Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Although they have never been as numerous as the women’s social groups, several other men’s social groups have operated locally or regionally within the black old guard. Among them are the Gallivanters, the Fellas, the Westchester Clubmen, and the Reveille Club, all of New York; the Forty Club and the Royal Coterie of Snakes in Chicago; the Rogues of Detroit; the Bachelor-Benedicts in Washington; the Commissioners and the Ramblers of Philadelphia; and the Illinois Club of New Orleans. There are also many men’s social groups that are built around specific activities such as boating. New York’s Rainbow Yacht Club, which is made up mostly of well-known black physicians like Harry Delany, the chief of surgery at Albert Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, includes two dozen men who travel in a fleet of yachts during summer weekends. Others gathered to establish the annual Black Summit, an all-black ski vacation in Aspen, Colorado.

  Some of these groups sponsor important annual events. For example, New York’s sixty-six-year-old Reveille Club, which includes such members as New York Hospital surgeon William Curry, Carver Federal Savings Bank chairman Richard Greene, Judge Fritz Alexander, former mayor David Dinkins, and Harlem real estate investor Ed Meyers, sponsors a “Man of the Year” award. Philadelphia’s Ramblers have two annual formals. The Bachelor-Benedicts in Washington remain famous because of the debutante cotillion that introduces daughters of some of the city’s oldest families.

  Of all the men’s groups, One Hundred Black Men is seen more as a professional organization and less as a selective social club. While some of the most prominent black men in America belong, the group does not have the prestige of a social club because its intent is to serve as a professional networking group. Its chapters are often quite large, and membership is based merely on sponsorship and payment of dues.

  Considered a leading force in economic development, mentoring, and networking, One Hundred Black Men was begun in 1963 and now has forty-six chapters around the country. In its early years, the group attracted only its host city’s old black family names, but today it has expanded to include young corporate executives, bankers, lawyers, physicians, accountants, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Most chapters have monthly meetings on a selected weekday evening, hosting speakers from the worlds of business or politics, where they discuss practical business strategies, personal improvement, local economic development, or legislation of interest to the black community.

  Since members represent some of the most affluent black men in their cities, many of the chapters have established scholarship funds for inner-city young people or have “adopted” special charitable causes such as a local hospital, a nursing home, a summer camp, the NAACP, or another group that needs their fund-raising support.

  Among the founders is Harvey C. Russell, who was the first black to attain the position of vice president at a Fortune 500 company. As a Pepsi executive in the 1960s, Russell served as a mentor for many young black managers and students who were pursuing careers in corporate America. “When we started the group, there were only fourteen or fifteen of us, and most of the members were working in local government,” says Russell, while relaxing at his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. “Our intent was to create a local networking group for business and political leaders, and we had no idea it would grow into a national organization.”

  For years, Harvey and his wife, Jacqueline Denison Russell—a member of the Girl Friends—have hosted fellow One Hundred Black Men members and families at their Oak Bluffs home, which is just steps away from the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. Since forming the first One Hundred Black Men chapter, the New York organization has been particularly successful in its high-profile fund-raising. Oprah Winfrey was so impressed with the group’s work that she contributed $100,000 at the group’s annual black-tie dinner in 1996, hosted by national president Thomas Dortch and New York president Luther Gatling.

  “It was impressive to see close to a thousand black male businesspeople all in one room recognizing the need for us to take a leadership role in our community. It was one of the snazziest One Hundred Black Men events I’d ever attended,” says a member who serves as a One Hundred Black Men mentor for kids in the local schools, “but I must admit that a few of us were a little annoyed that all twelve hundred blacks were in formal attire, while the mayor and governor of New York showed up in suits. We represent some of the most influential people in America, but some of these white politicians have no respect for us.”

  Among the members in One Hundred Black Men are Herman Cain, CEO of Godfather’s Pizza; Milton Irvin, partner at Salomon Brothers; Ken Chenault, president of American Express; William Campbell, mayor of Atlanta; Bruce Llewellyn, CEO of Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Company; Richard Parsons, president of Time Warner; Clarence Smith, president of Essence Communications; Kweisi Mfume, former congressman and head of the NAACP; Norman Rice, mayor of Seattle; Ronald Kirk, mayor of Dallas; and General Colin Powell.

  Many One Hundred Black Men members participate in the group because it gives them the opportunity to participate in the community service projects that the socially focused groups like the Guardsmen do not partake in on a group level. The group allocates 21 percent of its spending for educational programs and another 13 percent for mentoring programs. Many of the chapters also operate conflict-resolution and antiviolence programs.

  As a member of the Boulé, the Westchester Clubmen, and One Hundred Black Men, I am an unabashed cheerleader of these groups, and I often remind my peers of the need to continue the traditions that prior generations began. Although I initially joined because I liked their activities and was flattered to be asked, I have come to recognize that this is finally the safe harbor that I had never been able to find in other organizations where people looked at me—the successful black man—as the oddity.

  Because many of these elite men’s groups were initially focused on social rather than civic activities, some of my friends have not bothered to investigate the value that these organizations are now adding to their communities. Because of this, they often limit their activities to the alumni chapters of their college fraternities. As groups such as the Boulé and the Guardsmen become less secretive and gain the national exposure that women’s groups like the Links have had, they will begin to attract more than just the sons and nephews of the older members. Perhaps the exposure will remove some of the prestige and the mystery, but it will serve to maintain a national roster of men who can call themselves the best and the brightest.

  CHAPTER 8

  Vacation Spots for the Black Elite

  “So, Maggie, who’s here?” my mother asked.

  “I saw Velma yesterday. And Anna had a book signing on the boat Thursday afternoon. And some of the Links from Philadelphia came up last week.”

  “And what about Donald and Charlene? I heard they were looking at some property over in Vineyard Haven?”

  “Looking at?” the woman asked while rolling her eyes. “You’ve obviously been gone one summer too long. That place was built, moved into, and landscaped nine months ago—all three thousand square feet of it.”

  “Well, we spent last summer in Sag Harbor. You know how much easier the weekend commute is.”

  Maggie shrugged without empathy. “Well, no one said this stuff was easy. You can’t be in both places at one time. You know you really have to pick.”

  My mother didn’t miss a beat. “Well, I picked and I’m back. We’ll be at the tennis courts this morning and the Ink Well this afternoon. So call me—and tell everybody I’m back! Tell ’em I’m back!”

  That was the rallying cry that I remember hearing at the beginning of each summer that we spent in Oak Bluffs, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. When my parents spotted their good friend Maggie Alston strolling along Circuit Avenue, the summer had officially begun. This was long before the groups of black college students started coming in the 1980s. It was before President Bill Clinton’s highly publicized 1994 Vineyard vacation with Vernon Jordan and the Kennedys. It was before Black
Dog Tavern T-shirts had become a cheap cliché—seen on the backs of people who couldn’t even find Vineyard Haven on an island map. For three months each year, the three-block stretch of stores on Circuit Avenue and the short strip of sand along Seaview Avenue—which we blacks call the “Ink Well”—was the center of our universe. It was black heaven—a world that few of us could abandon, even for half a summer. Unless, of course, we wanted to get left behind.

  Even though we’d been going there since I was two years old, such was the arrogance of black privilege on that island that it never even occurred to me that white people had summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard until I was ten or eleven years old. Of course I saw white people at the Flying Horses, at Our Market, and at the tennis courts off South Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs. But I assumed they were just passing through as guests of black people who had homes there, or as unrooted tourists. Just people passing through a place that was ours.

  But of course Martha’s Vineyard had white families. The black neighborhoods of Oak Bluffs were dwarfed by the white sections in the town and by the white population that dominated the rest of Martha’s Vineyard. But I was a summer kid who defined the resort by the boundaries of the black neighborhoods and by whole days and evenings spent with our extended black family in our all-black tennis tournaments, all-black yachting trips, all-black art shows, and all-black cookouts, and the white vacationers had no relevance for me.

  As I grew older, I saw what my younger and more naive, self-satisfied eyes had missed. As an adolescent, I finally paid notice to the racial lines that long ago had been drawn between blacks and whites on Martha’s Vineyard. I eventually even saw the many hierarchies that existed within the groups of blacks who summered there. But in spite of these changed perceptions and my newfound confrontation with reality, the one unalterable impression that remains today is that when vacationing among our own kind, in places that have been embraced by us for so long, there is a comfort—and a sanctity—that makes it almost possible to forget that there is a white power structure touching our lives at all.

  Today, America’s black elite is closely associated with three historic resort areas that became popular as a result of laws that had kept other vacation spots exclusively white. They are Sag Harbor, Long Island; Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard; and Highland Beach, Maryland. In the past, and to some extent still today, blacks also choose Hillside Inn, a black-owned resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains; and Idlewild, Michigan, a small town two hundred miles north of Detroit that was a popular escape for the midwestern black elite. In recent years, the elite have built ancillary vacations around the annual Black Summit ski vacation event that brings hundreds of black skiers and their families to resorts in Aspen and Vail, Colorado.

  Although it’s the best-known resort among the black elite, the tiny, seven-square-mile village of Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, is actually a mostly white community with only a 5 percent black year-round population. Expanding each year as more black professionals from all over the country continue to buy or rent homes there, Oak Bluffs has been a popular area for elite black families since the 1930s and 1940s.

  Located on the quiet, ninety-two-square-mile triangular island of Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Oak Bluffs is one of six small island towns on Martha’s Vineyard—the others being Vineyard Haven, Edgartown, Chilmark, West Tisbury, and Gay Head. The island, which has a year-round population of thirty-three hundred residents (it swells to eighty thousand during the summer), was originally chartered in 1602 by Bartholomew Gosnold of England, who named the island after his daughter, Martha. Already living there were members of an American Indian tribe, the Wampanoags.

  Beginning in the 1890s, blacks who lived in Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island began to move full-time to—and open businesses on—the island of Martha’s Vineyard. At the same time, there were a handful of well-to-do black families that began establishing roots there as a summer vacation spot.

  Among the first blacks to locate there were the great-grandparents of Robert W. Jones, a New York City real estate developer and consultant whose family had come from Boston. The well-to-do family owns twenty-five lots on the island today. “Although we have always had a home in Oak Bluffs,” explains Jones, “prior generations in my family purchased property in the Edgartown section in the 1890s.” Jones’s great-grandmother, Phoebe Mosley Ballou, bought the family’s original parcels at a time when blacks were not allowed to stay in any of the hotels on the island.

  “My family and the family of the writer Dorothy West were the first to own homes and host black summer visitors, since the white inns had a whites-only policy,” explains Jones. “Since this is the liberal Northeast, people are often surprised to hear that the segregated hotel rule was actually in place on the Vineyard. But when I was summering there as a child in the 1930s and 1940s, that was the rule all over the island.”

  An alumnus of Howard, New York University, and New York Law School, Jones grew up in an accomplished family in the Back Bay section of Boston during the 1930s. His background was not rare for the kinds of blacks who could afford to summer at the resort. His father, John, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attended Harvard, and became the first black graduate, in the 1920s, of Suffolk Law School. Today, a portrait of his father hangs at the school in Boston. “My aunt Lois painted the portrait many years ago while she was still an art professor at Howard,” says Jones. Aunt Lois is Lois Mailou Jones—a well-known fixture on Martha’s Vineyard whom my parents first met at one of her many gallery showings. Black and white homeowners have been snatching up her works since she first joined the Howard art department faculty in 1930. Today, her works are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery.

  Gesturing to the street-corner location where Our Market, a busy Oak Bluffs general store, now sits, Jones recalls, “My family and the West family were next-door neighbors right here on New York Avenue until around 1903, when a fire burned the buildings down. Then they moved to Circuit Avenue. My grandfather, Thomas Vreeland Jones, bought more property in 1912 in Oak Bluffs and then moved to Pacific Avenue, which is where the family home is today.”

  Like a few of the other “originals,” Jones has clear memories of Martha’s Vineyard before it became popular with affluent blacks from all over the country. “I spent every summer of my life in Oak Bluffs, but when I was a kid, the only blacks that came here were ones from Boston and Washington. No New Yorkers, no southerners, no midwesterners. The Shearers, the Ashburns, the Dixons—all Boston and D.C. people—were our social circle.”

  The other kids Jones played with were white—a fact that struck me as odd, since my own childhood experiences in the 1960s and 1970s provided almost no contact with whites on the island.

  Like others, Jones points out that it was not until Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the outspoken congressman, and his wife, Isabel, and their son, Preston, started visiting there that Oak Bluffs gained true popularity among the New York black elite. “The Powells started coming to the island in the late 1930s and early 1940s and started to bring these high-profile friends,” says Jones, who remembers the congressman and still remains in contact with his widow, Isabel.

  But even with all the affluent, high-profile blacks who were coming from Washington, Boston, and New York, the island’s inns and hotels—even the 120-year-old Wesley Hotel on Lake Avenue—did not allow blacks to board in their rooms until the height of the civil rights movement.

  “And believe it or not, that hotel was owned by the Methodists,” remarks a woman who remembers her relatives being turned away from the ornate building when she was spending her childhood summers during the 1950s in Oak Bluffs. Even with the Jones family connections to the prominent members of the Methodist church groups that controlled much of the property and civic affairs in the town—Robert’s mother was a member of the Methodist community’s historic Tabernacle in Oak Blu
ffs and raised money for the religious structure’s lighted cross—they and other blacks had to entertain their black visitors in their own homes. “The only place for blacks to stay was the Shearer Cottage on Rose Avenue,” Jones added, while noting that the owners of the cottage—the Shearer and Ashburn families—were an important link between new black families and island culture.

  Some find it ironic that a community with so many religious roots would have supported such bigotry. It was a team of activists in the Methodist Church who first visited Oak Bluffs in the 1830s and established an annual meeting in subsequent years, when they would pitch large tents and establish two- or three-week retreats for their members. After conducting these retreats for several years, the group of Methodists expanded and purchased several acres in the center of town, where they constructed small Gothic-styled houses on the property. The property is called the Methodist Campground. Sitting on the land today, just steps away from the harbor, are dozens of colorful, hundred-year-old, wood-framed Gothic—or “gingerbread”—houses that, according to black residents in town, have always been inhabited by whites.

  “I don’t ever remember seeing a black family in one of those gingerbread houses either,” adds Alelia Nelson, “but I can’t imagine why any of us would really be trying to move into one of those tiny houses. They are so close together, and the road is ten feet from your front door. There’s no privacy.” Nelson, who has lived in one of the largest homes overlooking the Oak Bluffs beach for nearly forty years, believes that the more desirable homes are the ones that have a view of the water—not the ones on the Campground.

  Such is the way in which black Vineyarders discuss the early treatment of their kind in the resort community. Like my own parents, most people here eschew the debates on racial conflict and, instead, adopt an air of quiet resignation about the past. The bigots who came before them were typically much less affluent whites, so to dismiss them now as “white trash” is a gesture that—if not equally racist—makes the memories a little less painful.