Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  With the wide gap that exists between black and white society, certain details of behavior, certain “social graces,” that come naturally to upper-class whites either elude the blacks or, when they try to employ them, seem stilted, forced, and—to a white’s way of thinking at least—in poor taste. In very much the same manner, Old Guard Christian families regard the habits—in terms of dress, home decorating, and speech—of newly rich Jews as gauche and tasteless. Similarly, old-line German and Sephardic Jewish families who have learned to dress conservatively and live quietly look askance at their newly rich coreligionists from Eastern Europe who wear clear plastic sling-back shoes, mink stoles, and diamonds on the beach at Miami. As one German Jewish woman put it, “I have diamonds, too, but I’ve never taken them out of the bank.” Of course Charlotte Hawkins Brown had a word on this too: “Don’t make the mistake of trying to be too elegant. It is exceedingly bad taste to overdo at any time. Neatness and simplicity are often preferred to showy elegance.”

  But, even more important, black taste may be related to the rather special way blacks regard and interpret social “class.” In a series of interviews with successful black businessmen, each was asked the question, “How do you define class and what, to you, constitutes class?” An overwhelming majority immediately answered that class was a matter of clothes, and how a man dressed. Clothes, the feeling was, definitely made the man. One young man, the first black to be made an executive with a leading white accounting firm in Chicago, went on at length as to how important his clothes were to him. He not only bought his suits at the finest stores—Brooks Brothers, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Marshall Field—and his shoes at Bally and Gucci, but he was also deeply concerned with the care of his clothes. “Dry cleaning ruins a good suit,” he said earnestly, “and so does repeated pressing. I try to take care of my suits in such a way that they never need to be dry cleaned more than once every six months. As for pressing, if a man hangs up his clothes properly every night when he takes them off, making sure that the trousers hang straight from the cuffs in a clamp-type hanger, with the seams matched, and his jacket on a padded hanger, a suit will stay in press. If I have a spot on a necktie, I never have it cleaned. I simply throw it out. The same thing with socks. I’ve never worn darned socks. When I have a hole in a sock, I throw out the pair. Underwear too, and shirts, and shoes. I spend a dollar a day on shoeshines.”

  Blacks have always been extremely fashion-conscious. In fact, blacks have become genuine fashion leaders and any number of styles, later adopted by white people, were first popularized and worn by black men and women, including men’s flared trousers and wide-lapeled suits, body shirts, sandwich-soled shoes, women’s high boots, mini skirts, dyed furs and pants suits. Both Paris and Seventh Avenue are well aware of blacks’ trend-setting role. In terms of decorating and home furnishings, however, they have been much less influential. Perhaps this is because blacks have had less opportunity to display their homes to white people. A mirrored ceiling or a huge lamp with a pink-ruffled shade would impress another black, but it would not be admired by a white person with “good taste”—nor would it have much chance to. Clothes are another matter. A well-turned-out black man or woman on the street is noticed by everyone, and some status, after all, is determined by how others regard you, which may be related to how you regard yourself—and how well you can keep up your front. How you protect yourself, in any case, will determine how others will regard you and, to a black, fine, stylish clothes are the easiest, most obvious form of protection.

  On the white side of the racial divide, there is a tendency to think of “middle-class blacks” as middle-class people with dark skins. This is far from the fact, and class in the black world is determined by other, somewhat different, distinctions. To a white of the middle or upper class, his class is determined by his occupation, income, the quality of his residence, his prestige, life-style, and personal identity. In addition to the way he dresses and the way he presents himself—including the important matter of the way he speaks—black status is conveyed by home ownership and education. Blacks tend to attribute far greater importance to education as a means of maintaining and keeping status than white people do. Most educated whites tend to assume that their friends on their own social level were similarly educated, and give no more thought to it. “Oh, did you go to Yale? So did I” is the common white reaction whenever the subject comes up, which is seldom. Educated blacks, on the other hand, discuss and compare their educations—and their parents’ educations, and their children’s educations—endlessly. To have a son or daughter who is a college dropout is a sorry disgrace to a black family, while a white family shrugs it off as no more than a minor mishap. A college degree is the goal of every black achiever, and to have a graduate degree beyond that is regarded as a passport to the loftiest social strata in the black community. Black doctors, dentists, lawyers, druggists, teachers, ministers, psychologists, nurses, social workers, and even undertakers stand at the pinnacle of black society because they are, by virtue of their professions, recipients of higher education and special training. These professionals are much more highly regarded in the black community than mere money-makers. A black college professor earning $12,000 a year would be held in higher esteem by other blacks than the unschooled merchant earning $100,000 a year. A woman such as Mrs. Mary Gibson Hundley of Washington, a retired high school teacher who looks forward to her monthly Social Security check, considers herself of a much more refined cut of cloth than Chicago’s John H. Johnson with his $40,000,000-a-year publishing business—partly because she graduated from Radcliffe and Johnson never got to college. Berry Gordy, Jr., might head a record company with $50,000,000 in annual sales, but he, again, never went to college and is an ex-prizefighter to boot. It is doubtful that Mrs. Hundley or others in her class would even care to meet him.

  Education, of course—with its Latin derivation meaning “a leading out”—has been the traditional avenue out of the ghetto for all minority groups. And it is certainly true that, when little-educated blacks have been able to educate their children, the children have usually done better, financially, than their parents. But some critics have felt that blacks have stressed education, culture, and intellectual refinement too much and that education snobbery, in a capitalist society, helps account for the fact that there are so few successful black business enterprises, and even fewer people who could be called black capitalists. There is a limit, after all, to how much a Ph.D. social worker, teacher, or even physician can earn. By placing so much emphasis on education and the collection of multiple college degrees, blacks have failed to develop any strong tradition of setting up their own businesses, accumulating property and business assets, or inheriting wealth—all of which are preoccupations of white capitalist society. In fact, it has even been suggested by at least one black sociologist that blacks’ education fever, promoted by black colleges in the South—most of which were established by white missionaries—was part of a sinister white conspiracy to keep black people in the professional class and to prevent them from ever joining the ranks of the capitalists.

  Dressing well, being well groomed, owning your own home and car, having an education—these are the main criteria for status in black America. There are, of course, some regional differences in the way the struggle for status is waged. Northern Negroes tend to be more concerned about the goals of integration. In the South, old-line black families who resisted the rush to Northern cities in the 1920s and thirties tend to have a longer history of institution building, to have more status consistency, to place more stress on lineage and family background, and to have more feeling of having been “born into the class.” It is a sad fact, though, that many blacks all over the United States seem not to have realized that having a sense of personal identity is also a hallmark of class. Perhaps it is because, as many blacks claim, white Americans place more emphasis on race than on class, that white Americans look upon the black college professor with the same disdain, and even alarm, as
the black hoodlum, that whites cannot yet perceive blacks as individuals but only as blacks. But if this were true, the result of this kind of treatment might have been to teach blacks that they have a community of interest with one another. Thus far, however—as blacks continue to try to out-do and out-dress each other, and out-educate each others’ children in the scramble for class and status, a true community of interest and taste does not seem to have developed.

  Any scramble can become unmannerly, and good manners, too, are a part of having class. White upper-crust society places great emphasis—perhaps too much—on good manners and is frequently put off by black abruptness. As one white man puts it, rather despairingly, “Why do they seem to have a perpetual chip on their shoulders?” Not long ago, a white hostess in New York was entertaining a black woman—the owner and publisher of a successful black newspaper, a woman with a postgraduate degree. The black woman opened the conversation with “Mrs. S—, I’ll bet you don’t remember where we met.”

  “I certainly do,” said her hostess. “It was four years ago at a League of Women Voters’ meeting.”

  “That’s not true!” replied her guest. “I met you twenty years ago, when I was working my way through college cooking for white people. I was cooking a dinner for Mrs. B—on Sixtieth Street, and you came back into the kitchen to tell me that you enjoyed my meal. You see? You’re just like all white folks. To you, all black people look alike.” Very much put off, the hostess fell silent, and the brief drawbridge that had been lowered between the races clanged shut. Charlotte Hawkins Brown would not have approved. As she used to tell her privileged pupils, hoping that they would one day become the peers of privileged whites, “Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way in the world. Without them, it is like a great rough diamond, very well in a closet by way of curiosity, and also for its intrinsic value. But most prized when polished.”

  18

  “Sweet Auburn Avenue”

  If the mood in New York and Washington is edgy, uncertain and uncomfortable, the mood in Atlanta is, by comparison, serene. Georgia’s bustling, booming capital—“the fastest-growing city in the United States,” Atlantans say—has long taken pride in its “un-Southernness,” and in a more moderate, liberal, and enlightened attitude toward blacks than can be found in other cities of the South. Atlanta likes to compare itself with such cities as Houston and Los Angeles, rather than with Savannah, New Orleans, Memphis, or Mobile. Though a street in Atlanta is named Margaret Mitchell Avenue, gone are the days of Gone With the Wind and Scarlett O’Hara in her crinolines with her eye-rolling colored Mammy. Even during the hard, cruel days of segregation, Atlantans say, there was a “deep undercurrent of understanding and respect” between the whites of Atlanta and their black neighbors. The undercurrent may not have been as deep or as solid as white Atlantans like to suppose, but it is true that, for the most part, race relations in Atlanta have been peaceful. The last major race riots occurred here in 1910. Atlantans claim that this is because Atlanta is a city of colleges and educators. There are more than a score of institutions of higher learning in the city, including six major black colleges, such as Spelman, Morehouse, and Atlanta University. This has created an atmosphere of mutuality and morality, high-mindedness and tolerance. Atlanta University, for example, for years had a racially mixed faculty. White and black teachers dined with each other, entertained each other, and when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to invade the Atlanta University campus, the white teachers joined with the blacks to stop the Klan at the college gates.

  Some black Atlantans, on the other hand, claim that the generally good relationship that exists between blacks and whites can be attributed to other factors. Mrs. Grace Hamilton, who, among other things, was the first black woman to be elected to the Georgia State Legislature, believes that it is because so many prominent white Atlanta families have blood relatives who are black living in the same town. Mr. David T. Howard, for example, who for years ran a leading black funeral home, is said to have been some sort of cousin of Mr. Pierre Howard, a prominent white attorney and member of the State Senate. Another white Atlantan is said for years to have kept two families—one black and one white—on opposite sides of town. In the manner of a true Southern gentleman, he is equally generous to both families. His white wife is aware of, and accepts, the situation, as does his black mistress; the two women even smile and speak to each other when they encounter each other on the street. “Everyone in town,” as they say, understands the arrangement, as they understand other similar arrangements. Of course it is not considered quite “fitting” to talk about it much.

  Such situations have become quite common in the South, where there has been more sub rosa interracial mixing than one might suppose would have been the case. (Just as prominent Southern white men have discreetly kept black mistresses, so have prominent Southern blacks kept white mistresses; it is considered a bit of a status symbol.) In Charleston, South Carolina, there is the case of the Grimke family. Charleston’s Grimkes, who are white, consider theirs to be “one of the noblest names of Carolina.” Therefore, Mrs. Angelina Grimke Weld of Charleston was somewhat surprised, in 1868, to read in her newspaper of a young black student at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania—the first college for Negroes—named Archibald Henry Grimke, who had been cited for his extraordinary “erudition.” Mrs. Weld wrote to young Grimke and, saying that since Grimke was such an uncommon name, she was curious as to how he had come by it. Archibald Grimke wrote back to say that he was one of three children of Henry Grimke, Mrs. Weld’s brother. After Henry Grimke’s wife had died, he had taken his white children’s black nurse, one Nancy Weston, as his common-law wife, and had three mulatto children by her.

  At Henry Grimke’s death, he had said to his black wife, “I leave you better than free because I leave you taken care of.” His will had stipulated that Nancy should be provided for and her children educated. But his white son, E. M. Grimke, had disobeyed his father’s orders. He had thrown Nancy and two of her children out. He had kept young Archibald, his own half-brother, as his slave and then, heaping insult upon injury, sold him to another planter. After the Emancipation, the little family was reunited, and Nancy had been able to earn and save enough money to send two of her boys, Archibald and his brother Francis, to Lincoln University.

  Mrs. Weld was astonished with the revelation that she had Negro nephews. She had been a staunch Abolitionist, had moved from South Carolina to Massachusetts in order to carry on her crusade, and she was shocked to think that her white nephew—or any of the noble Grimkes, for that matter—could have treated his own flesh and blood so shamefully. She immediately went to Lincoln University to visit her newfound black kinfolk. In order to atone for what her relative had done, she offered to pay for Archibald and Francis Grimke’s education.

  The white Grimkes and the black Grimkes became friends. Angelina Grimke Weld and her husband invited the boys to visit them in Massachusetts and, when they arrived, though they had little money, their mother had seen to it that “each carried a cane, wore a high silk hat which had been made to order, and coats that were custom made.” Both boys graduated from Lincoln in 1870, and Francis Grimke was valedictorian of his class. With their Aunt Angelina’s support, Archibald went on to Harvard Law School, and Francis went to Howard Law. When Archibald Grimke finished Harvard, Angelina and her husband helped him get placed with a Boston law firm. From 1894 to 1898, Archibald Grimke was United States consul to Santo Domingo. He later joined W. E. B. DuBois in the Niagara Movement, and the N.A.A.C.P., which grew out of it. Francis Grimke switched to theology, and graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary. For the ardor of his sermons, he became known as “The Black Puritan.” Thus, to some extent, the stain that had been placed on the noble name of Grimke was erased on both sides of the racial fence, and Aunt Angelina had atoned for the misdeeds of her relatives.

  In Atlanta, Grace Hamilton is an excellent example of a Southern black lady of cultivation and refinement. Atlanta-bo
rn—as every true “Atlantan” must be in order to consider himself such—as was her mother, Mrs. Hamilton’s maiden name was Towns. Her paternal grandfather’s great-uncle was George Towns, and he was governor of Georgia in the late 1850s—and he was white. When Mrs. Hamilton was first elected to the Legislature in 1966 amid a certain amount of fanfare and publicity, she rather startled people by offering to pose for a photograph under a portrait of her distinguished white ancestor. Mrs. Hamilton’s husband, Henry Cooke Hamilton, is a tall, courtly gentleman, the retired admissions director at Morehouse and former professor at Atlanta University, and is so fair that, during segregation days, he had no difficulty passing as white and was therefore spared many indignities and inconveniences as he traveled about the South recruiting Morehouse students. (An uncle, Cameron Hamilton, actually moved to California and became a white; one of Mrs. Hamilton’s uncles also “passed.”) Once, when Mr. Hamilton took a seat in the Jim Crow car of a Southern train, he was asked to move to the white section. In a small Southern town, Mr. Hamilton stopped for a milkshake at a segregated lunch counter. He was served his milkshake by the white waitress, but was recognized by the black short-order cook, who told him, “You don’t belong here.” (Many blacks claim that, with a kind of black radar, blacks can recognize other blacks whom white people accept unquestioningly as white.) “You go to hell,” said Mr. Hamilton to the cook. The cook thereupon told the waitress that she was serving a Negro. The waitress, flustered, appeared not to know what to do about the situation. “So,” says Mr. Hamilton, “I decided to take the horns by the bull, and said to the waitress, ‘May I have a straw?’” He got his straw, drank his milkshake, and left the establishment without incident.