Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Robin Sowell says the area is not as popular as it used to be. “When people started going to integrated resorts or east coast vacation areas like Martha’s Vineyard and Sag Harbor,” explains the Southfield resident, “Idlewild lost its popularity. Now, it’s mostly a retirement area. My husband does continue to go in August just to reunite with old friends.” Like Sowell’s husband, others attend a special Idlewild Week each August where special parties and groups assemble from Chicago, St. Louis, and other midwestern cities.

  Since Detroit did not offer the same variety of entertainment as cities such as Chicago and New York, private parties and social gatherings were more sought-after—and because of this, black society in the city was reported on with unusual frequency.

  “If Myrtle or Grace didn’t report on it, then it wasn’t worth attending,” explains a lifelong resident of Detroit, as she recalls the social events covered by Myrtle Gaskill and Grace Sadler, society columnists for the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s black weekly. “But God help you if you snubbed them or certain elements in the black community that they protected as their own. I’ll never forget what Grace did to us when we hosted a national conference of Deltas and used the Sheraton Cadillac hotel, a white-owned building, instead of the black-owned Gotham Hotel.” The woman pulled out a yellowed clipping from a bright-red photo album with Delta Sigma Theta emblazoned across the cover. The article had the date “January 1957” written on the bottom.

  It was one of Grace Sadler’s columns, and in between its high-society terms of endearment, Sadler had woven in a tough problack message that was rare in the society columns of other black city papers at that time. She chastised members of Detroit’s black elite sorority for not supporting the city’s only black-owned luxury hotel. It began with the words, “‘Will you love me in December as you did in May?’ but alas the response was in the negative as far as the Delta sorority convention was concerned. Nearly one thousand Deltas met in Detroit last week… but no one dreamed that a Negro-owned hotel of Gotham caliber could have been so completely snubbed by any local or national body of Negroes—in spite of integration!”

  With less of a political edge, throughout the 1950s Myrtle Gaskill was there, writing about the annual one-hundred-dollar-a-plate NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner at the Latin Quarter or other locations and attended by people like Judge Elvin Davenport, the J. J. McClendons, Dr. and Mrs. Alf E. Thomas, and Dr. Wendell and Iris Bell Cox.

  The biggest event of its kind anywhere in the country, the NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner is still a major event among the black elite each spring. “The event has grown so large with politicians and famous people,” said Robin Sowell, who has been a frequent guest at the formal affair in recent years, “they moved it to Cobo Hall. This is a must-attend evening for the governor, the mayor, and other state officials. It’s one of the Detroit events where blacks and whites come out in equal numbers.” Nancy Glover agrees, “I think we raise more money at our NAACP dinner than at any other NAACP in the country. We get more than two thousand people here.”

  Other popular gatherings include the annual Barristers Ball, a black-tie affair hosted each February by some of the top lawyers, judges, and members of the local Wolverine Bar Association. An even more select crowd from the black elite attend the Cotillion Club Debutante Ball each year, which is sponsored by the Detroit Cotillion Club, a group of prominent businessmen who sponsor two or three dozen debutantes. The extravagant affair features two runways for the debutantes and escorts, who are initiated and rehearsed during a ten-week preparation period. A feature of the televised event includes the selection of a Miss Cotillion Club. Those selected in the past include Dykema Gossett attorney Nicole Lamb-Hale, who attended Detroit’s Gesu School, the University of Michigan, and Harvard Law School. A Jack and Jill alum and member of the Deltas, Lamb-Hale was typical of the bright and socially prominent debutantes to be presented.

  “When we started the Cotillion Club in 1950,” explains Judge Damon Keith, whose daughter debuted while in high school, “we did it because there were no businesspeople sponsoring debutante balls where black girls could debut. We wanted our daughters to be taken seriously too.”

  “I don’t know if I really like these cotillions, even if they raise money for charity,” remarks a father of two adult daughters during a dinner I am attending in northwest Detroit. “I grew up here and I think it’s a throwback to those high-yellow blacks that were all a part of that Marion and Alf Thomas crowd.”

  A woman looks over at him skeptically. She is there with two Delta sorors who also grew up in the city. “Oh, you’re still smarting because you didn’t get invited to the wedding.”

  I look at the woman as she drinks from her wineglass. “What wedding?”

  The woman looks at her two girlfriends and says, “He knows what wedding. I mean the wedding.”

  It seems that there has been virtually no black Detroit party that created more excitement (for those invited) and more dissension (for those not invited) than the 1958 wedding reception for Patsy Stubbs and Harold Fleming, which had nearly one thousand guests. Thomas’s mother, Marion Turner Stubbs Thomas, and her stepfather, Dr. Alf Thomas, were stylish, high-profile, and well respected among the Detroit elite. Marion, who had made her name twenty years earlier by founding the elite children’s group Jack and Jill, was the daughter of a Philadelphia physician and had been left a widow in the 1940s when her first husband, Dr. Douglas Stubbs, died suddenly.

  Patsy, a Vassar graduate and a member of the Deltas, was toasted at a wedding reception that took place just outside Detroit on a nearby island in Canada. “Patsy’s stepfather and his brother, Sam, both owned an island and I think they even named it after Marion,” recalls Mary-Agnes Davis, who attended the wedding.

  “That wedding got a whole lot of people upset,” said the woman as she sympathized with the father sitting at the head of the oval dining room table. “My husband knew both of those girls and he still didn’t get invited. Of course I was there, but we weren’t married yet. And I’ll tell you, for every one person who got an invitation—”

  “There were ten more who wanted one and didn’t get it,” interrupted her fellow Delta soror.

  “Sam and Alf’s father owned a group of convalescent homes and they were the only black millionaires in this town in the forties and fifties,” the offended dinner host added. “The whitest-looking black people you ever saw. As high-yellow as they come.”

  A medium-complexioned woman at the table glanced at the Cartier watch on her slender wrist. “Yeah, but that didn’t last. I can tell you that,” sniped the woman with near satisfaction.

  “What didn’t last?” I asked.

  “The money or the marriage,” two of them added, almost in unison.

  The man looked across at me. “The family lost their money by the early seventies, and Harold and Patsy split up too. Damn shame.” He paused and reached for a plate of corn bread.

  Just as certain parties and annual events played an important role in maintaining the status of certain black families, so did membership in certain churches. Plymouth Congregational, St. Matthews, Bethel Baptist, Hartford Avenue Baptist, Tabernacle, and Little Rock Baptist were favored by the city’s black elite.

  Plymouth, located on East Warren Avenue, was long considered the intellectuals’ church and it ranked at the top. It was not uncommon during the 1950s to see Plymouth’s Rev. Horace White in the local papers, for which he would occasionally write thoughtful letters and editorials on the dangers of segregation and bigotry in Detroit institutions. He took on many of the passive local white ministers, like Rev. Malcolm Sylvester of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, and chastised them for not being more aggressive in the effort to bring about racial harmony. Robin Hamilton Sowell and her husband, Myzell, an attorney, have been members of Plymouth since the 1950s. “We got married at Plymouth in 1951, when the church was located at Beaubien and Garfield,” says Mrs. Sowell, whose wedding was conducted by Reverend White. “Then we moved the
church to Warren when the medical center began eating up the residential neighborhoods around us.” In addition to the Sowells, Plymouth Congregational is known for such families as the Bells and the Hoods. Dr. Hailey Bell was a dentist whose family also owned radio stations WCHB and the former WJZZ. The Hoods have been ministers at the church for two generations. Nicholas Hood Sr. was head minister as well as a member of the city council before his son, Nicholas junior, held the same two positions. Nicholas junior’s wife, Denise Page Hood, a member of the Links, is a federal judge.

  St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church is another church that is popular among Detroit’s old guard. Established in 1851, it served free blacks and runaway slaves who had been brought north by the Underground Railroad during the 1850s and 1860s. Most respected because its former priest, Rev. James Theodore Holly, became the first black bishop in the Episcopal Church, St. Matthew’s attracted many prominent Detroiters. “Lots of our Co-Ette Club members belonged to St. Matthews,” says Mary-Agnes Miller Davis. “If they didn’t go to Plymouth, they were at St. Matthews.” The church moved from St. Antoine and Congress in 1881 to St. Antoine and Elizabeth—all east-side locations. Finally, after Interstate 75 was built in the late 1960s, destroying many of the black east-side establishments, the church merged with St. Joseph’s at Woodward and Holbrook in 1971. Many artifacts from the 1881 building have been placed on permanent exhibit at the Museum of African American History downtown.

  Hartford is well known for its Yale-educated minister Rev. Charles Adams, and the selling point for many in the Tabernacle membership was the presence of fellow congregant Damon Keith.

  Detroit’s new black elite is becoming a much more visible segment of the city now that it has a sophisticated and well-educated mayor who very much has ties to this world. As Mayor Dennis Archer’s profile has risen, he has brought many accomplished people with him. C. Beth DunCombe, a member of the Detroit Girl Friends and sister-in-law to Mayor Archer, is considered one of the most influential members of the new black elite. In addition to being a partner in the law firm of Dickinson Wright, where she negotiates major development deals and important bankruptcy cases, DunCombe is also president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation and chairwoman of the city’s casino advisory committee.

  Because of Archer’s skill in working with white government officials and business leaders—a talent that was not visible or valued in the Coleman Young administration—he has improved business opportunities for black entrepreneurs and professionals. In fact, Industry Week magazine recently listed Detroit as the number-one city for manufacturing businesses, and the city also received a $100 million grant as an empowerment zone that the federal government recognized as worthy of special investments.

  Mary-Agnes Miller Davis doesn’t know why, but as she sees more blacks move to suburban areas that were once closed to them, she notices that whites are coming back to pockets of the city. “I’ve watched Detroit come full circle,” the longtime resident says. “At first, whites held on to parts of the west side, and now I see them moving back to the Boston-Edison neighborhood. I hope black people don’t give up on this city. We have a great history here.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Black Elite in Atlanta

  There is no major metropolitan area that has a better-organized black upper class than the city of Atlanta. Exerting its power in the worlds of politics, business and academia, Atlanta’s black elite sets the gold standard for its counterparts in other cities.

  “We’ve had three black mayors with national reputations,” says my friend Janice White Sikes of the city’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, the nation’s best collection of black Atlanta history documents. “We are home to the best-known historically black colleges. And in addition to hosting the Olympics we have some black-owned companies that are the oldest of their kind in the country.”

  Although she has spent most of her career researching and writing about an older, more rural Georgia, it is obvious that what excites Sikes most as we sit in the dining room of the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton is talking about the new Atlanta and how the black community has played a role in making it one of the most popular destinations for elite blacks in search of a city where they are in control.

  “This city produced older civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, and Congressman John Lewis,” she adds while looking over some notes describing her uncle, a black class-of-1933 Harvard graduate, “but Atlanta has also elevated people like Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson, and Johnetta Cole to national standing in recent years.”

  Unlike other cities of its size and sophistication, Atlanta has seen a black elite forge strong enough ties between blacks, whites, and the business communities of both groups to elect three consecutive black mayors. What is also interesting is that Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and current mayor William Campbell are solidly representative of the black upper class—a characteristic that historically has not been welcome in black electoral candidates in cities like Washington, Chicago, or Detroit. In fact, when Marion Barry and Coleman Young of Washington and Detroit, respectively, were campaigning in mayoral races, they bragged about their ties to the urban working-class community. In Atlanta, good lineage, money, and top school credentials are appreciated by the black mainstream.

  In addition to excelling in political clout, black Atlantans outstrip other cities’ elite in the area of college ties. Atlanta’s black academic community is larger than any other city’s because of prestigious schools like Spelman, Morehouse, Morris Brown, and Clark Atlanta. When former Spelman College president Johnetta Cole received a $20 million gift from Bill and Camille Cosby (she is a Spelman alumnus) in 1993, other cities and their black colleges took notice of the strong black university consortium that was growing on the southwest side of Atlanta.

  And further reinforcing the role and place of the black elite in the city are its black-owned businesses. While it does not outnumber New York or Chicago in black entrepreneurs, the city does claim the nation’s largest black-owned insurance company (Atlanta Life), the largest black-owned real estate development firm (H. J. Russell), and some of the country’s top black-controlled investment firms, law firms, auto dealerships, and food service companies.

  With all of Atlanta’s high-profile black schools, political leaders, and businesses, as well as its overall economic and population growth, it is not a surprise that many young black professionals from the North and elsewhere are relocating to Atlanta. I recall when my brother was in his last year of dental school in Boston—a city where the black elite often attend school, but rarely settle—he announced his desire to move to Atlanta. To him and to my family, the city and its new black elite looked so happy and so successful the idea made good sense. We called friends that we’d grown up with in Jack and Jill and others from the Links and other groups who had relocated to the southern city.

  Unfortunately, though, it took almost no time to discover that relocation would have been a major mistake. It took no time to uncover a dirty little secret about Atlanta and its black elite.

  One childhood friend, who had relocated to Atlanta after practicing medicine in New York, told us, “You can make a million dollars a year and live in the nicest house in Buckhead, but you’ll never be accepted by the old black elite in this town.”

  “These people will stare you in the face after you’ve told them of your great accomplishments,” explained our friend, “and the only thing that will matter to them is who in your family went to Morehouse, and for how many generations your family has lived in Atlanta.”

  This was not the only opinion we heard of the old-guard blacks in the city, but we heard enough similar stories to convince us that my brother should reconsider his plans and remain in New York, where family lineage mattered less.

  With all the success that exists in the black community in Atlanta, there is a hard line drawn between the new and old members of the black elite. The two groups seem to work tog
ether to empower the larger black community during election time, but the old elite seem to be quick to exclude the newcomers from the social circles that define the city’s original black upper class. And they seem to do this with greater ease than old-guard blacks in any other city—including Washington, D.C.

  Before the population and economic boom began in the 1970s, Atlanta’s privileged blacks had a rather firm definition of who they were and where they stood in relation to whites and to other blacks. Ella Gaines Yates has mixed emotions about the way Atlanta has changed over the last twenty years. Part of her time is spent among old Atlanta and another part is spent interacting with the new city that is emerging. “There are parts of this city that remind you of a New Jersey suburb,” she says, noting the number of people who have relocated to Atlanta from New York and New Jersey. “Many of the new people are accomplished and extremely pleasant,” she explains while sitting in her home in the southwest Cascade Heights neighborhood, “but some of them have no knowledge of, or interest in, the history that preceded them in Atlanta.”

  Many members of the city’s old guard—people like Ella Yates and the men and women she knows—would probably acknowledge that part of Atlanta has become known for its ability to remake itself: to tear up its historical roots every few years and erect a shiny new facade that reflects little of what preceded it. Yes, as a result of the changes there have been many improvements, but much of the past has also gotten lost through these changes. It happened when the busy Interstates 75 and 85 were run through the black Auburn Avenue neighborhood, and it happened when black sections of the city were demolished in preparation for the 1996 Olympics.