Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  “Jackie died two years ago,” the other woman added with a pained expression. “And her son, Alvin junior—the one who married white—he was a doctor. Well, he was diagnosed with cancer many years ago. The family was just beside themselves when they found out—Jackie’s husband was a doctor too. Well, it seems that young Alvin was determined to find a cure. And he and his wife were in a plane on their way to Mexico in order to have some special operation or get medicine, something like that. Well, the plane went down and they were both killed. They had a child back here. Left her an orphan. It was awful. Absolutely awful.”

  When the subject turns to Prince George’s County, a popular new area that sits to the southeast of Washington, strong opinions are shared without reservation.

  “Nobody important lives there,” says the Silver Spring matron. “Believe me, I’ve heard about all these five-thousand- and six-thousand-square-feet houses—I even went out there with my daughter and her husband to look at one, but gawd—” the woman added, bursting into a laugh. “The whole damned place looks like Disneyland!”

  “She’s right,” says the bridge partner. “Every house looks the same—or it’s a mirror image of the one across the street. The trees are so small they look like toothpicks with garnish on top. The streets are wide like airplane landing strips. They call it suburban and spacious, but it’s got no character. I think it’s great that we are building our own respectable communities for the kids to be around other educated, well-to-do blacks, but go to Colonial Village—go to North Portal. Who ever heard of Fort Washington or Clinton, Maryland? Not long ago, the police out there were arresting black folks if we just looked at them wrong.”

  Many members of the Washington black elite are becoming more aware of the growing number of affluent blacks in nearby Prince George’s County in Maryland. It was a trend that became obvious in the early 1980s, when development after development of large, expensive houses was attracting black professionals. In 1970, the mostly suburban county was 85 percent white and less than 14 percent black. Within twenty years, the county had become 43 percent white and 50 percent black. Although the original influx of blacks led to resistance from many white residents, it is one of the few counties in the country that have high income levels among both blacks and whites. The large new houses with their large yards have become a magnet for families. But, some say, not for the families of the old guard.

  One of the reasons members of the old guard remain in the District is that their businesses and their livelihood and their important institutions are there. The Mitchell family, for example, has one of the city’s oldest black-owned businesses. Cynthia Mitchell remembers how proud she was when her son, B. Doyle Mitchell Jr., was a sixteen-year-old student at Georgetown Day School and began working part-time at the bank her husband ran. “It was wonderful to see another generation of our family being introduced to a business that had served so many people in this city,” says Mitchell, who attended Howard in the 1940s.

  Industrial Bank of Washington was founded in 1934 by Cynthia’s father-in-law, Jesse Mitchell, after he raised the original $250,000 by selling stock. Jesse’s son, Doyle senior, took over the company as chairman in 1955 and became a major figure in several Washington-area organizations. “Like many of our friends, my husband graduated from Dunbar High School and Howard University,” says Cynthia, who often joined him in his activities in the Boulé and the Bachelor-Benedicts club.

  As one of the more prominent black business leaders of his time in the city, Mitchell served on the boards of many organizations, including Georgetown University and the D.C. American Red Cross, before his death in 1993. Today, the bank has assets of more than $270 million and nine offices in Washington and Maryland. Although it was originally established to serve a predominately black customer base, Industrial has long since moved into a mainstream customer base. Third-generation bank president B. Doyle Mitchell Jr. now runs the black-owned commercial bank—one of the nation’s largest—from the main office on Georgia Avenue. “I went into this business because of its early mission to serve a population that was neglected,” says Doyle, who serves on the board of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. “My father and grandfather started a tradition that I want to continue.”

  Other older, prominent businesses that have held an important place in black Washington have been the newspaper Afro-American, the newspaper Washington Bee, Scurlock Photography Studio, the Dunbar Hotel, Lee’s Flowers, the Howard Inn, the Lincoln Theater, and Independence Federal Savings, which is headed by William Fitzgerald and ranks as the country’s second largest black bank.

  Among the list of black businesses supported by this crowd are two select funeral homes—McGuire’s and Stewart’s. “Those are the only two places that the old guard will consider when a family member dies,” says a college professor whose family has used McGuire for three generations. Another institution that the old guard has enjoyed is Lil Your Hairdresser, a salon that opened in the 1940s and was the popular spot for debutantes and socialites. Located on Ninth Street, it was just one stop within the debutante’s schedule, which also included dance lessons at Therrell Smith Dance Studio and cotillion lessons from Jacqueline Robinson or Alicia Lanauze Webb, two prominent women who belonged to the Girl Friends social club.

  Today, there are many larger Washington-based businesses, such as Robert Johnson’s $170 million Black Entertainment Television cable network. In fact, Johnson has turned his BET franchise—television, publishing, and restaurants—into an important name for both blacks and whites in the city. The class of 1972 Princeton graduate sits on the board of Hilton Hotels and supports many charities in the city. Other notable Washington businesses include Earl Graves’s $61 million Pepsi-Cola Bottlers of Washington; Digital Systems, a $90 million technology company; as well as numerous law, accounting, and consulting firms that are owned by blacks yet serve a clientele well beyond the city’s black community.

  Although many of my friends are now practicing lawyers and bankers in Washington, they tell me that despite their important professional positions, they still have a difficult time breaking into the elite. They say that beyond their position in the business world and the status of their neighborhoods there are even greater factors that determine one’s place in Washington society. They say that one’s affiliations are crucial. Included among those affiliations are one’s church, school, and social clubs.

  “Where someone goes to church or where they attended school,” explains my friend Alice Randall, a graduate of Georgetown Day School, “can say a lot about that person and what his or her family happens to value.”

  One of my banker friends in the District happens to agree with what Alice says, particularly when it comes to churches.

  “I remember meeting a girl at a Jack and Jill party when I was in the tenth grade, and my mother and I drove her home,” explains the banker, now in his forties. “She didn’t belong to Jack and Jill, but she seemed like a nice girl. So when I told Mom that I was going to ask her out, I lied and told Mom that the girl attended St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. I knew that if Mom thought she belonged to a good church, then I’d be allowed to ask her out.”

  Over the years, the churches that have been popular among the black elite have included St. Luke’s Episcopal Church at Fifteenth and P Streets, Asbury Methodist Church, Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, Metropolitan Baptist Church, and People’s Congregational Church on Sixteenth Street, where the minister, Reverend Stanley, is considered to enjoy a particularly special status because he is married to former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young’s daughter.

  Certain schools have also played an important role in bestowing the right families with good credentials. Initially, it was the M Street School—subsequently named the Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School—that remained the black elite school of choice for Washingtonians for several generations.

  “My son, Craig, went to Georgetown Day School in the 1960s, and, at that time, it was not uncommon to find a few black children there,
but in the generation before him, the most ambitious black children were primarily directed toward Dunbar,” says Alberta Campbell Colbert as she recalls her son’s private school experience before he went to the University of Michigan. “When my husband, Frank, was going to Dunbar High School in the 1930s, he had the kind of classmates that caused Dunbar to rival the private schools.” Colbert, a retired pharmacist who graduated from Howard’s School of Pharmacy, remembers that one of her husband’s Dunbar classmates was Edward Brooke, who later became the first black U.S. senator.

  “By the time our kids were starting high school, we had to find alternatives to Dunbar because it wasn’t what it used to be.” Like Colbert, many Washingtonians remember the prominence of Dunbar High School, which opened at First Street between N and O Streets in 1916 and remained the premiere high school for blacks until the late 1940s. The school, which was originally known as the M Street School when the city established an entirely separate school district for blacks in the 1870s, had black teachers who had been educated in the best colleges and graduate schools in the Northeast. Many of the faculty had doctorates, and among the Dunbar graduates were students who went on to Harvard, Amherst, Yale, and other top universities.

  “We had black teachers who pushed in the same ways that our parents did,” says a class-of-1944 Dunbar graduate. “White teachers don’t have the same high expectations.”

  During the late 1950s, the popular public high school for this group had become Roosevelt High School at Thirteenth Street NW, just a few blocks east of the Blagden Avenue gold coast neighborhood.

  Beginning in the late 1940s, the black elite began attending Georgetown Day School. Like Colbert, they recognized that Georgetown Day was more liberal and progressive about welcoming black children than were the other private schools. Georgetown Day is located off of upper Wisconsin Avenue in a neighborhood famous for its private schools, and its tuition is set at fifteen thousand dollars a year. Among its alumni are the children of former mayor Walter Washington, former U.N. secretary Donald McHenry, and Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander.

  Although it lacks Georgetown Day’s early history of integrating and having black members on its board, another relatively liberal private school is Sidwell Friends. Although many famous children had attended before her, Chelsea Clinton, daughter of President Bill Clinton, brought the school national attention. Clifford Alexander’s daughter, Elizabeth, also graduated from the school.

  “You actually see more diversity and a greater willingness for black and white kids to interact in private schools than at many public schools,” says Paul Thornell, a 1990 graduate of Sidwell Friends. A member of an old society family—his grandmother, Frances Vashon, helped charter the Links; his grandfather, Dr. Nolan Atkinson, graduated from Howard Medical School; his mother, Carolyn, graduated from Vassar and Harvard; and his father, Richard, has degrees from Fisk, Princeton, and Yale Law—Paul recalls how well he and his brothers interacted with other black and white students at Sidwell.

  “Many of the public school districts in the city were uniformly black, and those in counties like Fairfax were uniformly white.” Recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and now working on Capitol Hill, Paul feels that many of his black private school friends had a positive experience that allowed them to maintain a strong black self-image even though they made up a small minority at the elite day school. “In fact,” he recalls, “almost half of my black classmates decided to attend historically black colleges.”

  Today, there are also many affluent black children at the most “blue-blooded” of the D.C. private schools: the all-girls National Cathedral School and the all-boys St. Albans School. Located on Wisconsin Avenue near the Washington Cathedral, National Cathedral School is considered the most expensive private school in the District, with an annual tuition priced at over fifteen thousand dollars. Judge Henry Kennedy—whose sister, Angela, is an alumna—remembers escorting a National Cathedral student, Virginia Brown, to the Washington Girl Friends cotillion when they were in high school. “Virginia’s father was the archbishop of Liberia, and among her classmates was Luci Johnson, daughter of President Lyndon Johnson. That school has always attracted the daughters of influential families.”

  “My granddaughter, Tiffany, had a wonderful time at the National Cathedral School and it prepared her well for the University of Pennsylvania,” says grande dame ViCurtis Hinton as she considers how much things have changed in the city since her own kids were graduating in the 1960s. “But what her parents made sure of while she was at that school was to keep her active in programs with black children. She was teen president of her Jack and Jill chapter.”

  The equally elite all-boys St. Albans School is as Waspy as National Cathedral and includes such alumni as Vice President Al Gore, Washington Post publisher Donald Graham, and former Indiana governor Evan Bayh. But at the same time that blacks such as Marjorie Holloman Parker were joining the school’s board, black students were beginning to attend St. Albans, which now includes such black alumni as author and Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy from the class of 1974 and two young black congressmen, Jesse Jackson Jr., ’84, who represents Illinois, and Harold Ford Jr., ’88, who represents Tennessee. ViCurtis Hinton’s grandson, Phillip, was also a graduate of the school. “All of my grandchildren have been able to balance these worlds while maintaining their identity as black people,” says the proud matriarch.

  Of all the D.C.-area private schools, the only one that appears not to have won popularity among the black elite is Madeira, the all-girls boarding school in nearby McLean, Virginia. Already respected in conservative WASP circles, it received national attention in the early 1980s when its headmistress, Jean Harris, was imprisoned for murdering her lover, Scarsdale diet doctor Herman Tarnower. “We took our daughter for a visit there several years ago and the students were ice-cold to us,” says a Jack and Jill mother who settled on National Cathedral instead. “Madeira reminded me of being in the deep South. Lots of blonde, blue-eyed girls. Lots of tradition. And lots of talk about horses and getting married. They seemed to have a good academic program, but it didn’t seem like they were really ready for black people yet.”

  But even beyond the schools and the institutions that keep Washington’s old guard rooted to the city are the selective social groups that have linked elite black families for generations.

  “We are the third oldest Links chapter in the country,” explains Dr. Joan Payne McPhatter, president of the Washington, D.C., Links, as she recounts the distinguished history of the city’s leading group of black women. A Howard University professor of communications, McPhatter is particularly proud of the causes that her chapter of fifty-two women has served and contributed to over the last fifty years. Because there happen to be six different Links chapters in the Washington metropolitan area, some women in this town are obsessed with the notion that the original group—McPhatter’s chapter—holds the premier position in terms of history and prestige. The other chapters—while not as well known—have some impressive members in their ranks.

  Although McPhatter grew up in Nashville, her Washington ties make her equally dedicated to the Washington community. She has four generations of ties to the city’s Howard University: Her son graduated from the school; she graduated from Howard in the class of 1968; her mother, Dr. Gretchen Bradley Payne, was assistant dean of women at Howard from 1943 to 1947; and her grandfather, Roland Bradley, was also a Howard graduate. Among the members of the Washington Links are Alma Brown, the widow of Ron Brown; and Ann Dibble Jordan, wife of attorney Vernon Jordan.

  In addition to having Boulé, Girl Friends, Guardsmen, Northeasterners, Drifters, Jack and Jill, and more chapters of the Links than virtually any other metropolitan area, Washington also has some very small elite organizations that have been in existence for generations. One of those groups is the Bachelor-Benedicts club, which includes prominent men from different backgrounds. Formed in 1910, the group was made up of black professional
men who gave dinners and elaborate debutante cotillions. “The name of the group has an interesting history,” says Alberta Campbell Colbert, whose husband, Frank, joined in 1943. “Five young bachelors founded the social organization, but after a few years, one of them got married, and they labeled him a ‘benedict.’”

  Colbert and her husband were successful pharmacists who frequently attended the group’s dinners and cotillions with Alberta’s uncle, William Lee, an attorney who had joined in the 1930s. “At that time,” explains Colbert, “virtually everyone was a judge or a lawyer. They limited the group to one hundred members, and they usually had three formal affairs each year.” Although the club hosts summer outings and group trips, the most popular event was always the annual cotillion. “Each year, the group would present around twenty girls,” says Colbert. “My daughter, Doris, came out in 1962, and I still remember her marching in with her escort, Rodney Savoy. His father was also president of the group.” The cotillion, which was held in various large hotels in the city, remained popular until the late 1980s.

  A later cotillion that more than rivaled the Bachelor-Benedicts ball was the annual Girl Friends cotillion, which required white tie and tails and was held in major hotels, including the Sheraton Park and Washington Hilton throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It was an event that got covered not just by the black press but also by such publications as the Washington Post and the New York Times.

  In recent years, the new “in” party to attend has been the Tuxedo Ball, which takes place every year in Washington and selects young black men and women from around the country as guests. One cannot simply buy tickets to attend the formal event; one has to be formally invited by the twenty-member ball committee. “My kids went one or two years to the Tuxedo Ball,” says Bebe Drew Price, “and it really is a tremendous affair. My friend Rikki Hill has been very involved with it as well.”