Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  “So, are we being voted on now, or was this decided before?” I asked the two, in a tone that suggested I wasn’t that worried.

  “I think we’ve already been accepted,” said the media lawyer with an air of quiet confidence.

  Before I could express my gratitude at receiving this information, the door opened and each of our sponsors escorted us into a room of about twenty-two members. A few of them—faces that were familiar from my childhood—gave me a strange handshake. And then the door closed for an initiation ceremony that was to remain confidential.

  While the 450-page Boulé history book is distributed only to members, some of what it reveals is information that is already open to the public. But most of the information is held as confidential. “Years ago, the Boulé was an extremely secretive organization,” says Grand Sire Archon Anthony Hall Jr., a Houston attorney who presides over the national organization, “and during the period when W. E. B. Du Bois was a member, they worked hard to maintain the club’s code of secrecy and to avoid attention or scrutiny.”

  The gold insignia pins that Boulé members wear on the left sides of their crisp white shirts, for example, are given out at a secret ceremony. But the one-inch triangle with Greek letters on it is visible to any guest who attends a Boulé formal or a Boulé funeral where a deceased member might be buried or cremated with it in accordance to the group’s constitution. Nonmember guests have a general sense that members greet one another with an unusual handshake that is not obvious to others or that they display unusual hand gestures when conducting private meetings, but all of this has remained confidential among the membership. The decision to keep these traditions private was made by the small and insular first chapter of the group—long before the Boulé became a national organization.

  Because the original Philadelphia chapter was very slow to expand its membership, and because the following chapters in Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis, and Washington were reluctant to open their membership to men who worked outside of the higher-education, medical, dental, and legal professions, the group was quickly accused of being elitist. Whether it was because they didn’t want to share their secret discussions or just that they didn’t want to dilute their significance by welcoming lesser-known candidates, the members were unapologetic about their decision to exclude. Both then and now.

  “People might use the term ‘elitist,’ but it is accurate to say that this was, and is, an elite group of people,” explains Boulé member Harold Doley, who was the first black to own an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange. “It’s a little absurd for black people to apologize when they are educated, accomplished, and successful, and choose to belong to organizations populated with other blacks like them.”

  Like Doley, most of the members in the Boulé history have been contributors to, and champions of, black causes. But they do not see their membership in the Boulé as their primary means of contributing to charities or institutions. Doley, who purchased and restored the twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion of late-nineteenth-century black entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, has contributed generously to, and sat on the boards of, numerous black colleges, including Shaw University and Clark-Atlanta University.

  “While all of us have community activities that we support,” says Grand Sire Archon Hall, “Sigma Pi Phi was not created with a social action agenda. It was not designed with community service projects in mind. And this is one reason why the public might know a lot more about the Links or the fraternities than they know about us. My wife is a Link, and she and her organization are accustomed to hosting public functions like fund-raisers, cotillions, and civic projects. That’s not us.”

  The membership, which now numbers around thirty-seven hundred, is organized into 105 local chapters, called “Subordinate Boulés,” representing all of the major cities and metropolitan areas where the black elite can be found. In addition to including such esteemed people as the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. in 1895 and taught at Atlanta University and the University of Pennsylvania, the Boulé membership has also included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; historian Carter Woodson, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. and served as dean at Howard; Harlem physician Dr. Louis T. Wright; Howard University president James Nabrit; philosopher and Rhodes Scholar Alain Locke, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. in 1918 and chaired Howard’s philosophy department; and numerous judges and college presidents.

  Among the more recent members are virtually every current or former black mayor of a major city including New York’s David Dinkins, Atlanta’s Andrew Young and Maynard Jackson, Memphis’s Willie Herenton, Baltimore’s Kurt Schmoke, Detroit’s Dennis Archer, New Orleans’s Ernest Morial, Charlotte’s Harvey Gantt, and Seattle’s Norm Rice. Other members have included American Express president Kenneth Chenault, Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan, Ebony magazine founder John Johnson, Black Enterprise founder Earl Graves, Essence founder Ed Lewis, Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder, and National Urban League heads Whitney Young, Hugh Price, and John Jacob, as well as such presidential cabinet secretaries as Louis Sullivan, Robert Weaver, Michael Espy, and Ron Brown.

  Also in the group are millionaire Wall Street bankers, investors, money managers, and brokers like Harold Doley, Maceo Sloan, John Procope, Bruce Llewellyn, and members of the Hudson and Houston families in Los Angeles.

  And probably more typical than any other group is the doctor crowd that populates the membership. Dr. Melvin Jackson Chisum belongs to the original chapter, in Philadelphia, and remembers when he was first sponsored for membership in the mid-1960s. “Most of the members were physicians who had ties to Mercy-Douglass Hospital,” says Chisum, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine before specializing in internal medicine and rheumatology. “All of my mentors were physicians and they said they wanted me to join. And of course Raymond Pace Alexander was there too. He was Mr. Boulé back then.”

  Even though some members of the old guard insist that admission to the Boulé has become too easy, most would argue that there is no black men’s group—fraternal, social, or professional—that scrutinizes its candidates more closely. To begin with, many of the chapters have a preference for not considering men who are below the age of forty-five.

  “When I first joined in 1977,” says Grand Sire Archon Anthony Hall Jr., who presides over the organization, “the average age of incoming members was close to fifty-two years, and that was primarily because the Boulé has always been an organization that accepted men who had already distinguished themselves in their fields.”

  Hall, a Houston attorney, was admitted at the unusually young age of thirty-two, but he had already become a recognizable figure in Houston by that time. A graduate of Howard, he had already been named to the board of a savings and loan bank and elected to the state legislature by the time he was twenty-six.

  While many of the members are lawyers, physicians, dentists, professors, politicians, or business owners, there is no professional career requirement that needs to be satisfied in order to be considered for membership. “We only require that the candidate holds a bachelor’s degree or an honorary doctorate,” explains Hall, who notes that out of the three thousand members only six or seven have used the honorary doctorate method of qualifying for admission.

  The selection of members begins as a very quiet nomination process in which the candidate does not even know he is being nominated. A sponsor quietly collects information about the candidate. “This keeps anyone from being embarrassed,” says Dr. James “Rump” Jones, an oral surgeon who joined the group in 1964. “This has always been a very staid organization that respects people’s stature in a community. It would never want to embarrass someone because he was turned down.”

  “But as with most of these groups, there is no one you can call for an application to the Boulé,” explains E. T. Williams. “People will join because someone has asked them. Most members have friends and relatives in it already, and they simply want to continue socializing with them.”
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  Many members join because their fathers or grandfathers belonged. “When I joined in 1966, I already knew a lot about the group because my father had been a member of the Boulé in Louisville, Kentucky,” says Harvey C. Russell, who remembers that his father, Harvey senior, had joined in 1938. Although he had helped found the national group One Hundred Black Men in 1963, Russell says he has enjoyed the fraternal and intellectual atmosphere that the Boulé presents. He served as grand sire archon for the organization after federal judge Leon Higginbotham stepped down in the late 1970s.

  Russell is not alone in joining because his father preceded him in the group. In fact, there are many families who have seen multiple generations represented in the Boulé. Highly conscious of history and lineage, the Boulé manual and history book lists dozens of father-son memberships, son-in-law memberships, and family trees displaying generation after generation of blood relations and marital relations that have made the prestigious organization a common thread in a family’s history.

  “I realized I’d never get into the Boulé as soon as I began reading about the history of my local chapter,” says a successful entrepreneur who had hoped to join the Nashville chapter almost thirty years ago. “One of the members—a friend of mine—showed me a page of the book that listed the original Nashville members. Next to each name was his graduate degree and the school he attended,” adds the businessman. “I can still remember the schools: Fisk, Columbia, Meharry Medical School, Harvard, Yale. And all the degrees were Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s. I said ‘Man, you can forget this right now.’ At first I didn’t recognize the names, but then I landed on ‘Horace Mann Bond, Ph.D., University of Chicago,’ and I remembered he’d gone there back in the 1920s. I was clearly in way over my head. Hell, he’d been president of two universities, and all I had was a bachelor’s degree and a twelve-person business. I didn’t have lineage or big-time degrees.”

  “I was attracted to the Boulé because the people they invite to join are genuine leaders in their communities who are making lasting contributions,” says Los Angeles Boulé member Thomas Shropshire, who compares the group to the Links, where his wife, Jacqulyn, has served as a national officer. “Both of these groups are organizations that seek out leaders who are committed to helping less-advantaged people, and we want to encourage that kind of activity.”

  When I first joined the Boulé, I was astounded by the willingness of members to spend so much time with an organization that placed so much emphasis on formality. In a world that is becoming increasingly casual at work and play, the Boulé seems anachronistic in its demand for structure. But that is actually part of its appeal.

  Whether it’s at my Boulé chapter’s Christmas party at the Waldorf-Astoria or Valentine’s Day dinner at the Harvard Club, my wife and other guests comment on the courtly and sophisticated hosts. The fact that these guys are exchanging gifts from Tiffany’s, waltzing with their wives while also discussing politics and football scores makes the group unique for men of my generation.

  Among the activities I’ve experienced with the group in addition to the many black-tie dinners and dances are monthly presentations on racial and political issues and weekend retreats to discuss business topics. There are also many social outings which are limited to the members; the members and their spouses (an archon’s wife is referred to as an “archousa”); or the members, spouses, and invited guests. The social functions are typically held in the most formal settings. In New York, it’s the Harvard Club, the Williams Club, the Yale Club, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, or at a member’s apartment or country home. A popular annual picnic for the New York area chapters takes place at the suburban Chappaqua mansion of Dr. John Hutchinson, a thoracic surgeon who also has an apartment in Manhattan.

  On the morning of a recent Hutchinson picnic, John and his wife, Anne, sat out by the tennis court watching their son and daughter play a match. “We’ve had the Manhattan, Westchester, and Brooklyn Boulé chapters come up here for a picnic for the last twenty years,” says Anne as her husband, a longtime member, looks over the acres of their gently sloping rear yard. “It is great for the parents and the kids to interact at an informal event.”

  In Memphis, the settings are mostly formal. “We have our social affairs at the Peabody Hotel or at a club along the Mississippi River,” says Dr. W. H. Sweet, a native Memphian who grew up with my parents and belongs to that city’s Boulé. According to Ivan Houston, former chairman of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance, the Los Angeles chapter has meetings in a variety of places. “We will meet in people’s homes, and we’ve certainly had functions at the Wilshire Country Club, the California Club, and the Los Angeles Athletic Club.”

  The group’s other activities follow a rather formal structure that has been mandated by the office of the grand sire archon. Because it is a fraternal group that emphasizes social and intellectual interaction rather than community fund-raising or political activism, there are no public forums or public breakfasts like one finds among such fraternal groups as the Rotary Club or Kiwanis Club. When money is raised for a charity like the NAACP or the United Negro College Fund, it is collected directly from the members, who will simply write a check for the contribution.

  Many of the chapters also provide college scholarship and youth development programs that encourage members to mentor local students.

  Each chapter meets once each month at a private club, restaurant, or conference center that can accommodate the typical thirty-or-more-person group.

  “When I was growing up, my parents used to host a lot of Boulé meetings and parties at our home,” says Chicago native Maudelle Bousfield Evans, whose father, Dr. Midian Bousfield, was a member as well as medical director and president of Supreme Life Insurance during the 1930s and 1940s. “Everything they did was formal and sophisticated.”

  Fellow Chicago native Truman Gibson Jr. served recently as sire archon of his chapter and remembers that when his father was in the organization, the group was small enough to meet in members’ homes. “Now, we’re meeting at places like the Union League Club downtown,” he adds, “and places where the real business networking is going on.”

  The membership meetings usually take place on a Thursday, Saturday, or Sunday evening—once a month—and involve a four-course dinner and include a detailed discussion of a current issue in business, medicine, news, law, or politics that has an impact on black people nationally or abroad. Many Boulé chapters send out reading material to members in advance of the dinner meeting and ask a member who is well-informed on the subject to lead the discussion. The monthly meetings, which last three to four hours, are typically for members only, unless an outside speaker is brought in to present an issue.

  “We generally don’t need outside speakers because we already have the most interesting and best-connected men among our local membership. They are already making the news,” says a Los Angeles Boulé member. “If we want to hear about insurance, we’ve got insurance company founders like Ivan Houston in our group. Our Hudson family members know all about banking. When we wanted to talk about the L.A. riots, we already had Bernard Kinsey, the cohead of Rebuild L.A., in our group. And if it’s medicine, most of our guys are leading doctors.”

  Ivan Houston, retired chairman of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, is a longtime Boulé member, and acknowledges that he was attracted to the Boulé because it provided another opportunity to discuss issues that black people cared about. “I joined in 1970. I was already friends with many of the members because they were from the city and because my family has been in Los Angeles for many years,” he recalls, “and a lot of us are concerned about the same issues in this community. Many of the members are doctors, but we talk about a wide range of issues—from business to politics to international issues.”

  Chicago lawyer Truman K. Gibson Jr. remembers when his chapter invited the powerful white publisher of the Chicago Tribune to join a discussion at a Boulé meeting. “Robert R. McCormick was a conservative member of the Ch
icago political community,” explains Gibson, “and some of our members thought we’d be able to persuade him to be more sympathetic in the already racially divided city.”

  Grand Sire Archon Hall says that some chapters have attempted to support a more activist agenda. “Twenty-five years ago, a social action committee in the Boulé was created so we could outline a social agenda,” Hall explains, “and now we have Eddie Williams, grand sire archon-elect, heading a public policy committee with the historian Archon John Hope Franklin.” Williams, who founded the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Franklin, who is heading President Clinton’s race relations initiative, illustrate the kind of powerful team that that can be fielded when the Boulé chooses an issue to investigate and support.

  Most members agree that there are very few ways in which the group has changed since its founding in 1904. Those who do note any kind of evolution generally point to three areas: the group’s concern for secrecy, the members’ racial attitudes, and the standards used for admission.

  “For years, the Boulé was extremely secretive,” says Los Angeles member Thomas Shropshire, who first joined while he was working for Philip Morris in Milwaukee. “So I frankly had never even heard about the organization until I was out of school. Today, members are more willing to talk about it. You don’t really see the group in social columns, but it’s also not as hidden as it used to be. It is evolving into a more visible body.”