Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Among the families that are included in Randall’s 150 names would be such people as the Bruces, Bullocks, Cardozos, Francises, Grimkes, Hilyers, Hollands, Pinchbacks, Terrells, and Wormleys, and, of course, the Syphaxes.

  I grew up hearing and reading stories about the Syphax family. I eventually came to know them when I got older. Although she now lives in Baltimore, Carolyn Syphax-Young and her family have long been associated with Washington, D.C., as the descendants of Martha Washington’s white grandson. “I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, as did most of my family members, but you will find many Syphaxes living in the capital, or along the outskirts,” says Syphax-Young, when considering her ancestors, who date back to an important eighteenth-century family. She has been a member of the Links for the last fifteen years, and she and her husband, Harold Young, are friends with others who travel in elite circles—people like their neighbors: Boulé and Links members Dr. David and Amy Dalton. Like many of the younger descendants of old Washington families, Syphax-Young exudes a modest reverence for her family’s history and recognizes the importance of preserving the story. “My cousin, Evelyn Reid Syphax, in Arlington, is one of our family’s best historians. She keeps some of the best records on our ancestors,” says Syphax-Young, acknowledging that her family’s history is, indeed, substantial enough to require a family historian to get it right.

  As has been well documented, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington, owned slaves in the early part of the 1800s. One of his slaves, Charles, worked as a butler in the Custis home. The father of Charles was William Syphax, who was also a slave but who had recently purchased his own freedom. Because of Charles’s relatively high status as a Custis butler, he did not join his father’s acts of buying his way out of slavery. A fellow slave working with Charles at the Custis home was a mulatto child named Maria whom Custis had fathered with Arianna Carter, a black slave who also worked in the Custis house.

  Eventually, the two Custis slaves—Charles and Maria—married each other after Custis approved the union, arranged a wedding in his home with an Episcopal minister, and promised to release them from enslavement. Since he had only one legitimate white child—a daughter named Mary Custis, who later married Confederate officer Robert E. Lee—Custis gave his black daughter and her black husband a fifteen-acre plot of land that formed a part of his estate in Arlington, Virginia, as a wedding gift, and left his white child, Mary Custis Lee, the remainder of his estate when he died.

  Charles and Maria Syphax, upon their marriage and release from slavery, owned the fifteen-acre plot that adjoined what was later to become Arlington National Cemetery. The couple had ten children, and during the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, several of the children gained important jobs in politics. The oldest son, William II, worked in the Interior department and later became superintendent of the special black segregated school district. This was at a time when a large black community resided in the Georgetown section of the city. A congressional bill was passed in 1866 acknowledging that the Syphax land was given to the family because of its relationship to George Washington Parke Custis.

  In the 1940s, the federal government wanted to expand Arlington Cemetery and asked the Syphax family to exchange their land that abutted the cemetery for land in another part of the District. Also, in the exchange the Syphax family cemetery was moved to Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. In recent years, Syphax family members have attended Harvard, Howard, and many other schools, and have held such jobs as chief of surgery at Howard Medical School, foreign affairs officer in the State Department and legal posts in the U.S. government. As a child, my parents had told me about the Syphax family’s roots when they first introduced me to Washington, D.C.’s history. It is a family history that everyone in the D.C. black elite knows.

  “The Syphaxes aren’t the only ones around here who keep track of their family history. People here will tell you who they are related to in a heartbeat,” says a fourth-generation Howard graduate who grew up knowing the family names of old black Washington. “A lot of women will tell you their maiden names, and it’s pretty common for them to incorporate a maiden name in the child’s first or middle name—just so the historical ties can be made with little effort. It sounds pretentious, but knowing somebody’s background is taken very seriously.”

  In Washington, a few dozen names carry so much history that it’s rare to find a member of the old guard who can’t give you at least a few details on the family’s significance. For example, in addition to the Syphax history, most will know that the name Bruce relates to Senator Blanche K. Bruce and his wife Josephine Willson Bruce. Blanche was a black U.S. senator from Mississippi from 1875 to 1881 who also served as registrar of the treasury and recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C. They will also know that the Wormley family owned a hotel and other businesses. If someone claims ties to the Cook family, Washingtonians will know that during the mid-1800s that person’s ancestors established the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, graduated from Oberlin and the University of Michigan medical school, and ran Washington’s colored school system, and that by the end of the nineteenth century, one of the ancestors, John Cook, had assets of $200,000, making him the richest black man in the city.

  The merger of two prominent names—the Church family from Memphis and the Terrell family of Virginia—served to create an important dynasty in 1891. Mary Church, the daughter of millionaire Memphis businessman Robert Church; and Robert Terrell, an 1884 graduate of Harvard College and Howard Law School, became an important couple in black Washington society, as Robert served as an officer in the Capital Savings Bank, held government positions, and held a judgeship that he was given by President Theodore Roosevelt. The Terrells summered with other well-to-do black families at Highland Beach in Maryland and at times included affluent whites among their friends.

  What most of these first elite families had in common was not just their wealth and social status but also their lineage, which included ancestors who were free people of color or who were able to gain their freedom at least one or two generations before slavery ended. While some were concerned about the status of poor blacks, they often did not associate themselves with the larger black community, which numbered around eighty thousand by the end of the 1800s.

  As in many cities that had a black elite, one of the most devastating periods for these families was from the late 1890s through the first two decades of the 1900s, when new Jim Crow laws eroded their access to many jobs, public accommodations, and schools. Even though these people had money, education, and social status, the white community began to shut them out and limit their ability to move as freely as they had before.

  But even with the setbacks that occurred during and after Reconstruction, there was a core group of Washingtonians who carved out a community that was almost untouched by the demeaning Jim Crow limitations. In fact, during the early decades of the twentieth century, segregation caused this group of elite blacks to become more and more insular—eventually forcing the creation of a subcommunity within the larger black middle-class community.

  “There was a time in Washington when you really felt that everybody knew everybody,” says Charlotte Schuster Price as she recalls life in the 1940s and 1950s as a Howard graduate. “The Howard community that lived in and around LeDroit Park, or that was in certain professions, all knew each other. You heard a maiden name or even an unusual first name and you just knew the family tie.”

  A short conversation with Price, a former library archivist at Howard, and the mother of National Urban League executive director Hugh Price reveals the intricate web that often connects many of the most prominent black elite Washington families. Within the web, the individuals each have dazzling Washington credentials, and they each have ties to some of the same top schools, social clubs, and friends. Her family, in particular, weaves together four prominent Washington families of doctors: Charlotte Schuster grew up in a family of ten children where many became dentists and physicians. “Long before I
met my husband, Kline Price, he had grown up with his cousin, Frank Jones, in LeDroit Park. In 1927, he graduated from Dunbar High School,” says Charlotte as she recalls the prominent high school that claimed many within the black elite who continued on to Howard. “The two schools had some of the most accomplished blacks in the country.” Charlotte and Kline eventually met at Howard, where she pledged Delta and where he pledged Alpha before continuing on to Howard Medical School. Following his cousin, Frank, who eventually became head of the urology department at Howard, Kline entered medicine, also became a urologist, and served as clinical professor in the field at Howard.

  Teaching at the medical school during those years were such luminaries as Dr. W. Montague Cobb, an expert in anatomy, and Dr. Charles Richard Drew, who served as chief of surgery and worked on blood plasma. “Dr. Cobb and Dr. Drew were already important figures at the time,” says Price.

  Charlotte and Kline Price’s two sons, Hugh and Kline junior, grew up in Jack and Jill at the same time as Dr. Drew’s children, who lived on the Howard campus. After older brother Kline junior graduated from Tilton Academy, Howard, and Howard Medical School like his father, he ended up marrying one of the Drew daughters, Bebe. Younger brother Hugh went off to Amherst College—the same school as his father’s colleagues Dr. Cobb and Dr. Drew—and then graduated from Yale Law School. Hugh tied together another prominent Washington family with his own when he married Marilyn Lloyd, the daughter of Dr. Sterling Lloyd, a prominent thoracic surgeon, who was also the son of a physician. Marilyn’s mother, Ruth Smith Lloyd, earned a doctorate at Howard and became a well-known anatomy professor after her own sister, Hilda Smith, married Dr. Montague Cobb, the head of Howard’s anatomy department. Dr. Cobb had been the one who had originally encouraged Ruth to enter the field of anatomy.

  The way in which prominent doctors were linked together in the Price-Drew-Lloyd-Cobb families is not an unusual phenomenon in Washington’s black elite circles.

  Similar dynasties have been created in the areas of law, education, politics, and the clergy.

  “I’m just not used to knowing people who have no interesting family ties,” says a housewife who lives on upper Sixteenth Street. “In fact, I don’t know if I can really trust people who don’t come from some real background. How can you know what to expect from them? In the world I grew up in, everybody has some respectable person in the past that they can trace back to—somebody that gives you a clue of who they are. Sometimes it’s a grandfather or grandmother who did something notable in business or education—or even a grande dame in society. There has to be something.”

  Background has long been important to many members of the D.C. old guard. For many years, one of the grande dames of black Washington was Benetta Bullock Washington, who was the daughter of George Bullock, the minister of Third Baptist Church, and the wife of Walter Washington, the city’s first elected mayor. Although they lived in it even after Washington was named mayor in 1967, Walter and Benetta’s LeDroit Park home was originally bought by Benetta’s father during the heyday of that historic neighborhood. While her husband was not a native of the city, Benetta had ties to the District’s most important institutions as a graduate of Dunbar High and Howard and a principal of Cardozo High.

  Howard graduate Alberta Campbell Colbert agrees that there is a core group in Washington who have ties to the same institutions. In her world, those institutions seem to include Howard University, Dunbar High School, the Bachelor-Benedicts Club, and for her kids’ generation, Georgetown Day School. “My husband, Frank, was born in Washington and graduated from Dunbar High School in its heyday. His classmates included Senator Edward Brooke and lots of other respected people in government.” Colbert and her husband, Frank, were Washington pharmacists and began operating Colbert’s Pharmacy in the 1940s. Their son, Craig, went to Georgetown Day; and their daughter, Doris, was a debutante who was presented by the Bachelor-Benedicts, a men’s social club that included the city’s most established black professionals. The family operated in the midst of the city’s most important families. When Frank Colbert died in 1996, he had been a member of the exclusive Bachelor-Benedicts club for fifty years.

  In talking to black Washingtonians, one gets the distinct impression that there have been so many prominent names over the past few decades that people don’t even attempt to rank them in their minds. “Instead we just group them into the doctor crowd—people like the Leffalls, the Rayfords, the Spellmans, the Clarks, or the Freemans,” says an elderly man who has belonged to the Bachelor-Benedicts club for more than twenty-five years. “And there was always the lawyer-government-policy crowd—the Brantons, the Brimmers, the Duncans, the Webbers, the Lynks—and of course, Vernon Jordan.”

  The man paused for a moment. “But actually, Jordan isn’t one of us. He’s new.” The man laughed. “My wife would know it better because I never really paid much attention to lawyers—especially the new ones like Jordan or Brown.”

  I’ve learned well not to interrupt or ask for full names when members of the old guard talk about their neighbors and colleagues. To break the flow and reveal that I am unfamiliar with a name or position is counterproductive when I am in the company of members of this very insular group. Although I do know some of the individuals to whom this doctor refers, there are many that I don’t; and to acknowledge this would suggest to him that I am “new,” and should therefore not be privy to such conversation—and even worse, it would be insulting to suggest that I did not already recognize and appreciate the distinctions between old Washington names and new ones.

  The fact that he dismisses a power broker who is as important and relevant as Vernon Jordan—former head of the National Urban League; partner at the law firm of Akin, Gump; and close confidant to President Clinton—as being “new” reveals what it requires to be taken seriously by some members of the old guard in this city. Equally outrageous was his lack of enthusiasm over one of my mentors, Ron Brown, who was living in Washington and serving as the U.S. secretary of commerce when he died in 1996.

  “Upstarts,” the man explains. “Sure they’re in the Boulé and they know where to buy a house, but every four years—with every administration—they come and go. No roots, no history, no plans to stay. Why should I invest the time in knowing them all?”

  Because Washington is a city of politicians and government officials, there are many blacks who have received national prominence from blacks and whites outside of the District yet little acclaim from the black elite who have lived in the city for multiple generations. The most clannish residents will admit that Jordan and Brown were clearly accepted into the group, but will note that the old guard is usually less likely to be enamored with new government appointees who come in from Little Rock, Atlanta, or New York after being appointed by the newest president who is sworn into office. Instead, this group prefers to adopt the permanent professionals—the doctors, the lawyers, the economists, the intellectuals and, to some extent, the entrepreneurs who come to the city to live and stay.

  The lawyer crowd is probably the largest of all the society groups in Washington. “Because of the many government offices and the prominence of so many law schools like Howard, American, George Washington, and Georgetown,” says Judge Henry H. Kennedy of the superior court in the District, “black Washington has always had more lawyers and judges than other communities.” The graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School grew up in a Jack and Jill family where all three children received the same Ivy League college degree. His brother, Randall, graduated from St. Albans School and Yale Law School and was a Rhodes Scholar. He was later one of my professors at Harvard Law School. His sister, Angela, two years behind me in college, graduated from the elite, all-girls National Cathedral School. I remember shamelessly circling her name and photo in the Freshman Herald—the Princeton face book that listed each student’s name, address, birthdate, and high school—a few days after she arrived on campus.

  Although he is modest and unassuming, Judge Kenned
y grew up in a rarefied world where his childhood playmates included people like Dr.C. David and ViCurtis Hinton’s daughters, Audrey and Diane, who were both celebrated Girl Friends debutantes in the 1960s, as well as Frank Spellman, who became a successful physician; Ernest “Chico” Williams, who was the son of a Howard dean and who later became a professor at the University of Maryland; and of course, a large contingent of attorneys and judges.

  In addition to the Kennedy brothers, other Washingtonians who have played an important role in the successful lawyer crowd over the years are Karen Hastie Williams and her husband, Wesley Williams, a partner in Covington and Burling. Karen’s father, Judge William Henry Hastie, was a class of 1925 graduate of Amherst and a class of 1930 graduate of Harvard Law, and in 1937 he became the first black appointed to a federal bench—a job he held before being appointed governor of the Virgin Islands. Karen’s brother, Bill Hastie, a Boulé member, is also a successful attorney, practicing in San Francisco.

  The old guard among the government and policy leaders has included such people as Patricia Roberts Harris, who was a Howard dean before she served as President Johnson’s ambassador to Luxembourg, as President Carter’s secretary of HUD, and then as secretary of health, education, and welfare. “Now that woman had class,” says a woman as she took a break between sessions at a Delta Sigma Theta sorority gathering that I recently addressed. “Pat Harris was smart, stylish, and was going straight to the top. We just died when Marion Barry—with his coarse rhetoric and attacks—beat her in the mayoral race.” An attorney and government official who achieved many “firsts,” Harris died prematurely of cancer in 1985. A few years before Harris’s death, the controversial Barry had run a vicious political campaign that labeled Harris as a representative of Washington’s light-skinned elite. It was a simplistic and prejudicial label, but for the city’s large working-class black population it was a characterization that stuck long enough to sink her mayoral ambitions.