America Behind the Color Line (6 page)

Some people in the community say these guys and other successful blacks are not brothers anymore. But that’s something you have to live with. People say things they don’t even mean and certainly do not understand. When I was doing voter registration in the South, I was considered the militant. Then I’d go to work for the United Negro College Fund and find out I’d become a Tom. Same person, same beliefs.

It’s important to the progress of our people that black people like Ken Chenault and Dick Parsons and Frank Raines and Stanley O’Neal are occupying these positions of power. It’s important in that it says to young people that they can do it too—that anything you want to achieve can in fact be achieved. But it says something else. It says that if you have the ability, the tenacity, the perseverance, the fortitude, and the smarts, they will put you in this job. Ken Chenault is chairman of the board at American Express, and I’m the only other black member of the AmEx board, so we’re a minority. But when you think about Parsons, Raines, Chenault, and O’Neal, white people have put them in charge of their money, and my people did it. That’s very serious! And the one thing that we know is that white people like money, and that’s why they sold us and bought us. It had to do with money. It had nothing to do with humanity; it was about money. But white people have entrusted their trust funds and the future of their children and their grandchildren to these brothers, because they are competent.

Bear Bryant didn’t play those black football players to integrate the team; he played them to win. There are so many choices today that didn’t exist when I was growing up, in sports as in education, business, community work, and politics. It’s important to individuals that they have a place to pursue their happiness. And places are now available that were not available. I’m sort of a golfer. I love it and I do a lot of it, especially with my wife. It’s being outdoors, the fresh air and the sunshine, green grass, a breeze from the lake or the ocean or wherever you’re playing, and it’s fun and it’s competitive. It’s a growing sport among black professionals, among this new leadership class of businesspeople. I played a lot of tennis for a time, after I moved to New York. I never put a tennis racket in my hand before I came to New York, and I don’t play as much tennis now, but I love it. I have partners here who take clients golfing, but I’ve never made a deal on the golf course. I fundamentally don’t take clients golfing, because golfing is my thing. And so I do it with my wife, Ann, and with my friends and my buddies.

When I grew up in Atlanta, the city golf courses were not open to blacks. The only place you could play golf was at the Lincoln Country Club, and so most of the Talented Tenth, upper-class blacks played golf there, but the better golfers were the black kids who were caddying at the white country clubs, because every Monday they got to play there. I understand that sometimes I’d like to be Michael Jordan, especially when we play golf together, at the same golf course, and when I see him playing from the gold tees and shooting in the mid- to high seventies, I’d like to be Michael. I would like to have made that last shot when they beat the Utah Jazz.

I grew up in the first public housing project for black people in this country, University Homes, so called because it stood amid the web of Atlanta’s black colleges: Morehouse, Spelman, Atlanta University, Morris Brown, and Clark. University Homes was not just for poor people; I had many adult role models there from varied social and economic levels, and my family would have been considered in the black middle class then. I can remember on a Saturday friends and I went to Ashby’s Theater, and after your hot dog, your toasted-bun hot dog at Amer’s drugstore at the corner of Ashby on Hunter Street, you walked home. I can remember walking home and seeing Dr. Benjamin Mays walking through the Morehouse campus. As a kid, I knew he was a giant, that he was important. He achieved an international reputation for Morehouse College, and he mentored Martin Luther King, Jr. He also persevered till he won a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Morehouse. Dr. Mays always walked erect, and so I’m walking twenty yards behind him, emulating Dr. Mays. Well, that’s not all bad.

I loved going to the campus because I wanted to see Dr. Rufus Clement and Dr. James Rawley, President William A. Fountain, and I would see these professors. Rufus Clement always wore a vest, and I remember him in spats, and he always wore his frat Beta Kappa key on his vest. I have never forgotten those images, and when I would go through the campus, I would say, I want to be like that.

Black kids who grew up later, in the fifties, thought the blackest thing you could be, the greatest thing you could do for our people, was to become like Thurgood Marshall or Dr. King. Being an athlete was okay, and there was Hank Aaron and Willie Mays in the fifties. But when I was growing up, there was only one athlete—Joe Louis. When Joe Louis fought—he fought Billy Conn the first time in 1941—every radio in the court in our housing project was on. You could be out in the court and hear the fight, because every radio was on, and everybody cheered and he was big. We knew about Jesse Owens, but that happened in 1936. But we saw—heard, you couldn’t see it—heard about Joe Louis on the radio. He was the man athletically.

I was in sixth grade, and during the annual Negro History Week celebration, my best friend, Frank Hill, who lives out in Kansas City now, was given the role of Joe Louis. This is the role that everybody wanted and it’s the role I wanted, because you get to wear trunks and tennis shoes and boxing gloves to go on the stage. And you come out with these boxing gloves and you bow and then you get to the middle of the stage and you say, “I am Joe Louis,” and you get cheered. So Frank got that role, and I was a little jealous. I was given the role of William Grant Still, which meant I had on paper tails and a baton in my hand, and I walked down and said, “I am William Grant Still and I conducted Tchaikovsky’s symphony and New York’s blah, blah . . . ,” and no buzz, no cheers. But as I think about my life, that was a role I should have had, as opposed to Joe Louis, because it was more consistent. But it was not a happy moment. Everyone wanted to be Joe Louis because he was the man.

I always knew as a kid, growing up in the public housing project, that I was going to college. It was never a doubt in my mind, because the seed had been planted. And so it was not even a second thought. The role of economics, in terms of racial discrimination and the future of our people, takes a backseat to education. The problems affecting our people now have first to do with education. You can’t get to the economic issues until you get the education. There was a time when you could work and not be educated because it was about brawn. Now it’s about brains. Even if you have a job at McDonald’s, you have to know how to work a computer. So you have to start with education, certainly in fundamental reading, writing, arithmetic, and computers. Then you are reasonably assured of some degree of economic security. Education is first. It begins there.

When I got ready to go to college, I had a falling-out with my best buddies, because we had talked since junior year about going to Howard—getting a house, having a car, being sharp every day, and dating the beautiful girls who we understood went to Howard. We didn’t talk a whole lot about studying. But then this marvelous man came to my school from the National Scholarship Service Fund for Negro Students. He talked about the fund and he talked about going north to school, and I was absolutely intrigued by him, and I applied and got accepted. My buddies didn’t like it, because it was going against the grain, and while they didn’t accuse me of being white, they felt that I thought I was better, which is sort of the same thing, and that I was not a brother anymore.

One night I couldn’t go out with my buddies because I had to work on my mother’s business, but I went out the next night with a girlfriend who had been out with them the night before. We were sitting on this date and she says, I want to tell you something. I said, what’s that? She said, your friends aren’t your friends; you were the topic of conversation, and they said you are doing something different, so you are odd man out, and while I was bothered by it, I was not sufficiently bothered by it to change my mind.

But when I went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, it bothered me, because a chasm had developed between us, and I raised it with the young woman who ran with me for vice president of the student body at DePauw University. I wrote her and I said, what have I done? What’s wrong? It’s not the same with me and my buddies anymore. She wrote me back and she said, you’re walking with kings and you’ve lost the common touch, and I wrote her back a one-sentence letter. I said, “Dear Ethel, kiss my ass!” Because here I was the only black in my class, running twice as fast to stay even, and she’s telling me I’m walking with kings, I’ve lost the common touch.

The answer to that, I believe, is that we have to work at giving our kids enough self-confidence and enough perseverance and fortitude to press on. You really cannot let other people create tensions for you in life; you have to create your own. Dr. Evans Crawford, at Rankin in 1958, preached that sermon, and I never forgot it, what he said about creating your own tension. I believe that we have to somehow ingrain that in the hearts and minds and souls of young black people, that they will create their own tensions and not be tempted by the tensions of others. Now, that’s very difficult because the social pressure is difficult, but if in fact these individual kids are interested in achievement, then they have to create their own tensions, and that is true whether it’s Michael Jordan or Vernon Jordan or whether it’s Tiger Woods or Deval Patrick. They have to create their own tensions, and that transcends race.

You do not get to be a distinguished professor or public servant or successful entrepreneur letting other people create tensions for you. You have to create your own. When I gave the commencement at Tougaloo, I tried to make four points to these young people. First, you are what you are today because you stand on somebody’s shoulders, and wherever you are going tomorrow, you cannot get there by yourself. That’s point number one. Number two, if in fact you stand on other people’s shoulders, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life in such a way that people can stand on your shoulders. Third, if in fact you have that responsibility to live your life in a way that others are going to stand on your shoulders, then you have to be prepared. You have to be committed to excellence and hard work and sacrifice. And fourth, if you do those three, then you have to have some moral and ethical boundaries and standards for your behavior. As Churchill said, you have to march in the ranks of honor. I believe that, and I think that those four principles have helped me in my own life.

I remember when my parents took me to college. They stayed that weekend, and I remember my father shaking my hand to tell me good-bye, but he didn’t say good-bye; he said, you can’t come home. I said, what do you mean? He said, the college counselor says your reading scores are far lower than those of your classmates, which means when they’re in chapter six you’d be trying to get out of the preface. He said, these kids up here, these white kids went to fine township high schools and private schools and you went to this old dilapidated, segregated, ill-equipped, double-sessioned, overcrowded school, he said, but you can’t come home. And so I said, well, what am I supposed to do, Dad? And he said, read, boy, read, and he drove away.

Well, I was stunned. Four years later at graduation, the graduation is over and you go to say hello to your parents. My father, with the same expression that he had four years before, walked to me and shook my hand. He didn’t say, congratulations; he said, you can come home now. It’s absolutely true. He said, you can come home now. And in a book of eulogies that contains the one I wrote for him, I tell the story about you can come home now. And then I say that there was another conversation between a father and son, a conversation between Dad and God, the father of us all. And Dad said to God, not long ago, I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith, and God said to Daddy, you can come home now. I like that.

But it was a mandate. My dad was telling me what I had to do, and he had accepted the fact that I was going to college and that it was a challenge. I remember at the end of my sophomore year writing home, I think I’ve had enough of this; maybe I’m going to transfer. My mother wrote me back and she said, there will be no transfer. It was like that passage that says, woe be unto him who puts his hand upon the plough and turns back. That would have been turning back; no way. And she was absolutely right. I’m going next Saturday to my forty-fifth college reunion. It seems like yesterday I was the only black in my class, only five in the student body. So I’m going back. I spoke at the twenty-fifth. You have to go to the forty-fifth just in case you don’t make the fiftieth.

What was so clear to me in my early life was that there was a structure, there was a family unit, home, there was school. There was the Gate City Day Nursery, there was the Butler Street YMCA on Saturday, and there was St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sunday, and every Monday and Friday at five o’clock I knew that we were going to choir rehearsal at St. Paul. I knew at five o’clock on Wednesday I was going to be at Boy Scouts, and I knew on Saturday that I was going to be at the Butler Street YMCA swimming. There was structure, and there was no doubt about it.

I think that my mother, as compared to my father, was a woman ahead of her time, and my father was a man of his time. So that if I had finished high school, got a job in the post office, married a nice girl, got a little white house with green shutters and a white picket fence, kept my car washed, my grass cut, my hair trimmed, my shoes shined, went to work every day, went to church every Sunday, listened to the news, read the news, and voted, my father would have said that was a good life, and he was not wrong about that. It is a good life.

On the other hand, my mother believed that was not enough, that there were other things beyond that I could do. And she pushed me. I had an extraordinary mother who was president of the PTA at every school I attended through high school. And when I was at one high school and my younger brother was at another elementary school, she was president of both PTAs. Unlearned and unlettered though she was, she understood, based on her own deprivation, the value of education. The value of going to the PTA meetings. The value of trying to make those segregated, dilapidated, ill-equipped schools that I attended as good for me as they possibly could be. Somehow she knew the importance of relationships with the teachers, relationships with the principals, relationships with the communities. How, why, I do not know. But intuitively she knew. So there was never any doubt in my mind.