had settled on attending the Ivy League school, a white neighbor asked me where I would be going to college in the fall. I remember proudly answering “Brown.”
The woman returned a blank stare.
The moment was devastating for me because it suddenly made me realize that the universal approval that I always craved was not about to be bestowed.
“Brown?” the woman asked. “I’m not sure I’ve heard of it. Is that one of those black schools?”
Now, I am ashamed to admit how crestfallen I felt. But even with seventeen years of valuing my black culture and history, I suddenly felt offended that this person would have thought that I, who had spent his adolescence proving to white kids that he could compete in their white-dominated arena, was now relegated to the less respected arena of “one of those black schools.” This is why I chose Princeton that afternoon. Today when people ask me if I missed out on anything by not attending a black university, I tell them “yes” for one reason: Although a vast number of career opportunities have opened for me as the graduate of an Ivy League school with a worldwide reputation, I missed out on a black college friendship bonding experience that has been impossible to replicate in any activity or organization that I have joined since.
“There are many black families today—regardless of their wealth—who consider black colleges because they recognize the overall benefits to their children,” says Dr. Joan Payne McPhatter, a Howard professor and alumnus who has seen four generations of her family attend the 132-year-old university. “This is particularly true for blacks in the South.”
Although two buildings at Tennessee State University are named after her father, it is Howard that fills the family résumé. McPhatter’s son went there before going to Georgetown Law School. She went there before becoming a professor in the communications department. Her mother, who held a doctorate, was Howard’s dean of women in the 1940s. And her grandfather went there before entering a career in accounting.
Just as the Roosevelts and the Kennedys had Harvard and the Buckleys and the Basses had Yale, old families among the black elite have selected certain colleges for their children and their descendants. While northern blacks and some free southern blacks certainly chose to come north during the 1800s to attend white colleges and universities like Amherst, Harvard, or Oberlin College in Ohio, most members of the black elite attending college during the immediate post–Civil War period preferred to establish their family roots at the black southern universities founded by religious organizations.
Today, there are a total of 117 historically black colleges and universities, but only a few of them play a role in the upper-class black résumé. The three most prestigious in this group are Howard University in Washington and Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta.
“I never say it to people, but it’s really the black man’s Harvard,” says an Atlanta lawyer who was the third generation of his family to attend Howard University. “I laugh when whites walk into my office and see the framed picture of Founders Hall. ‘Oh, is that Harvard?’ they ask,” says the attorney as he points to the photo of the imposing redbrick building that serves as a centerpiece of the eighty-nine-acre campus that sits on top of a hill in northwest Washington.
Founded in 1867, Howard is the most popular school among America’s black elite, with many of its students third-and fourth-generation alumni. Because of the reputation of the undergraduate, law, medical, dental, and other professional departments, Howard lays claim to more prominent black alumni than any other college or university. In fact, nearly one-third of all black physicians and dentists and about one-fifth of all black lawyers in the United States are graduates of Howard.
Included among the alumni are such people as Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and Princeton professor Toni Morrison, United Nations ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, New York mayor David Dinkins, U.S. senator from Massachusetts Edward Brooke, National Urban League president Vernon Jordan, TV actress Phylicia Rashad, Yale Medical School psychiatrist Dr. James P. Comer, and Nobel Peace Prize–winning United Nations undersecretary Ralph Bunche. Although it is the largest predominately African American university, it has always had whites and other nonblack students among its enrollment.
“Howard is not only the center of Washington’s black society; it has long been at the center of this country’s black society,” says Alberta Campbell Colbert, who received a pharmacy degree from Howard in the 1950s and became a part of the elite Howard circle that represented the most accomplished blacks in medicine, business, and government. “My husband, Frank, had graduated from Howard and studied under Dr. Charles Richard Drew, who invented blood plasma storage, as well as so many other famous black intellectuals. The campus and LeDroit Park were teeming with famous faces when we were in school,” she adds. Colbert’s circle of Howard friends included some of the affluent physicians and businesspeople who belonged to Washington’s Bachelor-Benedicts club with her husband. One of her oldest friends is Howard graduate Cynthia Mitchell, whose husband, Doyle Mitchell, also a Howard graduate, was chairman of Industrial Bank of Washington, one of the country’s largest and oldest black-owned banks.
“The Howard name has long been an important credential in every part of the country,” says Howard graduate Bennie Pratt Wiley, who heads the Partnership, an association of corporate executives in Boston. Wiley, whose sister, former Washington mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, also went to Howard, still interacts with her circle of Howard friends, whether it is through her activities in the Links or summering each year in Martha’s Vineyard. “When I was growing up here,” adds Judge Henry Kennedy of the superior court of Washington, “Howard was an indicator of reaching the top. The people that went there were the people that really counted in black society and American society.”
Not only has the school produced a dazzling array of graduates, but Howard has always attracted the top scholars in both its undergraduate and its graduate departments. Within that group are such individuals as Dr. W. Montague Cobb, who has degrees from Amherst and Howard and later became chairman of the Howard Medical School anatomy department; legal scholars William Henry Hastie, Spottswood Robinson, and Charles Hamilton Houston; historians Carter G. Woodson and John Hope Franklin; marine biologist Ernest Everett Just; chemist Dr. Percy Julian, who developed the synthetic cortisone used to treat arthritis; and religious scholars like Benjamin E. Mays, who later headed Morehouse and earned forty-three honorary degrees—to name just a few.
“Most of us Howard graduates knew all the major black Ph.D.’s in the country because they would always end up teaching there,” says Colbert, who also sent her daughter, Doris, to the school. “But one of the reasons why we had the best professors was that these top professors weren’t hired or taken seriously by white universities. Of course the times are different now.”
Named after Oliver Howard, a commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the school was originally established to educate recently freed slaves. But instead of identifying itself as a school that pushed an aggressive civil rights agenda, the school spent most of its early years apolitically, maintaining a conservative approach to leadership. While never stated, its goal was to become a black version of Harvard or Yale: The university wanted only the most accomplished intellectuals on its faculty and sought out students from the most ambitious and well-to-do families. Its goal was to duplicate the curriculum of northern white schools and produce black students who could compete in the same arenas.
The school was not without its detractors. In fact, some were disappointed that the university was so fixated on avoiding the emphasis of problack messages in the curriculum. So cautiou
s was the black university about avoiding a strong black image that it continued to appoint white men to preside over the school for the first sixty years of its existence—passing up its own black scholars and other blacks who had applied for the position. In fact, the rumblings got so loud in 1912 when three black deans—George Cook, Kelly Miller, and Lewis Moore—got passed over in favor of a white minister from Maryland that the school was forced to increase the deans’ powers in order to appease them and other blacks who thought it was time for this black institution for black leadership to actually employ a black leader.
Today, it is surely regarded as an embarrassing fact that it was not until 1926 that Howard selected its first black president. It was Mordecai W. Johnson, a light-skinned black who could easily pass for white, who received the honor of serving as the university’s first black president. With degrees from Morehouse, the University of Chicago, Rochester Theological Seminary, and Harvard, and a doctorate from Howard, he was clearly qualified for the appointment. One of the best-known presidents in the school’s history, he is credited with increasing Howard’s national prestige by attracting contributions and top scholars to the campus. Both because of his physical appearance and because of his intellectual accomplishments, he was effective at winning access to, and support from, wealthy white donors who had previously expressed no interest in supporting black institutions.
James M. Nabrit, a graduate of Morehouse College and Northwestern Law School, became president of Howard in 1960, after teaching at its law school for twenty-four years. He retired from the presidency in 1969, when the position was given to thirty-seven-year-old James Cheek, who had a Ph.D. from Drew University. It has been said that it was during this very late period that Howard finally accepted its role as an important voice in the civil rights movement.
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