Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  In an uncharacteristic gesture of conspicuous consumption, my normally conservative father nodded anxiously. “Then it’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

  After he handed over something in the neighborhood of nine hundred dollars, the woman put the bag and its blue cloth protector into a matching blue box and the three of us looked at each other with the assurance that the upcoming event justified spending such an exorbitant amount of money for a handbag that was not even large enough to hold a wallet.

  “Is this a wedding anniversary?” the woman asked.

  “No,” he answered. “My wife was just accepted into the Links.”

  The woman offered us a blank stare and the three of us gave each other a knowing nod. The woman was white. There was no reason for her to understand.

  As my mother and every other woman in her crowd would have told you, getting accepted into the Links was a big deal, and it was not something you’d ever need to explain if you were in the company of the right kind of people. In this case, some would say the right kind of people didn’t include whites or blue-collar blacks.

  Later that week, my mother was initiated into upper-class black America’s most elite organization for women: the ten-thousand-woman-strong Links Incorporated. For fifty years, membership in the invitation-only national organization has meant that your social background, lifestyle, physical appearance, and family’s academic and professional accomplishments passed muster with a fiercely competitive group of women who—while forming a rather cohesive sisterhood—were nonetheless constantly under each other’s scrutiny. Each of the 267 local chapters brings together no more than fifty-five women, most of them either professionals, socialites, volunteer fund-raisers, educators, or upper-class matrons, and is added to only when a current member dies or moves to another city. Along with her longtime friend Betty Shabazz (widow of civil rights leader Malcolm X), Anne Walker (wife of Harlem minister Wyatt Tee Walker), and several other high-profile professional women, my mother was preparing for an elaborate weekend of black-tie festivities in New York, where she and the other new recruits would be feted by friends, relatives, and Links members who had flown in from different parts of the country.

  Although not as old as other elite black women’s groups like the Girl Friends or the National Smart Set, the Links is by far the largest and the most influential. Founded in 1946 by seven well-to-do black women, it contributes millions of dollars to organizations like the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and supports hundreds of local charities and scholarship programs in the United States and abroad. A social group with local chapters that meet monthly in members’ homes or at restaurants and private clubs, the Links gets its members to donate more than one million volunteer hours a year and has donated more than $15 million to a wide range of charities and programs in the United States and abroad.

  On top of all of the volunteer work demanded of its members, the Links also manages to dominate the social calendars of the black elite with its formal parties, annual White Rose balls, debutante cotillions, boat cruises, art auctions, and fashion show luncheons. The stylish women often arrive at its larger affairs in mink, diamonds, and pearls with husbands helping them from limousines. The semiannual conventions are de rigueur for anyone who wants to combine elaborate black-tie dinners with scheduled workshops and debate sessions on such issues as affirmative action, voter registration, national health, or economic development. Following these sessions are golf outings, boat rides, and other leisure activities that allow for networking and socializing among members, spouses, and children from around the country.

  “I try to make as many Links events as possible so I can keep up with friends and stay abreast of the current civic issues black people and others are talking about,” says Atlanta Link Portia Scott, whose family has been a pivotal part of black Atlanta since it founded the Atlanta newspaper Daily World in 1928. “This is a group that does everything from raise money for student scholarships to sponsor cotillions to finance the building of water wells in Africa. How could you not want to be a part of it?”

  “It took me about twelve years of strategizing, party-giving, and brownnosing to get into this group,” admits a Links member who lives in Washington, D.C., and never misses her chapter’s meetings or the annual regional and national conventions. “My mother didn’t have the connections to get in when she was trying thirty years ago, and she never got over being left out,” says the woman. “It’s not that I need the validation, but I can definitely say that getting in was worth the eleven or twelve years of anxiety. When you get accepted, the rewards are more than just increased status and a larger number of party invitations. I ended up with a built-in national network of friends who are just like me.”

  When Philadelphia natives Sarah Strickland Scott and Margaret Roselle Hawkins conceived of the Links, the plan was to create programs where educated black women could focus their attention on civic, educational, and cultural issues. The two women turned to Frances Atkinson, Katie Green, Marion Minton, Lillian Stanford, Myrtle Manigault Stratton, Lillian Wall, and Dorothy Wright—all women from old-guard Philadelphia families. Their résumés defined the city’s black elite.

  Scott, who eventually served as the group’s first national president, epitomized the well-connected Links member. Born in 1901 and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University Graduate School, she was a guidance counselor and teacher at schools in Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware. Scott’s husband, father, and brother were all physicians. Like Scott, cofounder Hawkins was also a teacher who had graduated from Philadelphia schools. Both had children who were active in the then-young but growing elite children’s group, Jack and Jill.

  Whether by coincidence or design, the Links was to attract future members from the most stellar backgrounds—or at least members who shared a similar blueprint of social and professional credentials.

  The current national president, Patricia Russell McCloud, an Atlanta attorney, admits that the organization has always attracted well-to-do women, but says that its mission has never included focusing on social status. “For many years, people wanted to characterize Links members as rich ladies who wore white gloves and sponsored teas and quiet socials, but we are an activist group that takes on important domestic and international projects that assist blacks, children, and others.” McCloud acknowledges that there is a preponderance of well-to-do and professional women in the membership, but she insists that the group should be judged by its history of volunteerism and fund-raising and its ability to effect change in the communities it serves.

  Noting the occasional articles that have been written about the Links in the style pages or society columns of papers like the New York Times or Washington Post, McCloud recognizes that the original Links like Sarah Scott were all well-to-do, “but what matters is that they were purposeful.”

  Of the seven other founding members besides Scott and Hawkins, six were married to doctors and the seventh, Dorothy Wright, was married to Emanuel Crogman Wright, the president of the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company, a black-owned Philadelphia bank. Among the nine Philadelphia women, the most represented church was the extremely patrician St. Thomas Episcopal Church. The women had degrees from such schools as the University of Pennsylvania, Howard, Hampton, and Temple, and had been active in such groups or institutions as Jack and Jill, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, the Main Line Charity League, the Bryn Mawr School, and the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company.

  “When my mother and her group of friends were forming the Links,” says Gwynne Wright, daughter of Links charter member Dorothy Wright, “none of us had any idea how important and influential the group would one day become. I had grown up in an activist home. My parents had hosted Mary McLeod Bethune at our home back when my mother was very active in the National Council of Negro Women. The other women were all rather affluent, but their interests were in improving the welfare of blacks, childre
n, and families, so it was inevitable that the Links would become an activist group.”

  After its founding, other Links chapters quickly sprung up in Atlantic City, Washington, St. Louis, Baltimore, and New York. There were fifty-six chapters by 1952. Although each new chapter and its proposed membership are closely scrutinized by the national office and other Links members, there are now chapters in such far-flung locales as Beverly Hills, Albuquerque, the Bahamas, and Frankfurt, Germany.

  Among the Links’ members are some of the most prominent black women in politics, business, education, medicine, and the social world. A look through its membership directory reveals Congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee and Eddie Bernice Jackson of Texas; Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman; Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole; former Washington, D.C., mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly; the recently deceased Betty Shabazz; former secretary of energy Hazel O’Leary; NAACP Legal Defense Fund head Elaine Jones; and numerous philanthropists, college presidents, judges, physicians, bankers, attorneys, corporate executives, and educators, plus the wives of such high-profile figures as Congressman Charles Rangel (Alma), Vernon Jordan (Ann), American Express president Kenneth Chenault (Cathy), and Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint (Tina).

  “You can generally be sure that the most important, best-connected, most affluent, and most socially acceptable black women in any city belong to the local Links chapter,” says a San Francisco Links member who rarely socializes with women outside the circle. “Maybe it sounds a little pretentious, but I simply can’t waste time getting to know women who aren’t Links. It’s an automatic screen that lets me know if this person comes from the right background and has the same values. I’m almost fifty and I live a busy life. I don’t have time for people who don’t have the right stuff. Rich, educated white women don’t hang around with middle-class college dropouts, so why should I?”

  As they sit at an elegant mahogany dining-room table twenty stories above Manhattan, Dr. Marcella Maxwell and Mrs. Audrey Thorne compare their experiences as president of one of the oldest and most talked-about Links chapters in the country. The two women refuse to admit it, but their chapter of forty-nine women is ranked by many as one of the most successful because of its high-profile members and because of an elaborate, well-attended annual fund-raiser the group puts on every Easter at the Waldorf-Astoria.

  “Nobody misses the Greater New York Chapter’s Fashion Show,” says a woman who belongs to a Links chapter in New Jersey and who remembers going to her first fashion show when Thorne was president in the 1960s. “I remember reading about those New York Links and seeing their pictures in the New York Times and the Daily News back in the fifties and sixties when you didn’t see black ladies in the white newspapers. I would go to the fashion show not so much for the clothes and the models, but more to see these New York Links women. They’d be walking around the ballroom at the Waldorf or the Plaza talking to friends and smiling for the cameras with so much confidence. It scared me to death, but boy, was it invigorating.”

  The annual Easter luncheon and fashion show—known as just “The Fashion Show”—attracts nearly one thousand women each year to the main ballroom of either the Waldorf or the Plaza Hotel. The attendees—often attired in gloves and hats—are as high-fashion as the models who parade down the ballroom runway. Several publications, including the New York Times and Daily News, covered the event when my wife was honored at the group’s forty-ninth luncheon.

  “I joined the Links in 1954, and we had our first fashion show in the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria,” says Audrey Thorne, who served as president of the chapter from 1965 to 1967. “I think we were the first black group allowed to hold a function at the Waldorf.”

  Marcella Maxwell, the chapter’s immediate past president, nods as she looks over prior photos taken at the fashion show. Models can be seen walking down runways, showing off Chanel suits, Bill Blass gowns, alligator handbags, mink or ermine flings, and dresses designed by a host of white and black designers.

  “Most of the white hotels were closed to us back then,” says Maxwell, who has held many New York state political appointments and is a longtime resident of Brooklyn. “In Harlem, there was the Hotel Theresa, but if we wanted a Midtown hotel, we were usually resigned to the Belmont on Lexington Avenue. That was the only place that allowed black functions.”

  Thorne, whose husband, Dr. Duncan Thorne, was one of the first black orthodontists in New York, acknowledges that the Waldorf name helped add to the cachet of the event, but also admits that it wasn’t easy getting into the Waldorf during those times. “Two of our members, Dorothy Reed and Gertrude Thomas, went around to the larger midtown hotels to see if they would let us in,” says Thorne, a former labor union executive, “but most of them simply wanted nothing to do with blacks—no matter how much money we had or what kind of affair was being presented. Of course the white management had no idea who the Links were, so we had to get more aggressive with our approach.”

  Because many of the Links members were light-skinned and because the banquet manager was favorably impressed with the social stature of the women who bombarded him with requests, the Waldorf finally agreed to rent them space. “It seems ridiculous today,” explains Thorne, “but back then, the white banquet managers would actually insist on visiting the host group at one of their meetings before agreeing to rent. Bigotry wasn’t so subtle back then, and they wanted to be sure they were letting in the ‘right’ kind of blacks. It was an insult.”

  “Although we all take our mandate from the national office and sponsor similar social events and projects in each city,” says Links member Patsy Campbell Petway of Nashville, “there are some chapters that have taken on some traditions that are very different from others. For example, the Chicago chapter is known for the debutante ball it always sponsors. My sister’s Los Angeles chapter also gives a big cotillion. Atlanta has a jazz brunch, and San Antonio does a lot with artists and photography because Texas Link Aaronetta Pierce is a major collector and art expert.”

  What is clearly required of all Links members is the adoption of core program initiatives around the areas of education, health, domestic legislation, international welfare, services for youth, and the arts. “Anybody who joins that group just for the social benefits is making a big mistake,” says a former Minneapolis-area Links member who says she dropped out several years ago because she didn’t have time for all the volunteer hours that the group requests. The organization’s book of program initiatives outlines how chapters and members are to implement certain projects. Here’s a sample:

  Join forces with the American Cancer Society’s National Cancer Initiative mammogram mobile unit and plan mass mammography and extended examination opportunities for local communities.

  Encourage Links members to present papers, seminars, and workshops at international conferences with a focus on improving health, education, and housing.

  Sponsor voter registration drives, get-out-the-vote carpools, phone circles.

  Provide reading materials to students in Rwanda.

  Monitor actions of local, state, and national officials and produce a Legislative Alert Newsletter for inclusion in chapter mailings.

  “I like the activism of this organization,” says St. Louis Links member Anita Lyons Bond. “We are smart women with money and clout, and we should use it to help blacks who need our connections and our mentoring.”

  Toni Fay, a New York Link who is also a high-ranking executive at Time Warner, agrees that the group should remain activist. After I met up with her on a plane as she was leaving a recent Links convention in New Orleans, she remarked, “I remember first seeing the Links when I was in high school and I thought of them as a high-society group of ladies, but I’ve seen them transform themselves from a group of women married to influential men to a group of women who became influential themselves. I’m eager to see this organization go even farther—maybe even start a PAC.”

  Fay, who is also active with th
e U.S. committee for UNICEF, the National Council of Negro Women, the board of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the Roosevelt Presidential Library, and the International Women’s Forum, is an example of the new politically driven Links member. Many of the younger members like Fay are more interested in the group’s ability to help those in need, while some of the old guard would rather focus on the closer-to-home social activities.

  “There is a clear conflict between the old guard and the new guard,” says a Cleveland Link who joined in the 1970s. “And you really see them butt heads when new members are being nominated. Some of the older women are so insular and so parochial that they really see their chapter as a fiefdom over which they can rule and determine who is acceptable and who isn’t. Of course this is just a handful, but when you’ve got a handful of people doing this in a few chapters, it gets to be a real opportunity for vindictiveness.”

  Because each chapter is limited to just fifty-five members and because new women are often taken in only once a current member vacates her position by death, by a move to another city, or through resignation (the latter being extremely rare), admission into the Links is extremely competitive. Unlike sororities, members do not join until well after they have completed college or graduate school. Most join in their forties and fifties and stay until they die. The admissions process is a rather confidential one that involves no formal application at the initial stages. There is no one to call if you’re interested in joining.

  “The only way to get in,” explains a Kansas City Link, “is to get one of your friends to nominate you for membership. The main problem is that if the other members don’t know you or don’t think that you come from their background, your chances of being admitted are nil. The ones who get in are usually those who know at least half of the chapter’s membership and who attend Links functions, like the dinners, fund-raisers, or arts shows. Of course it also helps if your social, professional, or economic background will add to the prestige of the chapter—in other words, if you are rich and important.”