Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  A great deal of black philanthropy is carried on by organizations. The black Elks in New York, for example, give $15,000 a year to charity and support between forty and fifty scholarship students annually at Eastern colleges. The Masons contribute $25,000 a year to black causes, and the two leading women’s organizations, the Links and The Girl Friends, have each given $100,000 to both the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Urban League.

  In New York, blacks have prospered in supermarkets, publishing, insurance brokerage, and real estate, but they have not, for some reason, been particularly successful in banking. There are six black-owned banks in Chicago, two in Washington, but only one in New York City, the Freedom National Bank in Harlem, which was incorporated as recently as 1964. Harlem’s black elite, furthermore—though a number are stockholders—won’t bank at the Freedom Bank. It is considered “the poor man’s bank.” In 1928, an experimental bank was opened in Harlem which was the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It was Mr. Rockefeller’s philanthropic notion that a bank should be established which would provide banking services for the black community, which, at the time, could not get loans at white banks. The bank was also designed to provide banking training to young blacks, and to strengthen New York’s banking ties with black-owned banks in the South. It was called the Dunbar Bank—like Washington’s Dunbar High School, after the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar—and it failed after barely five years.

  One reason for the bank’s failure was the Great Depression that hit the American economy within a year after its founding—but that was only a contributing cause. The real reason for the Dunbar Bank’s failure was that it got no support from the black community of Harlem. Partly, this was because Harlem was suspicious of Mr. Rockefeller’s motives; it was assumed that here, again, was a case of a rich white man trying to exploit poorer blacks in order to get richer. Mr. Rockefeller might claim to have high-minded aims, but this was doubted. Also, of the bank’s nine employees, three were white—the three at the top: the president, the vice president, and the cashier, which again created an impression of white exploitation. Mr. Rockefeller also employed a black man at the Dunbar Bank named Roscoe Conklin Bruce. Mr. Bruce was supposed to “keep a finger on the pulse of Harlem”; he was distrusted by Harlem.

  Other things were wrong with the bank. It was probably placed in the wrong location, in the “snob area” hard by the Dunbar Apartments, at 148th Street and Eighth Avenue. Had it been placed on Harlem’s main artery, 125th Street, where most of Harlem shopped and did business, and where the new Freedom Bank is located, it might have done better. But, as it was, it drew its employees from the neighborhood and the “Dunbar Apartments crowd.” And, as Mr. Guichard Parris, an early employee of the bank, recalls, “People here didn’t like the idea of going to a party and running into the teller they just made a deposit with the day before. People don’t want their business to be told to other people. When it comes to banking, Negroes want secrecy. They don’t want the rest of Harlem to know what they’re doing, what money they’re making, how big their deposits are. You have to remember, too, that this was during Prohibition, and a lot of Harlem money was being made illegally. At a white bank like the Chemical, you could at least be sure of privacy and anonymity.” Rockefeller, after four unsuccessful years, tried to reorganize the bank. Augustin A. Austin, Harlem’s richest man, was persuaded to place his funds in the Dunbar Bank, and was advertised as the bank’s largest single depositor. Nothing worked. The bank folded and, ever since, the Rockefellers and their various foundations and philanthropies have been noticeably wary about going into anything in the areas of housing or banking.

  Much of black fund-raising and philanthropy in New York is in the hands of several capable women. There is Mrs. Louise K. Morris, for instance, who works furiously for a variety of black causes and heads the Utility Club, Inc., which raises and disperses between $15,000 and $20,000 a year for charity. But probably the leading black society woman in New York—though some criticize her for her love of publicity and her fondness for hobnobbing with white society folk—is Mrs. Henry Lee Moon. Plump, fair-skinned, animated, with a flair for startling and exotic clothes and jewelry, Mollie Moon is certainly one of New York’s more colorful ladies. In her pretty apartment in Queens—the Moons moved out of Sugar Hill several years ago in quest of more space and cleaner air—Mollie Moon arranges herself against a large bouquet of gladioli and sips champagne. A program from the Bolshoi Ballet sits on her coffee table, and it is not one of the free handout variety but the kind you pay for. It is clear that Mollie Moon is a woman of taste and consequence, and that her status symbols are the same as any white woman’s in her station.

  Mollie Moon has been much photographed by the press, and has a huge stack of eight-by-ten glossy prints to prove it. She has been photographed being bussed by former Mayor John V. Lindsay, chatting with the late Mrs. Robert Wagner, with Marietta Tree, Marian Anderson, Ralph Bunche, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt, the late Winthrop Rockefeller, Robert David Lion Gardiner (sixteenth Lord of the Manor of Gardiner’s Island), and Pope Pius XII (with whom Mollie Moon, a Catholic, had a private audience)—all of whom she counts among her many friends. Mollie Moon adores champagne, and it matches her effervescent personality. She never used to drink wine and once, on an ocean voyage to Europe, she said to a steward in the dining room, “No wine for me, thank you.” A friend turned to her in amazement, and said, “Mollie, are you turning down champagne?” She cried, “Was that champagne?” She tried some, liked it, and has been sipping it ever since from a stylish tulip glass.

  Mollie Moon was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but “escaped at the age of nine months—obviously not under my own steam.” The person who engineered her escape was her mother, an energetic lady who brought her to Cleveland and who for years was active in Republican politics there—remaining a Republican long after most blacks transferred their allegiance to the Democrats under Roosevelt. Mollie Moon was educated at Rusk University and at McHarry Medical School, where she earned a degree as a registered pharmacist, a profession she has never practiced. She also studied at Columbia, and took courses in German and biology at the University of Berlin. Mollie Moon, clearly a woman of the world, says, “If you ask me, the main difference between upper-class Negroes and upper-class whites is that the Negroes are better educated.” On travels that took her into the segregated South, she was undaunted by discriminatory regulations. “I just put on a sari, painted a red dot on my forehead, and said I was an Indian.”

  Back in Cleveland, she met her husband, an erudite man who is a graduate of Ohio State School of Journalism and who wrote, briefly, for the New York Times—where old Mr. Sulzberger refused to give him a press card, saying that the Times was “not ready for that”—and later for the Amsterdam News. Henry Moon is now retired and is now known, according to his wife, as “the best martini-maker on the East Coast.” In New York, where the Moons have lived for the last thirty-five years, Mollie Moon threw herself into good works, and her name has decorated any number of boards and committees. At the moment, she is on the board of the Advisory Drug Committee, which reports to the Commissioner of Food and Drugs in Washington. But her main philanthropic endeavor has been in behalf of the National Urban League, and for a number of years she has been chairman of the Urban League Guild.

  In New York, though she is unaware that she has a rival in Washington with the same title, Mollie Moon is known as “the black Perle Mesta.” She is also known as the “Queen of the Cocktails-five-to-nine Set.” She loves parties, and there has been quite literally no one of importance in New York in the last three and a half decades who has not been to one of her entertainments. In her apartment, the telephone never stops ringing with party invitations. Her favorite party guest was Dr. Bunche, who also loved parties. “Oh, how that man loved parties!” she says. “Even when he was old and ill and losing his eyesight, he’d drop everything to go to a party. He’d come to my house for cocktails at five and stay u
ntil two in the morning.”

  Mollie Moon’s most celebrated party is New York’s annual Beaux Arts Ball, which she inaugurated in 1942 in behalf of the Urban League and which has been a New York society feature ever since. Mollie Moon is considered a genius at getting leading white socialites to dress up and sit down at dinner with celebrities from the black world of society, sports, and entertainment. One might not think that Josephine Baker and Marian Anderson would both turn up as honored guests at the same party, but Mollie Moon did it. And when Josephine Baker met Marian Anderson, Mme. Baker performed a deep curtsy. The Beaux Arts Ball used to be held in the old Savoy Hotel in Harlem—“in the days when Harlem was safe, and gay, and fun to go to”—but in recent years it has been held in the Waldorf-Astoria, always in February “to relieve the mid-winter doldrums.” Though 1975, because of the recession, was not a banner year for the Beaux Arts Ball, its profits usually yield the Urban League about $20,000 annually and, over the years, has netted the League over half a million dollars.

  The Beaux Arts Ball is famous for the dazzling spectacle of the costumes people turn up in and, at every ball, the most spectacularly dressed person of all is its chairman. She appears in glittering headpieces of towering tinsel, fur, feathers, jewels, and gowns bedizened with sequins and gold paillettes. At a recent ball, the glamorous chairman was presented to the audience stepping out of a huge mock-up of a champagne bottle, wearing a gown of silver lamé with a jeweled breastplate and a crown of white ostrich plumes.

  Some black New Yorkers criticize Mollie Moon and call her a social butterfly. But she has her serious side. Not long ago, for example, she attended an Urban League conference in Atlanta, and a diversion offered to the conferees was a tour of the homes of the many wealthy blacks in the city. Mollie Moon demurred. “Why should I be interested in going to see the homes of wealthy blacks?” she says. “I said no. I told them I’d rather go to the museums, or visit some of the local historical sights.” She is aware that she has critics, but pays them little heed. Poring through her huge collection of glossy photographs of herself and her famous friends, of her many public appearances in her extraordinary costumes over the years, she says, “My only regret is that I’m not a size twelve anymore.”

  17

  Taste

  White visitors to homes of affluent blacks are often struck by a puzzling, and yet pervasive, “difference” in the appearance of things. Louis Auchincloss, the novelist and Manhattan Brahmin, whose favorite philanthropy is the Museum of the City of New York, has been called on to visit the homes of wealthy blacks in Harlem in the course of fund-raising, and says, “It’s very hard to describe. These were gracious, cultivated people, but there were things in their houses and apartments that—while obviously expensive—I just wouldn’t want in mine.” Another New York white, a woman, says, “I noticed little things, small details, that just struck me as somehow—well, not wrong, but still not quite right. I remember, for example, noticing a huge Steuben glass bowl in the center of a coffee table. I know the cost of Steuben, and I’m sure that bowl must have cost at least twelve hundred dollars. It was filled with gold-painted walnuts.” Others have noticed other subtle differences, which raise bemused questions among white people. Why, for example, should Bennetta Bullock Washington, the wife of Washington’s mayor and a woman of aristocratic background, satisfy herself with plastic plants in her house and settle for brightly colored glass ceiling fixtures that would strike some as garish? And why, though she is a woman with a Ph.D. degree, does she live in a house that seems to contain not a single book? Why (as Ebony’s success stories never fail to note) has the ownership of a Cadillac automobile become the ultimate black success symbol—to the point where less rich blacks often go heavily into debt simply in order to drive a Cadillac? The Cadillac has become such an important ornament to black life that blacks themselves make jokes about it. There is the story of the black man who bought a new Cadillac but was careful always to park it across the street—so his house wouldn’t topple over on it. Then there is the tale of the wealthy black who directed in his will that he be buried in his Cadillac. As the great car and its departed passenger were being lowered into the grave, a spectator at the funeral murmured, “What a way to go!” Wealthy whites tend not to favor Cadillacs and, instead, would tend to buy an equally expensive, but smaller and less ostentatious, Mercedes. At issue here is the complicated question of black taste or, perhaps, lack of it. Or the subtle difference between using wealth and simply spending money.

  Should, for instance, a white visitor to the home of a well-to-do black be surprised—or slightly put off—when his hostess asks him politely, “Will you have apple juice, milk, or ginger ale?” At least one New York man found this selection of drinks a trifle odd. Why do so many black cooks add two cups of sugar to the cake recipe when one would do? Do blacks really “like different foods,” and is that why many Southerners still insist that “blacks smell different”? (The theory of black body odor is as difficult to assess as the theory that black males have larger sexual organs than do whites. Body odor is a black obsession, as attested to by the number of deodorant ads carried in Ebony, but the answer is probably that some black people have an unpleasant body odor at some times, just as some white people do.) Why is Kool-Aid such a popular drink among blacks? And, for that matter, why do so many black people smoke Kool cigarettes? At least one psychologist, Dr. Edward Lahniers of the University of Cincinnati, feels that the associations of the words Kool and cool, as in “keeping one’s cool” and “playing it cool,” have much to do with this. As for alcoholic beverages, the more expensive brands of Scotches, such as Chivas Regal, are often served in the households of well-to-do blacks. At the same time, liquor distributors have long been aware that whiskies with the word “white” in their brand names are extremely popular in black bars—White Horse Scotch, and Dewar’s White Label, for example. A Scotch with an integrationist label—Black & White—is not a popular drink with blacks, nor is expensive Johnnie Walker Black Label. That, of course, is one kind of taste. It has nothing to do with why the Harry Belafontes, in their large New York apartment on West End Avenue, have a living room dominated by a huge, curving, mirrored bar (whereas, in a white home, one would tend to find a small rolling table for drinks), or why Berry Gordy, Jr., the mogul of Motown Records, has—or had an interior decorator who let him have—a California house draped with gold lamé curtains, or why Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is certainly a woman of a high degree of sophistication, contributed exactly one dollar to a recent Cancer Crusade in Atlanta, and then demanded to know how much other people were giving. Each to his taste, of course. But the divergence between black tastes and white has certainly been a factor that has contributed to the apartness of the races, and that has made the white, when encountering the black in his home or his world, feel that he is entering alien, puzzling, and not particularly compatible territory.

  Many whites feel, along with Professor Frazier, the black sociologist, that blacks, when they become successful, immediately want to flaunt their success—not merely to whites, but also to less fortunate blacks. One white New York woman, who has been involved with various committees involving the black community, made this observation: “The first time I was invited to dinner in a black home, I was a little bit overwhelmed. I knew the family had money, but I was completely unprepared for what I found at the dinner table. The food was delicious, but there was so much of it! Course after course after course. I got the definite feeling that this wasn’t the way they usually ate, but was a spread that was put on just for me, because I was white. And the table setting. I’ve never seen so much silver and china in use at one dinner table. Even though there were all those courses, there was more silver laid out beside my plate than I could possibly use. I had the feeling she was using every piece of silver and every piece of china she owned. A few weeks later, I had this same woman to my house for dinner. I had what I thought was a nice menu, but I could tell that she was somewhat surpris
ed that I wasn’t serving as much food as she had. After all, she had served a turkey, a ham, and a roast of beef, and all I was offering her was a roast. At one point, she pointed to some dishes that I keep displayed in a dining room china cabinet, and said, ‘That’s lovely china. Why don’t you use that?’ She seemed actually a bit put out that I wasn’t using all my best things. Oh, and another thing I remember about the dinner at her house. The dining room was quite attractively furnished, but there was a television set in the room. At seven o’clock, even though we were eating dinner, she turned on the news.”

  Partly, the difference in taste that white people find odd and foreign may stem, as Professor Frazier suggested, from the fact that middle-class blacks try desperately hard to “do things” the way white people do, and to conform with what they see as white upper-crust standards (including, perhaps unconsciously, drawing an association with whites from such products as White Horse and White Label whisky). At the same time, even the wealthiest blacks have had only a limited opportunity to observe, at first hand, white upper-class life on a daily basis, and to absorb the small nuances of white social behavior that whites take for granted and therefore practice with ease.

  For their ideas of what upper-class white tastes and manners are like, most blacks have had either to rely, as house servants, on occasional backstairs, behind-the-scenes glimpses, or on the heightened version of white life that is presented in films or on television. Understandably, with Hollywood as a model, the black imitation of white high life often seems—to white eyes—garish or even grotesque. A curious loss of communication between blacks and whites is the result. In Cincinnati, for example, a white hostess telephoned a prominent black couple and invited them to her house for cocktails, and was disappointed when the couple did not appear. Later, she learned the reason: the black couple had been offended because the hostess had not mailed out a printed invitation. In the eyes of the black couple, the white hostess had been guilty of a social gaffe. The proper black hostess—as the white hostess would have known had she read Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s little etiquette book—mails out her invitations. In her section on “Invitations,” Dr. Brown wrote: “A formal invitation is printed or engraved to be elegant, while an informal invitation may be given on the telephone. The receiver of such an invitation is sometimes at a disadvantage because he is not given time to consult his or her calendar.… The telephone is a most convenient substitute for informal invitations [but is] recommended for school boy and girl affairs.”