Certain People (24 page)

Though Strivers' Row is still considered “the best two blocks in Harlem,” there are other choice addresses, constituting small pockets of black wealth and prestige, in northern Manhattan. For years, fashionable blacks have also favored the area nicknamed “Sugar Hill,” which is more properly known as Harlem Heights, an amorphous
neighborhood between Edgecombe and St. Nicholas Avenues and West 143rd and 155th streets. There were the Dunbar Apartments, for example, at Seventh Avenue and 150th Street. Originally built as cooperative apartments for middle-income families, the Dunbar quickly became a stronghold of the emerging black bourgeoisie. W. E. B. DuBois and Walter White, among others, lived in the Dunbar for a while, and the buildings, which had large interior gardens, were exceptionally staffed and protected. A drawback of the Dunbar was that the apartments, though many of them had fine views of the city from the bluffs, had rather small rooms and were walk-ups. An even more prestigious Sugar Hill address was 409 Edgecombe Avenue, a tall elevator building, which, from the 1930s on, was something of a Harlem showcase in that it boasted not only an elegantly canopied entrance but also a full-time uniformed doorman. Bus tours of Manhattan used to point out 409 Edgecombe, where a number of black entertainers and athletes—including several New York Giants players—made their homes. It was said that if a black person got into a taxi in Manhattan, all he had to say was, “Take me to Four-Oh-Nine”; the driver would know he meant 409 Edgecombe. To live there was a symbol that a black had “arrived” in New York. W. E. B. DuBois also lived for a while at 409, as did Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, and W. H. Braithwaite.

There are newer semiluxury apartment houses in other parts of Harlem that have tended to replace 409 Edgecombe in terms of desirability and fashionability. There are the Esplanade Gardens, between 137th and 138th streets on Seventh Avenue. There is also the Lenox Terrace, on 135th Street just west of Fifth Avenue, where Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton lives, and the Riverton, at 2235 Fifth Avenue. Other well-to-do black families have moved into large apartments in fine old buildings on upper Fifth Avenue, north of Ninety-sixth Street, which have become peacefully integrated. Dr. Cannon, for example, lives at 1200 Fifth Avenue, at 101st Street, with a view of Central Park. His was the first black family in the building. Now there are two others.

New York, unlike Washington and other cities of the South, does not have a pronounced black Old Guard. Like most white New Yorkers, most black New Yorkers were born elsewhere, and many migrated to Harlem from Southern cities. But New York's leading black families would include the Austins (Augustin A. Austin, a real estate man, was called the richest black man in New York). Today,
that distinction probably belongs to Mr. J. Bruce Llewellyn, who operates a chain of supermarkets called Fedco Foods Corporation, which is ranked as the fourth largest black-owned business in America (behind Motown and Chicago's two Johnsons). Mr. Llewellyn is president of a New York organization called One Hundred Black Men, Inc., which was formed to impress the white business community with the vitality of black enterprise in the city. Membership in One Hundred Black Men is limited to the city's top black businessmen, including John Procope, publisher of the
Amsterdam News
, Earl Graves, publisher of
Black Enterprise
, F. W. Eversley, Jr., a leading building contractor, and Eugene H. Webb, a real estate broker.

One of the crusades of One Hundred Black Men is to try to refute the claim, which is often made, that black people, when they become successful, “do not take care of their own kind.” They point to such philanthropists as the late Dr. Arthur C. Logan, who was extremely community-minded. (The old Knickerbocker Hospital in Harlem has been renamed the Arthur C. Logan Memorial Hospital.) Members of New York's Bishop family have also been generous, along with the Bradfords, Billupses, Sanderses, Riverses, Wrights, and Weavers—all prestigious New York names. The late Dr. Godfrey Nurse was a noted philanthropist who gave $100,000 to Columbia University; Dr. Lloyd Freeman was a benefactor of both Columbia and Fisk Universities, and Dr. C. B. Powell, emeritus publisher of the
Amsterdam News
, contributes heavily to the Y.M.C.A. and the N.A.A.C.P. New York's black leaders also point out that less well-to-do blacks contribute to philanthropy as well, albeit indirectly, when they pay dues to unions, which, in turn, give from their treasuries. Business leaders stress that blacks have always been generous to their churches, and that the thousands of black churches in the United States could not exist, and provide the services they do, without black philanthropy. In Harlem, the richest church is probably Abyssinian Baptist on West 138th Street, a block from Strivers' Row. “Abyssinian thinks of itself as very fancy,” says one woman, “simply because it's got air conditioning.” The elite black church, however, is St. Philip's Episcopal, on West 134th Street.

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 until 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.