Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Another family of physicians are the Browns. Dr. Calvin Brown and his wife Joy San Walker Brown met each other while she was a biology major at Spelman and he was a premed student at Morehouse in the 1950s. His grandfather had been a missionary as well as a physician. “I came to the city for college, but my husband grew up here. Other than the time that we moved to Nashville when my husband went to Meharry,” explains Mrs. Brown, “we have remained in Atlanta. We raised our daughters here and they stayed to attend Spelman College.”

  Today, both of the Browns’ daughters, Joisanne and Sannagai, are physicians in Atlanta, following their father, Calvin, a member of the Boulé, who is in general practice. Joy, a former teacher in the Atlanta Schools, says that it was not a surprise that her daughters pursued challenging careers in medicine. “They grew up surrounded by people like the Yanceys and other friends of ours, and they went to a college where young women were told they could excel in the sciences,” explains Mrs. Brown, who volunteers much of her time through organizations like the Girl Friends and the Links, which she had previously served as chapter president.

  Laying the foundation for people like the Yanceys were other black doctors such as Henry Butler and Thomas Slater, who founded the National Medical Association; Dr. Homer Nash, Dr. Hamilton Holmes, and Dr. James Porter, who began their practices before World War I; Earl McLendon, who opened an Atlanta medical clinic in the 1940s; as well as many others, including Dr. Albert Cooper, Dr. Waymond Reeves, and Dr. Antoine Graves.

  In addition to the city’s physicians, other contributors to Atlanta’s early history were its intellectuals, who were tied to various churches and institutions. They included people like Henry Proctor of First Congregational Church; George Towns of Atlanta University; Benjamin Davis of the Atlanta Independent; Peter Bryant of Wheat Street Baptist Church; Edwin Driskell, head of Union Mutual Publishing Company; John Hope, president of Atlanta University; and many individuals involved with the leadership of Friendship Baptist Church.

  As well known as these names and institutions are among the black community, they have almost no place in the collective memory of Atlanta whites. In fact, because Atlanta was a city that did very little to preserve historic buildings and settings, it is easy to live here as a member of the black or white community and have little sense of the other. Although the city came out of segregation with greater ease than cities like Memphis or Montgomery, the black and white communities place very different value on the various elements of Atlanta history that have actually survived destruction: There is “their” history and “our” history.

  For example, while well-to-do whites in the city revere the history of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind; Robert E. Lee; and the many other symbols that accompany the Confederate side of the Civil War, blacks pay tribute to the black civil rights movement that was advanced by hometown sons like Dr. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Many whites say that the different focus on history has little to do with race. But blacks say that race is the primary factor that separates the two groups’ histories and experiences.

  “White people don’t respect us here,” says a retired Spelman professor. “They know that we Atlanta blacks have a lot going for us—powerful elected leaders, strong colleges, and the hard-to-ignore legacy of Martin Luther King. They claim that celebrating the Confederacy has nothing to do with race. Let’s not forget that the Confederacy supported our enslavement, and that these same supporters later fought against integration.” The professor points to a more modern example of that bigotry. “One way in which the white Atlanta elites continue to show their disrespect is by supporting a state flag that reflects the Confederate logo.”

  While some wealthy white Atlantans dismiss their poorer white counterparts in the outlying “bubba counties” as rednecks or bigots, many of them claim to accept the local black elite and insist that they embrace the state flag and Robert E. Lee only because the Confederacy is a part of Georgia’s history.

  “I don’t buy it,” says Atlanta resident and author Janice White Sikes. “Let’s remember that the Georgia flag didn’t even have the Confederate symbols on it until they were added in the late 1950s. The flag was actually changed as a sign of defiance after the federal government forced integration on our schools and public accommodations.” Sikes is correct when she points out that many blacks are justifiably offended by a flag that was specifically redesigned to underscore the antiblack sentiments of white citizens.

  But how does the black upper class in this city of 3.5 million people deal with the slights that blacks don’t quite have the power to completely erase? Some say they work hard to preserve the surviving remnants of the old black middle and upper classes. The city’s black leaders have invested a great deal in maintaining Auburn Street, the locale for many of Atlanta’s first black businesses. These same individuals were the ones who called for the establishment of the Auburn Avenue Research Library, which opened in 1994 and serves as an important archive on black Atlantans who have excelled in scholarship, business, and civic life.

  Because even museums and libraries have their limitations in terms of being able to promote the history of the black elite in Atlanta, current members of the elite take it upon themselves to look back at their own families and share the personal histories of some of their relatives. In my conversations with people like Eloise Milton, I learn that these family stories are truly the best way to learn about the city’s earliest black elite.

  “Although my grandfather, David T. Howard, was eventually a very well-to-do man,” said Eloise Murphy Milton, describing one of the first successful black businessmen in Atlanta, “he was born a slave—not a free black like some of the other blacks who became successful in the North in the late 1800s.”

  As Milton explains, her grandfather had been born a slave to a white master who decided to give him a small inheritance upon his freedom. Very few blacks in nineteenth-century Atlanta received their freedom before the end of the Civil War. In fact, of the twelve thousand people who lived in the city in 1860, three thousand were enslaved blacks and only twenty-five were free blacks. So, when one looks at the speed with which Atlanta developed an educated and well-to-do class of blacks, one cannot credit early generations of free blacks such as one finds in the history of cities like Washington. Instead, the basis for Atlanta’s black elite is found among former slaves who gained modest benefits either from their white masters or, more often, through the education and physical support that they received from Atlanta’s early established black university community.

  During the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, Atlanta’s black society grew out of Spelman College, Morehouse College, Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, and Clark University.

  The first of these to open was Atlanta University, in 1869, and like the other colleges, this campus served as a place of employment as well as a place of learning for many of the city’s black families. “These schools turned this city into an oasis for black people,” says Spelman graduate Joy San Walker Brown. “Not only did many of us have the chance to attend these schools, but the campus programs gave blacks who didn’t attend the schools the opportunity to see musical performances, dramatic groups, and national leaders that were not accessible to them anywhere else. Remember that this was a segregated city that was not concerned with exposing black children and adults to intellectual and artistic forums.”

  Many of Atlanta’s original and current black elite are affiliated with the schools either through their alumni status, like Brown and her husband, who attended Morehouse, or by virtue of their employment at one of the schools.

  “Most of the families who have been here for a generation or more will have some kind of close tie to at least one of our colleges,” says Morehouse graduate Dr. Asa Yancey; he notes that Mayor Maynard Jackson’s mother and five aunts all went to Spelman.

  In addition to the support that the colleges gave them, another factor that contributed to ea
rly black success in the city is that there was an unusually large and concentrated black customer base to support black entrepreneurism. Unlike Chicago or New York, where blacks made up only a small percentage of the population, Atlanta was already more than 40 percent black by the 1890s. Because of this, black-owned businesses had no difficulty finding patrons to support them.

  Between the universities growing up on the southwestern edge of the city and the black owned-businesses growing up on Auburn Avenue, just north of downtown, the black community had relatively good odds for success.

  Of those business leaders who found their success outside the university community, several also used politics to bolster their position in the community. One person who succeeded at business and political brokering was Henry Rucker, who served in 1880 as a Georgia delegate to the Republican Convention in Chicago. He was also an appointee of President William McKinley in 1897, when he was named collector of internal revenue. In fact, by 1904, Rucker had become so successful in the barbershop business that he built a five-story office building, which became the city’s first building that would rent space to blacks.

  A family that looms even larger than the Ruckers and the Howards in the worlds of business and civic affairs is the Herndons: “The Herndon family is still thought of as the first family of Atlanta’s black elite,” says Atlanta resident Keith Chaplin, who graduated from Morehouse and now works at CNN. “Not only did Herndon become a rich man in the 1890s, but he also left an estate and a business that several generations of blacks have been able to visit and patronize since his death.”

  As you stand in the backyard of the Herndon mansion, you can scan the entire Atlanta city skyline. The massive 1910 Beaux Arts classical-style building is a testament to the wealth that Alonzo Herndon amassed by the turn of the century through a variety of businesses.

  “Although he eventually founded Atlanta Life Insurance Company in the early 1900s, his earlier successful business was an upscale barbershop that served an affluent white clientele at 66 Peachtree Street,” explains Dr. Carole Merritt, an Atlanta historian and the curator of the Herndon home.

  Like many of the black-owned upscale barbershops in the country, Herndon’s shop catered to affluent white customers who wanted haircuts, shaves, manicures, and skin treatments. They referred to the shop as the “Crystal Palace,” and it featured black barbers dressed in white suits who worked in an ornate room lit by crystal chandeliers. Each day, white businessmen arrived for appointments and waited on leather sofas in the center of a marble floor. “That was the largest and most formal barbershop I’d ever seen. It had at least twenty-five leather barber chairs in it,” recalls Chicago Boulé member Truman Gibson, who remembers visiting the shop as a child while his father, Truman senior, was an executive at Atlanta Life.

  “Mr. Herndon’s wealth supported many institutions in this city, including First Congregational Church, which he attended,” says Dr. Merritt. “And his son, Norris, gave generously to many groups like the NAACP, the Butler Street YMCA, and Morris Brown College, to which he gave $500,000 in 1948.”

  Although Herndon was to turn over his mansion, businesses, and riches to his son, Norris, the latter never married or had children.

  “But fortunately,” says Morehouse graduate Keith Chaplin as he looks up at the crystal chandelier hanging in the Herndon home’s music room, “the family established a foundation that preserved the mansion and its contents so that generations of black people could see what one of their own had accomplished.”

  Although Herndon and other members of Atlanta’s black elite had much greater interaction with middle- and upper-class whites than blacks in other southern towns that lacked the city’s sophistication, the quality of black life and race relations had a serious setback in the early 1900s when a series of Jim Crow laws were adopted by the Atlanta city council and other agencies in order to further separate blacks and whites. It restricted blacks in their business dealings and their housing options, as well as their educational and job opportunities, at a time when the first generation of successful blacks was just becoming established. For example, at a time when black-owned eating establishments were flourishing and attracting both black and white customers, the Atlanta city council passed, in 1910, an ordinance that required restaurants to become single-race establishments—either “white only” or “colored only.” In 1913, the city created legal boundaries for the segregation of black and white residential neighborhoods. And in 1920, the council limited the success of black-owned beauty salons and barbershops by making it illegal for them to serve white women or white children.

  Alonzo Herndon’s salon and his other business enterprises survived in spite of these new laws—eventually allowing him to build the mammoth Atlanta Life Insurance Company, which has remained one of the largest black-owned insurance companies in the nation. Upon his death in 1927, his son continued with the company, and today the downtown area is bordered by the insurance company’s large modern headquarters building. And leading down Auburn Avenue onto the main downtown thoroughfare of Peachtree Street are banners honoring the Herndon family for their role in the city’s history.

  Another prominent family that also established a successful enterprise on Auburn Avenue was the Scott family. They are best known as the founders and owners of the newspaper Atlanta Daily World, as well as landowners who purchased a great deal of Atlanta property during the depression. “I am the third generation of my family that has worked in publishing,” explains Portia Scott, editor of the family-owned paper. “My grandfather William A. Scott Sr. was a publisher and printer of church bulletins while he was living in Mississippi. During the time that he was working with Booker T. Washington in the Business League, he bought his own printing presses.”

  On August 5, 1928, twenty-eight years after her grandfather bought his first presses, Portia’s uncle William A. Scott II launched what was then called the Atlanta World. “My father, Cornelius Adolphus Scott, his five brothers, and three sisters had all come to Atlanta because this was where blacks could find good high schools and universities,” explains Portia, who grew up in the Atlanta chapter of Jack and Jill and remains an active member of the Atlanta Links. “Most of the brothers went to either Morehouse or Morris Brown, and all three of my dad’s sisters—Ruth, Vashti, and Esther—went to Spelman.”

  As Portia Scott points out for her own family, there were many who benefited from and made use of the same schools and universities—an advantage that black Atlantans had over many other segregated cities. They were a people who were not going to miss out on opportunities just because the city refused to provide them an equal opportunity in education.

  When the wife of John Hope, Morehouse’s president, joined the wives of David T. Howard and Alonzo Herndon to establish a kindergarten for black children in 1905, there began a tradition whereby the old-guard families worked together to fill the void that Atlanta’s segregated schools left in the black community. This tradition of turning to privately funded schools and programs was one that would continue to link the city’s black elite.

  For example, beginning in the 1930s, a core group of old elite families sent their children to a private laboratory elementary school they had helped to create at Atlanta University. “My parents and several other families like the Coopers and the Yateses decided they wanted to establish a school with top teachers and students,” explains Eleanor Milton Johnson, who attended the Atlanta University Laboratory School from first through twelfth grades before going to Spelman and Mount Holyoke colleges. “The elementary division was set up on the Morris Brown campus,” Johnson says, “and the high school was located on Spelman’s campus.” Although the school was clearly populated by many children from elite families, Johnson says the intent was for the school to have a cross section of children, “so the parents established a scholarship program to make it accessible for any gifted student who wanted to attend.” There have also been a number of private nurseries and kindergartens that grew out of the
churches that some of the old-guard families belonged to.

  The largest segment of old black Atlanta, however, has its roots at Booker T. Washington High School, the first public high school built for blacks in the state of Georgia. “Before Booker T. Washington was built in the 1920s,” says Ella Gaines Yates, a graduate who went on to Spelman, “blacks had to rely on the small private schools that were run at Spelman or Atlanta University, or they were sent to black boarding schools like Palmer Memorial in North Carolina. A small group of kids with wealthy parents were sent up to the white boarding schools in the Northeast.”

  Some Atlantans remember when state legislator Grace Towns Hamilton sent her daughter, Eleanor, to a Vermont boarding school in the 1940s. “She was the only black in the entire school,” says a man who knew Eleanor Hamilton as a child, when her parents were big names in the city. “Eleanor grew up with her own nanny because her mother was this busy politician, and her father was busy with the university,” says the childhood friend. “I guess they figured a boarding school would be better for her, since they were always out of town, but I just can’t imagine growing up in this city and missing the entire black school experience. Those of us who went to Booker T. had the chance to learn from black teachers and black administrators who had master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s from the best schools. That’s not something you’d get in the white prep schools back then—or today, for that matter.”

  Ella Gaines Yates often runs into her Booker T. classmates at the meetings that her graduating class holds on the first Sunday of each month. “There were around 425 students in my class, and each month, we have as many as fifty alumni from the class joining us at meetings.”

  That same loyalty is found at the colleges in the city as well.

  “When I first got to Atlanta in the early fifties, what I found was a real oasis,” says Joy San Brown, who came from Houston to attend Spelman College. “My family did not like the idea of my coming to Georgia for school because they saw it as such a bigoted state, but the Atlanta community that surrounded Spelman and the other colleges was more enriching than anything we could have expected. We had one of the most dynamic faculties, which not only informed the students but also informed the community and helped to transform the city into a metropolis that attracted talented students and adults.”