Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Many members of the Memphis black elite were around when the old Malco Theater used to require blacks to sit in the balcony or when some of the major department stores like Goldsmith’s didn’t allow blacks to try on certain kinds of apparel, and they now see a town that could have been much more important than it is today. The old Goldsmith’s that used to be downtown has moved a half hour outside of downtown on a section of suburban Poplar Avenue where the number of blacks is very small. Beale Street, the historic downtown avenue that had been popular among blacks who socialized among their own when black jazz musicians were developing their craft in the 1920s, has now become a mostly white tourist destination where Elvis Presley T-shirts are sold. The street, which was once the locale for the city’s first black bank and the first park to be named after a black man, now has a faux “New Orleans meets Disneyland” look to it.

  Unfortunately, when it comes to integrating certain all-white institutions, the community has also been slow to change—even for the wealthiest blacks. For example, many of the white society clubs in Memphis—the Chickasaw Country Club, Colonial Country Club, Memphis Country Club, and Memphis Hunt and Polo Club—had no black members as of 1996. The University Club had one black member, and that was Ronald Walter. For all of its small-town qualities, Memphis still has managed to draw a hard line between its black and white residents.

  Successful Memphis entrepreneur H. Arthur Gilliam represents a link to the next generation of elite Memphians. The son of a Universal Life executive, Art grew up in the black South Side of Memphis and belonged to Jack and Jill with the rest of the local elite. But unlike the prior generation, he was educated in northern white schools, attending the Westminster School in Connecticut and graduating from Yale (class of 1963), and from the University of Michigan with a graduate degree in actuarial science.

  “Memphis is changing, but more of us need to be in business if we want to have a voice during this transition,” says Gilliam, owner of radio station WLOK and the first black to own and operate a radio station in the city.

  Memphis attorney Rita Stotts agrees. “We cannot become complacent after our parents have done so much to get us where we are,” adds the Vanderbilt Law School graduate. “Successful blacks like us need to remember to give back and speak out so that we inspire the next generation. Just because I have enough money to move to a suburb east of Memphis doesn’t mean that bigotry no longer exists or that black kids no longer face major hurdles in this town.”

  Although Memphis is still considered to be an important hub in the American South, its black professional community has not kept pace with the elite black communities in other southern cities that started after it. As many of my older relatives in Memphis often comment, they are surprised that successful young blacks would want to return to or relocate in a community that has taken so long to embrace a segment of the population who have wanted to contribute.

  I love Memphis because it feels like a small town when I return there and walk the neighborhoods and streets that my parents and grandparents knew as children. But I also find myself resenting Memphis because its small-town nature prevented it from developing into the kind of community that Nashville, Charlotte, and Atlanta have become. It is a town that has the old organizations and infrastructure that make it possible for the old guard to feel rooted, but it still needs the kinds of businesses, neighborhoods, and black cultural and educational institutions that will provide a vibrant future. It is a place that is clearly only recently finding itself, and I am hoping that it does so completely before the blacks of my generation turn their backs on it.

  Without a trace of a southern accent, Gilliam recalls his father’s years as the first black on the board of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water utility. “My father loved this town, and I do too. But we have to stay connected and involved,” the media executive explains, “because if you are black in the South—even today—it can be a humbling experience. We cannot get intimidated or complacent. Our parents gave us these advantages and we have to pick up where they left off. We have to do things that are important and productive.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Black Elite in Detroit

  Whenever my wife and I return to visit her relatives in Detroit, I find myself driving through streets and neighborhoods that look nothing at all like the image that has so often been painted of this city. During one of my earliest visits with her—while we were still both students at Harvard Law School—her family took me around a city that featured a wide range of neighborhoods. Some were urban and depressed, but some looked suburban and upper-middle-class. One area at the end of the tour included a neighborhood of quiet, winding, tree-lined streets with well-preserved colonial and Tudor homes.

  “This is still Detroit?” I asked as we drove through three different neighborhoods in the northwest corner of the city. I gaped out of the window in disbelief.

  “Yes, it’s still Detroit,” my wife answered, mocking my tone of incredulity.

  “And black people live here?” I was starting to sound like some of the condescending white children I had grown up with: always stunned to learn that some black people weren’t destitute, perpetually caught off guard by the notion that you can’t believe what you see on the six o’clock news.

  “Of course black people live here,” she said. “Black people and white people live here.”

  Even though my family and I knew professional black families in most of the country’s largest cities, we had few connections to Detroit. Because of this, I not only had relied on the conventional wisdom about this town, but had also been completely convinced by the media’s mostly negative portrayals of the city as a place of burned-out buildings, vacant boulevards, abandoned factories, and depressing housing projects. To the dismay of my wife and her relatives, I had already embraced the notion that when people left the city for outlying suburbs like Southfield, Bloomfield, and the various Grosse Pointe communities after the 1967 riot, the things they left were General Motors, poor blacks, and decrepit homes.

  As we turned up a quiet street and passed the Detroit Golf Club and Palmer Park, we were suddenly enveloped by a neighborhood of large gracious homes with automatic sprinklers spraying over manicured lawns. The street was Pontchartrain Drive. Thick trees shielded parts of the road from the sun.

  “This is Palmer Woods,” my wife explained as my eyes fell on a towering oak tree shading a deep lawn. “These neighborhoods—Palmer Woods and Sherwood Forest—have had black people living in them since the 1960s.”

  Since that first tour of the city, I have gotten a better sense of the blacks and whites who lived in this town before the tumultuous 1960s. After talking to blacks and whites who have lived there since that time, I also have a better understanding of how class played a major role in the city’s past racial strife as well as in the healing process that has taken place under current mayor Dennis Archer—a well-respected representative of the city’s black elite.

  Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, when my wife was growing up in Detroit, there was a general belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the city under any circumstances. Even in her small private school, it was rare for blacks and whites to cross the color line for even the most superficial of social interactions. They shopped at different malls, joined different activities, took separate buses, and in certain years had separate school proms. The white children from the suburbs were afraid of their black classmates, and the black children from the city were suspicious of their white counterparts.

  When I was in college, I recall that whenever I met white classmates from the Detroit area, they always clarified their geographical identification. Unlike students who hailed from Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, New York, or Philadelphia, these Detroit-area students immediately made it clear to new acquaintances that they did not actually live inside the city limits: they lived in the suburbs. Even if those suburbs were working-class communities like Taylor, Southgate, or other poorer white areas that the old-guard blacks der
isively refer to as “hillbilly heaven,” these students were quick to point out that they didn’t call the city of Detroit their home.

  But even though whites seem to be quite forthcoming with their opinions on the city and the blacks who live there, black residents are not nearly so free with such commentary. In fact, I have not found a black community more reticent than the one in Detroit. More than those in any other city—including Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Washington—black professionals here are unwilling to freely voice their opinions on the issue of class among the black population.

  “The black upper-class community is very small in this city,” explained an attorney in his forties who grew up in Detroit and now works for a downtown firm. “We’re not like Atlanta or Chicago, where there are lots of old families or new transplants. Not many ambitious, wealthy blacks decide to relocate to this town. And even though the city is three-fourths black, only a handful of us are well-to-do, and nobody wants to offend anybody. Where would we go if we did? It’s too small a community for you to get lost in.”

  Even with the introductions I received from my wife’s family and personal friends like federal judge Damon Keith, I found dozens of Detroiters who eschewed any discussion of the city’s black elite. Many would speak with me only on background without being quoted. Others insisted that their names not be used, even though they invited me to dinner at their homes. And still others simply refused to talk to me at all after I reached them and explained my project. Remarkably, my letters and calls to a Detroit-based national officer of Jack and Jill—a group I admire and grew up in—would not respond even after I left messages telling her that I had interviewed Jack and Jill presidents going all the way back to the 1950s. All of this formed a stark contrast with the elite families I grew up with and knew in other parts of the country. In those settings, people not only were unapologetic about their views on class, but were also proud to acknowledge their roles in their communities.

  “Possibly because of the contempt that Coleman Young exhibited toward affluent blacks during his twenty-year term as mayor,” says a former reporter from the Michigan Chronicle, “people have become conditioned to keeping their mouths shut. Coleman didn’t like whites, suburbanites, or upper-class blacks. He was an angry fellow and he had no use for them. He put up with them while he was in the state senate, but not later.”

  In this city of one million people, where 75 percent of the population is black, Young’s twenty-year tenure as mayor had a long-term impact on people’s views regarding race and class. And although he died in 1997, his influence continues to be felt by many black residents who came of age in the early and mid-1970s, when Young was most outspoken. Menacing and resentful toward many in the black professional community in a way that exceeded the tone set by Washington’s Marion Barry, he sent a clear message to the post-1970s black elite that they should keep quiet and stay out of his way.

  Coleman’s tenure reflected a fiery zenith in the city’s racial history: he was the first elected official who refused to allow blacks to be walked on or ignored. “Coleman Young was quick to point out that the treatment of blacks under former mayors like Louis Mariani had been a disgrace,” says Michael Goodin, senior editor of the Michigan Chronicle. “Mayor Young often declared that neither the city nor the major companies operating in Detroit made any efforts to invest in or support black businesses or black entrepreneurs here. In 1973, the year before he took over, the city and its major companies had spent not much more than $30,000 with black businesses. But by 1993, when he stepped down, more than $200 million was being spent with black businesses each year. Mayor Young was not afraid of letting bigoted white citizens or businesspeople know what they owed black people. And he was also not afraid of telling certain black people what they should be doing.”

  Judge Damon Keith of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a Detroit native and agrees that Coleman Young served an important role during Detroit’s difficult times. “Many white residents left the city after the 1967 riot,” explains Keith, who practiced law in the city before being appointed to federal judicial positions by Presidents Johnson and Carter, “but Mayor Young solidified the black community and convinced many of them with businesses to stay in Detroit rather than leave for the suburbs.”

  Although many in the black elite community benefited from Coleman’s message, some were offended by his coarse style and by his rumored resentment of old-guard blacks. Many of these people ignored him or avoided him. In fact, there is a whole old-guard community that was in place long before the Coleman Young regime, and it members seem to have lived their lives and conducted their activities very far above his radar. That community includes people like Mary-Agnes Miller Davis.

  “Mary-Agnes created a lot of bright moments for us girls when we were growing up in Detroit,” says Fredrika (“Rikki”) Stubbs Hill as she recalls the years that she and her sister, Patsy, spent in Mary-Agnes Miller Davis’s Co-Ette Club, an exclusive social organization that included girls from all the well-to-do black families of Detroit. Rikki says that she can barely recall the circumstances around her being selected “Miss Co-Ette of 1954,” even though it was covered in all the papers. But what she does remember is the positive influence that Mary-Agnes had in getting young black girls to join this group—a black version of the Junior League—and volunteer their time for public service in the city’s black community.

  “The Junior League was all white back in the 1950s and 1960s,” says a mother whose daughter became a Co-Ette in the late 1960s. “But Mrs. Davis showed the community that young black women could have the same impact. She whipped them into shape and brought out our best.” Whether she is known as Mary-Agnes or Mrs. Ed Davis, few people are better known among Detroit’s old-guard black society than she and her husband. Since the day they moved onto West Chicago Boulevard in the historic Boston-Edison neighborhood, they have remained important figures in the tightly knit circle of the city’s west side black elite.

  Ed became famous in 1939 when he became the first black in the United States to own an automobile dealership. Mary-Agnes, a longtime member of the Girl Friends, has remained prominent in social circles since 1941, when she founded her well-respected social club for young women.

  Briefly interrupting our conversation at their stately brick home in order to admit a television producer and camera crew, she remarks modestly, “CNN is here to interview Ed because he was just selected for the Automobile Hall of Fame.” A few moments of conversation about Studebakers ensues.

  The Davises have been profiled and toasted at major affairs throughout the Motor City, so such situations are not out of the ordinary for Ed and Mary-Agnes. They are used to standing out and being in the center of things. Moving into a neighborhood that had included auto entrepreneur Henry Ford, inventor Thomas Edison, the Kresge retail family, and the auto-building Fisher brothers, they surprised a lot of white west-side residents in 1949.

  “When we moved here, we were the first blacks in the neighborhood association, and the second black family to move onto the street,” explains Mrs. Davis as her husband leads the camera crew to a downstairs playroom. “In fact, our street has the oldest residential neighborhood association in the country, and when we got here, the all-white membership met to vote on whether they should let us in.”

  Davis had no problem getting the house, even though the area had been a white upper-class stronghold in the center of a city that had a fast-growing black population. It wasn’t long before she was being feted in the pages of the Detroit Free Press and Michigan Chronicle for the contributions she was making, and the crowd of corporate benefactors that she was attracting through the Co-Ettes.

  Over the last fifty-seven years, more than twenty-five hundred young women have belonged to the selective club. Although the Co-Ette members—all in high school when they join—are responsible for raising money for charities like the United Negro College Fund, maintaining high grade point averages, and volunteering their after-school hours to
community groups, they are best known for the annual Co-Ette Charity Ball, a cotillion that brings together the city’s old guard.

  Flipping through the club’s fiftieth-anniversary album, one sees the expansion of Detroit’s black society from one generation to the next: “I remember all the old Co-Ette members, like the Stubbs girls—Patsy and Rikki,” says Davis as she looks at some old photos from the 1950s. “And there’s Gail Burton. Her father, Dr. DeWitt Burton—we called him D.T.—gave her a coming-out party that got her on the cover of Ebony magazine. She’s a doctor now. And there’s Leslie Brown and Karen Heidelberg. Both of them are doctors too. And there’s Trudy DunCombe, who was a Co-Ette in the sixties. She’s a judge now and married to our mayor. Trudy’s sister, Beth, is a partner at one of our biggest law firms. And Beth’s husband Joe was law partner with Damon Keith.”

  I listen, impressed that no detail regarding the women she has feted is missed by Mary-Agnes.

  “And there’s Camara Jones-Singleton from the seventies. She went to Wellesley and graduated from Stanford Medical School. She was a Henry Luce Scholar and is a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital now. And there’s Nancy Farmer from the sixties—she’s a judge….”

  But of course there are those who are not enamored of Davis’s group. “A bunch of Plymouth Congregational snobs,” remarks an elderly mother who says her daughter was shut out of the group thirty years ago because she was too dark and didn’t go to the right church.

  “I could understand that they didn’t want Baptists, or girls from any of those working-lass churches,” says the woman, “but people told me we didn’t get in because we weren’t in the right Episcopal church. I was just devastated. I mean, Episcopal is Episcopal. What was I going to do then, just jump up and switch churches? Weren’t money, breeding, and good looks enough for a fifteen-year-old?”