Certain People (20 page)

Though young black people insist that they are proud of being of the upper, or at least more privileged, class, they have definite mixed feelings about being black at all, as another young man says: “Knowing that there are difficulties that confront us all as Negroes, if I could be born again and had my choice I'd really want to be a white boy—I mean white or my same color, providing I could occupy the same racial and economic level I now enjoy. I am glad I am this color—I'm
frequently taken for a foreigner. I wouldn't care to be lighter or darker and taken for a Negro. I am the darkest one in the family due to my constant outdoor activities. I realize of course that there are places where I can't go despite my family or money just because I happen to be a Negro. With my present education, family background, and so forth, if I were only white I could go places in life. A white face holds supreme over a black one despite its economic and social status. Frankly, it leaves me bewildered.”

Bewildered—it is as good a word as any to describe the way well-educated, well-off black families view themselves in relation to white society. It is with the same ambivalence and uncertainty that blacks view interracial marriages. Black women, for example, are nearly always opposed to black men marrying white women. It is not so much that they hate and resent the whites, nor is it because of the reasons usually given—that when a black man takes a white wife, he becomes subservient to her and, at the same time, usually marries someone beneath his social class. It is more likely to be because black women feel that, since there are so few eligible black males, they should save themselves for black women. At the same time, in a number of upper-class black families, a wife will accept the fact that her husband has a white mistress and even, at heart, be a little proud of it; it does not threaten her position socially, a position she tends to regard as somewhat shaky. Black women see nothing wrong with white men who take black wives, particularly if they are
rich
white men. This is taken as a tribute to the “secret charms” of black women. But when Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., married New York socialite Beryl Slocum, even though she was rich and social, the black communities of New York and Washington were up in arms.

Because of their mixed feelings about being black at all, most blacks are not quite sure how they feel about the many light-skinned people who manage to move out of the black world and “pass” as whites. No statistics are available, but it has been estimated that thousands of black people cross over the color line each year, and it is assumed that because men are more mobile, more black men than women are passing as whites, and that they do so for economic reasons. Some black men have left their black wives and children to move upward and outward into the white business world. There is the case, for example, of Harry Murphy of Atlanta. The son of a printer, Harry Murphy, and not James Meredith, was actually the first black person to graduate from “Ole Miss.” Murphy attended the
University of Mississippi as a white man, and no one ever knew the difference. He is now living and working in New York. And Robert Johnson, an editor at
Ebony
(and no kin to John Johnson), remembers that at Great Lakes Naval Training station, a schoolmate, who Johnson knew was black but who had fair skin, approached him and said, “Listen. This is the last time we'll ever talk about this, but I'm passing. Just don't blow my cover. Don't blow my gig.” Johnson insists that he was delighted to hear of his friend's good fortune. “My theory is,” he says, “that if you can fool the white folks, more power to you!”

But one wonders whether such sentiments are, in the last analysis, sincere. The word “pass” has two meanings in the black world. When someone says, “He passed,” it does not usually mean that the person referred to has become assimilated with whites. To pass is also to die. Even the best-educated blacks refer to death as “passing,” the way lower-class whites will use the euphemism “passed away.” In other words, it is possible that light-skinned blacks who have disappeared to join the whites are considered as good as dead.

A number of upper-class blacks have, of course, made noble efforts to come to grips with their black identities, and to rid themselves of their insecurities and feelings of inferiority. One of the most articulate of these is Dr. Margaret Burroughs, an assistant professor at Kennedy King City College in Chicago and the director of Chicago's DuSable Museum, which is devoted to black art and culture. Dr. Burroughs, a doughty, wirily built lady who looks as though nothing would faze her, has long been concerned about her fellow blacks' poor self-image, and long ago decided to do something about it. Early in her teaching career, for example, a group of black students came to her office and complained about a white teacher who had asked her pupils to sing “Old Black Joe.” Dr. Burroughs, a woman not without a sense of humor, thought about the problem for a moment, then turned and faced a window and said, “Now listen. I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to this window. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm telling you what
I'd
do. I'd do as the teacher told me, but whenever I got to the chorus of that song, I'd sing it, ‘Old
white
Joe.'” The students followed her suggestion and, though the other teacher was not amused, she got the point.

In 1952, long before the natural or “Afro” style in hair became fashionable among blacks, Dr. Burroughs decided, for no particular reason, to stop “pressing” her hair. “It was expensive, and it was
time-consuming,” she says, “and I thought, why should I go to so much fuss just to make my hair look like white people's hair?” So she let the natural kinks emerge. The reaction among her friends, associates, and students was strong, even hostile. She was criticized and ridiculed and got anonymous letters. In her classroom, a student placed a note on her desk that read, “Maizie's Beauty Parlor: You go!” She took the note up with the class, and asked them if they could think of any reasons why she might be wearing her hair as she was. One student suggested, “You've got a scalp disease.” Dr. Burroughs explained, “I think I look more beautiful this way. I think all people look more beautiful when they look like themselves.”

Still, wherever she went she was jeered and mocked. Ironically, for letting one of the traits of her race show, she was called “a disgrace to the race.” The most violent criticism came from her fellow blacks. On her way to a lecture she was giving at a black college in the South, she passed a dormitory window and heard a student say, in a loud voice, “What's
she
trying to prove?” And at the lecture she was booed, not for what she had to say but for her choice of coiffure. As a result of this experience, Margaret Burroughs wrote a poem that has become something of a black classic, called “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black”:

Let it be known to all, the story

Of the glorious struggle of my people
.

Let it be known that black men and women

Helped to build this, our country
.

Let it be known that black men and women of the past

In an effort to make this country

What it ought to be, gave up their very last

To make America a real democracy
,

A true homeland of the free
.

Let our leaders of today go back into the past

And come fighting forth envigored with the spirit

Of Turner, and Vesey, Douglass, Tubman and Truth
.

Let our stalwart black youth lift their heads in pride

As they tell of their fathers' fight for freedom

To the white youth by their side
.

Yes, let it be known, let all the old folks tell it
.

Sing it to the babes yet in arms
.

Let us read the glorious story

Right along with our Bible. Let it be known to all
,

The story of the glorious struggles of my people
.

Too long
…
Too long has it been kept from us
.

Margaret Burroughs's hairdo became not only her personal trademark but her personal symbol of protest. “To me it began to have a deep meaning,” she says. “It meant that black people
must
be proud of what they are and who they are, and not try to hide their lights under wigs, and hair straighteners and bleaching creams. I hope it also meant that what goes on inside a person's head is more important than what sits on top of it.”

Building her DuSable Museum of African American History has been another “glorious struggle” for Margaret Burroughs, and she has faced problems similar to those of the Museum of African Art in Washington. Though Chicago had an American Indian Museum, a Jewish Museum, an Oriental Institute, and a Polish Museum, there was vociferous opposition to the idea that a museum of black culture should be established. Much of the criticism came, again, from leaders of the black community, one of whom wrote to say, “We have nothing to be proud of.” The white community was also opposed, claiming that a black museum would constitute an instrument of segregation. Still, the DuSable Museum was formally inaugurated in October 1961, in Dr. Burroughs's living room.

It was not until thirteen years later that the museum was able to move out of her living room and into a building in Washington Park with 25,000 square feet of exhibition space, donated by the city of Chicago. The museum's collection is still almost pathetically small, and the building, with cracked plaster and peeling paint, is sadly in need of repair. Its cleaning and maintenance staff is meager, and the museum presents an appearance of honest, if untidy, poverty. Dr. Burroughs and her husband do most of the work themselves, and they put in long hours without any compensation. The museum offers a number of unique services. It will supply suggestions to parents who want to give their babies African names. It will demonstrate techniques for wrapping skirts and turbans in various African styles, and it will advise couples who want to get married with an African theme. In 1974, the DuSable Museum put on a wedding where the minister wore a dashiki, and the bride and groom stood at an altar decorated with African sculpture. If a group of children cannot come to visit the museum, the museum will come to visit them—in the form
of a lecturer, usually in the person of Margaret Burroughs, with a suitcase full of artifacts. Though most museums shut off their telephones after 5:00 or 5:30
P.M.
, the DuSable Museum keeps its switchboard open until late at night to answer questions on African history. Usually, these come in forms of calls from barbershops and corner taverns from men and women who need a fact to settle a bet. But the museum is desperately in need of funds, and Dr. Burroughs is currently trying to raise $2,000,000 for operating costs, renovations, and new acquisitions—a modest enough sum, compared with budgets of other museums. “If every black person in Chicago would contribute just one dollar, we would reach our goal,” Dr. Burroughs says. So far, however, these dollars have not been forthcoming.

In Washington, one of the problems facing the Museum of African Art is that its director, Warren Robbins, is white. In Chicago, the situation facing the DuSable Museum is, if anything, even more acute because Margaret Burroughs is black. So deeply rooted is black self-doubt that the majority of blacks simply cannot accept the possibility that a fellow black, such as Margaret Burroughs, might be doing something worthwhile. Such is the competitiveness of black versus black that blacks actually resent and seek to belittle other blacks, such as Margaret Burroughs, who have achieved some degree of recognition and status above them. The result is a large segment of the black population that would rather submit to the authority of whites than to accept the leadership of other blacks.

In fact, middle-class blacks often seem to have difficulty cooperating in any endeavor. It has been noted that black scholars and educators often tend to turn to a white “authority” in their field for advice, that black doctors turn to white doctors when they need a confirming opinion, and that black lawyers would rather confer with white members of their profession than with blacks. A black client often feels more secure with a white lawyer, and a black patient feels he is in better hands if his doctor is white.

In a study by sociologists Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, it has been pointed out that blacks' frequent failures in professional, social, and business relations with other blacks is because “in every Negro, he encounters his own self-contempt.” It is as though the black were saying, “You're only another black man like me. So why should you be in a position above me? Why should I listen to you?”

Or perhaps, in even more human terms, it is because in small, daily ways, even the most successful blacks are reminded that, though
some
black people have made great and important strides,
most
have not. It is what the Washington lady, from her car, saw in the drunken young man dressed like “Super Fly.” It is what Doris Zollar sees when she looks at her wedding book. When she married Lowell Zollar, a young doctor, it was a great social event in Little Rock, and was given large coverage in the society pages of the black press. There was a huge reception, with many gifts, each one carefully listed in the wedding book. Among the gifts of Lenox china dinner plates, vermeil table settings and silver tea services, are listed such gifts as this one:

“Mr. and Mrs. B—: $5.00”

14

The Power of the Press

In 1957, a black sociologist named E. Franklin Frazier published a book called
Black Bourgeoisie
, the contents of which still raise hackles among upwardly mobile blacks. Frazier, who died in 1962, was chairman of the Department of Sociology at Howard University, and among his assertions, repeated throughout the book, was the statement that Negro society lived “in a world of make-believe.” Primarily, Frazier was critical of the new middle-class blacks who had achieved some degree of affluence during their lifetimes—in the professions or white-collar occupations—and whose lives had become an abject, and usually second-rate, imitation of the doings and attitudes of the white upper-class social structure they saw around them. This imitation, as Frazier saw it, was more like a dreadful parody. Frazier pointed mockingly at the then-current phenomenon of black debutantes, in long white dresses and opera-length gloves, being presented at cotillions in rented hotel ballrooms by tail-coated fathers who were druggists, bank clerks, or electricians. These new-rich (or comparatively rich) blacks, Frazier claimed, tried to compensate for their innate feelings of inferiority by buying expensive automobiles—even then, the Cadillac had become the black status car—which were nearly always financed; on houses that they could not afford; on clothes, furs, and jewelry that they did not need; on costly and tasteless furnishings that they never used; and on luxury cruises and other travel undertaken not so much for pleasure as for a way to flaunt their new wealth. Needless to say, Professor Frazier's book made a
number of black people, who could see themselves reflected in his pages, very angry.