Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Mary-Agnes admits that Co-Ette meetings were often held at Plymouth Congregational—a church that she and many well-to-do blacks attended—but it was by no means a factor in the selection process. Indeed, many of the young women in the club over the last six decades have belonged to a wide range of churches in the city.

  Despite occasional snipes from onlookers who miss the point of black elite groups like the Co-Ettes, Mary-Agnes, along with her sister, Dora Miller Reid, continues to galvanize resources from the black and white community while continuing to teach girls the importance of public service.

  Another experience that contrasts dramatically with the antiwhite, anti-black-elite mood that was later sometimes advanced by Mayor Coleman Young was that of Marge Dunbar Yancey, who grew up in the city when blacks were still a small percentage of the overall population. Yancey remembers that her experiences were much more racially integrated than those of her children thirty years later. “Although there were parts of Detroit that were exclusively white in the 1930s and 1940s—like the northwest part of the city,” explains Yancey, who has fond memories of the years she spent as a Detroit adolescent, as a Wayne State University student, and as a teacher in the Detroit Public Schools, “I always had both blacks and whites in my east-side schools and neighborhoods. There were certainly a few restaurants along Woodward Avenue that would not seat blacks—and I remember when one of my white female friends in college asked me to join her for dinner and we got turned away at the door—but for the most part, there was interaction between the races.”

  Although her life is now in Atlanta with her husband, Asa Yancey, a prominent Atlanta surgeon, and includes her activities as a Spelman College trustee, Marge Dunbar grew up surrounded by Detroit’s black middle and upper classes. Her family attended the black society church, Plymouth Congregational. Her father, Henry Dunbar, graduated from the Detroit College of Law, and in addition to being an attorney, held such positions as director of the Detroit YMCA and manager of the Brewster Public Housing Development during its very early and successful years as a big-city public housing project.

  “From the time I was eight years old, when we moved to Grand Boulevard and Woodward Avenue near the Fisher Building,” says Yancey, “I remember having a completely integrated life experience—nothing like the way people describe the city today. Breitmeyer Elementary and Northern High School were both integrated with blacks and whites from different economic groups. Back then, you saw whites without going to the suburbs—after all, blacks never ventured into the suburbs then. Of course this was dramatically different from today’s Detroit and from the segregated Atlanta school experience my own children saw when they were growing up.”

  Nancy Tappes Glover, a member of the Detroit Girl Friends, represents a newer generation of Detroit residents who arrived at a time when blacks were allowed to live in the surrounding suburbs. She and her husband, Dr. Frank Glover, move comfortably between their home in suburban Dearborn, which lies on the east side of the mostly black Motor City, and the Girl Friends’ events held inside Detroit. “Like most social clubs here, we hold many of our activities in the city as well as the suburbs,” she explains. “Whether it’s a picnic in a member’s large suburban yard or a formal gathering at the Rooster Tail, downtown, overlooking the river, we try to take advantage of the best of this city.”

  For years, it was said that there were forty influential families who made up Detroit’s early black history. Arriving mostly from Virginia in the 1880s when there were fewer than three thousand blacks living here, these families earned a living as attorneys, physicians, business owners, and investors in real estate. The names best associated with this group were Hackley, Beard, Ferguson, DeBaptiste, Cook, Purvis, and Pelham.

  Best remembered of this group was the Pelham family, which today has its name on a school in the downtown area because of its ties to newspaper publishing, government, and education.

  “My husband, Alfred, graduated from Harvard Business School in 1922—the second black to attend—and then was later the director of budget and finance for Wayne County and for the city of Detroit under Mayor Cavanaugh,” recalls Doris Pelham. “His father was born in downtown Detroit in 1862 and got involved in local government at a time when there were very few blacks here.” Probably the best known of the Pelhams, Doris’s father-in-law, Benjamin, was appointed to the Wayne County clerk’s office in 1895 and became county accountant in 1906.

  A light-complexioned black man who practically controlled Wayne County—which included Detroit—and its finances by the time he retired in 1937, Ben Pelham was often referred to by black and white Detroiters as the czar of Wayne. Some of his power also derived from the Detroit Plain Dealer, the newspaper he published. Like many of the “top forty” black elite families, the Pelhams arrived in Detroit from Virginia in the 1850s. Today Pelham descendants still reside and work in the Detroit and Grosse Pointe area.

  “To understand the experiences of those first blacks in Detroit,” says Michigan Chronicle editor Michael Goodin, who grew up in the city’s Russell Woods neighborhood, “you have to look at the old distinctions between the city’s east side and west side. When I was born in the early fifties—and during the time that my parents and grandparents were here in the 1930s and 1940s—most of the homes and businesses owned by blacks were located on the east side. As blacks became more affluent and as restrictive covenants were challenged, we were able to move farther and farther west.”

  The borderline between east and west in Detroit is the major thoroughfare Woodward Avenue. “You didn’t find blacks living west of Woodward in the thirties and forties,” explains Joseph Brown, a Detroit attorney who grew up in the city. “Blacks lived, worked, and socialized in the neighborhoods around Hastings Avenue.”

  That neighborhood of thriving black-owned establishments was alternately referred to as Elmwood Park, Paradise Valley, or the Black Bottom. Before the 1950s, all blacks—whether working-class or upper-class—conducted their business and social activities in this east side area.

  “The Black Bottom-Paradise Valley neighborhood was an entrepreneurial oasis for blacks,” explains Michael Goodin. “Black doctors and lawyers, like John Roxborough—Joe Louis’s attorney—had offices there. Ed Davis’s car dealership, the Paradise Theater, Sonny Wilson’s Bar, Sidney Barthwell’s drugstores, insurance offices—all the black-owned businesses were there. It’s ironic, but segregation helped us to build our own businesses.”

  When large numbers of blacks were arriving in Detroit from the South in the 1920s, they established neighborhoods on the east side of the city close to downtown. They chose an east-side street, Hastings, as a main thoroughfare for their stores and businesses. Diggs Funeral Home, an upscale parlor, was just off Hastings. John R. Street was the area for many of the nightclubs and bars.

  Great Lakes Insurance Company, one of the city’s largest black-owned firms, had its own building on Woodward Avenue before it was folded into a large insurance parent.

  Owned by the Sengstacke family, the Michigan Chronicle newspaper has been an important link among members of the black community.

  Another institution was the Gotham Hotel, considered one of the most elegant black hotels in the country. “Harlemites like to say that the Hotel Theresa was elegant,” remarks Judge Damon Keith, “but it couldn’t light a match to the Gotham and its lobby with oil portraits of W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and other black historic figures.” Owned by John White, the Gotham hosted black fraternities and celebrities like Lena Horne and Joe Louis, since white hotels in the downtown area didn’t admit black people or their organizations until the late 1950s.

  An influential family that ran many of their businesses in the black east-side neighborhood were the Diggses. Charles Diggs Sr. headed Diggs Enterprises and owned a string of businesses including an insurance firm, a limousine company, the House of Diggs Funeral Home, and the Diggs House of Flowers on Mack Avenue. His son, Charles junior, graduated from Wayne State Univer
sity and the Detroit College of Law before being elected to the Michigan State Legislature. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954, he remained a congressman for more than two decades.

  Although people like the Pelhams and the Diggses became a part of the elite because of their activity in government and public service, most of Detroit’s black elite developed through the legal and medical professions, which served their own community exclusively, since many of the other high-paying employment opportunities were closed to blacks. The city’s largest industry—automobile manufacturing—did not offer well-educated blacks office or management positions because until the early 1940s, many of the white-run auto unions were resistant to giving blacks opportunities. It wasn’t until blacks were hired as strike-breakers that they got a serious foothold in the industry. Unlike Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta, Detroit in its early years—the period preceding the 1930s—lacked the sizable black population that could support the early growth of major black-owned banks and insurance companies. Another reason the medical and legal professions dominated the elite was that the city lacked an important black educational institution that could attract and establish an intellectual elite such as the ones flourishing in Atlanta, Washington, and Nashville.

  Among the prominent physicians were Dr. DeWitt Burton, who headed Mercy Hospital; Dr. Remus Robinson, who was one of the first blacks on the board of education; Dr. Alf E. Thomas Jr., who was a major NAACP fund-raiser and the husband of Jack and Jill founder Marion Stubbs Thomas; Dr. Darnell Mitchell, who was married to Helen Cox Mitchell, a prominent socialite and schoolteacher; and Dr. Marjorie Peebles Meyers, who was in private practice before joining Ford Motor Company. Although favored in the east-side black community, these “establishment” black doctors also had great access to powerful whites.

  Deborah Fitzgerald Copeland grew up in one of the establishment doctor families in the Boston-Edison neighborhood, a west-side neighborhood where many of the old-guard blacks began moving in the 1950s. “A lot of the kids I grew up with in Jack and Jill and the Co-Ettes in the fifties and sixties were living in integrated settings and attending integrated schools. Most of these black friends, however, were going to the same black churches,” explains Copeland, who grew up attending the establishment Plymouth Congregational Church.

  Although she now lives in the Palmer Woods neighborhood, a far northwest section of the city that would have been off-limits to even prominent blacks like her parents forty years ago, Copeland and her husband carry on the traditions of old-guard Detroiters: Her kids are in Jack and Jill, her husband is a member of the Boulé, and she is now in her mother’s Girl Friends chapter. “My mother was president of the chapter in 1959,” she says, “and I recently became president too because it’s important for the next generation to keep supporting groups that have aided our community.” In her role, she has helped raise money for Meharry Medical College, as well as many charities in the city.

  Like those prominent physicians, certain lawyers in earlier years were able to bridge the east-side black and west-side white communities, including Hobart Taylor, a prosecutor and White House staffer in the Johnson administration; George Crockett, who served as a judge after holding high labor law posts in the United Auto Workers union; Judge Elvin Davenport, who served on the court of common pleas; and John Roxborough, who represented the prizefighter Joe Louis.

  The older of these professional men were in the Detroit chapter of the Boulé, which was founded in 1917 by nine doctors and one engineer. During the 1950s, many of their wives and daughters established local chapters of the Links and the Girl Friends. The men who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s joined social groups like the Rogues, a local group, and the Guardsmen. Old-guard names like Dickson, Arrington, Mitchell, Milton, Scruggs, and Loomis appeared in these organizations. Surprisingly, there was one name that almost never appeared in these rosters. And although that name is almost synonymous with Detroit, the Gordy family, which founded Motown Records, was never embraced by the city’s black professionals.

  “When Berry opened Motown in 1959 on West Grand Boulevard,” explains a retired auto executive, “he lost any hope of moving into the upscale black crowd. Since his family already owned businesses—cleaners, bakery, drugstores—a lot of us already knew them. But Motown appealed to this lower-class element that made it impossible for us to ever really let him into our circle.”

  Although Motown eventually grew into America’s largest black-owned company, neither Gordy nor his recording stars ever became a part of Detroit’s black society. Michigan Chronicle editor Michael Goodin agrees on this assessment of how Detroit’s black society viewed the Motown celebrities. “Their national stature did not translate into status among the elite. They were perceived as a jitterbug crowd that wealthy blacks didn’t appreciate.”

  “Music people would never have fit into my parents’ crowd,” says a third-generation resident of Detroit who remembers her family’s circle of friends, who belonged to the Links, the Deltas, and the Omegas. “The Motown people were uneducated entertainers, so they were somewhat coarse. We certainly asked them—as celebrities—to sit on the dais at our events—you know, for publicity purposes—but that’s as far as things went. The best of them was Diana Ross because she wanted to improve herself, and just look how well she’s done.” The woman pauses for a moment and stares out her living room window at a mostly white tour group walking through her neighborhood. Her mind drifts back to Diana Ross, and she continues, “But then again, she was a bit coarse too, because you know she also grew up in the Brewster Housing Projects. My parents were professionals, so they certainly weren’t talking to people in the projects.”

  Because my visits to Detroit often bring me together with professional blacks who belong to the national groups that my wife and my family participate in, I find myself socializing almost exclusively in bucolic neighborhoods that don’t look anything like the descriptions that most people hear when this city is discussed.

  In fact, much of Detroit’s current reputation comes from the devastation suffered from the 1967 riots, and the way in which the city moved from being a prosperous city with black and white residents to a stagnant metropolis struggling to keep uneasy white residents and the auto industry within its boundaries. Fighting hard to hold onto a population of a million people, black professionals in Detroit say they are starting to see a renaissance that makes the loyal old and new members of the black elite grateful.

  “We finally have one of our own running this city,” explains a retired Detroit physician as he stands in the foyer of a spacious Tudor home in the exclusive northwest neighborhood of Palmer Woods. “I don’t blame the whites and corporations for leaving during the 1970s and 1980s. Before Dennis Archer got here, people saw this city as an antiwhite town that was being run by an angry, unsophisticated black mayor whose head was still in the 1960s.”

  Like many well-to-do blacks who have remained in Detroit or who live just outside in Southfield, Bloomfield Hills, or the other suburban areas, this physician says that former mayor Coleman Young gave blacks pride and direction during the 1960s and 1970s when he was a state legislator and mayor because he stood up to the racist whites who ran many parts of the city establishment, “but he overstayed his welcome. He was loud and difficult from the moment he got elected in 1973. I’m sure that he had to be tough in that job during the early years, but he went too far. He despised successful blacks just as much as he disliked the whites who had left for the suburbs. But plenty of us stayed because we believe in this place. My wife and I could have run to the Pointes, but this is home.”

  It is obvious why the black elite quietly call the city’s new savior, Mayor Dennis Archer, one of their own. Although he did not grow up in one of the privileged families, he has clearly moved into their circles. A former Michigan Supreme Court judge, he is a member of the Alphas and the Detroit chapter of the Boulé and is an articulate and capable liaison with the corporate and mostly white suburban communitie
s. His wife, Trudy DunCombe Archer, also an attorney, has long been a part of the elite and is a member of the Detroit Girl Friends and the Detroit Links.

  More typical of a local member of the elite who gained national stature was Wade McCree, who became U.S. solicitor general under President Jimmy Carter. A graduate of Fisk University and Harvard Law School’s class of 1944, McCree served as judge of the Michigan Circuit Court, judge of the U.S. District Court and then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the sixth circuit. His daughter, Kathleen McCree Lewis, is now a partner at Dykema Gossett, one of Detroit’s best-known law firms.

  Like Kathleen and her father, other current elite in the legal profession include recent mayoral candidate Sharon McPhail and federal judge Damon Keith, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals. I first met Keith, one of my mentors since graduating from high school, through his support of a special NAACP competition that brings together black high-school students and black professional role models from around the country to compete in the areas of essay writing, engineering, architecture, and chemistry.

  “What I’ve always liked about the black professional community in Detroit was that it was always small and intimate enough that others in our group took a personal interest in helping each other in their careers,” says Keith, who was mentored by such Detroiters as 1918 University of Michigan graduate Alfred Pelham. A former Wayne County official before joining the federal bench, Keith has been honored by virtually every major black or white Detroit organization in addition to receiving honorary degrees from schools like the University of Michigan, Morehouse, Georgetown, and Yale. “When I began practicing law here in 1949, all the black attorneys were in the same building at 1308 Broadway—and almost all of us were criminal lawyers. We belonged to the same groups and mentored each other because we’re all we had.”