Our Kind of People
Page 39
“But that family was cursed,” says a former neighbor of the Walker’s. “Not only did the mother, Harriett, die at a young age, but so did Lily Pat and Candy. And of course Maceo’s father was shot one day in his office at Universal when a former partner had a dispute with him.” The man paused slightly. “And don’t even ask about Antonio, the son—he’s the last Walker child living and he’s hit all kinds of hard times. But Maceo’s second wife is still living over on Parkway.”
Adding to the Walker family mystique are the rumors that besides Maceo and his sister Johnetta Kelso, Dr. Walker had another child, but out of wedlock, while he was still married to his wife. Today, there is still speculation over who that child was and whether the child’s birth had any connection with the murder of Dr. Walker years later.
“That story is just tearing this town apart—just tearing us apart.”
The others sitting around the table nodded in agreement as Erma Clanton pushed her shiny black hair from her left eye and gestured over to a large book that sat on my Aunt Earlene’s kitchen counter.
“Dr. Hunt was a fine man, and it’s just a shame that he should be villified by his own flesh and blood,” added another woman who sat in the family room that opened up into the breakfast room where a dozen of us had collected the night before my uncle’s wake at the T. H. Hayes Funeral Home.
Most of the fifteen or sixteen men and women who sat in the kitchen—including my parents—had grown up in Memphis. And they were fiercely protective of the highly esteemed black families who had played a role in the town’s history. The person they were talking about was Blair T. Hunt, leader of two of black Memphis’s most important black institutions: Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first black high school, and Mississippi Boulevard Church.
“Those stories are just tearing us apart,” repeated Clanton, a recently retired professor who had taught drama for twenty years at Memphis State University. Like many on the South Side of Memphis, she was disturbed by a book that had recently been published by the granddaughter of Blair Hunt, the prominent educator and minister.
“I don’t know how much we should believe anyway,” one of the men snapped. “Isn’t she married to one of these white rock stars anyway?”
My relatives shrugged as they listened to the well-substantiated rumor about how the beloved Hunt had allegedly placed his light-skinned wife in an insane asylum in the 1940s against her will. What was most shocking was that many of the old guard presumed that she had died in the 1950s, though when in fact she was still alive in the 1990s when her granddaughter wrote about her in the controversial book Repossessing Ernestine.
Much of what was said—and not said—in my aunt’s kitchen really captured the essence of how black Memphians protect their local heroes, even when the evidence is stacked against them.
Because Memphis lacked the important black educational institutions that Atlanta, Nashville, and Washington had and also lacked the larger middle-class black populations of New York and Chicago, the black elite in Memphis was always rather small and parochial. In fact, its reliance on the church rather than on business and intellectual institutions made it seem second string to the more cynical and more sophisticated black elite in other cities. In fact, in other cities, during the 1930s and 1940s, the best-known members of the elite circles were attorneys, college presidents, professors, and rising politicians. Not in Memphis. Of course there were some business owners, attorneys, and physicians. But the biggest names in town at that time were ministers and teachers.
“People had great respect for Dr. Hunt,” says native Memphian Dr. William H. Sweet. “As principal of Booker T. Washington High School and head minister of Mississippi Boulevard Church, Dr. Hunt was simultaneously running two of the most important black institutions in the city.” In many ways, Sweet explains, Hunt was the bridge between the old and the new elite because unless someone was sent away to a boarding school, virtually every black person growing up in Memphis between 1925 and the early 1950s attended Booker T. Washington. “The Hunt family even have an official section of the Elmwood Cemetery named for them,” says Frances Hayes, owner of the Hayes Funeral Home and a graduate of the famous high school.
My aunt, Earlene Graham, also a graduate of Booker T. Washington, recalls that Hunt was not a celebrity just in Memphis. “We all knew Dr. Hunt from high school, but we also saw him again when we became students at Tennessee State University,” she explains while recalling that Hunt was a friend of the college’s president. “He would come to campus in Nashville and give an incredible sermon entitled, ‘Good-Bye, God, I’m Going to College.’ He would talk about why we should not be dismissing religion as we advanced through school and our professions. Since his church attracted many of the successful families like the Walkers, this was an important issue for him.”
The power of the church—in both the black and the white communities of Memphis—cannot be underestimated. Today, there are nearly one thousand churches in a metropolitan area of under one million people. This can be compared with a city such as Detroit, which has only around six hundred churches for its one million citizens. Many of Memphis’s black elite, who are not considered as active in their church as the black working class, blame the city’s lack of commercial growth on the black and white churches that dominate the street corners, the storefronts, and the radio stations in the city. “If these Baptist churches had their way,” says a black attorney in his forties, “all our stores would be shut tight on Sundays, just like they used to be.” This attorney does not identify with prior generations of black society who found their lives and livelihood in the church community.
As a part of the Bible Belt, church life in Memphis has played a major role in the city’s history. Mississippi Boulevard Church’s Blair Hunt was just one of the many early elite black Memphians who recognized the ties between the church and career success. In fact, although his church did include the top executives at Universal Life and Tri-State Bank, it was actually Second Congregational that attracted the most prominent black residents.
“You could call a quorum of the Links and Jack and Jill at a Second Congregational service,” says Ronald Walter, a fourth-generation Memphian who grew up in Jack and Jill.
“At one time, that church was criticized for being solely for light-skinned blacks, but what it clearly had was the largest number of well-educated, affluent, and accomplished people.” Among its members have been Taylor and Frances Hayes, who owned the funeral home; the Price family, who ran LeMoyne-Owen College; Addison Branch, a LeMoyne professor; and many who belonged to the Memphis Boulé. “They even had an indoor swimming pool in that church,” says Dr. William Sweet, who learned to swim there as a child in the 1930s.
Tied with Second Congregational for historical prestige would be Emmanuel Episcopal Church, which was founded by the wealthy Church family. Alma Roulhac Booth grew up in the church and still belongs to it today.
Now that Memphis is a city with dozens of churches throughout the black neighborhoods, and with some well-to-do blacks attending white churches in the eastern, mostly white section, there are fewer distinctively black upper-class churches. The only others that have been placed in this top group are Metropolitan Baptist, Centenary United Methodist, and, for the few Catholics, St. Augustine’s. St. Augustine’s was unique because, while all the other churches had completely black clergy and black memberships, it was the only one of the group that had white clergy. “Our priest, Dr. Bertrand Koch, was white, as were the nuns at the church’s school,” recalls Dr. Sweet, who has attended St. Augustine’s for five decades.
“Today, you don’t find churches dividing themselves by skin color and by affluence with the same degree as they used to,” says Walter who found himself forgoing a church and renting the historic Orpheum Theater when he and his wife, Marianne, got married in 1987 at one of the largest weddings in the city’s history. Covered in the New York Times and the Washington Post, the wedding included over one thousand guests and
required three florists and 250 candles to transform the stage into an ornate altar. Among the eighteen groomsmen and eighteen bridesmaids in the wedding party were former congressman Harold Ford and Tri-State Bank executive Jesse Turner, both members of old-guard families.
Over the years, many prominent families have been members of the clergy. Among the group are the Fullers and the Whalums, who also had ties to the Union Protective Life Insurance Company. In addition to churches, the other locales that have drawn the elite crowds were certain neighborhoods and streets.
Historically, blacks have lived on the South Side of the city, and the upper-class blacks of the 1930s and 1940s sought out homes on such streets as Mississippi, Lauderdale, and McLemore. “When I was growing up in the thirties,” says my cousin, Anna Griffin Morton, a graduate of Booker T. Washington, Fisk, and Columbia University’s graduate school, “we lived next door to Dr. Walker and his kids, Maceo and Johnetta. He had already started Universal Life Insurance, and at that time, Mississippi was a very desirable street.” Now a New York resident, Morton recalls that her sister, Addie Griffin Owen, later joined the exclusive Memphis Dinner Club with Maceo’s wife, Harriett.
“Beginning in the late 1940s, the street to live on was South Parkway,” says Dr. William H. Sweet, “or at least any street that was just off South Parkway.” That street—particularly the end of South Parkway East, heading toward Heiskell Farms, is still desirable today because of its deep front lawns and large old trees.
“Whites lived on the eastern end of this street, as well as the other parts of Parkway that wrap around the other parts of the city,” explains Ron Walter as the electric gate opens up to the driveway running up past his redbrick home on the famous boulevard. Among the people who have lived on the street are the Walkers, the Hayes family, Mutual Federal Savings & Loan founder Chew Sawyer and his wife Helen, Dr. W. O. and Jewel Speight, and many others.
In more recent times, the street has included such residents as Judge and Mrs. Odell Horton, William and Addie Owen, Dr. James and Orphelia Byas, Dr. Fred Rivers, and Dr. Leland Atkins.
During the early 1970s, the entire street became available to blacks, and the western end became less desirable for single-family homes. Soon after that, blacks also moved east to the section known, ironically, as White Haven; and when the restrictive covenants were removed in Chickasaw Gardens, some integration took place there as well. During the 1980s, there was a large group of affluent blacks moving farther east to Hickory Hill, and then to suburban areas like Germantown and Cordova.
Perhaps the richest and most historic neighborhood in Memphis is known as Central Gardens. “I moved here because it feels like a suburb in the middle of the city,” says Memphis attorney Earl Douglas, as he drives his taupe-colored Jaguar down a street of million-dollar mansions and pulls into his three-car garage. “This neighborhood was begun in 1903. But what is so special about these houses is that they have a lot of land and a lot of character and you cannot find that in East Memphis or the suburbs.” A graduate of MIT and Columbia Law School, Douglas represents a wave of young professionals who have moved to Memphis in recent years. While Central Gardens remains more than 90 percent white, blacks have started to consider it, as well as neighborhoods close to the Mississippi River. Dr. Anita L. Jackson, an otolaryngologist with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, moved into Harbor Town, an island area that lies along the Mississippi River. The expensive development is one of the largest and newest sections of Memphis. “A lot of the young physicians who are working here need to be just a few minutes from the hospitals,” says Jackson, who is originally from Augusta, Georgia. She is surrounded by other physicians and professionals who like being near the downtown activities. “The revitalization of downtown Memphis and the waterfront has brought a lot of black and white professionals into a more integrated environment,” says Alex Coleman, anchorman at WREG-TV, who lives not far from the upscale neighborhood of actress Cybill Shepherd. Other young elites like Ella and Odell Horton Jr. and Amber Dancy Northcross and her husband Dr. Reginald Northcross have chosen the suburbs just east of Memphis.
In addition to favorite neighborhoods, the black elite in Memphis have always had their favorite institutions. As owners of the city’s oldest and most prestigious funeral home, the Hayes family had no problem attracting the old-guard families. But besides T. H. Hayes and Sons, other prestigious funeral parlors have been S. W. Qualls Funeral Home, which was owned by Sam Qualls; and R. S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home, which was run by Robert Lewis, who also owned the Memphis Red Sox baseball team and Lewis Stadium before selling the team to the Martin family. The Lewis Funeral Home handled the bodies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and bankers Chew and Helen Sawyer.
“One reason why the Lewis name has some extra star power,” says a retired attorney, “is that Robert Lewis Jr.’s wife, Ruth, was the daughter of Bishop Mason, who started the Church of God in Christ in the late 1800s.”
Today, a major force in the funeral business and other aspects of Memphis life is the Ford Family, which includes several siblings who hold political office in the city and in the state of Tennessee. In fact, when Harold Ford Sr. decided, in 1995, not to run again for his congressional seat, he was able to just about pass the job to his son, Harold junior, who had just graduated from law school. “People respect the Fords so much in this town,” says a retired dentist, “it didn’t matter that Harold junior had spent most of his life growing up in Washington, D.C. They have fought for us and served us well.”
For many years, black society relied on one particular photographer to cover their events. The sons of a popular music teacher, brothers Robert and Henry Hooks started the Hooks Brothers photography business and passed it on to their own sons. Though he did not enter the family business, Benjamin Hooks further distinguished the family when he became the first black member of the Federal Communications Commission and was named head of the NAACP. His wife, Frances Dancy, also comes from an old Memphis family.
The early years of Memphis did not feature the large number of black businesses that one saw in Atlanta or Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s. While there had been black businesses on Beale Street and certain other small businesses around the South Side—like Eggleston’s Tailors, Buffington Tailors, Service Drug Store, and Coyne Shoes—the only large businesses were funeral homes and insurance firms. My grandparents owned three different restaurants from the 1930s until the late 1960s, along with farms, as did many other families, but blacks were locked out of most other high-paying professions except for medicine and law until the early 1960s. Some of the small neighborhood stores like Prescott Pharmacy on Bellevue near Parkway were segregated: for whites only.
Equally segregated are the social activities of many elite black Memphians. There are many groups in addition to the small, exclusive Memphis Dinner Club, which included fewer than twenty women who got together each month, and included such names as Bland, Hayes, Owen, Rivers, Walker, Reed, Hooks, Speight, Young, Byas, Trigg, Daniels, and Beauchamp. Former club president Mrs. T. J. Beauchamp had also been president of the Negro Girl Scouts before the white council allowed black girls to join the Girl Scouts.
Several local clubs for the black elite predate the Dinner Club. They include the Iroquois Club, the Whist Club, and the Primrose Club. Among the members of Primrose were Mordecai Johnson, the first black president of Howard.
In the city, there are also chapters of national organizations such as the Links, which includes well-known family names like Price, Dancy, Prater, Hulbert, Latham, Horton, and Pinkston. The Girl Friends has members like Maria and Toya Pinkston, Frances Dancy Hooks, Erma Lee Laws, and Dr. Chrystine Shack. Laws, a former society columnist for the Memphis newspaper Tri-State Defender, says that Memphis society has always been a much smaller and more cohesive group than affluent black groups in larger cities. “I had many friends in cities like Chicago and Detroit who belonged to these groups,” says Laws, “but the groups lacked the small-town intimacy that you find in a
city our size.”
Given what Laws says, it is not a surprise that the Boulé has only approximately fifty members. “But they are the people you’d expect to find,” says Margaret Rivers, who used to throw parties and Boulé outings in the home she shared with her deceased husband, Dr. Frederick Rivers. Included in that group is Mayor Willie Herenton, the city’s first black mayor, who was also the city’s school superintendent. There are also chapters of the Smart Set and the Drifters. And so popular has the Links become in Memphis that two other chapters—River City and Shelby County—have been established. “But the real old guard is in the original Memphis chapter,” says a woman as she pulls up to the curb near Second Congregational Church and waves to a fellow Links member.
Many of these organizations hold annual black-tie dinner dances at places like the Peabody Hotel, the Memphis Yacht Club, or other upscale locations in the city.
There has been a Jack and Jill chapter there since 1946. My cousin, Dr. Angela Owen Terry, remembers growing up with Tommie Kay Hayes in Jack and Jill. “Even though I went off to Spelman and Tommie Kay left for Fisk, we still remained close friends because of our early years in Jack and Jill together.” Angela, who now lives in Connecticut, often calls Tommie Kay in California. They both remember that Alma Roulhac Booth’s son, Christopher, was teen vice president of their chapter.
Today, the black elite still use Jack and Jill for their children, but they have access to other organizations as well. Ronald Walter, who had been teen president of the chapter in the 1960s, now has his three children in the group. His wife, Marianne, belongs to the Memphis Links, but she also belongs to the blue-blooded Junior League organization. “I joined in the late 1980s and we have raised a lot of money for charity,” says Marianne Savare Walter, who grew up in Memphis and was the second black woman to join the group.