Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  This group of men and women who sized up the popular daughter of Earl B. Dickerson now launch into a discussion of other prominent black South Siders who sent their kids to white North Side private schools—like the Latin School—or northern suburban schools like New Trier High, which drew from wealthy Wilmette, Winnetka, and Kenilworth—and then saw them marry outside the race and never return.

  “You know what we mean, don’t you?” one of the women asks.

  Actually, I knew quite well what she meant. In fact, I had recalled my mother telling me that while she was attending the all-black DuSable High in the late 1940s, she had dated one of the two or three black students who were attending the suburban New Trier. The boy used to pick her up in her black South Side neighborhood and ride north on his motorcycle through Chicago, past the all-white but somewhat liberal suburb of Evanston, into the rich white conservative towns of Wilmette and Winnetka. I remember her telling me that their dating ended as she came to realize that growing up as one of the only blacks in his town and school had made him angry, confused, and embarrassed by his racial identity. When he announced that he would prefer to date a white woman or a black woman who could pass for white, his problems put a quick end to the teenagers’ friendship.

  Several years later, when Truman Gibson Jr. sent his own daughter, Karen, from the South Side of Chicago to the North Side to school, he also picked the expensive, private, and uniformly white Francis Parker School. Like the Dickersons, he was also Chicago royalty. “Earl Dickerson’s daughter, Diane, had actually been the first black at the school a few years before, so we really weren’t blazing any trails,” says Gibson, an attorney who represented the boxer Joe Louis and who worked on many high-profile cases, including the 1940 Supreme Court case, Hansberry v. Lee, which helped outlaw race-based restrictive covenants.

  “Since the 1920s, we’d been told we had to live, work, and go to school on the South Side, but I was not going to have my family limited by that,” Gibson says as he explains that his daughter eventually went off to Sarah Lawrence College. “I just wanted a top school for my daughter.”

  And when the old South Siders proudly announce that Karen Gibson had been raised in Jack and Jill and now lives in Harlem, they add that she was one of the few blacks who “survived the North Side experience.”

  “Many of us who raise our kids in white neighborhoods and send them to white schools are wise enough to teach them to be proud of their black identity,” adds a black South Sider whose son attends the mostly white Latin School. “It’s a daily activity to teach our kids these messages. They get no reinforcement on this at school, so we teach it at home.”

  When I listen to the way some people speak of Jewel Lafontant and Diane Dickerson, children of an old black Chicago elite, the tone and words sound familiar. My brother and I grew up hearing similar comments from black strangers or distant relatives who feared that we were being raised in environments that were too white to ever allow us to later identify with the black community.

  “With that white neighborhood, and all those white schools and white friends,” my Aunt Earlene had said to me on the evening of my wedding as we stood in a Fifth Avenue mansion on New York’s Upper East Side, “we were sure that you would lose interest in black culture and, no doubt, end up marrying a white woman.” Even though Peter Duchin’s distinctly nonblack orchestra was busy playing George Gershwin at our reception, filled with many of my white friends, what mattered most to her—and to many of my relatives and black friends at that moment—was that I had “remained at home” by marrying a member of our race.

  The fact that I married a black woman from a similarly integrated background and remained active in the black community is a scenario that pleases, yet still surprises, black strangers and relatives who raised their own kids in all-black settings. It is an unfortunate fact that the racial loyalty of integrated blacks who come from the middle or upper classes is constantly called into question. And what is also unfortunate is that so many of us measure race loyalty by noting who “marries black” and who “marries white.” I once focused on that issue and I now realize that it was both wrong and bigoted to do so.

  “I knew my three children were going to be among a handful of blacks in the Latin School of Chicago,” says Eleanor Chatman, who raised her two daughters and son in the elite Pill Hill neighborhood, “and I knew that this was a school that was known for having wealthy white children—the kids of Marshall Field and Adlai Stevenson. But my husband and I knew there was a way to still help them maintain their black identity. Ironically, all three of my children became president of the school’s black student organization. They spent Saturdays volunteering for Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket, and my two oldest daughters even went to the march on Washington. So they obviously were able to maintain that balance of black identity within their white academic surroundings at the Latin School and Northfield Mount Hermon.”

  Just as some blacks may have, years ago, unfairly accused second-generation Chicagoans like Jewel Lafontant and Diane Dickerson of selling out, I know that many elite blacks speak about me, my wife, and many other integrated black offspring in these terms. It is just the reality for the children of black parents who attempt to move outside of the black mainstream. But not surprisingly, just as members of the old guard will criticize those blacks whose money and status have given them too much access to the white upper class, they also continue to thumb their noses at lives that are “too black” and “too old-world.”

  For instance, blacks who lived on the West Side of Chicago were considered “country” and unsophisticated by old-guard South Side blacks. And even though there were many poor blacks living on the South Side as well, South Siders insist there were no professional blacks and no cultural or business institutions worth noting west of State Street.

  “Nobody wanted to be caught living on the West Side—nobody. Some people even said it was hotter on the West Side,” remarks Theresa Fambro Hooks as she explains how old-guard blacks viewed different sections of Chicago from the 1940s through the 1970s. “These days, the South Side is basically anything south of Madison Avenue. But back then, most people said the line was a couple of dozen blocks below that—at around Twenty-fourth Street. The border on the east was Cottage Grove, and the border on the west was State or Wentworth,” explains Hooks, who covered black society for more than twenty-five years in her gossipy social column “Teesee’s Town” in the Chicago Defender. “Where you always found white people,” she explains, “was on the North Side and in the neighborhoods near the lake.”

  “When I was growing up, you didn’t end up in the black social columns if you lived outside of Hyde Park, Kenwood, the Highlands, or South Shore,” says a retired teacher who belongs to the Links, “and you didn’t even know there were such things as social columns if you lived on the West Side. That’s where the ‘country’ blacks were. They were our old-world equivalent.”

  People on the South Side were the ones who belonged to the right black social clubs like Jack and Jill, the Boulé, the Links, and the Girl Friends. “We have also always had an inordinate number of elite men’s social groups,” says South Side resident Vivian Patton Durham, a friend of my parents, “like the Royal Snakes, the Druids, the Assembly, the Original Forty Club, and the Capricorns, which always included professional men who lived on the South Side.” Married to Charles Durham, an attorney and former municipal judge, Vivian is a member of the Carousels, an elite black woman’s club that includes many South Side women.

  “It was the South Side men who controlled black society in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s,” explained Theresa Fambro Hooks, a longtime friend of the Durhams. “In fact, if you were a girl from a good family on the South Side, it was the men’s clubs who would sponsor your coming-out party. Most of the groups gave formal dinner dances, but it was the Royal Coterie of Snakes—a group of black doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—who gave a formal debutante cotillion every Christmas.” As Hooks and Durham point
out, the women’s groups—the Links, Drifters, Royalites, Girl Friends, and Carousels—took over the social scene after the men’s clubs moved in other directions. Most of the members today come out of the South Side.

  In addition to the right black social groups, the South Side community had the stores, restaurants, churches, and activities that black elites cared about in Chicago. Of course they didn’t have Marshall Field’s, Sears, or Mandel’s as the whites did on State Street, but they did have The Parkway Ballroom, the Regal Theater, the Tiki Room, the Savoy, and night clubs like the DeLisa. These were all destinations for black celebrities who performed in or visited the city. They also had smaller, black-owned establishments—law offices, insurance firms, medical and dental offices, beauty salons, record shops, and pharmacies. And Provident Hospital, the South Side’s black hospital at Fifty-first Street, was a popular employer for old-guard black physicians who eschewed ties to Cook County Hospital, where the poor blacks were more likely to be treated.

  Further differentiating the South Side from the West Side was the fact that South Side blacks with means had access to activities that were particularly favored by, and more associated with, wealthy whites. Tennis courts, indoor swimming, and riding stables were an example of this. During her high-school years, my mother was one of the young South Side blacks who kept a horse at a black-owned stable located near Fiftieth Street and Forrestville, where a handful of whites also boarded their horses. Although the groups of young people socialized at different parks and beaches—the blacks at Jackson Park and the whites on virtually every other beach north and south of Jackson—one could see both races riding through trails near the University of Chicago.

  With these opportunities on the South Side, it was rarely necessary to venture to the West Side. In fact, whenever my mother did head in that direction, during the 1940s, the experiences were not pleasant ones. For a short time, her parents sent her to the mostly white Englewood High School, which, at that time, made it clear to West Side and South Side blacks that they need not try to join Englewood’s school activities or more challenging classes because they would not be welcomed.

  Looking specifically at the South Side, black professionals had a few favorite neighborhoods. Although several of them later owned homes in the elite and mostly white Hyde Park–Kenwood section, “there was a core group of professionals living in the Julius Rosenwald building on Forty-sixth and Michigan in the 1940s and 1950s,” remarks Fern Jarrett, a Chicago resident who has belonged to many Chicago groups including Jack and Jill, the Links, and the Girl Friends. Jarrett’s husband, Vernon, remembers that the Rosenwald was almost self-contained, making it almost unnecessary for its black residents to have to leave the neighborhood. The Rosenwald was built for blacks and was named for one of the founders of Sears and Roebuck. “Julius Rosenwald was an important name in this city and he was a major philanthropist in black education,” explains Vernon Jarrett, who was one of the first black columnists for the Chicago Sun Times and Chicago Tribune. “The Rosenwald complex even had its own nursery school, activity center, and areas where the Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops could meet. That’s where the upwardly mobile families wanted to be in the 1940s and 1950s.”

  Several years later, another important address for this group was established when Building 601 opened in the Lake Meadows complex at Thirty-first Street and Martin Luther King Drive. “If you lived at 601, you were in the midst of the whole Boulé and Links crowd,” explains a former resident who now lives in Evanston. “You got all that, plus the park and the water across the street.”

  Even today’s young black professionals recall how the neighborhoods were divided during the 1960s and 1970s—the last period before affluent blacks finally moved downtown or out to the suburbs altogether. “One of the reasons this city had such a strong black professional class when I was growing up is that segregation pushed us into just a few areas and we all ended up supporting each other’s businesses—whether we were lawyers, doctors, or entrepreneurs,” says Eric Chatman, a Chicago banker who grew up in a well-to-do South Side neighborhood referred to as “Pill Hill” because of the concentration of physicians living there. Pill Hill, which was populated originally by Jewish physicians and then by black physicians who were affiliated with South Chicago Community Hospital, lies roughly between Eighty-ninth and Ninety-fifth Streets with Stoney Avenue and Jeffrey bordering, respectively, on the west and east. The son of an obstetrician and a travel consultant, Chatman remembers his childhood in the 1960s and 1970s when he and his sister traveled to the white North Side, where they attended the private Latin School of Chicago.

  “My sister and I went to the Latin School when there were very few blacks there,” explains Chatman, who attended from the second through the eighth grade, “but there were many black families who chose private schools—like our friends the Dibbles. Ironically, I ended up in school with them when I went away to boarding school at Northfield Mount Hermon.” Just as the Dibbles sent their kids to the school because they had attended, Eric attended because his father and uncle had gone before him.

  Eric’s experience in moving back and forth between the North and South Sides was one that did not happen with any regularity a generation before him.

  For many years, the center of Chicago’s South Side was Forty-seventh Street and South Parkway, a busy section that featured the Regal Theater, the Savoy, the South Center Department Store, and other establishments that were patronized exclusively by the black residents.

  Sometimes referred to as “Bronzeville” by the newspaper Chicago Defender and others who lived there, the black South Side of Chicago had very strict borders before World War II because of restrictive covenants that kept blacks from living in areas that the city designated for whites only. The South Side was completely self-contained, with homes, businesses, schools, stores, and places of entertainment so that white Chicago could remain certain that blacks had no reason to cross its borders, regardless of how wealthy some of its black residents might be.

  “When we were growing up on the South Side, we knew not to walk east of Cottage Grove,” says Dr. James Jones, a physician who belongs to the Chicago Guardsmen. “Police would stop you, ask for your I.D., and then quiz you about what you were doing there. They knew blacks didn’t live in those neighborhoods, and this was their way of intimidating us from even taking leisure walks in that direction.”

  “In fact,” my mother recalls, “the only reason blacks had for going east of Cottage Grove—and the only explanation that would be acceptable to the police, would be our trips to swim in the all-black, segregated parts of Lake Michigan. We were always careful not to venture too far north or south along the Lake—beyond Jackson Park—onto the white beaches because we had heard stories about Gene Williams, the black kid who had been stoned and drowned a few years earlier after white swimmers saw him in the all-white section of Lake Michigan.”

  As black families were finally able to move beyond the black belt into areas that had been kept uniformly white with the help of restrictive covenants, they moved to such neighborhoods as Chatham for its houses and tree-lined streets, and to South Shore, which had many more apartments. They also moved a little west of South Shore to the Highlands neighborhood. They also moved south to Pill Hill, where many doctors settled. The most popular area for black professionals, however, was the older elite neighborhoods surrounding the University of Chicago: Hyde Park and Kenwood.

  “Hyde Park-Kenwood has always been a sought-after area, and it finally opened up to us in the 1950s,” says Jetta Norris Jones, a Chicago attorney who lives in the neighborhood with her husband, James, an obstetrician. Jetta, who sits on the board of the one-hundred-year-old Art Institute of Chicago, is a past president of the local chapter of the Girl Friends. She adds, “Because the neighborhood surrounds the University of Chicago, its residents included many progressive members of the faculty. This group was more likely to allow integration than many of the residents in the less affluent neighbor
hoods.”

  Although my Uncle Telfer’s business as a bail bondsman was by no means a glamorous business—his office kept pace with the increasing arrests and prosecutions of black South Side “policy” (gambling) operators, as well as black residents who were fairly or unfairly arrested by an all-white and abusive police force—it did introduce him to many of the influential South Side attorneys and business owners. It also required him to have contacts among the white citizens who worked in the courts and police precincts. Because of those ties, certain members of my family were always privy to who was doing well, who was in trouble, and who in the community was being watched.

  Most of the old elite supported their own black South Side establishments exclusively. One of the best-known old black businesses that maintained such loyalty was the Binga State Bank, which was founded by Jesse Binga. Originally from Detroit, the successful real estate broker opened the bank in 1908 and served South Side black businesses and families for many years. The funeral home most often selected by the elite families was Metropolitan Funeral Home. It was owned by the Cole family.

  “I remember when my brother, Arthur, took the Cole daughter—Michele—to the high school prom. That family was such a big deal then,” says Chicago native Ronne Rone Hartfield, who recalls when most of the formal parties and proms were held in another famous South Side establishment: the Parkway Ballroom.

  Like the Coles, who owned the Metropolitan Funeral Home, and the families tied to Supreme Life, most of the elite became famous because of the connections to their high-profile businesses. One of those families was the Sengstackes, owners of several major black city newspapers. As a longtime TV commentator and newspaper columnist, Vernon Jarrett knew the publishing family quite well. “John Sengstacke just died, but he and his uncle, Robert Sengstacke Abbott, owned the Chicago Defender, the Michigan Chronicle in Detroit, and the Tri-State Defender in Memphis,” says Jarrett, who has been a columnist with the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and continues to host a show on WLSTV, the city’s ABC affiliate.