America Behind the Color Line (15 page)

Summit is nice. I haven’t felt cut off from black people living in a mostly white town, because I’m in a Black Achievers Program at the Summit YMCA. It’s a good way to stay involved with my black community. It’s for kids in sixth to twelfth grade from private and public schools. Kids in the same grade level meet once a week just to be together and focus on our schoolwork. We do lots of reading and writing. We get time to talk about racial issues and what it feels like to be discriminated against. Sometimes we watch a movie. We just kind of hang out as kids and friends. It’s real fun, a nice group of people.

Some of the African-American kids in Summit make fun of me because I drive a Mercedes. It does make me feel bad, but I have a nice group of black friends too. It isn’t my fault that my parents are successful. I’m proud of that. Do I have to go hiding the fact that I’m rich? No. It’s not fair. Being black doesn’t mean you have to be poor.

My best friend, Kim, is black. She lives in Maplewood and goes to Columbia High School. Her family is middle class and she hangs out with the white kids. The poor black kids don’t like her because they think she’s not black enough. I guess you just find that anywhere. Is it jealousy maybe? I don’t understand why they would be jealous instead of proud of the fact that we are a well-to-do black community. Don’t you want that for your community if you’re black? Shouldn’t you be happy for us because we are well-to-do and we’re going somewhere?

The black kids who criticize the middle- and upper-middle-class blacks could make it somewhere. The kids at the Achievers Program are very smart people. The ones who aren’t middle class have very strong opinions about blacks who are. They have the intelligence to succeed; it’s just that they may not have the money to go to college. One of the things the Achievers Program does for us is provide a scholarship fund. They want us all to get into college so we have a future, and then other black kids will want to do the same. Someone will look at me and say, oh, why don’t I follow in Viola Irvin’s footsteps and become well-to-do? Not that I’m well-to-do on my own now, but someday I’ll have a good career.

At my school I sit with the white kids more often, but I also like the black kids. I went to a prom yesterday and my table was black, because I hang out with most of them and I need to talk to them. I remember in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, all the black kids sat together. I used to sit with them sometimes and then sit with my white friends sometimes. A couple of the black kids sat with the white kids. But now in sophomore and junior year, I’m finding that black and white sit at the same table more and more. There’s a group of five white kids, and there were five black girls sitting at the same table. We need that. It’s good, because we have to break that racial line. I’m not saying I’m going to marry a white boy. I mean, it might happen. I think it’s okay, but I don’t understand why there’s all this racial tension.

Maybe I’m young and I’m growing up in a different time period. I’m growing up in the white suburbs. I guess I must be a very sheltered girl, compared to most black kids or at least black teenagers. I don’t understand what they’re saying sometimes, and then I use some words they don’t understand. It makes me feel sheltered, but it doesn’t make me feel bad. It doesn’t make me feel not black. It doesn’t make me feel white. Black is black. You have a history of slavery in your blood. You share in the history of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

It’s not your money, and it’s not your Ebonics, it’s you that makes you black. It’s the history, the blood that’s in you from the past. If you’re a rich black person, it’s just as bad, because you’ve got the same racial profile. Our brother has been pulled over because he’s a nice black kid driving a nice car. It’s weird.

Sometimes you wonder, should I play the race card in school? Is it because I’m black, or is it because I’m me? I was getting a B minus in one of my classes and the teacher said I was doing fine, that there was nothing I could do to improve on my performance. But if I have a B minus, I can always do something to improve. Did he say that because I’m black? Or is it him? You never know. Is it a question of racism, or is it a question of me? Or him? Or her? Or is it being a woman as well, because sometimes women face discrimination in the classroom? It used to be that a woman’s place was in the home.

You don’t always want to play the race card, but sometimes you’ve got to. Personally, I don’t think I find much racism, because lots of the kids are open about things. We have a very open atmosphere. Sure, there’s those few people who are racist maybe, or maybe it’s more the parents. I remember hearing girls say, oh yeah, I can’t come to this place ’cause my parents said it’s too horrible. Like the Newark area. I can’t go to Newark ’cause it’s bad. That is racism. There are white towns with problems too, but you don’t stay out of the whole town.

One year there was a minor incident. A white girl I know was saying get out of the Black Achievers Group; you don’t want to be part of that kind. But then a couple of years later something more serious happened. A certain black girl got a very specific note, and the bottom line was like, get back to Africa with the animals, where you belong. It was something along those lines. At that time we had a black headmistress at the school and we had an assembly to talk about racism. I’m not sure what else could be done, but maybe that’s because I was in eighth grade at the time and it was a high school incident.

Then when I got into high school, we wanted a black teacher. As black students, we felt we needed a black teacher. We got a couple of notes saying we already had two incompetent black teachers at this school. If you don’t want a black teacher, it’s okay; we understand that. But you don’t have to be mean about it. They called them incompetent people, so there is racism in there. So there have been direct incidents of racism, but never to me, and I hope I never have to play the race card.

THE PEARSONS
Living the Life

Walt Pearson

We were comfortable in Summit, New Jersey. Our friend Milton Irvin was a big influence on us, because he was already living in Summit and he told us quite a bit about the area. My wife, Donna, is from Montclair, so she was also familiar with the area. Donna and I had a list of thirty indices for the community we wanted to reside in at the time. Ridgewood and Montclair were our second and third choices, but Summit was the only town that met all of our criteria. Summit has proximity to New York City, on the Midtown Direct, and it has good public schools and a diverse community. People are beginning to realize there’s a significant African-American community there. There are four African-American churches in town. Baptist churches. A lot of people don’t realize that, because when they hear the name Summit, they think of Wall Street affluence, white affluence. A long time ago, before they discovered the Jersey Shore, affluent whites from Wall Street used to have summer homes there.

I’m very happy with my new job in Boston, and with our home in a western suburb of the city. We’ve just begun to settle in, and someday we’ll have a story to tell about our life here. But our thoughts are often with our friends in Summit, and our memories of our life there will always be vivid. I remember, for example, our introduction to our Summit neighborhood, which one could say was rather humorous. Our house had been built by a member of the Rockefeller family in 1972. They lived in it for a year and then sold it to the family we bought it from in 1999. On the second day we were there, I had the moving company come. But on the first day, a couple of buddies helped me out. Across the street were the Hubbards. I had a truck outside, and as I was moving some things into the house, Mr. Hubbard’s housekeeper, who was Latino, came across the street and said to me, I’d like to meet the family that’s moving into this house. I laughed and said, you’ve just met him. I was in dirty jeans and a beat-up T-shirt and my buddies and I were all looking terrible, and she didn’t believe that I had bought this house. So that was the first day. After that, we were very welcomed by the neighbors here except for one next door, who chose to be unfriendly.

The person we bought our house from used to be chairman of the nominating committee at Canoe Brook Country Club, and he told us a great story. He said he was one of the first Irish members of Canoe Brook. He and his wife had been there for a few months, and he invited the president of Canoe Brook over to his house and said to him, well, how are things going at the club? I really enjoy it, but I’m new. And the president said, the club’s going downhill because we are admitting a lot of big Irish families. Little did he know that his new club member was Irish, with six kids.

I don’t think racism will ever disappear. The playing field still isn’t level, and I don’t think it will ever be, at least not in my generation or my kids’ generation or my grandkids’ generation. On Wall Street what happens now is they let us in the door, but instead of blatant racism, you come across subtle things. For example, it seemed like they never wanted me to get too big an assignment, too big a client. When I went after those guys, I was always told I had enough clients, I had enough capacity, whereas my colleague could have even more clients than I did but yet he wasn’t at capacity. It was things like that.

In most of my jobs, I’ve been the only African American, or the highest-ranked African American, particularly on the Street. At Alliance Capital, I had to work hard to be as successful as possible, but I knew that my being successful was a way to help bring in other African Americans. As long as I’m successful in my work, and I keep bringing in more people and they’re successful, that opens a door for more of us to get in there.

I do feel that by integrating the workplaces, the neighborhoods, and the country clubs, we are an extension of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Judge Ernest Booker, my brother-in-law, was the first black member of the Essex County Country Club, in West Orange, New Jersey, and Milton Irvin was the first African-American member of the Baltusrol Golf Club, which by the way will host its first PGA Championship in 2005. I felt comfortable at the Canoe Brook Country Club because I was out playing golf, but we didn’t become members. I think the rest of my family would have been uncomfortable at Canoe Brook.

My kids are eight, six, and three years old. Two girls and a boy. When we chose to live in Summit, we weren’t particularly worried about our kids’ identity in a white environment. We knew there was another African-American family a few doors down, and Milton and his family were close by. We were active in Jack & Jill, an African-American social and cultural organization. We belonged to a black Baptist church in Montclair but visited Fountain Baptist in Summit, which we liked. And we had a network of like-minded friends, many of them my buddies from Harvard Business School, who live either in Summit or in South Orange and Montclair. I would have liked to see more of them move to Summit when we were living there, but it costs a nice piece of change to do that.

There’s no question that my kids, as blessed as they are, will be criticized by economically disadvantaged African-American kids. They will have to learn to handle being called white. I went to a private school, and I would come home to a housing project every day and was called “schoolboy” a couple of times. I had to knock a few heads. Fortunately, I was a good athlete, which always helped me. A lot of people left me alone. But I tell my kids now, you’re going to encounter a different kind of racism. You’re going to confront the class system from your African-American peers, some of whom are going to call you “whitey” or “Oreo” because you talk a certain way, or because your daddy works in a firm that is identified mainly with middle- and upper-class white people. In addition, you will have racism from white people. It’s going to be arduous. The kids need to have a strong foundation here at home. They have to come home and be able to tell us everything. They have to realize they’re blessed, but they must give back. It’s nonstop. You have to keep after them, keep warning them. It’s not an easy thing.

We are trying to give our children a strong sense of identity as African Americans in a predominantly white environment. If my children decided to marry a white person, I would be a little disappointed. I’m open to it, and I would definitely support them. But I would prefer them to marry someone African American.

We thought about going back to the inner city and perhaps renovating a brownstone while living around more middle-class African Americans. But once we started having children, we wanted green grass and we wanted a sizable lot. I sit on the board of two nonprofit organizations because I’m very involved in the community, and that helps me a lot. The kids I work with are touched by the fact that I’m willing to keep up with them and keep track of them, that I come from the same situation they do, and I speak their language if I want to. Most of them don’t have a father figure at home, so they’re looking for a role model. As my own kids get older, I will get them more involved in community work.

In downtown Summit, there’s a housing project that’s pretty much all people of color. Every day when I got off the train, especially in the summertime, I used to see the brothers who live there hanging out, and I was reminded of where I come from. My kids saw the project all the time when we went downtown. They realize that there is a significant African-American community out there, some not as blessed as they are.

Nowadays there are programs to help bright and motivated African-American kids get out of the ’hood—whether it’s ABC or Prep for Prep or private schools that offer some students full scholarships. However, if you come home to little or no family structure, you need something to keep you going, and that’s the tough part. Beyond that, the playing field is far from level in terms of the ability to make connections in a white world. I’ve worked with young entrepreneurs of color in a program called the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and they complain all the time about insufficient access to circles of people who could help them get connected in business, or even get funding for their projects. They don’t have the opportunity to be where those conversations happen.

Black-on-black crime is one of our biggest problems, and we can’t simply blame white people for it. It comes back again to the family and the family structure. In my household, the last thing on my mind was joining a gang. I came home from school and my mom said, you’re not going outside until you finish your homework. We had a structure. My father came home every night, and we had supper together and a routine. We went to church often. We had values put into us, strong, powerful values, so we never thought about gangs or sticking someone up. When we saw somebody’s mother wheeling a shopping cart, we ran over to help her with the groceries. That’s just the way we were brought up.

Savoy
magazine recently published a disturbing article about a beautiful girl who was killed in Chicago. She was raised by her white grandparents, and her black grandmother always sent for her to come up to Milwaukee for the summer. She enjoyed spending the summer in Milwaukee seeing the black side of her family and learning about that part of her heritage. When her black grandmother died, her white family would not pay for her to go back to Milwaukee to see her other black relatives in the summer. So she started feeling she was missing something, and she ran away from Texas with a couple of friends and went to Chicago, where she hooked up with some friends on the South Side.

She was invited to a party on the West Side of Chicago. I lived in Chicago for four years, and I know it well. This beautiful mulatto child went to a party on the West Side, in one of the most treacherous neighborhoods. She went with two other girls, sat down at the bar, and was immediately approached by a bunch of cool, slick-on-a-curb brothers. The other two girls say, let’s get out of here, and they leave. The mulatto girl gets in a car with three young black men, not knowing anything about these guys from the ’hood. It turns out that one of them has sex in the backseat of the car with the girl, later claiming it was consensual sex, and when she doesn’t want to perform anal sex, he rapes her and then kills her.

If the girl had been able to see the black side of her family, she wouldn’t have been so intrigued with being seen at the rough side of black life in Chicago. If her family had just kept letting her go to Milwaukee in the summer, the West Side of Chicago wouldn’t have been something exotic for her, the forbidden fruit.

The two pillars of family and education must be in place if African Americans are to make further progress. If we can stabilize those two structures, then I think we can bring up most of our people. I’m optimistic. I see the glass half full. That’s just my nature. When I see Ken Chenault, Stan O’Neal, Richard Parsons, and Franklin Raines, I see the barriers being broken down and the glass ceiling being cracked. I hope they bring along others with them. Realistically, you can’t capture everybody. Even in the Jewish culture, which does a great job, there are some Jews that are lagging; there are white people that are lagging. I don’t think we can get everybody. But those of us who are successful owe it to our community to go back and help as many people as we can. Furthermore, I encourage bright African Americans to seek out the investment management profession, because it is one of the few endeavors that has a scorecard on your performance every day. It’s about as close to a meritocracy as one can get. Of course, it isn’t perfect.

Lack of access to capital has deterred the movement and progress of all African Americans. But as a people, we are starting to gain that access. We had the late Reginald Lewis, the financier and entrepreneur who owned TLC Beatrice International. We have Bob Johnson, founder and CEO of BET. I just read in
Savoy
magazine about a brother I’d never heard of who’s a billionaire out of Birmingham, Alabama, and I was like, wow! One of my classmates, Keith Clinkscales, founded Vanguarde Media, which owns
Savoy
and
Honey
and
Heart & Soul
. Catherine Hughes, a black woman, is doing great things in the radio/media world.

There was a group of brothers and sisters in my generation at Harvard Business School. A lot of them came through a program called ABC—A Better Chance—which helps young people from low-income households. Several, like me, come from modest means, but from a family that stressed education. We’ve all done well, and now we’re pulling for each other, while helping each other out. We all try to support African-American dentists, doctors, and accountants. We try to patronize each other’s businesses and keep it in the community. That’s key. And the kids see that too. We live a bicultural life. We have a black base and a black nurturing environment; we live part of our lives in the white world; and then we come on home.

Donna Pearson

I’m very happy living in the Boston area now, and I also loved living in Summit. I like a family-oriented town. I’m always involved with the girls’ schools. Before we moved to Summit, and then west of Boston, we lived in a similar kind of town in California.

I worry about our kids being in a mainly white upper-middle-class town. It was that way in Summit, and it’s the same in the town we recently moved to. The girls go to school with a majority of white kids. So we try to keep a balance. We make sure our children are aware of being black. They’re surrounded in our home with works of art by blacks, and they read a lot of books by and about African Americans. We’re in Jack & Jill, and that’s good. In Summit, there was an African-American teacher at the school and we asked, make sure our children get that teacher. And we kept our kids in touch with their friends in other communities, as we will do when they have had time to make new friends in the Boston area.