Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Mrs. Hundley recalls that Grandpa Syphax was “always impeccably tailored, and terribly pious. He had a quotation from the Bible for every occasion. The children had to be at the table every morning at 8 A.M. for an hour of prayer. He was even opposed to going to the theatre, and they say that the only time he ever went inside a theatre was to pull one of his brothers out. My mother was more liberal. She tried to convince him that some theatre was like a sermon. Once, as a girl, when a young man had taken Mother to the theatre, and she told Grandpa about it, all he said was ‘My, you’re getting worldly.’”

  When she was a child, Mrs. Hundley’s model for decorum and behavior was her mother’s close friend, Mrs. Mary Church Terrell. “Notice how Mrs. Terrell speaks,” her mother would advise young Mary. “Notice how Mrs. Terrell does things. She does everything with perfect ease.” One thing that Mrs. Terrell did with perfect ease, it may be remembered, was to walk into a segregated Washington restaurant several years ago, sit down, and demand to be served. Her lawyer, Charles Huston, had discovered an obscure District of Columbia statute which stated that no public restaurant could refuse service to any “respectable” customer. It had been decided that of all the women in Washington, black or white, Mary Church Terrell was one who no one could say was not respectable. She won her case. “She was magnificent,” says Mrs. Hundley. Mrs. Terrell, an educator, lecturer, and the president of the National Association of Colored Women, had a celebrated feud with Mrs. Mary Bethune. Said Mrs. Bethune to Mrs. Terrell, “I’m glad I’m black because I know I’m legitimate.” Said the light-skinned Mrs. Terrell to Mrs. Bethune, “I wouldn’t be too sure about that.” They never spoke again. “Mary Bethune was highly overrated,” says Mary Hundley. “She latched onto Mrs. Roosevelt and hung to her coattails. Now, Charlotte Hawkins Brown was something else again—she was of Mrs. Terrell’s breed. But Mary Bethune did more to spread prejudice among black-skinned people against light-skinned Negroes than anybody I can think of. She used to talk about ‘my black girls,’ and she started that whole ‘black is beautiful’ nonsense. She said that she used to look into her mirror and say, ‘Mary, you’re black and you’re beautiful.’ Beautiful! She was ugly as sin. But Mrs. Terrell was a lady.”

  Like Mrs. Hundley, Mary Church Terrell came by her ladylike ways through both training and inheritance, and it is worth spending a moment to consider Mrs. Terrell’s extraordinary background. Though she made her home in Washington, she was “a Church of Memphis,” and the Churches of Memphis are often considered—and certainly consider themselves—the grandest black family in America. For nearly three quarters of a century the earthly remains of various illustrious Churches have reposed in the vast marble Church mausoleum in Memphis’s Elmwood cemetery, which is now regarded as something of a family shrine. Mary Terrell’s father, Robert R. Church, was born in slavery and, as a youth, worked as a cabin boy on the Mississippi River steamboats. After the Civil War, he settled in Memphis where, working quietly and with the required amount of obsequiousness within the framework of the black power structure, Mr. Church started his business rise. He began as a saloon-keeper, and soon he acquired a hotel. In the riots of 1866 he nearly lost his life when he was shot in the back of the head and left for dead on the floor of his saloon. But he recovered and went on gathering up more parcels of Memphis real estate. He built a large auditorium, which became the city’s leading meeting-place for black organizations and was, at the time, the largest black theatre in the United States. He also developed an amusement park on Beale Street, which became the black recreation center, and opened the city’s first—and for many years only—black bank. By the turn of the century, Robert R. Church was unquestionably the richest black man in Memphis and was touted as “the first black millionaire in the South.” The huge gingerbread Church mansion at 384 South Lauderdale Street was a Memphis landmark. After the city of Memphis was devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, Church was the first person to purchase a City of Memphis municipal bond, as a token of his faith in the town’s economic recovery. He was the first black in Memphis to be selected for grand jury duty and, as a power in the Republican Party, he served as a delegate to the Republican national convention in 1900.

  After divorcing his first wife, who was Mary Terrell’s mother, Robert R. Church made an imposing second marriage to the former Anna Wright, who became Mary Terrell’s stepmother. The new Mrs. Church had a dizzying ancestry, and was descended from a Kentucky colonel who was related to the Kentucky Breckenridges; from an English-born Philadelphia Quaker named Benjamin Wright; from a wealthy Memphis plantation owner; as well as from a Chickasaw Indian family who were distinguished not only by the fact that they owned a prosperous brickyard but also by the fact that they had a relative who lived to be a hundred and ten years old. Anna Wright’s Grandfather Wright, in fact, was a man of such consequence that he imported white private tutors from the North to educate his children. Though Anna Wright Church was so fair as to be hardly recognizable as a Negro, she became the unquestioned leading grande dame in Memphis’s black society.

  Robert R. Church himself could boast of a heritage that was every bit as colorful and illustrious as his wife’s, and which included nothing less than royalty. On the distaff side, Mr. Church’s first American ancestor was his grandmother, a slave who was simply called Lucy. But Lucy’s upbringing had been far from simple. When Lucy was first brought to the slave block in Norfolk between 1805 and 1810, she attracted great attention. She was described, somewhat wonderingly, as “a beautiful bright red young girl with very long straight hair.” For reasons no one could understand, Lucy spoke perfect French. Also, when she went on the block, she was wearing a pair of heavy gold earrings in her pierced ears, and an exquisite necklace of coral tipped with gold was at her throat. Because of her beauty and regal bearing and her jewels, Lucy was the object of heavy bidding and was sold at a “fancy price”—to a rich Norfolk tobacco merchant.

  The exotic Lucy, it turned out, was not African at all but Malaysian, and in her native islands she had been a royal princess. As a result of civil strife, she had been taken prisoner and sold. In the tobacco merchant’s home, her Church descendants like to point out, Lucy worked as a seamstress and “was never treated as a slave” or required to do menial chores. She was regarded almost as a member of the family, and was treasured for the stories she used to tell of the court life she had known in her faraway Oriental palace. The earrings and necklace are still in the family.

  By his second wife, Robert R. Church had a son, Robert R. Church, Jr., who inherited his father’s money and expanded the family real estate interests. He became even more active in Republican politics than his father. In 1916, he founded an organization known as the Lincoln League, the purpose of which was to encourage blacks to take part in the electoral process. He had been educated at private schools in the North, and was a dapper, fastidiously tailored man whose trademark was the spotless white handkerchief that always blossomed from his breast pocket. He was also a gifted orator. In 1912, at the age of twenty-six, Church attended his first Republican national convention, an event which he never missed for the next forty years, until his death in 1952. During the 1920s, Church was at the height of his political powers and was considered one of the most influential black Republicans in the country. Through his Lincoln League, Church and his Black and Tan wing of the party succeeded in wresting control of the Shelby County Republican organization from the whites and, during the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, whenever it was necessary to make a political appointment in Tennessee, Washington’s advice was, inevitably, “Ask Bob Church.”

  Bob Church’s power declined considerably during the New Deal era, however, and when many blacks began switching their traditional allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party, Church and his family remained staunchly Republican. In fact, it is said that pressure from the Memphis Democrats caused Bob Church to leave the city in 1940 and move with his family to Washington, where his half-sister Mary made her fam
ously dignified restaurant entrance.

  Bob Church’s daughter, Roberta Church, is also well known in Republican circles. She has served as Special Consultant for Minority Groups to the United States Department of Labor, and was appointed by Richard M. Nixon to the National Advisory Council on Adult Education. She continues to be prominent in Washington public affairs though, as she says, “I will always consider Memphis my home.” In Memphis, they say, “The Churches are Memphis.” And, in the hierarchy of the American black Old Guard, the Churches stand very near the top, if not at the top, of the list of the black Four Hundred—or, as the blacks themselves often put it, “The black Three Hundred and Ninety-Nine.” This is not to say, of course, that the Churches are all that tight-knit a family. The two sets of children by Robert Church, Sr.’s, two wives did not always get on with one another. (For one thing, the children by the first Mrs. Church had much darker skins.) Mary Church Terrell and her half-brother Bob seldom saw eye-to-eye. And in Roberta Church’s privately printed history of the family, The Robert R. Churches of Memphis, which deals primarily with the achievements of her father and grandfather (and does not overlook Miss Church’s own accomplishments), she gives short shrift to her half-aunt, Mrs. Terrell. She merely notes that, “Since two books have been published about Mary Church Terrell, daughter of the first marriage, and her family, this book will limit itself to the second marriage of Robert Church, Sr., to Anna Wright Church.”

  If Mary Church Terrell was the early model of decorum for Mary Gibson Hundley, Mrs. Hundley learned her lessons well. Like her mentor, she is aristocratic in bearing, a spirited conversationalist, a woman of strong opinions, and a trifle aloof in the presence of those she feels to be of inferior intelligence or breeding. Like Mrs. Terrell, Mrs. Hundley is also a doughty fighter over matters of civil rights—though, like Mrs. Terrell, she goes about doing what must be done in a ladylike way. A number of years ago, using the same lawyer who had represented Mrs. Terrell in her restaurant case—and won it—Mrs. Hundley and her husband went to battle against their all-white neighbors in order to buy their Thirteenth Street house, which had been under a “restrictive covenant” forbidding sale to blacks or even Américaines de couleur. The Hundleys lost in the lower court but, on appeal, won, and the case, Gorewitz v. Hundley, was cited in the 1948 Supreme Court desegregation decision. “I believe Grandpa Syphax would have been proud of our victory,” Mrs. Hundley says, even though the long legal fight cost many thousands of Syphax dollars. As a result, she remains somewhat bitter about the N.A.A.C.P. “We had been members of the N.A.A.C.P. for years,” she says, “and they didn’t help us with a plugged nickel.”

  Currently, Mary Hundley is involved in another battle—another of those that, like the one to save the Museum of African Art, have divided Washington’s Old Guard light-skinned families against the newer-rich, darker-skinned majority. It is over the fate of the old Dunbar High School, where Mrs. Hundley taught for so many years. Dunbar High School is an altogether unique institution. Established in 1870 by federal charter, it was originally called The Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, and its original trustees, who had influential friends in Congress, were members of Washington’s old-line black families, including a number of Mary Hundley’s ancestors. Dunbar was, for many years, the only free public high school for blacks who wanted a college education, and blacks who could afford to—and wanted higher education for their children—moved their families to Washington so that their sons and daughters could go to Dunbar. There were no special entrance examinations for Dunbar, but youngsters were thoroughly interviewed to see whether they could do the work. Most important, Dunbar’s charter stipulated that the federal salaries paid the black teachers at Dunbar must equal those paid to white teachers in the District of Columbia. At the time, there were a number of black graduates from Northern colleges like Oberlin, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Harvard. But academic posts were closed even to those blacks who had completed graduate work, and black teachers had been forced to accept low-paying jobs at all-black schools.

  The creation of Dunbar appeared to black educators as a kind of salvation, and the best black teachers from all over the country competed for posts at Dunbar. With the best faculty available, and the best students that could be found, Dunbar was indeed a school for the upwardly mobile elite. Generations of black achievers attended Dunbar, and went on to shine in the best colleges of the Ivy League. Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke went to Dunbar (“I taught him Latin,” says Mrs. Hundley), as did Ralph Bunche, the late Dr. Charles Drew, who organized the first Red Cross blood banks, along with numberless judges, doctors, lawyers, and professors, in addition to Washington Terrells, Syphaxes, Wormleys, and Cobbs. It carried great cachet to go to Dunbar, and its alumni today—like the more expensively educated alumni of Palmer—consider themselves a special breed, and hold regular reunions once a year and sing the old school song. Needless to say, many Dunbar alumni are light-skinned—like Senator Brooke, who claims descent from Thomas Jefferson.

  Later, led by women like Mrs. Hundley and her friends, the school’s faculty resisted efforts to turn Dunbar into a manual training school of the kind advocated by Booker T. Washington, and insisted that Dunbar remain a college-preparatory high school, of the kind Booker T. Washington’s archrival, W. E. B. DuBois, endorsed. Washington and DuBois squabbled over educational matters almost as much as Mary Terrell, Mary Bethune, and Charlotte Brown did, but most of Washington’s Old Guard are DuBois admirers, since he stressed “excellence.” Booker T. Washington they regard as a spokesman for the lower classes.

  Today, with Washington’s schools integrated, and blacks able to attend—and teach at—any American private school or college, there is no real need for a school like Dunbar. Dunbar is now in a slum, and there is another, newer, college-preparatory high school, Woodrow Wilson, in another part of town. Dunbar High School will retain its name, but will move into a new modern building close by, and Washington’s Board of Education wants to tear the old building down and turn it into a football field. Dunbar alumni and former teachers like Mrs. Hundley are outraged and up in arms. To them, Dunbar is a symbol—the shining symbol—of black higher education, prestige, and success in the capital. They have tried to have the old building declared an architectural treasure or monument, though the building is no more than routine Tudor. What the building is, of course, is a nostalgic treasure and yet, the Old Guard feels, if all else goes, this building, where so much was done for so many people, must remain.

  The board of education, meanwhile, an eleven-man board consisting of seven blacks and four whites, is heavily representative of the newer-rich, black-skinned group. They are equally determined that, at all costs, Dunbar must go, must vanish from the face of the earth. To them, Dunbar is a symbol, too, but of something they have hated and resented for years—Uncle Tomism, black elitism, the Old Guard “Dunbar snobs,” the light-skinned blacks. And so the battle lines are drawn over an empty and unused building. “It’s the same as in the days of slavery,” says Mrs. Hundley. “The slaves who worked in the fields hated the slaves that worked in the house. If the housemaid consorted with the master or the master’s son—which she was often willing to do because it was one way for her to get her freedom—she had light-skinned children. My great-great-grandmother was a house slave, which is why I’m the color I am. The board of education represents the old field hand mentality, and they hate me for what I am.”

  The fact is that the black Establishment in Washington has changed. Families like the Syphaxes, Terrells, Cobbs, and Wormleys, who used to stand at the top of the city’s Negro pecking order and rule the roost, no longer do, and their power has been usurped by a younger, hungrier, and larger group who have come to Washington from other cities and struggled upward from the bottom. They are supported by a working middle class—government workers, bank and department store clerks, nurses, pharmacists, and the like—who have tended to move out of the central city into the surrounding suburbs. The Old Guard, need
less to say, dislikes seeing the old order change.

  It used to be said in Washington that “Syphaxes speak only to Wormleys, and Wormleys speak only to Cobbs.” The Wormleys have certainly had a rich history in the city. The founding father of the family, James T. Wormley, a former steward on a Mississippi River boat, was induced by white friends in the 1850s to start a catering business, and by the eve of the Civil War he was a rich man, with his services as much in demand as those of Messrs. Augustin, Prosser, Dorsey in Philadelphia, and Downing in New York. In addition to catering for some of Washington’s grandest parties, he owned a restaurant and several large houses downtown, one of which was occupied during the first year of the war by “Old Fuss and Feathers,” General Winfield Scott, making Wormley one of the earliest black landlords with a white tenant. Later, Wormley owned and operated the Wormley Hotel, which was the Washington home for Vice President Schuyler Colfax, and was a popular meeting place for foreign diplomats and dignitaries, as well as for makers and shakers of American politics. Ironically, this black-owned hotel was the scene of a historic political deal in 1877 that brought the Reconstruction Era to an end, and ushered in the Era of Segregation. At the conference, Democratic leaders agreed to end the dispute over the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, if the Republican leaders would agree to withdraw federal troops from the South. Wormley’s descendants have been prominent businessmen, educators, and clergymen, and consider themselves very much out of the top drawer among the Old Guard.