Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  “A lot of people credit Sengstacke for mobilizing the black migration to Chicago,” explains Jarrett, “so the family name was known among blacks of all economic backgrounds. Blacks in the South were reading his newspapers and learning about job opportunities in the northern cities. Even though they didn’t find everything they had hoped when they got here, they wanted to escape the sharecropping lifestyle and the harsher racial indignities that flourished in the South. And they credited the Sengstacke family for getting them here.”

  “The Sengstackes were dedicated people, but they weren’t society people,” says one of Jarrett’s Boulé brothers. “The prior generation of the family—the Abbotts—they were the Republican society types. But this next generation was more liberal and more concerned about using its money and power to advance blacks.”

  Another famous family on the South Side was the Barnetts. Etta Moten Barnett, a longtime grande dame who was well known in the city, was a jazz and concert vocalist and a collector of African art. She was also married to Claude Barnett, who founded the Associated Negro Press, served as an adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, and counseled many black and white political leaders on labor and agricultural issues. One of their daughters, Susan, married into the prominent Ish family, a well-respected Little Rock, Arkansas, family involved in medicine and insurance. Now widowed, Etta remains an important voice in Chicago old-guard life. “Some of the Links are giving Etta a ninety-sixth birthday party and inviting a lot of Chicago celebrities,” explained Fern Jarrett, a longtime Link, when I asked her to update me on the local parties among the South Side crowd. “Etta and Claude knew everybody in this city. They lived a truly global life because of her musical and theatrical work and his travels to Africa. They were rare in their ability to bridge the black and white communities here. For the most part, you didn’t see whites express an interest in blacks who lived on this side of town.”

  Other talked-about families include the Dibbles and the Cooks. And these are names that I had heard often at the all-black parties I was attending at Harvard, Wellesley, and Amherst. The Dibbles and the Cooks had offspring at all of these schools when I was in college and law school, and I recall many of my black friends adding names like Hillary Dibble, Mercer Cook, and Janice Cook to their party guest lists even when they didn’t know these classmates. What we did know was that these were famous last names from black Chicago, and this was sufficient to warrant an invitation.

  “Although we all think of them as Chicago people, Eugene and Ann Dibble actually grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama,” says a Chicago Link, “where their father was an important doctor in charge of the V.A. hospital, and their grandfather was the architect who built most of Tuskegee Institute.” Their uncle, Robert Taylor, who managed the Rosenwald and other real estate in the city, was memorialized when the Robert Taylor Homes development was erected on the city’s South Side. At the time, the sixteen-story homes were the largest housing project in the United States.

  “But Ann and Eugene both got married and raised their kids here,” the woman continues. “Ann got married to Mercer Cook and later to Vernon Jordan. Mercer’s family were Howard University professors, and everybody knows who Vernon Jordan is.” It is hard to find a member of the old guard who does not know Eugene Dibble, the financial adviser and real estate investor, or any of his children. There are still high-profile Dibbles and Cooks living in the city and throughout the country.

  As in other cities, the black elite in Chicago has had its favorite churches. When I talk to the established people today, two congregations are mentioned repeatedly. Not surprisingly, one is Congregational and the other is Episcopal. As an Episcopalian, I am well aware that America’s black elite has a preference for these two denominations—in spite of, or perhaps because of the black mainstream’s attachment to the Baptist and Methodist denominations.

  “Although Linda Johnson got married at Fourth Presbyterian Church on the Near North Side,” remarks Theresa Fambro Hooks, who covered many black society weddings for the Chicago Defender, “the two churches that were most closely identified with the city’s old black elite on the South Side were Good Shepherd Congregational at Fifty-seventh and Prairie, and St. Edmund’s Episcopal at Sixty-first and Michigan. The Dickersons and the Bousfields went to St. Edmund’s.”

  While it is not as important as it was during my parents’ generation, church affiliation in Chicago says a lot about an individual. It can confirm one’s place in South Side society, and it can also confirm one’s place outside of it. When people learn that my parents were married at the substantial but distinctly nonsociety Grant Memorial Church on Drexel Boulevard—a large stone Methodist church—they are not surprised to learn that they were new to the city and transplanted from the South. But occasionally, in the past, there have been old elite families that have shocked their old-guard neighbors with their church selections. Linda Johnson, the daughter of John Johnson, publisher of Ebony magazine and the richest black man in Chicago, disappointed many old-guard blacks who were hoping that she and her family would select their church for the ceremony.

  “To be honest, a lot of us were kind of surprised that Linda got married at a church that was as white as Fourth Presbyterian,” says a third-generation Chicagoan who belongs to Good Shepherd Congregational, “but then I have to remember that her parents had so much money living over there on Lake Shore Drive that of course they had a more integrated life. He probably didn’t feel attached to our churches. He was the wealthiest black man in America, but he wasn’t old Chicago.”

  Although some older people may not refer to her family as old-guard, it is only because her father was not born into a well-connected family. Despite the fact that he graduated from DuSable High with the children of many old-guard families and is a generous underwriter of many black and nonblack causes in the city, there is a segment of the black elite that considers him an outsider. The wedding at Fourth Presbyterian Church confirmed that for them.

  “John is a brilliant, self-made man who has done more for blacks in this country than virtually any other person of his generation,” says a member of Johnson’s Boulé chapter, “and some of these old-guard types just can’t stand seeing his success. If he wants to live on Lake Shore Drive and give a wedding on the North Side, he should be allowed to do it, but some of these people are unforgiving about that Fourth Presbyterian thing.”

  “My wife and I were married by the minister from Good Shepherd because my father belonged there,” says Truman Gibson Jr., a member of one of those old-guard families that you’d expect to find at a South Side Congregational or Episcopal church. “Today, my wife and I go to Trinity Episcopal, where I’ve been a vestryman for many years.”

  Maudelle Bousfield Evans has fond memories of St. Edmund’s. “Not only were my parents very active there but most of my friends like Katherine Dickerson and the Thatchers went there. I wouldn’t have had my children go anywhere else.”

  Another St. Edmund’s family is Fern and Vernon Jarrett, who sent their sons to the church’s grammar school. “They’ve put the most beautiful stained glass in that building, and many of us bought windows to honor certain historic black people,” says Fern Jarrett, who remembers going to the church before it moved to its present location.

  Another church that the elite favors is St. Paul the Redeemer, which the Taylors and Dibbles have attended for several years.

  The black elite in Chicago made some major changes during the early 1970s after the close of the civil rights movement. Even though many of the older families maintained their ties to their churches on the South Side, many of the elite and their adult children started to move to places they’d never lived before.

  “Even though Lake Meadows had been very fashionable, what became even more popular for some people was living downtown,” says Ronne Rone Hartfield. “Many families moved into buildings near Wacker Drive. And buildings like Harbor Point and Lake Point Tower were also desirable because of their proximity to the water.”


  This is when Maudelle and Leonard Evans moved downtown to an even more glamorous address: the sixty-fourth floor of the John Hancock Tower. It’s also when Ebony magazine founders John and Eunice Johnson moved onto North Lake Shore Drive, into what is still considered the best address in the city. As the richest black man in America, he has been able to afford to set high standards in this crowd. A member of the Chicago Boulé, Johnson moves effortlessly between the black and white elites.

  “I am optimistic for the future, but the Chicago metropolitan area is still a very segregated place,” says attorney Jetta Norris Jones, who served as director of external affairs in Mayor Harold Washington’s administration. “You still do not see large numbers of blacks in the north side of the city along the lake or in the northern suburbs like Winnetka, Kenilworth, Wilmette, or Lake Forest. Although brokers and residents will certainly sell their homes to blacks, the larger middle-class and professional-class black population has either stayed in Hyde Park-Kenwood or moved to the South Side suburbs like Flossmoor, Homewood, Country Club Hills, and Olympia Fields.”

  “And if they move to the north suburban area,” says Jetta’s husband, Dr. James Jones, an obstetrician-gynecologist on staff at the University of Chicago, “they will move to Evanston. That’s been known as one of the first liberal suburbs here.”

  “And of course, you’ll see a few Jack and Jill members in the northern suburbs,” adds Ronne Rone Hartfield, as she sits with her husband, Robert, a math professor at the University of Chicago, and points out a recent Chicago Tribune article profiling a Jack and Jill garden party where children are playing around a pool in the backyard of a large colonial home owned by Ronald and Jacqueline Irvine, a young black family in the exclusive north shore suburb of Lake Forest.

  Dedra Gourdine Davis, a Jack and Jill mother in the south suburban Chicago chapter, spends most of her time in the suburbs outside of the city. “We now have black families in every suburb around Chicago,” says Davis, who is a pharmacist and just saw her youngest daughter graduate from their suburban high school in Homewood. “My husband and I used to live in Pill Hill, but we moved to the suburbs in the seventies,” she explains, “and our children are a testament to the fact that you can raise black boys and girls with a positive black image in the Chicago suburbs despite what people on the South Side think. Our youngest daughter, Jaime, not only was in Jack and Jill here but was also an AKA debutante, as I was, and she’s now at Fisk. If she lacked a black identity, she wouldn’t have made such choices.”

  Jetta and her husband, who raised three kids in the Chicago Jack and Jill, nod in agreement. But what Jetta finds more interesting is how the politics of Chicago has also affected the wealth of black Chicagoans. “When Mayor Washington was in office, there were clearly black entrepreneurs and other professionals who were having their first chance at starting businesses because they had not had these chances with prior mayors.” Jones also says she’s optimistic. “We are seeing a new generation of blacks growing up in the city who still have a strong interest in its black political and economic development.”

  Many of the new black stars that people talk about in the city are, in fact, not so new at all. Many of them are the children of Chicago businesspeople or politicians who laid the groundwork before them. Among the group is forty-year-old Langdon Neal, an attorney who is chair of the board of elections. His father and grandfather were respected attorneys as well. “Langdon’s father, Earl, was so connected with the old Mayor Daley,” says a Neal family friend, “that he was able to help Langdon’s grandfather get named as a judge.” Langdon’s father, Earl Neal, distinguished himself in Chicago as a lawyer who not only represented the city at times but was also the head of the First Federal Savings Bank and the first black to head the University of Illinois board of trustees.

  Another family that produced a member of the new elite is the Davis family. Allison Davis Jr. is a lawyer and major real estate developer. A former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the city, he lives a life that straddles the elite black and white worlds. His father, Allison Davis Sr., who died in the early 1990s, was a tenured sociology professor at the University of Chicago and a vocal activist on the South Side. “When I first moved to Chicago, I thought Allison was white because of his complexion and his wife,” says a young attorney who lives in Hyde Park, “but then I was seeing him at all the black events and hearing about his work with Reverend Arthur Brazier. He’s everywhere.” Allison’s brother, Gordon, is a high-profile Wall Street attorney who served as New York City’s commissioner of parks in the 1980s.

  John Rogers is a third-generation member of the Chicago elite. Son of the recently deceased attorney Jewel Stradford Lafontant, he was a few years ahead of me at Princeton and now heads Ariel Capital, one of the nation’s most successful money management firms. His grandfather, C. Francis Stradford, graduated from Oberlin and argued many major civil rights cases in the city. His recently deceased mother, Jewel Stradford Lafontant, was a prominent attorney who sat on the boards of Mobil Oil, TWA, the Equitable, and Revlon. “Jewel was a powerhouse and she made us all proud. She was deputy solicitor general and then an ambassador under President Bush,” says Washington friend Savanna Clarke, who met Jewel during their volunteer work for the Urban League. “A lot of people know her because of her political and business activity, but she did a tremendous amount for blacks in Chicago and Africa. George Johnson, founder of Afro Sheen’s Johnson Products, was a good friend of hers, and when we all reunited at her funeral at Fourth Presbyterian Church, we saw how much she meant to Chicago.”

  George Johnson, founder of Afro Sheen and a developer of other products, is a name that Chicagoans like Dedra Gourdine Davis know very well. “Everybody in Chicago knows about the company that George built with his wife, Joan. Their son, Eric, recently bought Baldwin Ice Cream, an old Chicago black business.” Davis notes that Eric and his wife, Pamela Johnson, are in her Jack and Jill chapter.

  There is also Valerie Bowman Jarrett, an attorney who heads the Planning Commission under Mayor Richard M. Daley, son of former mayor Richard J. Daley. Valerie is a graduate of the University of Michigan law school, her father is University of Chicago pathologist Dr. James Bowman, and her father-in-law is the journalist and commentator Vernon Jarrett.

  And clearly, the most famous and respected member of the new elite is Linda Johnson Rice, CEO of Johnson Publications, a company that not only publishes Ebony and Jet but also produces a successful line of cosmetics. The daughter of founders John and Eunice Johnson, the Northwestern Business School graduate has run the $200 million company for several years.

  And of course there are many in the new elite who are not children of old-guard families. They are entrepreneurs, attorneys, politicians, and physicians like Raphael Lee, who is a plastic surgeon with a Ph.D. from MIT; Bill Curtis, the architect; Marty Nesbitt, an entrepreneur; Teresa Wiltz of the Chicago Tribune; Peter Bynoe, an attorney who sits on the board of overseers at Harvard; and Lester McKeever, an attorney and CPA whose son is a record executive in Los Angeles. Many of the new black professionals have no ties to the South Side. Some live along the “gold coast” in Lake Shore Drive apartments, while others live in the mayor’s neighborhood of Dearborn Park, or in town houses in the Printers Row section. Others have ventured south to suburbs like Olympia Fields or north to suburbs like Evanston and Glencoe.

  Because they live more integrated lives than the generation that preceded them, they support cultural institutions in both the white and the black community. So in addition to aiding the patrician Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, or the Chicago Zoological Park, they are also supporting the Black Ensemble Theatre, the DuSable Museum of African American History, and the Bud Billiken Day parade, an event that was created by the founder of the black newspaper Chicago Defender and has become the third-largest parade in the country. There is a particularly upscale black crowd that contributes to the activities of Abena Joan Brown’s ETA Creative Arts Foundatio
n, a South Side performing arts center that stages black cultural presentations. And since one of the Links’ best-known debutante cotillions in the country takes place each year in Chicago, the new elite are sure to be seen table-hopping at this black-tie affair every spring.

  “Some say the young professionals are a modern version of Earl Dickerson, Truman Gibson, and Midian Bousfield,” remarks a Boulé member in his seventies, “but these young people who are here from out of town are, for the most part, far removed from the life and history of Chicago’s South Side. They may be upper-class, but they don’t know anything about our old social clubs like the Snakes or Druids. They don’t know what we endured when we were ghettoized into a couple of dozen square blocks. They never had a policy with Supreme Life. They never set foot in St. Edmund’s. They came here after Harold Washington died, and they didn’t have the chance to see a black mayor face down a city filled with racial animus. I’m glad to see them here, but they need to know that we have a history here.”

  As Chicago businessman and author Dempsey Travis points out, “Chicago’s black history lives on. It didn’t stop with DuSable.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Black Elite in Washington, D.C.

  “What’s with the broom?”

  Trying to appear distracted, I tugged uncomfortably at the sleeve of my tuxedo and then looked up at the woman. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The broom under your chair?” she asked as she lifted a corner of the tablecloth and peered underneath the table where I was seated.

  The attractive woman’s floor-length pink silk chiffon dress instantly made me realize I owed her some kind of answer: She was obviously one of the eight bridesmaids. “Oh, that’s Lenny’s. I hadn’t even noticed it.”