Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In Ebony’s 1,000 Successful Blacks (actually a biographical listing of a little over 1,100 names), which is sort of a black Who’s Who, there are sketches of a number of entertainers. Only a smattering of black athletes is listed, including Althea Gibson, Hank Aaron, Vida Blue, Arthur Ashe, and Willie Mays. But where are O. J. Simpson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Roy Campanella, Oscar Robertson, John Brockington, Joe Frazier, Frank Robinson, and Sugar Ray? Apparently, Ebony’s editors considered none of these athletes sufficiently “successful” for inclusion in the book. Every year, Ebony publishes another, smaller list, The 100 Most Influential Black Americans. The criteria for inclusion in this list are, according to Ebony, “Does the individual affect, in a decisive way, the lives, thinking and actions of large segments of the nation’s black population? Does the individual command widespread national influence among blacks, and/or is the nominee usually influential with those whites whose policies and practices significantly affect a large number of blacks?” There are no entertainers, and no athletes, it seems, who meet these criteria, for there are none among the “100 Most Influential.”

  Perhaps the most exclusive and prestigious list is contained in Ebony’s Famous Blacks Give Secrets of Success. There are only seventy-two names on the “Famous” list, and each listee is given a fairly extensive biography. (Interestingly enough, Ebony’s publisher, John Johnson, is given a six-page profile, while only four pages are devoted to Thurgood Marshall.) The sketches are arranged in alphabetical order, from Milton B. Allen, state’s attorney for the city of Baltimore, to Andrew Young, Jr., Congressman from Georgia. Of the seventy-two, a healthy majority of forty-one are either businessmen, politicians, judges, doctors, educators, clergymen, lawyers, or civil servants. Fifteen are entertainers. Two are members of the military—Major General Daniel James, Jr., Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and Rear Admiral Samuel L. Gravely, Jr., the first black admiral in the United States Navy. There are only two black athletes—Wilt Chamberlain, perhaps because he is a college graduate, and George Foreman, perhaps because he was an Olympic Gold Medalist or because, as Ebony points out, he is now a “businessman” as well as a prizefighter.

  Incredibly, the man who is probably the most famous black in the world today, Muhammad Ali, is not included among the “Famous” (surely he is more famous than John H. Johnson). In George Foreman’s sketch, furthermore, Foreman is permitted to make a slurring reference to Ali and his penchant for making speeches. “Ali is qualified to explain physical fitness,” says Foreman, “but not philosophy. To make statements, I think, is the job of intellectuals, not athletes.” Muhammad Ali is probably also more successful and has made more money, than John Johnson. But he is not even included in 1,000 Successful Blacks. He is probably more philanthropic. “One of the problems with Ali,” says his business manager, Eugene Dibble, “is keeping him from giving all his money away, and trying to get him to build up an estate for his children.” The former Cassius Clay is also probably more devoutly religious. He wanted to give the entire purse from his fight with Foreman to the Nation of Islam, to which he is a celebrated convert (instead, under Mr. Dibble’s guidance, the $5,000,000—considerably reduced by taxes—went into a couple of high-rise apartment houses in Chicago). True, he once went to jail-but for a cause many people found admirable.

  Of course Muhammad Ali would never have been accepted by Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. But because he is an athlete, and therefore not quite “respectable,” he has not made it into the black Seventy-Two, the black One Hundred, or even the black One Thousand. Some blacks say, “It’s not so much because of his profession or his color. It’s his religion.”

  At the same time, Ebony publishes a regular feature called “Strictly for Laughs,” a page of black-oriented cartoons. As in any publication, the cartoons get the highest readership, and yet these “Laughs” project a somewhat different image and style of life. In a recent issue, for example, a cartoon showed a young black doctor telephoning his mother to say, “Hello, Mom! I’ve got this pain in my stomach. What do you think I can take for it?”—a fun-poking attempt to deal with black matriarchal society but one which, in the process, makes the doctor seem ignorant. Another cartoon depicts a black couple visiting a home-improvement loan agency; the wife has a large nose and protruding teeth, and her husband explains to the loan officer, “It’s for my wife. I want to send her to a plastic surgeon.” Another cartoon shows a black woman wielding a feather duster in front of the face of a white man. The man says, “You must be the new cleaning woman.” Still another depicts a black controller in the tower of an airport, speaking on the radio to the pilot of a plane that seems headed directly for the tower. The controller says, “You’re not upset about my winning that card game last night, are you, Fred? … Fred!!!”—a reference, of course, to blacks’ proclivity for poker-playing.

  The vicissitudes of black businesses, as well as blacks’ fondness for tavern life, are mocked in a cartoon showing a child manning a lemonade stand. His sign, “Lemonade 10¢” has been crossed out and replaced with a sign that reads “Beer 25¢.” He explains to a police officer, “Well … I couldn’t make any money with lemonade.” Still another shows a housewife, her hair in rollers, surrounded by small children in what is clearly a slum tenement. Rats crawl across the floor and across the newspaper she is reading, and the only visible luxury is an ancient refrigerator. Pointing to the paper, the wife calls out, “Hey, honey, look! It says here we’re part of the middle class.” And so it goes in “Laughs.”

  Editorially, Ebony seems to have become a “shelter” magazine, and this impression is supported by its advertising as one turns the glossy color pages showing glamorous black women dancing in moonlit Acapulco, and black couples, looking young and wealthy, building sand castles on Aegean beaches with bloody Marys at their sides. (White advertisers and their agencies have discovered the power of the black consumer market, providing many jobs for black men and women as models and mannequins. But, according to Beverly Johnson, a leading black fashion model, “The minute the economy takes a down turn, jobs for black models get scarce.”) White shelter magazines like Vogue, Town & Country, and House & Garden also deal with the perfumed never-never world of the very rich, but somehow, in these magazines, it is all taken less seriously; we know that most people do not have drawing rooms decorated with $100,000 trompe l’oeil walls and so we smile at House & Garden’s fantasy-land. But Ebony takes success with deadly seriousness. Ebony says, “This is what black life is like, and here is how much it costs,” which makes it all seem somewhat joyless and rather crass.

  As for humor, white magazines like the New Yorker, Playboy, and so on that publish cartoons also poke fun at human foibles and problems, but they do so in a gentle way. Ebony’s humor—whether one considers “Laughs” funny or not—is bitter and harsh. Certainly, in contrast to Ebony’s editorial text, it does not seem designed to improve the blacks’ self-image. Instead, “Laughs” portrays blacks as ineffectual, irresponsible, and vindictively ashamed of the way they look. Ebony’s “Laughs” seem more like cartoon Angst.

  In New York, the Amsterdam News, published in Harlem—“America’s Largest Weekly,” as its slogan proclaims—is also intended to reflect the quality of Negro life and thought in America’s largest city. With its newspaper format, the Amsterdam News makes for somewhat livelier reading than Ebony—one learns, in screaming red headlines, that one of Elijah Muhammad’s sons has been arrested for selling heroin. But, like Ebony, the insides of the News are filled with the gossipy doings of Society—who has been seen where with whom, and what the Alpha Kappa Alphas and Elks are up to. Marriages are given a great deal of space in the News, and from reading the News it is possible to believe that everyone in Harlem is sipping wine, dressing up, and stepping out. Backgammon, we learn, has taken the upper West Side by storm, just as it has the fashionable white world in Gstaad and Palm Beach. “All the ‘in’ singles are playing backgammon every Monday evening at Rust Brown (96th & Amsterdam),” declar
es the News.

  Like Ebony, the Amsterdam News is given to heady adjectives, and to counting, pricing, and measuring costly luxuries. The Guardsmen’s weekend at the Cavalier Hotel on Chesapeake Bay will be “fabulous,” and guests will arrive not just on a boat but on a “72-foot ChrisCraft.” Every bank teller is an “executive,” and everyone is “prominent” or “famous” and “brilliant.” In Betty Granger’s column, “Conversation Piece,” we read that at “the 50th anniversary of Martha Graham featuring Dame Margot Fonteyn and the fabulous Nureyev, your friends were right there sipping champagne, rubbing shoulders with the veddy, veddy rich.… Among them was the brilliant and handsome doctor Maurice V. Russell (he’s PROFESSOR OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE—Community and Social Medicine—at New York State University Medical Center) and also veddy, veddy rich who after party and reception that followed wonderful Roselyn McDonald and Dr. Lonny MacDonald (he’s the famous psychoanalyst whose patients include the top of the crop of show business and musical personalities) and also well-known Godfrey Cambridge.…”

  In another column, “Swinging Around Town with Audrey Bernard,” we learn that “among the beautiful people who joined in a champagne toast … were Adam Wade (host of Musical Chairs), models Evonne Swann and Barbra Prysock, Cordell Thompson (Jet magazine), Katy Jones, G. Keith Alexander (WBLS), Jean Habersham …” and that Jean Habersham’s morning radio talk program will be “focusing on ‘our’ in people.” Later, “The beautiful people gathered once again at the St. Regis penthouse at a press reception hosted by tennis ace, Arthur Ashe, Whitman ‘Grady’ Mayo of Sanford and Son fame, and officials of the Jamaican government and Reynolds Aluminum.” “Swinging Around” also includes blind “teaser” bits: “What prominent female banker has a foot fetish? Think about it! What prominent young man on the West Side’s ‘10 Best Dressed List’ is ’bout to ease down the aisle again?”

  Perhaps this land of champagne and feathers and Suzy Knickerbocker chitchat of the “in” places where the “in” people are going to play the new “in” games with famous psychoanalysts and rich and handsome medical professors is what Harlem’s readers most want to hear about. Perhaps success in America, for blacks, is what Ebony and the Amsterdam News seem to think it is: money and goods and nothing more. Perhaps, as Ebony and the Amsterdam News seem to suggest—and as Professor Frazier insisted—underneath whatever black success may be can be found that deep underlying layer of racial shame.

  It would be too bad if this were always to remain true. But, at the moment, with their emphasis on sheer acquisitiveness, both these popular publications seem a long way from encouraging, or even defining, true “class,” or dignity, or intrinsic human worth.

  In the world of white journalism, meanwhile, a number of American newspapers and magazines have begun integrating news of black affairs into their pages. A number of years ago, the New York Times quietly started reporting black engagements and weddings in its Sunday Society sections. And even in the South, white newspapers are making a noticeable effort to report news from the black community. The Memphis Press-Scimitar, for example, now gives black and white social news virtually equal space. Some thoughtful blacks wonder whether the black press might follow this lead, and gradually move away from its present parochialism, and stop limiting itself exclusively to stories concerning blacks. It this were eventually to happen, then one fine morning we might wake up to a world where there was no “black press,” and no “white press”—but merely an American press devoted to the daily doings of all of us.

  15

  Strivers’ Row

  Despite Ebony’s emphasis on money and status, black self-pride and dignity do exist. They can be found, furthermore, in some unusual places, such as right in the middle of Harlem in the pocket of citified self-assurance known as Strivers’ Row, an area of Manhattan that most New Yorkers do not know exists, and that few have ever seen.

  Strivers’ Row—or, more properly, the St. Nicholas Historic District, which is also called the David King Model Houses—comprises two parallel blocks, West 138th and 139th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. It is an anomaly and a bit of an anachronism, a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a reminder of what Harlem once was and, perhaps, might have remained. Today, most New Yorkers tend to think of everything north of Ninety-Sixth Street—where the Penn Central Railroad’s New Haven line emerges from its tunnel under Park Avenue into the open air—as “Harlem.” This is not accurate. Strictly speaking, Harlem was the area between 130th Street and 143rd Street, and between Madison and Seventh Avenues, an area, in other words, of fifty-two square blocks. One Hundred and Forty-third Street was the northern boundary, and beyond that the neighborhood was Irish. As older black Harlemites recall, “If the Micks caught you north of a Hundred Forty-third, they beat you up.” The Jews who lived on the eastern side of the border were less bellicose, but still unfriendly.

  In the early days of New York, of course, Harlem was a rural area of fields and farms, where old New York white families had properties. What is now Strivers’ Row once belonged to such families as the Cadwalladers, Lynches, Pinckneys, and Delanceys. As the city grew, Harlem became a kind of middle-class suburb, where real estate values were somewhat depressed since Harlem was considered a difficult place to get to. In 1891, a builder named David H. King, Jr., commissioned a number of leading New York architects—including McKim, Mead & White and its famous partner Stanford White—to design a series of elegant four-story row houses on West 138th and 139th Streets, to be called the King Model Houses. The houses had handsome entrances and facades, casement windows and balconies, balustraded roofs. Behind the houses were courtyards, gardens and fountains, connected by an interior alleyway that ran the length of both blocks. The houses were built of brick, terra-cotta and Belleville brownstone, a special stone gathered from the banks of the Passaic River north of Newark. The King Houses were to be, according to Mr. King’s sales brochure, for “millionaires.” At first, they were—white Christian millionaires, such as the first Randolph Hearst.

  But in the late nineteenth century, as huge migrations of Russian and Polish Jews flooded into the city fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, Harlem became predominantly Jewish. By 1910, an overwhelming majority of the people who lived between 110th Street and 155th Street and between the East and Hudson rivers were either foreign-born or had foreign-born parents. Russian Jews dominated the 1910 census figures. Next came the Italians, then the Irish, then the Germans, then the English, Hungarians, Czechs, and others coming from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In addition, there were 75,000 native whites, and only 50,000 blacks.

  Blacks did not arrive in New York in any large numbers until after World War I, and they followed the lead of foreign immigrants, and moved to Harlem. Most were from the South, and most were poor. As blacks moved in, the Jews moved out—north into the Bronx or, if they could afford it, to the South Shore of Long Island. They remained, however, in many cases as landlords. Landlords charged, many people still feel, exorbitant rents, and it is said that if a landlord wanted to raise his rent fivefold, he rented to a black family. For this, many blacks still hate the Jews. “I was brought up believing that all white people were Jews,” one woman recalls. Not only was the landlord Jewish, but his agent who came to collect the rent was Jewish. To meet their rents, black families doubled up. Large houses and apartments were divided into tiny rooms. As many as fifty people could be found living in a two-room apartment. Building and plumbing facilities were strained. Buildings began to deteriorate. Harlem was on its way to becoming a slum.

  At the same time, throughout the 1920s and early thirties, Harlem was also becoming a popular tourist spot, as well as a place New Yorkers from downtown flocked up to visit. There was “stompin’” at the old Savoy Hotel, there was the famous Cotton Club. Speakeasies abounded that offered lively black entertainment. Harlem in those days was also, ironically enough, a place where discrimination against blacks was rampant. Blumstein’s store was the only store where blacks cou
ld shop. If a black wanted to go to the Apollo Theatre, he had to sit in the balcony, in “nigger heaven,” and Harlem’s Victoria Theatre didn’t admit blacks at all. Childs Restaurant in Harlem, rather than serve blacks, closed its doors. Frank’s Restaurant, once a fine eating place on 125th Street, did not welcome blacks and if a black insisted on going in, he was seated in the back of the room. When black Catholics tried to enroll their children in Harlem parochial schools, they were refused. Even the great Universal and Apostolic Church, it seemed, did not want Negroes. Harlem’s public schools became the dumping ground for the misfits, the incorrigibles, the hard-to-educate—both black and white. Only a teacher who could not get work anywhere else in the city would accept a job in Harlem. Police officers were punished for misconduct or incompetence by being assigned a Harlem beat. Black-owned nightclubs, set up to entertain a white trade, would not admit blacks. To get into the Cotton Club, a black had to be known, and eventually the Cotton Club abandoned Harlem and moved downtown. The Jews and other white immigrants in Harlem had had the advantage of the settlement houses, designed to speed their Americanization. There were no such facilities to ease the Negroes’ transition to city life.

  In the early 1920s, one by one, the King Model Houses began to be sold to blacks who were, for the most part, professional people and therefore relatively affluent—doctors, lawyers, and educators. And the new black residents of these houses decided, at the outset, that their two streets would not be sucked into the burgeoning slum beyond. The trees were tended, the hedges clipped, the stone vases and window boxes were kept filled with flowering plants. Entrance railings and balustrades were painted, brass doorknobs and knockers were polished. Gardens and courtyards were maintained. Each neighbor tried so hard to compete with the others for the best-clipped shrubbery, the best-polished brasswork, the best-washed steps, and the prettiest garden that the two parallel blocks were humorously given the name “Strivers’ Row.”