Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  “And I was escorted by Melanie’s brother, Donald, for my debut,” adds Phyllis as she points him out in a photo that was taken while they were still in high school during the early 1950s.

  As the child of a Girl Friend, Phyllis grew up with a network of influential contacts in every major city. “I grew up with two dozen ‘aunts’ in every city—New York, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta,” Phyllis jokes as she thinks about her mother’s network of friends from the different Girl Friends chapters. “When my father and mother brought me to the annual conclaves in different cities, it was almost like a family reunion. The mothers, along with their husbands and children, were like an extended family.”

  Founded in 1927 in New York City, the Girl Friends, Inc., is composed of forty chapters and includes approximately thirteen hundred women in such cities as Washington, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Boston, Louisville, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The club focuses on philanthropic, social, and cultural activities, raising money for local and national charities as well as sponsoring programs for its own members. It was founded by a group of young women who were between high school and college, and who were first led by Eunice Shreeves, who was in college at Cheyney University. Shreeves initially pulled together a group of friends who were living in New York or away at schools like Howard University. Among the group were Murphy and several other women who had come from similar backgrounds. “One of my best friends at the time was Rae Olley Dudley,” explains Murphy, “and she along with me and seven others were asked to join.”

  Like the Links, the members of the Girl Friends come from some of the oldest and best-respected families in their communities. A quick conversation with any of them reveals that they and their husbands are all professionals. An overwhelming number of the members are married to physicians, dentists, and attorneys, with a few college presidents, government officials, big city mayors, and a U.S. Supreme Court justice thrown in for good measure.

  “He oughtta get Ersa and Paquita so he can get the song and the political ties,” says Murphy as she returns to the verbal shorthand that flies between mother and daughter. Like many women in this crowd, they are reluctant to talk too long to people who don’t understand the people or the history of their social world, so I avoid asking questions and exhibiting my lack of information.

  But silence doesn’t cut it with Murphy and Stevenson.

  The mother looks at me. “You do know who Ersa and Paquita are?”

  I stare back with a blank expression. “Ersa, yes, Ersa—”

  “Poston,” Murphy adds pointedly.

  The name sounds familiar. I’ve heard my parents or some of their friends mention it. But the only person that comes to mind is a journalist—Ted Poston. “Oh, of course,” I respond. “Ted Poston’s wife.” I recalled that Ted had been the first black journalist ever to be employed by a white daily paper in New York.

  “Ted Poston’s wife?” Murphy asked. “Some would say Ted was Ersa Poston’s husband. She was our national president from 1982 to 1984. And she was a bigwig in city and state government.”

  About a beat too late, I remember that Ersa was a Rockefeller appointee and one of the heads of the U.S. Civil Service Commission.

  “And Paquita Attaway is in D.C. too,” says Stevenson. “She was president from 1992 to 1994.”

  After leaving Murphy and Stevenson, I later learn that Paquita Attaway’s pedigree in the Girl Friends gives the mother-daughter team a run for their money. “My mother, Ethel Ramos Harris, graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1927 and was a charter member of the Pittsburgh Girl Friends where she composed the Girl Friends Hymn,” explains Attaway, a retired teacher who was presented at the AKA cotillion in Pittsburgh before earning degrees from Boston University and the University of Pittsburgh. Like many of the Girl Friends, Attaway started life off right. Her father, Chester Harris, was a surgeon who graduated from Tufts Medical School. He was also a member of the Boulé. “My sister, Yolanda, and I were introduced to many children while we grew up in Jack and Jill and attended Camp Atwater in Massachusetts,” says Attaway as she recalls the summer camp that was favored by the black elite. Like Phyllis, her sister Yolanda was presented at the New York Girl Friends Ball of Roses Cotillion.

  And again like Phyllis, Attaway summers in an old-guard community. “My husband and I bought a house in Martha’s Vineyard after my parents had spent years on the Vineyard during the Shearer Cottage days,” she explains. Her husband, John, is a member of the Boulé and holds a doctorate in business administration from George Washington University.

  With their credentials, Ersa Poston and Paquita Attaway have raised the stakes for the women who are clamoring to join the Girl Friends’ Washington chapter.

  But, of course, the New York Girl Friends are well aware of their own status. They and their husbands are well-known professionals. Their membership has included the late Vivian “Buster” Marshall, who was married to Thurgood Marshall, the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice. “As a matter of fact,” says Murphy, “our national incorporation papers were signed by Thurgood.” The New York chapter’s history of members also includes Manhattan resident Rae Olley Dudley, whose husband, Edward Dudley Sr., was U.S. ambassador to Liberia under President Truman before joining New York state’s supreme court; Jacqueline Denison Russell, whose husband, Harvey, was the first black vice president of a Fortune 500 company when he became a leading Pepsi executive; and Laura Mitchell Holland, whose husband, Jerome, was president of Delaware State and Hampton Institute before becoming ambassador to Sweden under President Nixon. Among the newer members is Carolyn Wright Lewis, wife of Essence magazine publisher Ed Lewis.

  In Detroit, one finds Judge Trudy DunCombe Archer, wife of Detroit mayor Dennis Archer. In New Orleans, there is Dr. Andrea Green Jefferson, wife of U.S. congressman William Jefferson. In Memphis, there is Frances Hooks, wife of former NAACP head Benjamin Hooks.

  Erma Lee Laws started the Memphis chapter of the group several years after her friend, Mary Agnes Davis of Detroit, had helped charter the Detroit chapter. Davis, whose husband, Ed, became famous as one of the country’s first black auto dealers, had successfully launched a chapter of the Co-Ettes, a smaller elite group. Mary Agnes, an important Detroit socialite and fund-raiser in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, enjoyed the Girl Friends so much that she encouraged Laws to bring the organization to Memphis. “I grew up reading about the Girl Friends in Toki Schalk Johnson’s society column of the Pittsburgh Courier,” says Laws, a former columnist for the Memphis Tri-State Defender, “but it was meeting socialites like Mary Agnes and others that got me to help launch my own chapter.”

  Not to be outdone by their husbands, many of the Girl Friends are educators, attorneys, physicians, professors, high-profile fund-raisers, and government officials. One example is former Clinton cabinet member Hazel O’Leary, who served as U.S. secretary of energy. She became a member of the Minneapolis chapter many years after her mother Mattie Ross Reid helped establish the Newport News, Virginia, chapter in 1938. United States congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson belongs to the Dallas chapter.

  Unless you are the daughter of a member, getting into the Girl Friends is even more difficult than getting into the Links. Since the chapters are generally smaller (usually twenty to thirty members) than Links chapters, and since no city has more than one chapter, it really does require a wave of resignations or deaths before a woman’s chances for acceptance improve. There is no application or membership office to call. You have to be sponsored by at least two members who know you well, and at least two-thirds of the members must vote for your admission. If a woman is turned down, she can never be proposed by that chapter again. “I had a friend who was so devastated by her rejection in the town where she lived that she and her husband bought a vacation home in South Carolina so that she could be reconsidered in another city,” says an Atlanta Girl Friend, who sees how candidates have jockeyed for admission. “I felt terrible when she got rejected again. After two yea
rs, they sold the house, moved to Washington, and I think she just ended up joining the Hillbillies or something. It was so sad.”

  In addition to their charity work, for many years the Girl Friends were known for their debutante cotillions, where high-school seniors were presented at the local downtown hotels or country clubs accompanied by their fathers and young escorts dressed in black tie. The Ball of Roses cotillion was adopted by the other chapters but originated with the New York chapter, which holds it around Christmas at the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue. Each debutante is selected through a rigorous process that compares applicants’ college plans, career goals, and accomplishments.

  While some of the chapters have abandoned cotillions because of a modern tendency to move away from elitist activities, the group has not stopped publishing its annual journal, the Chatterbox, which looks and reads like a black version of Town & Country. Each chapter’s activities of the year are highlighted and illustrated with photographs from formal parties, outdoor picnics, and other gatherings. Members and their families are captured at college graduations, battleship launchings, judicial swearing-in ceremonies, political campaign speeches, White House dinners, and other interesting events. New York artist Romare Beardon designed the cover of the May 1952 Chatterbox as a tribute to his mother’s ties to the group.

  Another popular women’s group is The Drifters. Smaller and less driven by family lineage than the Girl Friends, the Drifters consists of thirty chapters, with groups kept to as few as twenty members. With a focus on charitable work like sponsoring scholarships for students going away to college, the Drifters was begun in 1954 in Waco, Texas, and Chicago. Because it represents a generation of founders who were less likely to be housewives, the five-hundred-member group has a high percentage of Ph.D.’s, attorneys, and other professionals.

  I first came into contact with the Drifters crowd as a child through my godmother, Dr. Mirian Calhoun Hinds, who has been a member since 1963 and serves as president of the New York chapter. She says that the group is less focused on a husband’s status because the members are extremely accomplished in their own right. A former dean at City College with a doctorate from New York University, Hinds cites one of the newest chapters as an example of accomplished women. “Our Memphis chapter is a perfect example of how our group has established itself with intelligent and civic-minded women. Even though it’s only a dozen women, eight of them are attorneys who serve on local boards and civic activities.”

  A former department chairman at City College of New York, Hinds grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the daughter of faculty members at South Carolina State University. “Although I became a member of the Deltas when I got to college,” she explains, “I wanted to join an organization of established black women who would help me in my transition from the South to the North. One of my cousins was in the New York chapter, and she told me about the Drifters and the work they were doing in the city. I wasn’t looking for a group of society women.”

  Unlike the Girl Friends, the Drifters are inclined to organize frequent extravagant vacation trips for their members and friends—going to such places as Haiti, St. Martin, Greece, and Africa. Both groups give college scholarships to graduating high school students. Hinds says her chapter has given scholarships and monthly stipends to students who have gone away to Cornell, Spelman, Rutgers, Howard, Fisk, American University in Paris, and other colleges.

  Each August, the thirty chapters come together for a national conference and announce the college scholarships they are awarding to the graduating high school students in their respective cities. In addition to their scholarship program, the Drifters have also maintained a noninterest-bearing loan fund for students at targeted colleges since 1969. Among the schools targeted are Bennett College, LeMoyne-Owen College, Bethune-Cookman College, Howard University School of Nursing, and Virginia Union University.

  There’s also the Northeasterners, which was founded in the early 1930s. “We have twelve chapters, and most of them include no more than twenty women,” says Bebe Drew Price, a native Washingtonian who joined the national group a decade ago.

  Cathy Lightbourne Connors, one of the most influential society columnists to write for the New York Amsterdam News, has been a big supporter of the Northeasterners, serving as the New York chapter’s president. Connors’s name can also be found on the membership lists of the ViVants and the Hillbillies, in addition to her long-standing ties to the Links and Alpha Kappa Alpha, which she joined in college.

  Connors, whose deceased husband was John Connors, president and founder of American Express Publishing Group, the company that produced Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine, and other magazines, believes that black social groups like the Northeasterners serve a valuable role in the country. “Too much credence is given to the black urban project subculture,” explains the petite woman as she sits demurely in a blue and ivory linen suit. “When upper-class and middle-class blacks are kept hidden from the community, we fail to produce role models and mentors for young blacks who need to know that there are people like them who still have hope and who have not given up.”

  But Connors adds that the social groups must recognize that they have to get involved and interact with the people and the local groups they are supposed to be mentoring and helping. In directing the activities of her Northeasterners chapter, she uses certain role models to guide her. One such model is the Logan family, one of the most socially prominent couples in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s. “Dr. Arthur Logan and his wife, Marian, were affluent and well-connected in the black and white social world,” says Connors with conviction in her voice, “and they got their groups and their friends to support important issues. I remember when they gave fund-raisers for Dr. Martin Luther King when Dr. King was a controversial figure. Because of their social credentials, they went with Dr. King to assist in his introduction to Bobby Kennedy and his mother, Rose. This is how we have to use the clout of our social groups—to raise money and to raise awareness about issues in our communities.”

  When it comes to the social activities, Connors points out, “unlike the Links and other organizations, the Northeasterners do not sell tickets to our formal dances. It’s a tight circle of invitations, and the members pay for everything. We have a philosophy that is similar to that of the Guardsmen. We pay for all our events and all of our guests.” Originally founded in 1921 with the name The Gay Northeasterners—“when the term meant ‘happy’ or ‘free,’” chuckles Connors—the Northeasterners was started in New Haven, Connecticut, by three sisters. Longtime Harlem resident and Northeasterner member Esther James says the group grew slowly and formed chapters in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Indianapolis, and other cities where blacks were concentrated.

  Like the Drifters and the Northeasterners, the Smart Set is a moderate-sized women’s group with a fairly prestigious roster of female members. “Unlike many of the other groups that were started by adult women, our organization was begun by a group of schoolgirls from the Washington area who were going off to college at Howard,” says Ruth White, a Philadelphian who is a longtime member of the National Smart Set, an organization of approximately five hundred women that was founded in 1937.

  “Although we perform community service,” says Margaret Mayfield Rivers of Memphis, “we are much more like the Girl Friends than we are like the Links. A lot of our focus is on the social events that we sponsor. We generally have three major black-tie social events each year, as well as an outdoor summer activity at someone’s home.” In addition to spending occasional weekends at a vacation home in the Ozarks, Rivers recalls past years where she entertained Smart Set members in her large home, which is surrounded by a two-and-a-half-acre lawn. She has been in the group for more than thirty years and remembers other early members in the city’s chapter like Harriet Ish Walker, the deceased wife of Universal Life Insurance chairman Maceo Walker.

  Like her fellow socially prominent Smart Set members, Rivers has all of the right credent
ials: The daughter of Dr. U. L. Mayfield of Fort Worth, Texas, she pledged AKA at Fisk, then married into a prominent Memphis family after meeting Meharry dentist Frederick Rivers, who was the son of a successful doctor. She is also a member of the city’s Sophisticates bridge club and the original Memphis Links chapter. “Like the husbands of many of my fellow Smart Set and Links members, my husband was an Alpha and a member of the Boulé,” explains Rivers. “In fact, the overlapping was so common that we began to schedule our meetings to coincide with the same evening as the men’s meetings so we would all be out on the same night, and no one would be left at home alone.”

  Philadelphia’s Ruth White comments that since the Smart Set has not grown to the size of the mammoth Links group, the members remain intimate and can keep up with each other’s activities through the organization’s sometimes fun and gossipy Smart Set Talk magazine. “They report on contributions we give to the NAACP as well as the more personal events that happen in our lives. The group is still small enough that we know each other and try to keep up on family stories.”

  One group that had the potential of being an important national group but resisted spreading beyond its charter city was the Hillbillies. “They just dug their heels in and refused to let people outside their little circle become a part of their group,” says a former New Yorker who remembers getting rejected by the social group in the 1940s. Created by a group of well-to-do young women who lived in Sugar Hill—the most exclusive and more northern section of Harlem—in the 1930s, the Hillbillies never became a national organization.

  “There was an attempt to start a small chapter in Washington, and they had reciprocal status with the group in Manhattan,” explains Anna Small Murphy, one of the charter members of the New York chapter, “but it was never intended to be more than a Harlem-based group.” Murphy, who is no longer active in the Hillbillies, went on to be a big name in the Girl Friends as both a charter member and a national president in the 1950s.