Although the remark made me uncomfortable, I was well aware of the very Republican and very accomplished Jewel Stradford Lafontant, since her son, John, had been a couple of years ahead of me at Princeton. Her father had been a high-profile Republican lawyer in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, and my mother had lived a few doors down from the Stradfords on Chicago’s Washington Park Court at a time when Jewel’s father, Francis Stradford, gained notoriety for arguing against restrictive covenants in housing. A hero for many of the black South Siders, he supported the family of writer Lorraine Hansberry when, in 1936, the Hansberrys were refused an apartment on Sixtieth Street because restrictive covenants stated that only whites could rent in the building.
While the characterization of Lafontant is not entirely a fair one—because she did, indeed, support many black organizations like the Chicago Urban League—the perception that some of the wealthier blacks failed to work together politically with the working-class blacks is closer to reality. Today, the city is 40 percent black, and the white Irish, Polish, and German communities are much better able to unify and keep the mayoral seat in the hands of the white electorate and, particularly, in the hands of the Daley family.
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERTS
By the late 1890s, through her hair care products company and chain of beauty schools, Madam C. J. Walker had become the first self-made woman millionaire in America.
In 1906, Walker had this twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion built on her estate overlooking New York’s Hudson River in Westchester County. Her employees and guests pose around the rear terrace and pool in a 1920s photo.
Madam Walker’s daughter, A’Lelia, poses in the living room of the Walker mansion in the 1920s. A’Lelia was a Harlem socialite who owned two town houses where she entertained and raised funds for writers during the Harlem Renaissance.
Mae Walker Perry was the millionaire granddaughter of C. J. Walker. After attending Spelman College, she was married in this 1923 wedding, which cost in excess of $60,000. The ceremony took place at Harlem’s old-guard St. Philip’s Episcopal Church.
Madam Walker stands here with educator Booker T. Washington and other businessmen in 1913, when she gave thousands to the YMCA, the NAACP, and other groups who were combating the lynching of blacks in the South.
Alonzo Herndon, Atlanta’s first black millionaire, poses with his wife, Adrienne, and son, Norris, in 1908.
Alonzo Herndon built this mansion in Atlanta in 1910, five years after he founded Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Today, the black- owned firm has over $220 million in assets.
Herndon’s other Atlanta businesses included a twenty-five-seat men’s barber salon that employed only black barbers and served only white businessmen. Located on Peachtree Street, it featured leather benches, marble floors, and crystal chandeliers.
Supreme Life Insurance of Chicago was run by the city’s black elite. Seated in the boardroom in the early 1930s are (left to right) attorney Earl B. Dickerson, Harry Pace, A. P. Bentley, Dr. Midian Bousfield, W. Ellis Stewart, and attorney Truman Gibson Sr. Bousfield and Gibson were in the Chicago Boulé.
Since 1938, Jack and Jill has been the premiere by-invitation-only social group for black elite children. Here, Jack and Jill mothers pose at a 1951 convention. There are now 220 chapters throughout the United States.
Jack and Jill president Dr. Nellie Gordon Roulhac of Philadelphia (center) is flanked by four other national presidents at the 1955 convention. They are (far left) Alberta Turner, Emilie Pickens, Roulhac, Edna Seay, and Dorothy Wright. Wright’s family founded Philadelphia’s oldest black bank.
The Girl Friends is one of the most selective black women’s groups in the nation. Charter members gather in a New York home in the early 1930s. Anna Small Murphy (back row, fourth from left) launched the club’s famous cotillions when she was president in 1951.
Phyllis Murphy Stevenson (far left) was the most celebrated debutante in 1952, when she came out at the Ball of Roses cotillion in New York. Here, at seventeen, she joins her friends and escorts. Years later, Phyllis was president of the Girl Friends and her husband headed the all-male Comus Club.
A Girl Friends Ball of Roses cotillion formation being presented in the early 1960s at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, has been a popular summer resort for the black elite since the 1930s. Here, writer Dorothy West (third from right) joins friends on the island in the 1920s.
Clifford Alexander was named secretary of the Army under President Carter. He married Adele Logan, the daughter of successful Harlem physician Warren Logan. Clifford and Adele both attended the Fieldston School and Harvard before Clifford went to Yale Law School.
Jewel Stradford Lafontant was just one generation in a long Chicago dynasty. Her grandfather and father practiced law in the city before her. Here, in 1973, she serves as deputy solicitor general of the United States under President Nixon. A powerful Republican who made waves when she seconded the nomination of President Nixon, Jewel later sat on the boards of the Mobil Corporation, Revlon, and TWA.
An appointee of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ersa Poston held positions in New York State government and then in Washington when Rockefeller became vice president. Married to Ted Poston, the first black journalist to work for a mainstream newspaper, Ersa is a member of the Links, the Girl Friends, and AKA.
U.S. senator Edward Brooke (far left) was elected by Massachusetts residents in 1966 and was the first black senator since Reconstruction. Here, he joined Detroit debutante Mary-Agnes Simmons and Edward Davis, the first black to own an auto dealership. Davis’s wife is prominent fund-raiser Mary-Agnes Miller Davis.
Detroit socialite and philanthropist Mary-Agnes Miller Davis (far right) chats with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson during a 1961 press conference. A founder of the Co-Ettes, a national civic organization for black girls, Mary-Agnes has been at the center of Detroit society since the 1940s.
As publisher of Black Enterprise magazine and owner of a Pepsi- Cola bottling franchise, Earl Graves Sr. is an important figure in New York’s black elite. He raised three Ivy League–educated sons (shown here) in a $3 million Scarsdale mansion and a waterfront home in Sag Harbor, Long Island.
Each summer, beginning in 1921, the black elite sent their sons and daughters to Camp Atwater in North Brookfield, Massachusetts. These two photographs were taken in the 1940s, when the seventy-three-acre camp with its twenty-seven buildings was at its zenith. Its board includes Senator Edward Brooke, attorney Vernon Jordan, and former state department official Clifton Wharton.
In 1958, Rikki Stubbs is crowned at the Detroit Co-Ette cotillion. Stubbs’s mother, Marion, was founder of Jack and Jill, and her stepfather, Dr. Alf Thomas, hosted Rikki’s wedding on a family-owned island between Detroit and Canada. Holding the microphone (center) is Detroit philanthropist Mary-Agnes Miller Davis.
The cover of the brochure that New York brokers used to sell E. T. Williams’s Upper East Side duplex apartment. He and his wife, Lyn, moved into the $2.5 million apartment in 1982 and were soon profiled in New Yorkmagazine.
With ties to Jack and Jill, the Boulé, and Comus, Auldlyn and E. T. Williams (seen in both photographs) stand in the yard of their four-acre Sag Harbor family compound, built in the 1840s. Williams’s board memberships include the Museum of Modern Art, the Central Park Conservancy, Atlanta University, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Schomburg Library.
The Rainbow Yacht Club includes black physicians and attorneys who own yachts and travel together along the East Coast. Harry Delany, head of surgery at New York City’s Albert Einstein Hospital, is fleet commander. His wife, Barbara, integrated Cornell University’s all-white sororities in the 1950s. The Delany family story was told in the Broadway play Having Our Say.
Dr. Asa Yancey of Atlanta (back row, center) helped hundreds of black doctors become surgeons in Georgia and Tuskegee, Alabama, when southern hospitals refused to train them. He is a member of the Atlanta Boulé, and
he and his wife, Marge, have sat on the Atlanta School Board. Three of their children are physicians.
More than sixty years after its founding, Jack and Jill remains an organization that bonds children from black elite families. Members must perform volunteer community service and participate in leadership development projects. Here, Jack and Jill children from Chicago play in a backyard pool of a member’s home in suburban Lake Forest.
U.S. congressman Harold Ford Sr. grew up in a prominent Memphis family where members served in the state senate, city council, and county legislature. His father founded a prominent Memphis funeral home. Ford is pictured here (third from left) in a meeting in 1977 with some other members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
My grandmother poses in 1920 for her engagement photograph in Memphis, the same year my grandfather started a trucking business.
Founded in 1946, the Links has included congresswomen, mayors, college presidents, wealthy socialites, and presidential cabinet members. My mother (front, fourth from left) and her Links chapter are photographed here during a White Rose Ball that she chaired with fellow member Dr. Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X (front, sixth from left).
Before she was appointed to serve as secretary of housing and urban development for President Johnson, Washington’s Patricia Roberts Harris was Johnson’s ambassador to Luxembourg. Here, in 1966, she joins the president on the campus of Howard University, where she was dean.
Harvard Law School graduate Reginald Lewis became one of the richest and most influential men on Wall Street when he purchased McCall Pattern Company in 1986 and Beatrice Foods in 1987 in a billion-dollar leveraged buyout.
Reginald Lewis and his wife, attorney Loida Lewis, stand on the lawn of their mansion in Amagansett, Long Island. Before Reginald’s death in 1992, he and Loida gave $3 million to Harvard Law School. Active as a Jack and Jill mother, Loida now runs her husband’s business empire from New York and Paris.
Since 1903, Sigma Pi Phi (known as the Boulé) has been the most selective membership club for men in the black elite. Consisting mostly of doctors, lawyers, and wealthy businessmen, each chapter regularly hosts black-tie dinners and gatherings. I (top row, center) pose with my Boulé chapter members at a recent holiday party.
Harold and Helena Doley recently bought and restored the 1906 mansion of Madame C. J. Walker. Founder of the Wall Street firm Doley Securities, Harold was the first black individual to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. A native of New Orleans, he can trace his family back to eighteenth-century Louisiana.
Adding to the Chicago Defender journalist’s view of Lafontant, there are many more accurate stories of elite black families who at one time produced older, problack activists who had helped the community but later raised children who, in one way or another, did not live up to the larger black community’s expectations. Along with Francis Stradford and his daughter, Jewel, people often talk about Earl Dickerson and his daughter, Diane, in this group. Earl was the high-profile attorney who had been so outspoken for the black South Side during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. A city alderman, an assistant corporation counsel, a corporate executive, a well-to-do attorney, a Democratic committee member, and a member of the black community’s elite, Earl was long heralded as one of the leaders of black Chicago. His only child, Diane, however, eventually became an outsider because of what some blacks say she did not do for the black community.
“Diane was something else. I can still remember that white convertible she drove around in after she graduated from Francis Parker,” remarks a friend of my mother’s who welcomed me into her Hyde Park home during a recent visit. “She was like black royalty—wealthy, good-looking, sophisticated. But it just saddened me to see how little interest she took in black people.”
“Francis Parker?” another friend asks when the story is repeated. “So, that explains it.”
Explains what?
It is obvious that when outsiders ask what happened to Diane Dickerson and all the money, good looks, and sophistication she inherited, few of the old-timers are willing to answer. Some are willing to point out that she was typical among the black elite’s children: less concerned with and less tied to the black community than their parents. Others remain a little annoyed and share the facts that they are reluctant to forget.
“Oh, she married into the Brown family—you know, Sidney Brown, who was the first black on the school board.”
Another Chicagoan chimes in. “That’s right, she married his son, Nelson, the lawyer. Handsome couple—and what a wedding!”
Then everyone falls silent.
“So what happened to her?” I ask with obvious curiosity as I glance through some of the aerial photographs taken above the extravagant 1950 garden party that was given for Diane’s debut.
“Well, she died two years ago,” someone says. “But even before that she just kind of disappeared.”
“Disappeared” sounds like code for something, so I press on. I ask why I never saw her name in any of the directories in any of the black organizations, why she wasn’t listed in my mother’s Links roster, why her kids aren’t pictured in my family’s collection of Jack and Jill Up the Hill annual yearbooks, and why her name wasn’t appearing in the columns of the Chicago Defender. Given the professional and social stature of her father in Chicago, it seems that she would be well ensconced in the city’s, as well as the country’s, black society.
“Well, Diane was a little different from her parents. They belonged to the black world,” says one woman who was Diane’s age and had attended both her debut and her wedding. “Her mother was in the Northeasterners and her father was in lots of black groups, but—” Her voice trails off before the thought is completed.
Finally, one of the men in the group continues the sentence: “—you’re not going to find Diane in our groups. After her folks sent her to that Francis Parker School, that was the end of her life with black people.”
“The rest of us all were going to DuSable High School,” said a svelte, middle-aged Chicagoan who had known the Dickersons and understood the man’s point. The woman had graduated a year ahead of my own mother. “DuSable was where you went if you were black. And the Dickersons were high-toned people with money, so they sent her to this all-white private school on the North Side. Next thing we knew, she went to some white college out west.”
“And then,” the DuSable High woman continued, “she married Nelson Brown—this good-looking lawyer from a good family—when she came back. But then with all her good background and history, she divorces Nelson and then ups and marries some white man that nobody ever heard of.”
“Somebody named Cohen—”
The group shrugs while two of the women roll their eyes in disgust. Like many blacks of my parents’ generation, they have little understanding of interracial marriage and are particularly perturbed when they perceive that it’s the best-educated and most-respected blacks who are abandoning the black community the fastest.
“—and then her third husband,” one of the women adds, “was this other white man—some senior vice president from the National Bank of Chicago. So, after that, there was no way she was going to be interested in our clubs and things. She just totally went, if you’ll pardon the expression, Incognegro.”
“I heard she wasn’t even buried here,” one of the men remarks, with a sad expression. “Even though her family defined black Chicago, I heard they buried her with her new white family’s relations down south.”
“That’s Francis Parker for you,” adds one of the men who knew the Dickerson family from St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church. “You can’t send rich black kids to a school like that and expect them to come back and stay on the South Side with black folks.”
This group of men and women knew that Diane left the family church and converted to Judaism when she married her second husband and that she never joined a black sorority after attending all-white Mills College in California. Rather narrow-minded and judgmental, they looked at the
young woman’s personal decisions without putting them into the context of the upper-class, mostly white-oriented childhood that her parents had created for her. And although none of them knew her personally, they all assumed that Diane had disappeared into a white world that was unaware of her family’s role in both black and white Chicago.
Not surprisingly, this insular group had labeled Diane incorrectly. My conversation with Diane’s last husband, Charles Montgomery, revealed an independent woman who was looking for an identity outside the control of her powerful father’s circle.
“Diane’s father wanted her to attend one of the eastern colleges like Wellesley or Smith or Barnard because he had lots of business dealings on the East Coast and could have visited her often,” said Montgomery, while vacationing at his summer home in Maine, “and for this reason, Diane decided to go to college in California. She loved him but wanted her own identity.” Montgomery, a well-established member of Chicago’s white upper class, is a tremendous fan of Earl B. Dickerson and knows all the details of his contributions to the black citizens of Chicago. “Earl faced a lot of discrimination, but he changed Chicago.”
Our Kind of People Page 27
