As a part of its ongoing evolution, there is one area where members in specific chapters are expressing concern, and that is in the area of racial makeup. The Boulé was, of course, begun as a fraternity for black men when white fraternities were closed to them. There have, however, been a handful of white members who have been asked to join because they were closely associated with some of the high-ranking members, and shared the same liberal views regarding the role and responsibility of black professionals in America. Among the few white members have been Columbia University professor Jack Greenberg, who worked on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case and who replaced Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after Marshall was named to the federal bench by President Kennedy. Although there have only been a few of them, most of the other white members have been liberal Jews like Greenberg. In this regard, the Boulé is more progressive than the black sororities and fraternities, where one finds virtually no white adults in the membership.
“I’m happy that the Boulé is open-minded about welcoming nonblacks who share our vision and agenda,” says a Detroit member, “but what I don’t like is when one of these young black members wants to impress his white boss or colleague by nominating him—especially when the white boss knows nothing about the group and couldn’t care less about black people. It makes a mockery out of the group.”
An archousa who has been married to a member for twenty-two years is disturbed by a pattern she says was obvious to her when visiting some Boulé friends in Seattle. “I am shocked by the number of black men in this organization who are bringing their white girlfriends and wives into the group,” the woman remarks. “It’s not my business that all these powerful black men have decided to marry and date whites, but it is my business when I heard some of these women remark that the fraternity might gain more prestige if it contributed to causes that were not just associated with blacks.”
Another member agrees that certain chapters have a surprising number of members with white girlfriends. “I never thought I’d see this,” he remarks. “I know guys who used to be deeply committed, but now their new spouses are pulling their husbands away from a black agenda. When you think about it, there’s no reason why these white women would care about supporting a youth development program for black kids or would encourage their husbands to give more money to the NAACP or United Negro College Fund. I don’t see this kind of influence occurring in my wife’s Links group, or in the local chapter of the Girl Friends. They all seem to agree that the groups were meant to support a black agenda. What’s our problem?”
While there are some people who share these two individuals’ concerns, for the most part the Boulé membership does not see the interracial issue as a factor, since interracial couples represent a very small portion of the total membership, and most of those who do participate are respectful of the group’s history and its focus. What is interesting regarding the race factor is that when members are asked about the racial makeup of the Boulé, most have no sense of how many interracial couples are represented—and most would be surprised to learn that the membership includes any white men.
The only other area in which some say the group is changing is in the standards used for accepting candidates. Many will find this ironic, since the Boulé is probably the most difficult black elite group of all to enter.
“I think the group is lowering its standards,” says a retired physician who lives in Atlanta. “A lot of us go to the Grand Boulés or look in the directory these days, and we meet all these young men that never would have gotten in thirty or forty years ago. Some chapters are taking in five or six members at a time just because they’re wealthy or famous. Just because someone is a millionaire entrepreneur or a big-city mayor doesn’t mean he should be let into the group.” The elderly doctor looks at the bottom shelf of the library in his home and pulls out one of the blue-covered Boulé Journal magazines. His wife joins the conversation.
“I’d have to agree,” she adds. “Over the last few years, we’ve met some of the most coarse businesspeople and congressmen who have told us they were members. And it’s just ridiculous to admit all these people. Like that chapter in D.C. You can’t tell me that there are actually one hundred men that really deserve to be in the Boulé in that tiny city.”
The fact that the Washington, D.C., chapter includes college presidents, federal judges, cabinet secretaries, renowned physicians, and high-profile lawyers like Vernon Jordan left the woman unconvinced. Many of the Boulé’s members argue that the chapters have grown larger because the black elite is significantly larger than it was in previous years.
And as the organization grows, it continues to maintain most of the traditions that endear it to the membership. “We continue to involve the widows of our deceased members because this is also a family organization that values family relationships,” says Grand Sire Archon Anthony Hall Jr. As long as a widow hasn’t remarried, she continues to receive the Boulé Journal, as well as invitations to events and parties. In most cases, the organization pays for the widow’s ticket to these events. The Boulé directories even continue to list the address of a widow under her deceased husband’s chapter’s membership list.
As the most selective group for black men in America, the Boulé continues to be popular among both the old guard and the new elite who have earned the traditional academic and professional credentials that the original founders embraced.
I first learned of the National Association of Guardsmen from my cousin, Robert Morton, a New York surgeon who had joined the group thirty years ago. Founded in Brooklyn in 1933, the Guardsmen is comprised of eighteen chapters with locations throughout the country. Most of the chapters have fewer than the thirty-member maximum allowed, with an emphasis placed on physicians and attorneys. The original group included several Brooklyn residents who worked for a downtown oil company. They were James Adams, Armstead Cooper, Wilbur Rogers, Ray Nathan, Marcus Grant, Edward Taylor, Edward Hairston, Joseph Sircus, Everett Miller, Malcolm Fulcher, Harold Carter, and Weston Thorne.
The group is thought of as a purely social organization, so its mandate is very different from that of the more intellectually driven Boulé, or the more politically active women’s Links group, or even the children and family organization, Jack and Jill. Although many of the Guardsmen have wives in the Links or Girl Friends and children who grew up in Jack and Jill, the group is very clearly an adult men’s social club that eschews formal rules and structure.
While the Boulé’s goal has been to gradually increase its size, gain more national stature, and focus its discussions on political and intellectual pursuits, the Guardsmen have chosen to remain small and even more hidden from the public.
“Most of the early members were young lawyers, doctors, and dentists who already belonged to fraternities,” says Theodore Payne, the group’s national president, who lives in Fairfield County, Connecticut. “I have heard some people describe the Guardsmen as a black man’s country club, and I think that description is accurate in some ways.”
The group does not have formal conventions with plenary sessions, platforms, and speeches in the way that the Boulé and the fraternities have each year. “In fact, you might get kicked out of the organization if you ever suggested formalizing our get-togethers in that manner,” says national president Ted Payne with a laugh. “Most of our members already belong to professional associations in medicine, law, or other areas, and already participate in fraternities where formal conferences are the regular practice. That is not our purpose and everyone understands that.”
So averse to formalized practices is the organization that it allows each chapter to establish its own rules governing dues, the frequency of meetings, the size of its local chapter, and other issues. The only strict requirements are that each chapter serve as a host for the group’s scheduled weekend retreats and that each chapter send at least two delegates to the national gatherings.
Because the group wanted to remai
n small and elite, it was a long time before the national office would permit the creation of chapters west of the Mississippi. Today, there are chapters in the cities of New York, Boston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., as well as in Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and New Jersey.
The Guardsmen are particularly well known for their lavish “Guardsmen Weekends,” where a host chapter offers an all-expense-paid weekend in the host city for every other Guardsmen member and respective spouse. These weekends take place three times each year and cost the host members thousands of dollars, as they schedule black-tie dances, golf outings, sightseeing, fashion shows, and other events. The first weekend takes place in February, March, or April; the second is in May, June, or July; and the third annual weekend occurs in September, October, or November.
The Guardsmen Weekend scheduling is so important to the members that they set the dates and locations as far as twelve years in advance. For example, a recent Guardsmen Newsletter has already announced that the Atlanta chapter will be hosting the March weekend in the year 2012.
Among the lavish weekends are trips to Boca Raton, Atlantic City, the Caribbean, and western ski resorts. Dr. George Lopez and his wife, Mary, remember a recent weekend in Florida. “Our host was a multimillionaire attorney who spared no expense,” says Lopez, who is also a member of the Boulé. “Not only did they entertain us in public places but our host threw open his home to us as well.” As a society columnist, Mary Gardner Lopez has covered many social affairs. She was one of the founders of the Doll League, a national women’s organization, and is a regular on the black elite circuit. “We’ve been to weekends in Palm Springs, Bermuda, Martha’s Vineyard, Newport, Montreal, Hilton Head, you name it,” says Mrs. Lopez. “No one moves around as much as the Guardsmen.”
Alfonso Orr of New York and Tom Shropshire of Los Angeles say that they have flown cross-country and from business conferences outside the United States in order to return in time for the golf and tennis tournaments taking place at Guardsmen Weekends. Their wives, both members of the Links, also juggle their schedules for these extravagant events.
“You’ve never seen people spend money until you’ve been to a Guardsmen Weekend,” says a Boston member who recently returned from a Los Angeles retreat. “My wife and I were blown away. The group must have spent a quarter of a million bucks on us during the three days.”
Besides the extravagant weekends, each of the chapters has its own local events. While the different cities don’t sponsor cotillions as some of the fraternities do, they have theme parties and other gatherings. For example, the Los Angeles chapter gives a big New Year’s Eve party.
Each of the members is given a medallion that has a quill, a winged foot, a lion, and a helmeted guardsman embossed on it. The group is extremely selective about beginning new chapters and accepting members into the chapters that are already in existence. Because the Guardsmen requires a financial outlay greater than all the other men’s groups, many eligible men take themselves out of the running.
Past and current members include Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder, former U.S. secretary of commerce Ron Brown, and Hampton University president William Harvey.
You can ask ten different Guardsmen about the method for gaining admission to the club and you’ll get ten different stories. This is primarily because each of the chapters is allowed to establish its own rules governing admission.
“To this day, I still don’t understand how I got turned down, when I knew and got along with everyone in the group,” says a physician who lives in Boston.
“Some chapters have unusual rules for admission,” admits national president Ted Payne. “You may encounter a chapter where twenty members want to admit you, but two people don’t. If the rules say that two negative votes can keep you out, then this is what can happen.”
While there are some father-son memberships reflected in chapters like Atlanta and Philadelphia, the group does not have the number of “legacies” that one finds in the Boulé.
“I was attracted to the group for family reasons,” says Thomas Shropshire. “Since my brother had been in it for years in Atlanta, I decided to get a group together to form a chapter out here. Although it was traditionally an East Coast group, the newest chapters are generally west of the Mississippi.”
Whether the members come from the East or West Coast, most of them look to the group exclusively for social interactions. They have none of the pretensions that Boulé members have, even though there are some overlaps in their membership rosters.
“Even though there’s some overlap between them, the Guardsmen guys have always been a lot more fun-loving than Boulé men,” says an attorney who belongs to both. “But just because they know how to party doesn’t mean they weren’t all ambitious guys with accomplished families.”
There is no black-tie dinner ticket more coveted among the black elite than those for the annual Comus Ball that takes place each year after Christmas in New York.
Phyllis Stevenson fondly recalls the Comus Balls that she and her husband began attending in the 1960s. Frank Stevenson, now deceased, was president of the group during the 1980s. “People used to start calling us around September,” Phyllis explains, “all of a sudden renewing old friendships because they knew the formal was approaching and they wanted to get tickets.” Phyllis, who had been one of the most celebrated debutantes to come out with the Girl Friends in the early 1950s, is well-schooled in the art of high society diplomacy. “I understood the popularity of the event—I’ve gone to at least twenty of the annual balls. But I told people that I had no control over distribution of the invitations. They didn’t print more just because more people wanted to attend.”
“Each member gets only ten invitations,” says longtime member John Procope, who was once publisher of the Amsterdam News and now coheads the insurance firm E.G. Bowman, on Wall Street, with his wife, Ernesta. “We don’t sell tickets because we want to act as true hosts. We pay for each of our invited guests,” he explains.
Phyllis Stevenson says that most members have their wives, one or two family members, and their very closest friends at their tables, thus providing virtually the same crowd year after year. As she flips through a stack of photo albums that chronicle past years of the Comus Ball, it becomes obvious that there is one crowd, indeed. Many of the tables look nearly identical Christmas after Christmas.
“My wife and I would love to go to that ball, but they won’t sell you a ticket no matter how much you offer. And I’m not going to beg,” says a New York physician who has wanted to attend for the last fifteen years. “It’s a closed group if you’re not related to a member or if you’re not his best friend or business partner. At this point, I just want to go out of curiosity.”
A popular couple on the New York social scene, Frank and Phyllis Stevenson included on their membership and guest lists the names of the people who had been tied to the Comus group for decades. Phyllis not only is the daughter of Anna Small Murphy, one of the founders of the Girl Friends, but was also president of the exclusive women’s group in the early 1980s. Before Frank became an administrator at the New York state supreme court, he and entrepreneur Richard Clarke had opened a successful travel agency, Hallmark Holidays, in Manhattan to serve the corporate sector. Clarke, who was the first black named to the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a regular at the holiday event.
“Like most members of the Comus Club, my husband was a native New Yorker,” says Phyllis. “He went to Stuyvesant High School and Lincoln, so he knew this group when they were all young.” Other members at the time were Dr. Hiram Bell, Dr. Cecil Forster, Dr. Leslie Alexander, Dr. John Parker, Judge Herbert Evans, Judge George Fleary, Judge Charles Lawrence, Judge Robert Couze, Dr. Charles Greene, Dr. Robert Somerville, Dr. Oscar Allen, Dr. Thomas Leach, and many other prominent Brooklynites.
Founded in Brooklyn in 1923, the Comus Club was started by men who lived and w
orked in the city, holding a variety of professional and nonprofessional jobs. Unlike the Boulé, whose membership has always been professional, the Comus evolved into a completely professional crowd only after the first couple of decades of its existence. Unlike the other black elite groups, the Comus has only one chapter. The club owns a brownstone on Decatur Street, which members use as a clubhouse where they host Saturday evening meetings, card games, and other affairs. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Christmas ball was held at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn, but with crowds of five hundred or more, it is now held in larger and newer facilities like Terrace on the Park in Flushing Meadow Park or New York hotels.
A sought-after credential on any black society family résumé, the group is highly selective about admitting new members. Getting any of the approximately seventy members to reveal anything about the selection process is virtually impossible. In fact, memberships seem to be held by many families who pass them between relatives or across generations. “I was proposed in 1957 by my wife’s brother, Dr. Cecil Forster,” says John Procope. Forster, who was a Brooklynite like his sister, Ernesta Procope, was a New York psychologist and president of the New York Psychological Association. He went on to become president of the Comus as well.
Comus member E. T. Williams also has ties to this organization’s many family connections. “Ernesta Procope’s brother is my godfather,” explains Williams. He joined eleven years ago. And Earl Arrington continues the chain. “My mother and E.T.’s mother were very close friends in Brooklyn,” says Arrington, a real estate investor in New York, “and since Brooklyn was once a very small community, the Comus guys knew each other’s families very well.”
There are also many members who have memberships with the other groups. E. T. Williams, Dr. John Parker, Dr. Vernal Cave, and Dr. Hobart Jarrett are among those who have belonged to the Boulé as well. John Procope and Judge Herbert Whiteman belong to all three: the Comus, the Boulé, and the Guardsmen.
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