Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Dr. Beny Primm, an anesthesiologist and leading medical expert on drug addiction, has been visiting Martha’s Vineyard since the 1940s and is a popular player in the Tucker Tournament. His name has been drawn by such neighbors as PBS journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who recently built an Oak Bluffs house with her husband, New York investment banker Ron Gault.

  Another popular summer tennis tournament was established at the Oak Bluffs public tennis courts more than twenty years ago for Labor Day, and, while it attracts white residents as well, is a must-attend for the blacks in town.

  In addition to the very oldest families such as the Wests, the Joneses, the Shearers, and the Ashburns, there are many other established names on the island.

  There are Harvey and Jackie Russell, whose cedar-shingled house people first see when the ferry approaches the Oak Bluffs dock. In addition to being a former sire archon in the Boulé and a charter member of One Hundred Black Men in New York, Harvey became the first black to be named vice president of a Fortune 500 company when Pepsi promoted him in the 1960s. His wife, Jacqueline Denison Russell, an avid tennis player and a member of the Girl Friends, is the daughter of Major Franklin A. Denison, the highest-ranking black in the United States Army in World War I.

  Others in the New York contingent are Walter Lowe, a retired AT&T executive; Jill Nelson, the former Washington Post reporter, and her mother Alelia, who has a prominent house overlooking the water; and Howard Johnson and his son Brad, who have owned such New York restaurants as the Cellar and Memphis, and the trendy Los Angeles eatery Georgia’s. Howard recently sold his million-dollar Vineyard Haven home, which overlooked the harbor.

  Another group is the Boston crowd. Although they were the first contingent to arrive on Martha’s Vineyard, black Bostonians are clearly no longer the dominant voice. “Those New Yorkers now outnumber us three to one,” jokes native Bostonian Jack Robinson, who lives in Oak Bluffs and founded the Martha’s Vineyard Resort and Racquet Club. In addition to Robinson, over the years prominent Bostonians have included former senator Edward Brooke, who was the first black U.S. senator after Reconstruction. The new Boston crowd includes Harvard professors like James Cash, Charles Ogletree, Randall Kennedy, Chris Edley, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates.

  Harvard graduates Fletcher and Benaree Pratt Wiley are among the Boston set. “Flash” and “Bennie” bought in the 1970s and are active in many civic groups, including the Links. Flash is an attorney and head of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, while Bennie is the sister of former Washington, D.C., mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, and runs the Partnership, a nonprofit board of corporate executives who study business and social issues. “I wouldn’t have raised our kids anywhere else,” says Bennie, who owned a Vineyard Haven toy store, Giocatolli, in the 1980s. “It’s so safe, it reminds you of a 1950s community. Everyone looks out for each other’s children.”

  Others vacationing from around the country on the island include Washington power couple Vernon Jordan and Ann Dibble Jordan; former insurance executive Earl Adams and Ezola Adams from Atlanta and New Jersey, whose son is married to Vernon Jordan’s daughter, Vickie; former U.S. secretary of health and human services Dr. Louis Sullivan and his wife, Ginger; and Grace Frye of Los Angeles, who owns an estate in Vineyard Haven at the edge of Lake Tashmoo.

  And there are also a growing number of black celebrities, like Spike Lee, who have bought property on the island. “But those celebrities aren’t a part of our crowd,” says one matron who has owned for more than forty years in the Pork Chop section. “They’re here today, gone tomorrow—no stability and no background.” The woman pauses for a moment, then nods approvingly. “But I guess Spike Lee did go to Morehouse.”

  As old names disappear from the area, new ones are quick to replace them.

  While the old guard was sad to see the home of deceased New York physician and Amsterdam News owner Dr. C. B. Powell fall into disrepair after it was given to Howard University, they were all thrilled to hear that Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates had purchased the old Overton property overlooking the Ink Well. “We hear that Skip Gates is thinking of establishing a library there for black studies research,” says Primm. “That’s the kind of place that will help to further enrich black Martha’s Vineyard.” Mary Gardner Lopez agrees. Although she and her husband, George, now live in the Sengekontacket section, she remembers living two doors down from the Powells. “C.B. and Lena had the largest and most beautiful piece of property,” Lopez remembers, “but when they died, nobody had the kind of money to keep up what was the size of three large houses. There’s a lot of history and we need an owner who appreciates that.”

  A critical area in which blacks have failed to succeed in the resort is their ability to establish businesses there. In fact, given the concentration of well-educated, sophisticated black businesspeople who vacation on the island, I am struck by the dearth of black enterprises in the area. It is as puzzling as Harlem’s 125th Street—a neighborhood filled with black consumers, yet virtually no black merchants to serve them. Longtime black neighbors I talk to in Oak Bluffs cannot think of even five establishments owned by blacks on Circuit Avenue. “There’s Cousin Rose’s Art Gallery that Zeta Cousins owns, Summer Breeze Gift Shop that’s run by Diane Tarter, and the Carousel Clothing Store that the Foy family owns,” says a resident.

  “We are the richest blacks in the country and we have virtually no businesses here,” says an embarrassed Oak Bluffs resident whose family has summered there for three generations. “It’s a disgrace. Part of it is our fault because we get up here and just do a lot of profiling and social climbing. But white people are also at fault because they are not eager to support black businesses.”

  A few blocks up the hill from Circuit Avenue is the Martha’s Vineyard Resort and Racquet Club, which was established by Jack Robinson in 1989. The struggle to open this black-owned club highlights the challenges faced by black merchants who experience the subtle racism in the area.

  “The town government gave him a real runaround,” says a black resident who lives off New York Avenue near the club’s two-acre site. “They knew that black people with money were coming here, but the idea that we would have a country club too made us appear too permanent. It scared the town to death.”

  “It felt great to open the first black-run country club on the island because the white residents here already had their clubs,” explains Robinson, a commodities trader and former Boston NAACP president. “They had the East Chop Club down the road, and they had clubs over in Edgartown, but we were stuck entertaining in our backyards or on the public beach.” Robinson’s club, which is the only Vineyard resort with clay courts, has a fitness club, sporting goods shop, miniature golf course, jazz club, computers, sun deck, and hotel suites.

  “When the white residents, who quietly opposed the club, finally walked in and saw that these black folks had an eighteen-hundred-square-foot lobby in that building,” says a New York Avenue neighbor, “they flipped. Now they see both blacks and whites staying at the club.”

  Doris Stewart Clark founded the only black-owned licensed bed and breakfast on the island several years ago. A charming pink-and-white Dutch colonial built in 1906 in Vineyard Haven, the Twin Oaks Inn has won numerous awards from vacation guides and was host to many of President Bill Clinton’s staff during his high-profile 1994 summertime visit. But Clark was not welcomed with open arms when she was ready to establish the inn in the 1980s.

  “Not only was it a three-year fight to get a license from the local zoning board,” says Clark, whose relatives first came to the island more than sixty years ago, “but one of my white neighbors on the block specifically opposed my inn despite the fact that there was an inn operating on the same street and forty others that the zoning board had already approved prior to mine. The others were white-owned, and this neighbor actually told me that I should consider moving my business plans to Oak Bluffs, where there were a larger number of blacks.”

  Since Clark has turned T
win Oaks Inn into a popular stop for prominent blacks and whites, the neighbors have tried to forget the quiet dispute. Still, black residents are aware of the thin line of comfort that exists among the growing numbers of blacks in various areas outside of Oak Bluffs. I am particularly aware of this thin line when I am in Edgartown, the whitest and richest town on the Vineyard. Today, I feel quite comfortable perusing the merchandise in Edgartown stores like Bickerton and Ripley or the town’s palatial Harbor View Hotel, but as a child, it was the one town that my parents—and many other blacks—had no interest in visiting. Edgartown was considered a haven for older, white, blue-blooded Republican families, and its busy shops and residential streets are still populated by an almost exclusively white group of residents and tourists.

  But even with the subtle distinctions between the black and white sections and the nuances of those who own and those who rent, people who come to Oak Bluffs still believe it is the supreme place for the black elite. Longtime resident Robert Jones notes that his closest and oldest friends are people he met either at Howard or while summering as a child in Martha’s Vineyard. “From the minute that you line up for the ferry ride from Woods Hole in Cape Cod, you get a sense of the Vineyard’s informality and its energy.”

  I remember how I felt as a child each year on that ferry. We lived a wonderful life in New York, but it was one where race always seemed to be a factor in the things we saw and heard. In Oak Bluffs, we felt in control of our environment and protected against the offenses that were often witnessed by black children and black people living in a predominately white society. As we approached the harbor each June and caught the first view of those beautifully weathered, gray-shingled cottages on the bluff, I felt a serenity that I never felt on the mainland. It is a mood I am still able to capture when I return as an adult today.

  While not as well known as Oak Bluffs, a second summer resort community that is highly popular among the black elite is Sag Harbor, a small village on the eastern end of Long Island, New York.

  Although blacks have populated Sag Harbor and sections of nearby East Hampton, Long Island, since the early 1800s, in the early years they were primarily year-round laborers who worked in the whaling industry. During the nineteenth century, Sag Harbor and New Bedford, Massachusetts, were two of the northeast’s largest whaling ports. According to E. T. Williams, a Sag Harbor resident who has sat on the board of the town’s Eastville Historic Society, it wasn’t until just before the 1920s that black professionals started to purchase or build their own summer homes.

  “The first community of blacks here lived in the Eastville section of Sag Harbor, and they lived amongst a small group of Native Americans,” says Williams, a real estate developer who spent his childhood summers in Sag Harbor and who also has a home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Today, Williams, his wife Auldlyn, and their two daughters live on a four-acre Sag Harbor family compound where they maintain other family structures. He says that in the early 1800s, many of the blacks in the area were fishermen and craftsmen. “In fact, the church in our area, St. David AME Zion, was built in the 1840s and was a stop on the Underground Railroad as slaves were smuggled from the South.”

  While many black residents in the early 1900s owned houses on Lighthouse Lane, a street off of Route 114, many more were sent to buy land along the water, as most other sections of the village were reserved for white purchasers. The blacks were pushed into the remote east end of the four-square-mile town. It is for this reason that many affluent white Sag Harbor residents and vacationers are virtually unaware of the longtime presence of blacks in the community.

  “I started coming to Sag Harbor with my parents and grandparents in the 1940s, and black people were very clearly establishing our own neighborhoods,” says Williams, who, along with his friend Bill Pickens and other children of the Sag Harbor elite, grew up in a circle of black boys and girls who spent the summer taking tennis, swimming, and sailing lessons. As they became teenagers, they even formed a social club called the Centurions, which ended up nominating and sponsoring some of the prominent young girls for various New York debutante cotillions.

  Although we did not come to Sag Harbor as regularly as we summered in Martha’s Vineyard, my family first visited Sag Harbor in the mid-1960s for two- or three-week periods. As much as we liked the people, then and now, when I go back today, two- or three-week periods are still about as much as I can take, given the social intensity that one experiences in this Hamptons environment. Unlike Oak Bluffs, which has traditionally attracted a more diverse, laid-back crowd from the South and Midwest as well as the Northeast, the Sag Harbor black crowd is mostly a fast-paced, sophisticated, and often cynical New York crowd that likes formality and likes to avoid the rustic whenever possible. For example, in Martha’s Vineyard, dirt roads and sandy driveways are common, while Sag Harbor’s norm is paved streets and designer gravel.

  Since the 1940s, the black elite has settled into five specific sections of Sag Harbor—all on the east side of the small village. Each of the neighborhoods is off Route 114 and consists of no more than five or six small roads that had been left unpaved until about twelve years ago. While a handful of black society families live outside these neighborhoods, most own and socialize in these five tight-knit sections. Three of the neighborhoods offer beachfront property along the Sag Harbor bay. The first neighborhood—and the one with the most high-profile residents—is Azurest. Here, in a neighborhood of about one hundred families, the most desirable address is on Terry Drive, which runs along the water. This is where, among other well-to-do black families, Dr. and Mrs. Chester Redhead live.

  For three decades, the Redheads have helped to direct the black social scene of Sag Harbor, which is made up of some of the most successful professionals in the northeast.

  A prominent New York dentist and trustee of Howard University, Chester says, “We decided to buy in Sag Harbor rather than Martha’s Vineyard because of the close proximity to New York. Although we always visit our friends in the Vineyard, it’s much easier to live here because of the short drive or plane trip. We have no ferry rides like they have in Martha’s Vineyard, so I can see patients on a Friday afternoon in New York and be out here that same evening.”

  Redhead, whom I have known since I was a child, will either drive his Rolls Royce Silver Shadow from the city or take a forty-minute trip by plane and meet his wife, Gladys, at the East Hampton airport. The two of them look at the resort town as being an easy extension of the comfortable life they have carved out in Manhattan and the tony suburb of Scarsdale, New York.

  “This has always been a wonderful place to raise kids in the summer,” adds Gladys as she looks out over the deck to the beach and waves up to their son Raymond, who is flying a small red-and-white Cessna 172 single-engine plane a few hundred feet above their contemporary-style home. “Everybody knows everybody here. I never had to worry about our three sons because this is a family community and we all looked out for each other. And that’s still true today.”

  To see the truth of Gladys’s point, one only has to walk down their narrow street, which follows the beachfront. Terry Road, which has just nine homes, includes the residence of Ken Chenault, president of American Express; Earl Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine and owner of the Pepsi bottling franchise in Washington, D.C.; Cecil Broderick, a New York physician; Arch Whitehead, a New York head-hunter; and several other well-known names in the black New York crowd. Three of the nine families on their street have kids who grew up together in Scarsdale, and the others hail from Manhattan, suburban New Rochelle, and other parts of New York and suburban New Jersey.

  As a gardener trims away at a pine tree (a sight you’d never see in Oak Bluffs) in the Redheads’ front yard, real estate developer E. T. Williams is getting into his blue Mercedes station wagon to run into town. Vascular surgeon Bill Curry—on his way to the Shinnecock Hills Country Club—is thanking Cecil and Mercedes Broderick for a referral, and decorators are arriving next door at Ken
and Cathy Chenault’s to add finishing touches for a party to be held in honor of Alma Brown, the recently widowed wife of U.S. commerce secretary Ron Brown. Two doors down, caterers are opening cases of soda and laying out furniture on the deck of Earl Graves’s stately two-story shingled home. Graves and his wife Barbara are moving back and forth from the kitchen to the deck with their grandkids and daughter-in-law, Roberta—who went to Yale with their son, Butch—as they play host to Bob Holland, former CEO of Ben and Jerry’s; his wife Barbara; and Link Inez Richardson and her husband, Franklyn, a fellow Boulé member, who is a resident of Scarsdale and pastor of Grace Church in Mount Vernon, New York.

  “There’s a lot going on in Sag Harbor, and I’ve spent virtually every summer of my life here—including the one when I met my wife,” says Bill Pickens, a member of one of the first black families to summer in the community. Pickens is not alone in noting that everybody is somebody in this community.

  “Sag Harbor consists of a very New York-based group of families,” remarks Gladys Redhead as she walks up from the hot beige sand behind her home. As she recalls a quick trip to the nearby Saks Fifth Avenue and a recent gathering the day before, she says, “In just a few hours on this beach, in town, or at someone’s cocktail party, you will run into people from all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, or suburban New York and New Jersey.”

  Gladys herself is one of those many native New Yorkers who can be found hosting reading groups and art shows for the visitors and residents of black Sag Harbor. Like her husband, Chester, she is a tireless host and supporter of events that fill the calendars of the Sag Harbor crowd. A graduate of Howard and Columbia University Graduate School and a retired schoolteacher from suburban New Rochelle, she grew up in one of those well-connected, Sag Harbor-type families. “When I was growing up in New Rochelle, my father was an established dentist there, so I grew up knowing kids who were vacationing in places like this. Since both of my parents had gone to Columbia and were active on the school board in New Rochelle, my whole life has been New York-focused.”