Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Another prominent Atlanta resident is Jesse Hill, who arrived in the late 1940s and ultimately became a permanent fixture when he was named president of Atlanta Life Insurance in the 1970s. “Everyone knows that Jesse Hill supports black Atlanta,” says Keith Chaplin, a Morehouse graduate who is one of the younger members of the social set. Having just run into Hill at a Links brunch and auction at the Ritz-Carlton, Chaplin points out that the businessman was the first African American to serve as president of the city’s chamber of commerce. “People like him and the Baranco family are great role models in both the business and the social world.”

  The Baranco family is best known in recent years because it is virtually impossible to buy an automobile in Atlanta without passing through a showroom that is controlled by the Baranco Automotive Group. Headed by Gregory and Juanita Baranco, the nineteen-year-old company owns dealerships in Atlanta and Tallahassee, Florida, that sell Lincoln, Mercury, Pontiac, and Acura cars and General Motors trucks. Juanita, an attorney, is an active member of the Atlanta Links. Gregory is a member of the Boulé and also serves as chairman of the board of Atlanta Life Insurance.

  Another popular family of today are the Russells, who run a major construction company that did a great deal of the building at the Atlanta airport and other important sites and has annual sales in excess of $150 million. Herman Russell, founder of the forty-six-year-old H. J. Russell Construction Company, and his wife, Otelia Hackney Russell, a former teacher, have three grown children, who are also in the business. Otelia is in the Girl Friends. Still considered members of new Atlanta, they have broken down some of the barriers to the oldest groups and families.

  The Scott family became well known to black Atlantans when William A. Scott II established the newspaper Atlanta World, now known as the Atlanta Daily World. His brother, C. A. Scott, was publisher until recently. Today, family members Alexis Scott Reeves, Ruth Scott Simmons, and Portia A. Scott still operate the popular publication. Eleanor Milton Johnson grew up with some of the Scotts and remembers C. A. Scott throughout her life in the city. “Mr. Scott was ‘Mr. Atlanta.’ He ran that paper for sixty-two years and he knew all of us in that town like we were family,” remembers Johnson.

  Many of the important names in Atlanta are individuals tied to Atlanta Life, Citizens Trust, Mutual Federal, and the colleges. Atlanta Life’s key people have been Jesse Hill and Don Royster, as well as Gregory Baranco. During recent years, important names at Citizens Trust have been William Gibbs, Owen Funderburg, Charles Reynolds, and Johnnie Clark. At Mutual Federal, important names are Al Whitfield, Hamilton Glover, and Boulé member Fletcher Coombs. Among the fast-moving entrepreneurs are Nathaniel Goldston, who operates a food service company; Felker Ward, who heads his ten-year-old investment firm; and Floyd Thacker, who founded a $30 million construction and engineering firm. Morehouse’s Hugh Gloster, Spelman’s Johnnetta Cole, and Clark-Atlanta’s Thomas Cole have been among the well-known names in the university community. Among the political and civic leaders have been Shirley Franklin, a key adviser to mayors Young and Jackson as well as to the Olympic organizers; Henry and Billye Aaron, who have contributed their names and resources to causes; politicians Michael Lomax and Marvin Arrington; Dr. Alonzo Crim; Links national president Patricia Russell-McCloud; Bishop John Adams; and Friendship Baptist’s William Guy. And there are many others, such as Donald Hollowell, Asa Hilliard, Tim Cobb, Thomas Sampson, Charles Johnson, Madeline Adams Cobb, Herman “Skip” Mason, and Xernona Clayton.

  Perhaps better than any other city, Atlanta has maintained a black upper class that is committed to holding on to the political and economic power of its own community while also participating actively in the decisions made for the surrounding 3.5 million black and white residents in metropolitan Atlanta. It has included some of the most famous political figures in the nation—most of whom came out of the professional class.

  Spelman graduate Joy San Walker Brown is proud that so many of the black institutions in Atlanta survive generation after generation, and she believes it is because of the city’s black residents and leaders, who support them. “Whether it’s sending our daughters to Spelman, or maintaining a bank account at Citizens Trust, or making a contribution to the Butler Street Y, or attending the Links’ annual auction,” she says, “we will support each other in this town.”

  “Many people compare us to the blacks in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles,” says a longtime Boulé member, “but our black elite is much more cohesive. Those cities haven’t been able to elect one black mayor after another. They can’t walk down a street like Sweet Auburn and know that old black businesses like Citizens Trust, Mutual Life, the Atlanta Daily World, and Atlanta Life are still thriving. They can’t point to people like Maynard Jackson, Julian Bond, Andrew Young, Mayor Campbell, and John Lewis and say, ‘Look at the people we produced locally and on the national scene.’ And there is no other city in the country that can claim elite individuals like this, or black universities of the level that exists in Atlanta.”

  Black professionals in this city are justifiably proud of and unapologetic about their community’s success. They realize the importance of acknowledging and celebrating the fact that they have had an elite for many generations during the city’s development. As Atlanta historian Dr. Carole Merritt says, “You cannot understand the history of black Atlanta or black America if you don’t include its upper class. Only then will the story be complete.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Other Cities for the Black Elite: Nashville, New Orleans, Tuskegee, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia

  Large metropolitan areas, like New York, Atlanta, Washington, and Chicago, are not the only cities that have seen the development of black elite communities since the 1800s. Although these four are clearly the largest and best known, there are smaller cities as well as smaller black communities within equally large cities that have interesting and unique stories to tell. Although their number of well-to-do black families may not reach the hundreds that exist in these other cities, these towns still have certain neighborhoods, churches, social clubs, businesses, institutions, and family names that are specifically old-guard. They can be found in cities such as Nashville, New Orleans, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and in towns as small as Columbia, South Carolina, and Tuskegee, Alabama.

  I have always found that when I visit friends or family members residing in moderately sized or small towns with old-guard families, there is an almost claustrophobic atmosphere immediately enveloping our every activity. Because the towns are smaller, the black elite appear to have a disproportionately large presence, and you see them everywhere: at the one church everyone belongs to, at the one Labor Day party everyone has been invited to, at the one cotillion everyone is supposed to support. Moving into a community like this and attempting to live outside its narrowly defined institutions can be extremely difficult.

  In places like Columbia, South Carolina, one can see the black elite’s story told in one neighborhood, or around just six or seven old businesses or families. For example, only a few families loom larger than the one that runs the Manigault-Hurley Funeral Home, which has seen four generations of the family run the same business since 1911. With degrees from Morehouse, Atlanta University, and Howard University, the Manigault-Hurley family are decidedly establishment, but as the founders of the Columbia Urban League, they continue the tradition of elite families with purpose.

  “All three members of my generation graduated from Howard, including my brother, Brian, who graduated from its Medical School before working under former secretary of health and human services Dr. Louis Sullivan,” says Michelle Manigault-Hurley, who is the fourth generation to join the Columbia-based funeral home. Like most old-guard families, her parents have ties to all the right groups. Her father, Anthony, a Morehouse graduate, is a thirty-second-degree Mason and, along with his wife, Alice Wyche Hurley, founded the Poinsettia Cotillion.

  “We raised our children in Columbia’s chapter of Jack an
d Jill,” says Alice Hurley, “but we also wanted our daughters to have the debutante experience, so we started the formal affair in 1980.” The cotillion, which is a white-tie formal ball held during the Christmas season, brings together many of the old-guard families in Columbia and nearby Orangeburg—many of whom belong to old-guard churches like St. Luke’s Episcopal, Bethel A. M. E., and First Calvary.

  “We’re not a big city like Washington, but we have families like the Nances, the Richburgs, the Coopers,” says a member of the Columbia Boulé with a hint of self-satisfaction. “Since we’re small, we have our own special social core, and there’s not many who try to upset us or compete with us.”

  Alice Hurley, who stays busy as a member of the Deltas, the Moles, the Links, and the National Smart Set, is also a graduate of Boston University and Atlanta University Graduate School of Social Work. In addition to being the coordinator of social workers in the local school district and a licensed funeral director like the other members of her family, she assumes her role in community service by giving back through her annual Poinsettia Cotillion and Columbia’s Urban League Guild fund-raisers. “This is really a small town for us,” she says, “and my family can have an impact through the groups and activities we’ve started. It’s hard to do that in the larger cities.”

  NASHVILLE

  While a bit larger than Columbia, Nashville is another southern city with a black elite contingent that seems disproportionately large for its surrounding working-class community. In that city, many of my black friends tell me that the high-profile black residents are often embraced by both the black and the white communities. One of those high-profile people is Patsy Campbell Petway.

  When she pulled up in a sleek black Cadillac at the Swan Ball last April with her escort, Lewis “Bill” McKissack, photographers from Town & Country magazine, the New York Times, and several other national publications were waiting alongside the driveway to capture her arrival at the annual Nashville black-tie event.

  “We had no idea that people outside this town knew about this ball,” says Petway as she recalls the evening. For thirty-five years, the virtually all-white, all-rich crowd from the Belle Meade neighborhood and other sections of the affluent west end of Nashville have paid exorbitant ticket prices—now one thousand dollars—to dance and dine the night away at the Cheekwood estate and garden where the black-tie charity ball takes place each year.

  Even though the Campbell, Petway, and McKissack names are a big deal in the Nashville black community—a community that centers on Fisk, Tennessee State, and Meharry Medical College—the Swan Ball was one of those pivotal moments when a handful of upper-class blacks actually interact with upper-class whites in this southern city. “I’m on the board of Cheekwood with Leatrice McKissack,” explains Petway as she points out the need for blacks to involve themselves in charities that benefit the black community as well as the larger community. “We need to make our presence known wherever we live,” says the Tennessee State graduate, who belongs to the Nashville Links and the Girl Friends. And this is something that all three of these families have done in Nashville for the last fifty years. Their role in the black community there has been virtually unparalleled.

  A lifelong resident of Nashville, Patsy has been an important figure in the city’s civic activities—as was her husband, Carlton, who died of a heart attack in 1991. He was a city councilman and a wealthy, high-profile litigator who taught at Vanderbilt Law School and received an appointment to the U.S. attorney’s office as the first black to serve in the Middle District of Tennessee.

  Bill and Leatrice McKissack’s family is best known for founding McKissack & McKissack, the architectural and engineering firm that designed and built Carnegie Library at Fisk in 1908, the Tuskegee Squadron Air Base and Pilot Training School in 1942, the Morris Memorial building for the National Baptist Convention, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and Nashville’s Capers C. M. E. Church, as well as many other churches, homes, and buildings on such campuses as Howard University, Lane College, Texas State University, and Tuskegee University.

  “Our family members were among the first registered architects in the state of Tennessee,” says Leatrice Buchanan McKissack, who heads the firm, which has also opened offices in Memphis, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Washington, and New York since Moses McKissack Jr. first opened a business under the name McKissack Contractors in the 1870s. “My husband, William, was the grandson of Moses junior, and he graduated from Howard’s School of Architecture and Engineering. In fact, all five of my husband’s brothers earned degrees in architecture or engineering so they could enter the business. And I was happy to see our three daughters, Andrea, Cheryl, and Deryl, do the same.”

  “I remember back in 1942, when Calvin and Moses McKissack went up to the White House to get an award from Franklin Roosevelt when the company was named the best black business in America,” says a proud Nashville doctor as he sits in a front pew at the old-guard Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in south Nashville. He says he often runs into Leatrice and her daughters near the firm’s Broadway office. “I knew Leatrice’s stepfather, Dr. Alrutheus Taylor, who got a Ph.D. from Harvard and was the dean at Fisk,” adds the doctor.

  Leatrice sees her friend Patsy Petway at board meetings for Cheekwood, or for other activities in Nashville, and their circle of black friends is an interesting one. It includes Leatrice’s friends from her years at Fisk, as well as the associates they both knew from their years at Tennessee State. Leatrice knew such people as writers Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. In fact, on the evening when Petway first introduced me to her friend, Leatrice was dining with screenwriter Alice Randall, who is married to sixth-generation Nashvillian David Ewing. As I am quickly reminded by one of the dinner guests, Alice was originally from Washington but was adopted by Nashville society during her first marriage—into the historic Bontemps family.

  “Among the three of them,” says an animated member of the Nashville Links, referring to Patsy, Leatrice, and Alice, “they know everybody across three generations. In a small town like Nashville, there are certain people you have to know and you have to get their background right.” The woman explains that newcomers mix up facts on important but unrelated people who have the same last names—people like Helena Patton Perry, the pediatrician, who was married to two doctors, and the unrelated Rosetta Perry, who is quite rich and owns the weekly newspaper. Or they are confused about which families belong to which Links chapter.

  “Like the other week,” explained the woman. “There was this young upstart trying to convince me that Corinne Schuster was the founder of the newest Links chapter! I instantly knew this girl was new in town. There are like four Links chapters in Nashville and everybody knows Corinne is in the original one—the real Links chapter. Her chapter has been around for thirty-five years, and she used to be president of it!”

  “That’s the kind of mistake people shouldn’t be making,” adds the woman’s luncheon companion. “After all, the original Links chapter has the big names: Alberta Bontemps, St. Clair Foster, and Edwina Hefner—her husband, James, is president of Tennessee State.”

  And not surprisingly, it’s also the chapter to which Patsy Campbell Petway belongs. Her sister Doris belonged to it, and her niece Pamela Campbell Busby is a member today. These are facts that the old guard keeps straight.

  Patsy’s other niece, Gail Campbell Busby Schuster, points out how fortunate they are to live in a city that is sophisticated, yet still small enough for families to know and recognize each other. Gail’s grandfather—Patsy’s dad—Emmett Campbell, had done the electrical wiring on the old-guard Holy Trinity Church. “When my son, Evan, was baptized here,” says Gail, “it gave me such pride to know that my family’s history was in this church and in this town. It makes you feel rooted to know your own history is surrounding you.”

  Gail remarks that her mother, along with Aunt Patsy and several of her other aunts, attended Tennessee State. “In fact,” adds Patsy, “three o
f my sisters—Irene, Alberta, and Kathryn—went to a small private demonstration elementary school on the grounds of the college in the 1920s because President W. J. Hale had young children that he wanted educated nearby.” And Patsy’s uncle, John Galloway, also a member of Holy Trinity, was principal of Pearl High School, the public school that three generations of the city’s black elite have attended. Her sister, Phyllis Campbell Alexander, says that life in what was then the segregated north side of town was quite insulated from the problems blacks found elsewhere. “When we were growing up in a black community that had its own universities, our world was insulated from the bigotry we might have faced at segregated institutions run by whites,” explains Phyllis, who belongs to the Links in Los Angeles. “When we went to a ballet or an opera as children, the performances we saw were special ones, put on at our universities’ campuses, by our own people. Because black Nashville had these resources, we were in a fortunate situation.”

  But now, many old-guard families who grew up and established themselves in north Nashville, near the three historic black campuses, are seeing the next generation of black professionals venture to the newer, whiter, and richer west side of town. “My father and mother moved to the western side of Nashville in 1974,” says Gail Campbell Busby Schuster, “so I missed the whole Pearl High School scene. Along with my sisters, Suzanne and Pamela, I had a much more integrated school experience than my parents’ generation.” Gail’s father, George Busby, a dentist on the faculty at Meharry, belongs to the Boulé, where he socializes with Dr. Henry Foster—President Clinton’s controversial surgeon general nominee, as well as a crowd that is beginning to reflect the new generation to which Gail refers: young adults who grew up in Jack and Jill, but who were raised at integrated schools, in integrated neighborhoods, far removed from Jefferson Street, the Ritz Theater, the Bijou, and Meharry Boulevard, which the black elite favored in the 1930s and 1940s. They still go back to churches like Holy Trinity, St. Luke’s, Park Memorial, and Capers Memorial. They still know the history of the Boyd family, who founded Citizens Savings Bank. They even still call Patton Brothers or Kossie Gardner to arrange services at the Gardner family funeral home when one of their loved ones dies. But things are not the same as they used to be, because they live and work around whites more than ever before.