Certain People (10 page)

People who know Barbara Proctor and who admire her ambition and drive, often wonder why, with no one who cares to leave her growing business to, she continues to work so hard, setting new, more elaborate goals for herself each year. “What's she trying to prove?” one friend asks. “She makes a lot of money, but she doesn't seem to enjoy it. I don't believe she's ever even taken a vacation.”

Barbara Proctor smiles at this and says, “I suppose I could say that I'm doing what I do for
my people
, to build a foundation for my race. That may be part of it, but it's only one part. I wanted to succeed because I was born to succeed. There is a contribution I must make whether it makes my personal life comfortable or not. One really cannot defy a mission. The more you resist, and try to stay in the past, the more things never change, the longer we'll remain just another ‘minority group.' But we never were a minority, you know. After all, two-thirds of the world is not white. The real minority group are the WASPs. Maybe
they're
the ones we should all be sorry for. Could a WASP with all my so-called disadvantages do as much as I've managed to do in four short years? Sometimes I frankly wonder.”

IV

Getting Started

8

Memberships

Charlotte Hawkins Brown's Palmer Memorial Institute may have been the most prestigious, but it was not the only fashionable private school for well-fixed blacks. There was also St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, a girls' boarding and day school run by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, a religious community of black nuns that was established as early as 1829. In Rock Castle, Virginia, St. Francis de Sales School is another Catholic girls' school, run by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and affiliated with the Catholic University of America in Washington. At St. Francis, each school day begins with holy mass and, in addition to a regular college preparatory course, the school offers business and general courses. Like Palmer, both St. Francis and St. Frances are “uniform schools.” Unlike Palmer, however, St. Francis de Sales does not make music instruction mandatory, but charges extra for it. St. Francis de Sales is the sister school of the first black military school in America, St. Emma Academy, also in Rock Castle. In addition to the military, St. Emma, with its surrounding 1,700 acres of farmland, offers a complete agricultural course and has a trade school that teaches students to be automobile mechanics, cabinetmakers, carpenters and such. The two schools share social events, and have joint commencement exercises.

There are elite primary schools for blacks as well, and one of the most selective of these is the Junior Academy of Brooklyn, which takes children—mostly from Brooklyn and Manhattan—from nursery school through junior high school. “To gain admittance, students
must be recommended either by the parent of a child in the school or by a church or one of the recognized organizations, such as Jack and Jill of America or the Business and Professional Women,” explains Mrs. Dorothy M. Bostic, who founded the Academy in the late 1940s. “Most of our students are the children of professionals. We always have a long waiting list for the earlier grades.”

For many years, boys and girls who attended such schools as the Junior Academy or Palmer or St. Francis de Sales were sent away to summer camp at the equally elitist Camp Atwater in East Brookfield, Massachusetts. Like Palmer, Camp Atwater had vaguely religious origins and was run by the Springfield Urban League—supposedly for the children of underprivileged blacks in the Springfield area. In fact, it turned out to be something very different, and “underprivileged” children arrived at Camp Atwater in chauffeur-driven limousines from New York, New Jersey, Washington, and Philadelphia. The daughter of the president of Howard University was a camp counselor. Such families as the distinguished Dammonds from New York sent their children to Camp Atwater. (The Dammonds are descendants of Ellen Craft, a heroine from slave days; so fair was Ellen Craft's skin—she, the family claims, was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson—that she was able to disguise herself as a white man going north for medical treatment and to escape slavery in Georgia. Traveling with her was a “manservant” named William, who was actually Ellen Craft's husband. They traveled to Boston in first class accommodations, and arrived in time to take part in a mass meeting against slavery at Faneuil Hall.)

Atwater, under the surveillance of a Reverend and Mrs. DuBarry of Springfield, was strictly run. July was for the girl campers, and August was for the boys. “We all knew each other, and our parents all knew each other,” recalls one alumna of many July summers at Atwater. “I remember one afternoon, coming home from a canoe trip, and seeing all the girls from my cabin in a huddle down by the side of the lake. There was obviously some sort of crisis. It turned out that two little black-skinned girls from Springfield had arrived whom nobody knew. We didn't know who their parents were. They didn't look like us, dress like us, talk like us. We were sure they were covered with germs. We made them sleep in the center of the cabin, as far away from our bunks as we could get them.”

Far more important than where an upper-class black goes to prep school or camp has been which fraternity or sorority he or she joins
at college, or which club or fraternal order he or she joins afterward. In fact, black educators have often complained that, in terms of the Greek letter societies, upper-class black parents spend far more time and energy grooming and preparing their children for the social side of college life than they do for the academic side. On most college campuses, the most prestigious sorority is Alpha Kappa Alpha, followed by Delta Sigma Theta, both of which were founded at Howard University. The real reason why Delta Sigma Theta does not have the status of AKA is probably that AKA is smaller; Delta has nearly 250 chapters, while AKA has just over a hundred. To get into AKA on most campuses it is almost essential that one's mother have been an AKA also, and, preferably, one's grandmother. As for the Deltas, according to one AKA, “The Delta girls were never quite as
respectable
.” To counter allegations than they are snobbish and exclusive, the AKA's point out that their chapters and alumnae organizations raise thousands of dollars a year for scholarships, and to help to support such organizations as the N.A.A.C.P., the Urban League, and the United Negro College Fund. The Deltas, on the other hand, have been cited by the American Library Association for their bookmobile and library projects.

The oldest black college fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi, was organized in Philadelphia in 1904, and has now come to be known simply as
Boulé
. Although the original aim of this society was to bring together “an aristocracy of talent,”
Boulé
quickly became a symbol of all that is snobbish, restrictive, and antiblack in American Negro education. Only the “best” black men were taken into
Boulé
, membership in each chapter was kept small, and the number of chapters was kept few. To belong to
Boulé
meant that a man had escaped from the working class, and had entered the bourgeoisie, if not the elite. Two years later, as an “answer” to
Boulé
's exclusiveness, Alpha Phi Alpha was founded by eight black students at Cornell. Since then, Alpha Phi Alpha has expanded to membership in the tens of thousands and, because of its size, it has somewhat eclipsed
Boulé
in social importance on American campuses and in the quality of black business and professional men it has produced. Alpha Phi Alpha likes to boast that it has produced over forty college presidents, dozens of judges, a number of bishops, and that more than half the alumni members in the Philadelphia and Greater New York chapters are doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and men who own their own
businesses. (“Better and Bigger Negro Business” is one of the mottoes of the fraternity.)

Neither Alpha Phi Alpha nor Sigma Pi Phi, however, has had the impact on black businesses that the black fraternal orders have had. As early as 1865, there were black lodges of Elks, Odd Fellows, Masons, and True Reformers in every city in America that contained a significant black population. The oldest of these black societies is the Masonic Order, organized in Boston in 1775 and chartered twelve years later by the Grand Lodge of England under the name African Lodge Number 459. It was founded by Prince Hall, a West Indian, along with fourteen other blacks assigned to a British army regiment. The original purpose of the order was to provide members with mutual aid and protection in times of sickness and “distress.”

Prior to the Civil War, there were at least two secret societies in existence set up by free blacks in the South—the Galilean Fishermen and the Nazarites. After Emancipation, a proliferation of others came into being, including the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, the Order of Good Samaritans, and the Colored Knights of Pythias. Each had its secret ritual and ceremony, an esoteric handshake and other signals and codes of ethics for its membership.

The social and political life of the black community revolved around the meetings, parties, conventions and other affairs that took place at these lodges. They were where banquets and wedding receptions were held, where card parties were organized. They were centers of community news and gossip and, it would seem, of interminable feuding among the members.

These lodges collected large sums of money. There was a seemingly endless variety of dues and assessments—local dues, grand lodge dues, supreme grand lodge dues, initiation fees, grand lodge fees, supreme grand lodge fees, and special fees, plus assessments for building funds, endowment funds, education funds, and special funds. Many fraternal orders also sold such paraphernalia as fraternal rings, pins, tie clips, cufflinks, sweetheart pins and other jewelry, as well as the costumes and other trappings that were put on for special meetings and occasions. It has been estimated that blacks contributed at least $168,000,000 to fraternal orders between 1870 and 1920. Many lodges also sold insurance and endowment policies to their members.

What the members got in return for their large outlays of cash is worth noting. Obviously, as the lodges and clubhouses quickly
became repositories of large amounts of black capital, there were certain dangers, and there were many men who just as quickly lost sight of their orders' lofty goals, and were led into temptation. For a lodge treasurer to vanish with lodge funds was not unknown, and so it was essential that the man who supervised the coffers be a person of the highest probity and integrity. He had, in fact, to become the town's leading black citizen, topmost in the pecking order, the equivalent of the president of the town's biggest bank. Often, he was the town's leading physician or clergyman (black churches were also collecting large amounts of money).

The lodges were, in fact, the first black banks, and most of the black banks in America—as well as the black insurance companies-grew directly out of them. The lodges loaned money to their members, provided savings accounts and depositories for valuables, and offered mortgages. They were kindergartens and training schools in high finance. Because the lodges were, after all, private clubs, not only the treasurers but the general membership were learning how to handle and invest money. The monthly meeting when the treasurer's report was read was usually unanimously attended. Some lodges went directly into business. The Grand Lodge of Masons of Mississippi, for example, early in the twentieth century bought a thousand acres of timberland and went into the lumber business. During the same period, the True Reformers organized a bank, a chain of retail stores, a hotel, a newspaper, a nursing home for old people, and an all-black community called Browneville. The Independent Order of St. Luke, under the leadership of a forceful black woman named Maggie L. Walker, operated a printing plant, a bank, an office building, a restaurant and restaurant supply house, and a department store.

The argument, often given, that blacks have not attained a degree of wealth and success because of their “late entry” into the commercial world, is not valid. Between 1900 and 1910 there was an unprecedented black business and building boom, as the members of the various lodges within a city, or in other cities, strove to outdo each other for the good of themselves and the good of the order. In the process, of course, of building larger and larger buildings and acquiring larger and larger properties, many lodges overextended themselves, and many of their enterprises passed quickly into white hands. There was also the apparently insoluble problem of internecine bickering, jealousy, and squabbling. What seemed to be the major black
business coup of this period was undertaken by the Odd Fellows of Georgia, under the leadership of a dynamic man named Benjamin T. Davis. In 1912, the Georgia Odd Fellows bought an entire block of land on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, and constructed a five-story office building at a cost of $250,000. The following year, Davis and his group built an auditorium on the rest of the land for $180,000. At this point, however, when things seemed rosiest, the members of the order fell to wrangling. There were charges, countercharges, recriminations, and accusations of alleged mismanagement of funds. The disputes could not be settled, and the order went into receivership in 1916.

Feuding, mismanagement, lack of expertise, excessive and in some cases conspicuous spending (the earliest black banks went in heavily for costly marble facades, heavy chandeliers, carved pilasters, and ceilings decorated with gold leaf) all conspired to doom many early black enterprises—along with the eagerness with which white men moved in and took over the moment a black business began to founder. And yet the fraternal lodges, and the businesses they spawned and in some cases ruined, taught important lessons. The first black bank in America, the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company, was chartered in 1865, on the initiative of missionary groups and the Freedmen's Bureau, by the United States government. It was ostensibly a philanthropic operation to help the freed slave enter the economic community, “organized and controlled by white friends of the Negro for his benefit.” It was also designed to encourage black thrift and initiative and, to black men of the period, the creation of the Freedmen's Bank was as symbolic of their new freedom as the Emancipation Proclamation. No one expressed this better than Frederick Douglass, the wealthy black Washingtonian who became the bank's last president, when he said, “The history of civilization shows that no people can well rise to a high degree of mental or even moral excellence without wealth.… The mission of the Freedmen's Bank is to show our people the road to a share of the wealth and well being of the world.” Douglass had been a slave who escaped and made his way to Canada, and then to England. In London, he had been taken up by Mayfair society, where he was something of a curiosity. No one could believe that this courtly, bearded gentleman had actually been a slave, and enough money was raised—$700—to buy him his freedom. He returned to the United States, where he went on the lecture circuit as an eloquent and outspoken Abolitionist. From his lectures
and, later, from his Rochester-based newspaper, the
North Star
, he became a rich man.