For generations, women who went to Fisk for college have been insulted by friends and relatives who suggested that they were not using their time wisely if they had not yet left their campus to go across the street to find a male medical student to date at Meharry.
“It’s an unfair characterization,” says my cousin Robert Morton, a surgeon who graduated from Meharry Medical School and met his wife, Anna, while she was a Fisk student, “but there were a lot of Fisk-Meharry couples that came about simply because the campuses were so close.” Founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, Fisk University is a coed college that has attracted some of the most prominent black intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Harlem Renaissance figure Arna Bontemps, historian John Hope Franklin, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and poet Nikki Giovanni. Other well-known graduates include Congressman John Lewis, choreographer Judith Jamison, Solicitor General Wade McCree, New York judge Constance Baker Motley, and U.S. secretary of energy Hazel O’Leary.
Although Fisk is not as high-profile as Howard, Morehouse, or Spelman, many consider the school to be more intellectually driven because of its history: It was the first black school to have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, the first black school to be awarded university status, and the first black college to gain full accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. In its early years, its reputation was also boosted because Booker T. Washington served on its board, married a Fisk alumnus, and sent his children there. Furthermore, it houses the private papers of many prominent individuals such as Langston Hughes and Marcus Garvey.
Located on a forty-acre campus, Fisk is among the smallest of the elite black schools—with just nine hundred students in its undergraduate and graduate programs. In 1946, the school appointed Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a social scientist who had previously established a race relations institute at Swarthmore, as its first black president.
“One of the reasons why I went to Meharry,” says Morton, “is that it was one of the few places that was committed to training black doctors. When I looked at New York University Medical School in 1939, I heard that they had a quota which kept them from admitting more than two blacks and eight Jews per class. That was surely no way to begin my career.”
Meharry Medical College has graduated more black physicians and dentists than any other school in the United States except Howard, and nearly 40 percent of the black faculty members in American medical schools are Meharry alumni. Founded in 1876, it was one of the last black institutions—waiting almost eighty years—to put a black at the helm. But even though its first few presidents were white, the bulk of the professors have been black for at least three generations. “We had a few white students while I was there in the early forties,” says Morton, “but all of the professors were black. Of course that made for a stark contrast when I graduated and came to see the New York hospitals.”
Like other Meharry graduates, Morton discovered that it was virtually impossible to find a job at a big-city hospital. “In fact,” says Morton, who was to eventually land a residency at New York’s Montefiore Hospital, “at that time in New York, there was only one institution that would allow a black to perform surgery. That was the Edgecombe Sanitarium—an ancient building without elevators. Black surgeons weren’t even allowed to operate at Harlem Hospital.”
Originally established by members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Meharry now offers the M.D., D.D.S., and Ph.D. to an enrollment of 880 students. Its board of trustees includes Dr. Beny Primm, a New York anesthesiologist who heads an addiction research organization; and Hector Hyacinthe, a high-profile New York businessman who was also an appointee of President George Bush. Further evidence of the tightness of this elite group is the fact that the daughters of Morton, Primm, and Hyacinthe are all childhood friends who grew up in Jack and Jill together in New York.
In addition to Howard, Morehouse, Spelman, Fisk, and Meharry, other black schools that have attracted a number of members of the black elite are Tuskegee University, Bennett College, Hampton University, Lincoln University, Clark-Atlanta University (which was created by the merger of Clark College and the Atlanta University graduate schools), and Xavier University—for those who come from Louisiana or are staunch Catholics.
Although the Hampton credential has become important to the black elite during the last three or four generations, for a long time it was a stepchild to other colleges because it was founded as a trade institute intended to train blacks in various industrial and agricultural professions. In the early 1920s, it elevated its status by focusing more on the sciences and liberal arts that were offered at the more prestigious black colleges.
What is ironic is that even though the school’s original teachings were quite different from other respected black colleges, its organizers had the same reluctance when it came to placing black educators in control.
“My father was only the second black to serve on Hampton’s board,” says Dr. James Norris with amazement in his voice. “In the 1930s, when my father joined their board, they had never even had a black president.”
Norris is a Hampton graduate who now practices plastic surgery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and his loyalty to his school is as strong as that of his late father, Dr. Morgan Norris, but he is still mystified that a leading black university—founded in 1868—could have resisted appointing a black president or black board members for so many generations.
Playing a paternalistic role for the blacks that he was instructing, Hampton’s white founder, Samuel Armstrong, was most determined to attract important white trustees who could bring prestige to the private college in Virginia. Among its early trustees were such U.S. presidents as James Garfield and William Taft, who served as chairman from 1914 to 1930. The school, which now has 5,700 students on its 200-acre campus, has graduated many prominent alumni, including Spencer Christian, the TV personality; John Sengstacke, publisher of the Chicago Defender and other major black newspapers; George Lewis, vice president and treasurer of Philip Morris; and Booker T. Washington, who later used the school as his model for establishing Tuskegee Institute. Because of their roots as industrial—rather than liberal arts—institutions, both Hampton and its successor, Tuskegee, are sometimes looked at as second-tier when compared with their Atlanta and Washington counterparts.
Founded by educator and activist Booker T. Washington in 1881 as Tuskegee Institute, the 4,500-acre Alabama campus is the only college in the country to be designated a national historic site and a unit of the National Park Service. Modeled after Hampton University, from which Washington had graduated in 1875, Tuskegee was often criticized and snubbed by the black elite in its early years because, like Hampton, it encouraged blacks to accept their second-class status in the postslavery period and assume roles as tradesmen in the industrial and agricultural professions rather than pursue careers in medicine, law, or liberal arts areas.
Because of Washington’s calculated obsequiousness to powerful whites and a famous 1895 speech that he made in Atlanta at a major convention, Washington was able to attract more funds for Tuskegee from affluent and influential whites than any of the other black colleges. This alone allowed the school to become a force and an important institution among the black elite—even though many disagreed with his philosophy. In spite of Frederick Douglass’s demands for equality and W. E. B. Du Bois’s insistence that blacks ignore Washington’s pacifist “go along to get along” approach, Washington was able to successfully promote his black self-help message to wealthy white donors such as Andrew Carnegie. The more he discouraged his students and other blacks from entering politics and government or from insisting on social equality, the more popular Washington and his school became among white contributors, who helped turn his campus into a showplace, attracting such researchers as scientist George Washington Carver.
But even though Washington’s message was one that accepted segregation, his students all embraced his message about excellence. “My father graduated f
rom Tuskegee in 1915—the last year that Dr. Washington signed the diplomas,” says Patsy Campbell Petway as she pulls out yellowed pages from the thirty-fourth annual commencement, when her father, Emmett Cadwalader Campbell, graduated. “Like many of my father’s classmates,” explains Petway, who is an active member of the Nashville Girl Friends and Links, “he was an engineer and saw the positive messages of self-reliance and choosing an education that gave you a practical skill.”
Today, Tuskegee’s mammoth campus includes buildings catering to a curriculum that places a far greater emphasis on liberal arts, but it continues to offer degrees in architecture, construction science, engineering, and other areas that its founder felt were most important.
“They called us Bennett Belles because it was an all-women’s college that produced intelligent southern ladies,” says Orial Banks Redd, whose family has lived in the affluent white New York suburb of Rye since 1912. She remembers arriving at the Greensboro, North Carolina, campus and feeling as if she had never left home because of the school’s provincial rules. Members of the black elite have always looked upon Bennett as the women’s college that was the most likely to enforce rules of decorum. Founded in 1873, the liberal arts college was still sticking to its rules of etiquette through the 1940s and 1950s when Redd, now a newspaper publisher and Democratic political activist, was a student.
“Most of my classmates were the daughters of southern doctors, lawyers, and influential ministers,” explains Redd, whose brother attended the less etiquette-conscious Hampton Institute in Virginia. “We had to wear gloves and a hat and carry a purse whenever we were going to town. We didn’t have sororities and we were not allowed to wear earrings that dangled—they watched for that. And we had to be chaperoned by an adult or faculty member whenever we went shopping.”
David Dallas Jones was president of the society-conscious school while Redd was a student. Like many of the presidents of the elite black colleges at that time, Jones had a complexion that was light enough to “pass” for white if he had chosen. He unified two important black dynasties when his son, David, married Anna Johnson, the daughter of Howard University president Mordecai Johnson.
“Bennett was a wonderful school,” says Beatrice Moore Smith-Talley, who graduated in the early 1940s, “but the campus and the students were operating in a protective, almost predictable environment.” Like many of her ambitious classmates, Smith-Talley was the daughter of a Spelman graduate who had high expectations for her future. “Like my mother, I went on to Columbia University for graduate school. And like her, I was expected to compete with the best.”
When I look at educated members of the black elite today, I make constant comparisons about whose decisions were best: those who attended historically black colleges and graduate schools or people like me, who attended white schools like Princeton and Harvard Law School, or still others who compromised by attending a top black college and then a top white graduate school. I know of happy, well-adjusted adults from each of these groups. The group I worry about most is the offspring of parents who have no ties to black educational institutions. There is now at least a generation of these individuals, and I fear that they will find no reason to use these schools or contribute financially to their endowments.
Because I have no ties to those schools and because my wife’s three degrees are from Harvard, I think it is rather unlikely that our own children will consider a historically black college for their own future. Even though I recognize the quality and value of these institutions, my own personal choice would make me an unconvincing supporter.
When we look at the future of the elite black colleges, some interesting patterns are evident. For one, the schools at the top—Howard, Spelman, and Morehouse—will continue to attract the smartest children from elite families. Because they are schools that are well respected in the white corporate and professional community, the graduates of these schools will continue to have access to good jobs and graduate schools. For these reasons, members of the black elite will continue to embrace these three schools for their children.
Unfortunately, the schools that will become less important to the black upper class—particularly those living outside the southeastern United States, where most of the schools are located—are those that are not considered the high-profile, top-tier black colleges. These schools will have a difficult time attracting contributions from black professionals who don’t see the schools’ relevance, and they may also have a tough time offering unique curricula or activities now that many predominately white universities already have a department devoted to African American studies, a dean of minority affairs, and local chapters of black fraternities and sororities.
The challenge facing many black colleges today is being able to convince black professional parents that their mainstream career-driven children will have as much access to top-paying careers as their white counterparts whether they attend a black college or the prestigious, historically white schools. Even though most of the nation’s black colleges will do a great job preparing students for the academic challenges of graduate school, or the professional challenges of the workplace, it may be a school’s image and the parents’ general impression that contribute to the future success of some of the lesser-known black colleges.
CHAPTER 5
The Right Fraternities and Sororities
I could hear my aunt’s anxiety level rising through the phone line.
“So, is she an AKA?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I answered.
“You don’t think so? Either she is, or she isn’t.”
I rolled my eyes as I looked over at Pamela, the woman I had just gotten engaged to. We were on the telephone from New York, calling relatives to give them the news of our wedding, which would take place in eighteen months. Most of my father’s relatives had already met Pamela. My Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Earl were my mother’s side of the family and knew few of the details.
Aunt Phyllis already knew that my fiancée was from Detroit and had graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School. But foremost on her mind were Pamela’s ties to Greek life.
“Well, no,” I finally responded. “She’s not an AKA.”
“Oh, a Delta?” she asked, sounding a little crestfallen.
My uncle interrupted on the line. “Now, Phyllis. Just because you’re AKA doesn’t mean everybody has to be.”
“So, she’s a Delta?” she asked again.
I looked over at my fiancée and started to feel a little embarrassed. “Aunt Phyllis, she’s actually quite nice.”
“I’m sure she is, Lawrence. So she’s a Delta?”
“Please, Phyllis.”
My uncle and aunt were inextricably tied to black college life. He was an Omega who sat on the alumni board of Ohio’s Central State University. Aunt Phyllis, a teacher with two master’s degrees, had pledged AKA forty-six years ago at Wilberforce, the country’s second-oldest black college. She’s the kind of sorority member who finds it hard to believe that not every accomplished black woman would want to be in Alpha Kappa Alpha.
“No, I’m sorry, Aunt Phyllis, she’s not a Delta either.”
“Oh, I see.” As I looked over at Pamela, a long awkward silence fell on the other end of the phone line.
I wasn’t sure what my aunt was thinking, but it was probably one of three things:
His fiancée is white.
His fiancée is in one of those lesser sororities.
His fiancée is not a Greek at all.
In the world of the black elite—where race, class, and black fraternity life are intertwined—I’m not sure which of the three assumptions about my fiancée would have been more shocking at the moment. It is an experience I encounter whenever blacks discover that I was not in a black college fraternity. What was certain was that my fiancée won a reprieve when it was revealed that her mother was an AKA and her father was an Alpha.
While there are clearly old-guard blacks who wo
uld limit their circle to just those who went to the “right” black colleges (e.g., Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, Fisk), there are also many others who would expand the circle to include those blacks who went to good white colleges, so long as their “good white college” experiences also included membership in one of the black establishment fraternities or sororities.
To understand this mentality is to understand the difference between white fraternity life and black fraternity life. While the former is mostly limited to a three- or four-year college experience, the black fraternity experience begins in college but is an activity that has even greater importance after graduation. It goes far beyond the well-choreographed campus musical “step shows” that the student members present on stage as competitions to show which fraternity can “outstep” the other with synchronized music and dance steps, and the unique traditions they follow in their attire and speech and actions while “on line.”
For my aunt, my uncle, and many other blacks, their sororities and fraternities are a lasting identity, a circle of lifetime friends, a base for future political and civic activism. Continuing throughout their adulthood, membership means lifetime subscriptions to publications like the Sphinx, the Ivy Leaf, or the Oracle. It means regulated funeral programs with unique fraternity services that are specifically outlined for surviving fraternity members in attendance. Having attended a college that permitted neither black nor white fraternities, I have long felt alien to—and envious of—the experience that my friends received at other colleges. For many of them, these black Greek-letter organizations provided a forum, postcollege, through which some of the best-educated blacks in America can discuss an agenda to fight racism and improve conditions for other less-advantaged blacks.
Our Kind of People Page 12
