Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Although the Houstons are considered one of the old-guard families, L.A.’s black elite history is among the youngest of all the cities in the United States. This is because Los Angeles developed long after eastern cities like Washington and New York, and also because the black population here did not grow out of the early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave populations of the East Coast or out of the 1930s black southern immigration to the Midwest.

  “Even though blacks were a rather small percentage of the Los Angeles population at the time I was growing up in the 1930s,” says Houston, who—like his father—belongs to the city’s Boulé chapter, “there were many professionals—physicians, dentists, attorneys, and entrepreneurs—working and living around us in the Central Avenue neighborhood and on Adams and in the Sugar Hill section. Many of them went to the same churches—First A. M. E., Second Baptist, and later Holman United Methodist at Adams and Crenshaw.”

  Since the black L.A. community was far newer than those in the Midwest and on the East Coast—only a few hundred blacks lived in the city at the turn of the century—the old guard remained small for years. Thomas Shropshire, a fellow member in Ivan Houston’s Boulé chapter, points out that some of the old black organizations were very late arriving in the city. “I organized our Guardsmen chapter here only a few years ago,” says Shropshire, a retired Philip Morris executive who lives in the city and has sat on the board of Howard. “The Guardsmen didn’t move to the West Coast until recently, even though it was started in the 1930s on the East Coast.”

  Among the prominent black Los Angeles families—the Houstons, the Dunnings, the Hudsons, the Groveses, the Weekeses, the Lindsays, the Blodgetts, and the Somervilles—one finds almost no ties to Hollywood. Instead, their professions and their successes were in the fields of banking, medicine, dentistry, insurance, real estate, hotels, and engineering. “When my father, Norman, founded Golden West, we lived next door to the Hollywood actress Louise Beavers,” says Houston, “but my father’s friends were mostly businesspeople or doctors.” Houston points out that the racially restrictive covenants in the city’s neighborhoods placed all the black people in close proximity to each other, but this did not bring together black entertainers and their black professional neighbors. They were two entirely different social groups.

  Another phenomenon that distinguished the old L.A. black elite from the groups in other cities was the academic experience of its members. Many of them had no ties to prominent black colleges like Howard, Morehouse, or Spelman. Ivan Houston, for example, went to the University of California at Berkeley—like his father. “Blacks that grew up in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s had a much different experience than those who grew up in southern cities or even eastern cities. Many of us went to predominately white California state universities.”

  Similarly, blacks in Los Angeles were more likely to have had integrated grammar-school and high-school experiences than their counterparts in places such as Atlanta or Washington. While blacks in those cities grew up in segregated elementary and secondary schools, L.A. blacks attended schools that were predominately white with a small number of Asian and Latino students. “In fact,” Houston says, “many of us had been educated our entire lives with white classmates. Our neighborhoods might have been all black, or mostly black, but our early school experiences were integrated ones. So it was not a surprise that I would end up in a school like Berkeley or my brother Norman would end up attending UCLA.”

  Among the elite families, there were people like the dentist Dr. John Somerville, who built the Somerville Hotel, the precursor to the black Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue. There was also another dentist, Claude Hudson, who was the beginning of several generations of Hudsons who excelled in the banking business. Joe Dunning was a successful engineer who attended MIT. “My father and the Blodgett family worked to start Liberty Savings Bank,” says Houston.

  The generation of black professionals who followed Ivan Houston moved further south than the South Central neighborhood that had so long been associated with the black community. They moved, principally, to three upscale suburban areas within the city: View Park, Ladera Heights, and Baldwin Hills. At the foot of these three neighborhoods is a park named after Ivan’s father.

  “Since we don’t typically include these black entertainers or the people who are tied to the music or film business as a part of our crowd,” says a Los Angeles Jack and Jill mother whose children graduated from the organization in the 1960s, “there are really two sets of affluent black people in this town: the ones who live in our neighborhoods and join our organizations, and the ones who make a lot of fast money in music or TV but are not very educated or rooted in the community. Some of them want to attend our affairs so they can check off a box and say they ‘belong.’ Back in the sixties and seventies, they wanted to break into this crowd, get their name in Jessie Mae Brown Beavers’s columns in the Los Angeles Sentinel, and then move on.”

  The Jack and Jill mother remembers the temptation that she and others have had to invite industry or celebrity types into their affairs, only to be reminded that the old guard and the industry people have little in common. “I remember working on fund-raisers,” the woman recalls, “and all of us pretty much lived up here in View Park or Baldwin Hills, and we thought we should include a celebrity or some record executives to broaden the guest list. Big mistake. They have no class and no patience for people who won’t give them the star treatment. That’s why I am so glad that the Links cotillion hasn’t turned the list of girls into a pageant full of celebrity daughters. The only one who had any class was the singer Marilyn McCoo, who debuted in 1959.” The woman pauses for a moment. “But then, of course, she was Jack and Jill and came from a good family.”

  Of all the annual old-guard events in the black community, the Links cotillion is one of the favorites. “I have gone to many of those cotillions, and it’s one of the nice southern traditions that Los Angeles has adopted even though it no longer exists in some cities,” says Links member Phyllis Campbell Alexander, whose husband, Joseph, is a surgeon in the city. “For the last fifteen years, my Links chapter has been known for an annual awards luncheon for our achiever program that takes place at either the Beverly Hilton or Century Plaza,” explains Alexander, “where we raise around one hundred thousand dollars and offer college scholarships to students in the L.A. schools.” Other major events have included the Omega Starlight Ball and the AKA’s annual Fantasy in Pink Ball, which typically attracted as many as fifteen hundred people at the Biltmore Hotel in its heyday in the 1970s.

  “Laura Anderson, Marjie Davis, Nancy Graves, Laura Hunter, Angela LaMotte, Laurie Marine, and Cynthia Wilson.” It’s been two decades since they graduated, but Los Angeles native Teresa Clarke can recall their names as if it were yesterday.

  “There were seven other blacks in my class of sixty-nine girls,” says Clarke as she recalls the class of 1980 at the Marlborough School, the most exclusive girls’ school in Los Angeles. Located in the conservative, blue-blooded neighborhood of Hancock Park, the prestigious school sent a hefty percentage of its students to Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and the private colleges on the East Coast. Although Clarke was later to attend school with my wife at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School, she has very clear memories of what it was like growing up among the black elite in the Los Angeles of the 1970s.

  “Although Marlborough attracted smart blacks from top neighborhoods in L.A.,” remarks Clarke, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who grew up in the city’s upscale View Park neighborhood, “it was obvious that our white classmates who lived in Hancock Park or in other West Side areas like Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, or Brentwood had absolutely no idea of where we came from. They had no idea where Baldwin Hills, View Park, and Ladera Heights were—and since whites didn’t live there, they really didn’t care.”

  The three neighborhoods that Clarke refers to are the sections where one finds the majority of today
’s old-guard black L.A. residents. Clarke’s experience demonstrates that although smart, well-to-do blacks and whites came together and befriended each other in the very best schools, they still remained worlds apart in the diverse city of 3.5 million.

  A few years younger than Clarke, James Bond, a Los Angeles native, agrees that most whites on the West Side would have no ties to these affluent black neighborhoods, which were far away geographically and in ethnic culture. “While a lot of my classmates would have heard of Baldwin Hills and View Park,” says the class-of-1990 graduate of the Bel Air Prep School, “most white students would never have been there before.”

  Even though she grew up in sprawling Los Angeles and had many white friends, Clarke’s world was well defined. “I used to give an annual Christmas party that was attended by students from the private schools and parochial schools around L.A.,” she explains. Besides Marlborough students, there were kids from Westlake, Harvard, Buckley, and Crossroads, and a couple from University High. But what is interesting is that while they spent their schooldays with white students, the evening parties around the pool at home were exclusively black.

  Clarke grew up in a professional family that includes a grandfather who graduated from Lincoln University, an uncle who graduated in 1944 from Yale, a grandmother who graduated from Howard, and a mother who graduated from Howard and holds a doctorate from UCLA. Her circle of black neighbors and classmates are from very similar families who live in beautiful homes in the neighborhoods of View Park and Baldwin Hills. She stays in touch with her old girlfriend and former neighbor Shaun Biggers, who was a class behind her at Marlborough and Harvard. The daughter of a prominent black surgeon—also in the L.A. Boulé—Shaun is now an obstetrician in New York. When I see Clarke or Biggers today, they reminisce about their experiences of growing up in a tightly knit black Los Angeles. Interestingly, like the older generations of the L.A. elite, this group still does not include entertainers or other blacks in the music, television, or film industries.

  Spelman graduate Heather Bond Bryant remembers when her family moved from Baldwin Hills to the affluent and mostly white Laurel Canyon neighborhood in 1971, and then a few years later to an even wealthier West Side neighborhood abutting the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I have always had close friendships with whites wherever I lived,” says Bryant, who recalls that the only black neighbors she had on the West Side were Billy Dee Williams and Rae Dawn Chong’s family, “but what kept me truly connected to my black world were my family and those early friendships I had formed with kids in View Park and Baldwin Hills.”

  Bryant’s father, a residential developer, had built their prior home in 1961 on the highest point of Baldwin Hills—on Don Carlos Drive, where the north side of the house had a view all the way across the city. The family could see the Hollywood Hills twelve miles north of them. “And we had a lot of glass on the west side of the house,” remembers Bryant, “so that on a clear day, you could see Santa Monica and the ocean. A lot of the houses in those two neighborhoods have incredible views.”

  The families in those neighborhoods were the envy of some of the blacks living in the older South Central neighborhoods. “That was the place to move back in the seventies,” says a Los Angeles attorney in her thirties who grew up on Crenshaw in the South Central neighborhood. “There was this big doctor-lawyer-CPA crowd back then—people like the Groveses, Feasters, Hunters, Littles, Paxtons, Moultries, Gibsons, LaMotts—and a lot of them lived up in those View Park–Baldwin Hills neighborhoods and went to St. Bernadette’s Church. I went to one of those open parties when I was in junior high, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a black person with a Rolls Royce.”

  Today, there is even a growing number of black professionals moving into the previously all-white West Side areas of Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, Bel Air, and Brentwood. “My wife, my son, and I moved to Pacific Palisades thirteen years ago,” says Los Angeles Boulé member Bernard Kinsey, “and we see blacks living in every area around the city. Many have moved to San Bernardino and Riverside counties, but what we have to remember is that no matter where we settle, it is still necessary to give our black children a positive self-image. This is why we had our son, Khalil, participate in Jack and Jill activities.” Kinsey, who cochaired Rebuild L.A. with Peter Ueberroth after the riots in 1992, says that L.A. is not very different from other cities when it comes to successful blacks.

  “Ultimately, our success is going to be found in starting our own businesses,” says Kinsey, who has made a successful career as a developer of multimillion-dollar homes in the Pacific Palisades and Bel Air neighborhoods. His own home, which has a 300-degree view of the Pacific Ocean, is in a town where very few blacks live, but Kinsey points out that like most blacks who live in integrated, affluent settings, he always remembers who he is and how he got there. “My wife and I recently appeared on the Tony Brown Show,” says Kinsey, “and I thought about what a shame it is to see what’s going on out here with affirmative action. There are many blacks who have succeeded because of it, and now they are turning against other blacks who could benefit from it.”

  As Kinsey and others of L.A.’s black elite are beginning to see, blacks who wield clout in the area are no longer simply those who feel rooted to the old South Central community that grew up in the 1920s with an Afrocentric outlook.

  PHILADELPHIA

  Many members of black society point out that while it is no longer a city which leads in its number of black elite families, Philadelphia remains an important town because it is where black society’s three most important selective clubs were founded. Native Philadelphian Dr. Nellie Gordon Roulhac does not seem fazed by the common thread. “The Links, the Boulé, and Jack and Jill shared many of the same members because they were all black people looking for opportunities to socialize with blacks who had similar backgrounds and similar desires to improve the black community.” A member of the Philadelphia Links, she is a former national president of Jack and Jill and was married to the recently deceased Dr. Christopher Roulhac, who was a member of the original Boulé chapter.

  “My husband, our children, and I all gained immensely by belonging to these groups,” says Roulhac, “because they further rooted us to the community.” Although she was later to spend part of her adulthood in Memphis and in Georgia, Roulhac’s family story is primarily rooted in the genteel setting of historic black Philadelphia. Her father, Dr. Levi Preston Morton Gordon, was a dentist who graduated from Howard University and its dental school. Her uncle, Dr. Chester Gordon, was a physician who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania; and her grandfather, Dr. Alexander Gordon, was pastor at the city’s Monumental Baptist Church.

  Even though she has degrees from Cheyney University, Columbia, and the University of Sarasota, and has a stellar social background and family history, Dr. Roulhac insists that she does not represent old-guard Philadelphia. “There are many distinguished families who have a much longer history in this city than my own.”

  In fact, although the city’s overall population is considerably smaller than New York’s and Chicago’s, Philadelphia had a prominent black upper class long before these other northern communities. Many members of the old guard in the North have family histories that seem almost new when they are matched with those with Philadelphia lineage.

  One of the women in Roulhac’s crowd, Emilie Montier Brown Pickens, came from one of those old families. Born in Philadelphia, Emilie was also a Link and a national president of Jack and Jill. “My mother’s family was responsible for building the oldest African American home in Pennsylvania, just outside the city in an area known as Glenside,” says William Pickens, who now lives in New York.

  John Montier, who erected his home in 1770, was a free black man and was eventually included in a census that was taken in the 1790s by Benjamin Franklin. “My mother’s family also had a family burial ground across the street from the 220-year-old home,” explains Pickens, “and there were more than seventy of our relatives buried t
here during the 1800s.”

  While most members of Philadelphia’s black society cannot trace their local roots to the 1700s as the Pickens-Montier family can, there are, nevertheless, many family names that have been around for generations.

  “When I was growing up in Philadelphia, the town was small enough that you knew the names of the old families,” says Boulé member Boyd Carney Johnson, whose uncle and father founded the city’s chapter of the Alphas when they were at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s. In addition to names like Alexander, Purvis, Adger, Forten, and McKee, Johnson was particularly familiar with the Minton family name. “The Mintons were Philadelphia royalty—especially among the doctor crowd.”

  After having attended Phillips Exeter Academy and the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, Dr. Henry M. Minton went on to graduate from Jefferson Medical College in 1906 and was the founder of the Boulé and of Douglass Hospital, Philadelphia’s first black medical center.

  “A lot of my parents’ friends at Mother Bethel Church used to wonder where Minton got all his money because my dad and his friends were all doctors, and none of them had what he had,” says an elderly physician. “He had lots more than regular old black-doctor money.”

  “And more than white-doctor money too,” adds a fellow physician who remembers Henry and his protégé, nephew Russell Minton. “They had the kind of money and lineage that would normally make somebody bored by us ordinary black doctor types.”

  The phrase “black doctor crowd” does not seem to be an unusual one among Philadelphia society. Whereas the crowds or cliques in Atlanta and Nashville were formed around the various black colleges, Philadelphia had no black universities, thus leaving the divisions to be drawn around certain professions—mostly the legal and medical professions. And there were also entrepreneurs. The Mintons fit into all of the groups.