Certain People (26 page)

Education, of course—with its Latin derivation meaning “a leading out”—has been the traditional avenue out of the ghetto for all minority groups. And it is certainly true that, when little-educated blacks have been able to educate their children, the children have usually done better, financially, than their parents. But some critics have felt that blacks have stressed education, culture, and intellectual refinement too much and that education snobbery, in a capitalist society, helps account for the fact that there are so few successful black business enterprises, and even fewer people who could be called black capitalists. There is a limit, after all, to how much a Ph.D. social worker, teacher, or even physician can earn. By placing so much emphasis on education and the collection of multiple college degrees, blacks have failed to develop any strong tradition of setting up their own businesses, accumulating property and business assets, or inheriting wealth—all of which are preoccupations of white capitalist society. In fact, it has even been suggested by at least one black sociologist that blacks' education fever, promoted by black colleges in the South—most of which were established by white missionaries—was part of a sinister white conspiracy to keep black people in the professional class and to prevent them from ever joining the ranks of the capitalists.

Dressing well, being well groomed, owning your own home and car, having an education—these are the main criteria for status in black America. There are, of course, some regional differences in the way the struggle for status is waged. Northern Negroes tend to be more concerned about the goals of integration. In the South, old-line black families who resisted the rush to Northern cities in the 1920s and thirties tend to have a longer history of institution building, to have more status consistency, to place more stress on lineage and family background, and to have more feeling of having been “born into the class.” It is a sad fact, though, that many blacks all over the United States seem not to have realized that having a sense of personal identity is also a hallmark of class. Perhaps it is because, as
many blacks claim, white Americans place more emphasis on race than on class, that white Americans look upon the black college professor with the same disdain, and even alarm, as the black hoodlum, that whites cannot yet perceive blacks as individuals but only as
blacks
. But if this were true, the result of this kind of treatment might have been to teach blacks that they have a community of interest with one another. Thus far, however—as blacks continue to try to out-do and out-dress each other, and out-educate each others' children in the scramble for class and status, a true community of interest and taste does not seem to have developed.

Any scramble can become unmannerly, and good manners, too, are a part of having class. White upper-crust society places great emphasis—perhaps too much—on good manners and is frequently put off by black abruptness. As one white man puts it, rather despairingly, “Why do they seem to have a perpetual chip on their shoulders?” Not long ago, a white hostess in New York was entertaining a black woman—the owner and publisher of a successful black newspaper, a woman with a postgraduate degree. The black woman opened the conversation with “Mrs. S—, I'll bet you don't remember where we met.”

“I certainly do,” said her hostess. “It was four years ago at a League of Women Voters' meeting.”

“That's not true!” replied her guest. “I met you twenty years ago, when I was working my way through college cooking for white people. I was cooking a dinner for Mrs. B—on Sixtieth Street, and you came back into the kitchen to tell me that you enjoyed my meal. You see? You're just like all white folks. To you, all black people look alike.” Very much put off, the hostess fell silent, and the brief drawbridge that had been lowered between the races clanged shut. Charlotte Hawkins Brown would not have approved. As she used to tell her privileged pupils, hoping that they would one day become the peers of privileged whites, “Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way in the world. Without them, it is like a great rough diamond, very well in a closet by way of curiosity, and also for its intrinsic value. But most prized when polished.”

18

“Sweet Auburn Avenue”

If the mood in New York and Washington is edgy, uncertain and uncomfortable, the mood in Atlanta is, by comparison, serene. Georgia's bustling, booming capital—“the fastest-growing city in the United States,” Atlantans say—has long taken pride in its “un-Southernness,” and in a more moderate, liberal, and enlightened attitude toward blacks than can be found in other cities of the South. Atlanta likes to compare itself with such cities as Houston and Los Angeles, rather than with Savannah, New Orleans, Memphis, or Mobile. Though a street in Atlanta is named Margaret Mitchell Avenue, gone are the days of
Gone With the Wind
and Scarlett O'Hara in her crinolines with her eye-rolling colored Mammy. Even during the hard, cruel days of segregation, Atlantans say, there was a “deep undercurrent of understanding and respect” between the whites of Atlanta and their black neighbors. The undercurrent may not have been as deep or as solid as white Atlantans like to suppose, but it is true that, for the most part, race relations in Atlanta have been peaceful. The last major race riots occurred here in 1910. Atlantans claim that this is because Atlanta is a city of colleges and educators. There are more than a score of institutions of higher learning in the city, including six major black colleges, such as Spelman, Morehouse, and Atlanta University. This has created an atmosphere of mutuality and morality, high-mindedness and tolerance. Atlanta University, for example, for years had a racially mixed faculty. White and black teachers dined with each other, entertained each other, and when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to invade the Atlanta University campus,
the white teachers joined with the blacks to stop the Klan at the college gates.

Some black Atlantans, on the other hand, claim that the generally good relationship that exists between blacks and whites can be attributed to other factors. Mrs. Grace Hamilton, who, among other things, was the first black woman to be elected to the Georgia State Legislature, believes that it is because so many prominent white Atlanta families have blood relatives who are black living in the same town. Mr. David T. Howard, for example, who for years ran a leading black funeral home, is said to have been some sort of cousin of Mr. Pierre Howard, a prominent white attorney and member of the State Senate. Another white Atlantan is said for years to have kept two families—one black and one white—on opposite sides of town. In the manner of a true Southern gentleman, he is equally generous to both families. His white wife is aware of, and accepts, the situation, as does his black mistress; the two women even smile and speak to each other when they encounter each other on the street. “Everyone in town,” as they say, understands the arrangement, as they understand other similar arrangements. Of course it is not considered quite “fitting” to talk about it much.

Such situations have become quite common in the South, where there has been more
sub rosa
interracial mixing than one might suppose would have been the case. (Just as prominent Southern white men have discreetly kept black mistresses, so have prominent Southern blacks kept white mistresses; it is considered a bit of a status symbol.) In Charleston, South Carolina, there is the case of the Grimke family. Charleston's Grimkes, who are white, consider theirs to be “one of the noblest names of Carolina.” Therefore, Mrs. Angelina Grimke Weld of Charleston was somewhat surprised, in 1868, to read in her newspaper of a young black student at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania—the first college for Negroes—named Archibald Henry Grimke, who had been cited for his extraordinary “erudition.” Mrs. Weld wrote to young Grimke and, saying that since Grimke was such an uncommon name, she was curious as to how he had come by it. Archibald Grimke wrote back to say that he was one of three children of Henry Grimke, Mrs. Weld's brother. After Henry Grimke's wife had died, he had taken his white children's black nurse, one Nancy Weston, as his common-law wife, and had three mulatto children by her.

At Henry Grimke's death, he had said to his black wife, “I leave
you better than free because I leave you taken care of.” His will had stipulated that Nancy should be provided for and her children educated. But his white son, E. M. Grimke, had disobeyed his father's orders. He had thrown Nancy and two of her children out. He had kept young Archibald, his own half-brother, as his slave and then, heaping insult upon injury, sold him to another planter. After the Emancipation, the little family was reunited, and Nancy had been able to earn and save enough money to send two of her boys, Archibald and his brother Francis, to Lincoln University.

Mrs. Weld was astonished with the revelation that she had Negro nephews. She had been a staunch Abolitionist, had moved from South Carolina to Massachusetts in order to carry on her crusade, and she was shocked to think that her white nephew—or any of the noble Grimkes, for that matter—could have treated his own flesh and blood so shamefully. She immediately went to Lincoln University to visit her newfound black kinfolk. In order to atone for what her relative had done, she offered to pay for Archibald and Francis Grimke's education.

The white Grimkes and the black Grimkes became friends. Angelina Grimke Weld and her husband invited the boys to visit them in Massachusetts and, when they arrived, though they had little money, their mother had seen to it that “each carried a cane, wore a high silk hat which had been made to order, and coats that were custom made.” Both boys graduated from Lincoln in 1870, and Francis Grimke was valedictorian of his class. With their Aunt Angelina's support, Archibald went on to Harvard Law School, and Francis went to Howard Law. When Archibald Grimke finished Harvard, Angelina and her husband helped him get placed with a Boston law firm. From 1894 to 1898, Archibald Grimke was United States consul to Santo Domingo. He later joined W. E. B. DuBois in the Niagara Movement, and the N.A.A.C.P., which grew out of it. Francis Grimke switched to theology, and graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary. For the ardor of his sermons, he became known as “The Black Puritan.” Thus, to some extent, the stain that had been placed on the noble name of Grimke was erased on both sides of the racial fence, and Aunt Angelina had atoned for the misdeeds of her relatives.

In Atlanta, Grace Hamilton is an excellent example of a Southern black lady of cultivation and refinement. Atlanta-born—as every true “Atlantan” must be in order to consider himself such—as was her
mother, Mrs. Hamilton's maiden name was Towns. Her paternal grandfather's great-uncle was George Towns, and he was governor of Georgia in the late 1850s—and he was white. When Mrs. Hamilton was first elected to the Legislature in 1966 amid a certain amount of fanfare and publicity, she rather startled people by offering to pose for a photograph under a portrait of her distinguished white ancestor. Mrs. Hamilton's husband, Henry Cooke Hamilton, is a tall, courtly gentleman, the retired admissions director at Morehouse and former professor at Atlanta University, and is so fair that, during segregation days, he had no difficulty passing as white and was therefore spared many indignities and inconveniences as he traveled about the South recruiting Morehouse students. (An uncle, Cameron Hamilton, actually moved to California and became a white; one of Mrs. Hamilton's uncles also “passed.”) Once, when Mr. Hamilton took a seat in the Jim Crow car of a Southern train, he was asked to move to the white section. In a small Southern town, Mr. Hamilton stopped for a milkshake at a segregated lunch counter. He was served his milkshake by the white waitress, but was recognized by the black short-order cook, who told him, “You don't belong here.” (Many blacks claim that, with a kind of black radar, blacks can recognize other blacks whom white people accept unquestioningly as white.) “You go to hell,” said Mr. Hamilton to the cook. The cook thereupon told the waitress that she was serving a Negro. The waitress, flustered, appeared not to know what to do about the situation. “So,” says Mr. Hamilton, “I decided to take the horns by the bull, and said to the waitress, ‘May I have a straw?'” He got his straw, drank his milkshake, and left the establishment without incident.

The Hamilton family also has deep roots in Atlanta, and a number of white relatives. Henry Cooke Hamilton's great-grandfather was white, and his mother's grandmother was an Indian. He is descended also from Alexander Hampton, a white governor of South Carolina, and from Alexander Hamilton, the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. Henry Cooke Hamilton's father was Alexander Hamilton III. His older brother is Alexander Hamilton IV.
His
son is Alexander Hamilton V. And Henry Cooke Hamilton's grandnephew is Alexander Hamilton VI. Of the original Alexander Hamilton, who was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, Henry Cooke Hamilton—a man not without a sense of humor—says, “We have always considered him the black sheep of the family.”

The Hamiltons live in a comfortable modern house hard by the
University of Atlanta campus, built on property adjoining the much larger house in which Grace Hamilton grew up, and with a garden that presents a spectacular view of the Atlanta skyline. It is typical of Atlanta's enlightened mood—and indicative of the Hamiltons' position in the community—that when two white workmen appeared at Mrs. Hamilton's house to clear away some branches of trees that were overhanging Mrs. Hamilton's garden and were conferring with the lady of the house as to what should be done, the white workmen were careful to call Mrs. Hamilton “Ma'am.”

During segregation days, times for blacks in Atlanta were humiliatingly bad, but old-line Atlanta blacks were doughtily proud. When the Atlanta streetcars became segregated, Grace Hamilton's father, who was also an educator, simply stopped riding the streetcars, and walked to work. Others did the same. A lawyer friend of the family's, Mr. Peyton Allen, whose office was on the other side of town, used a bicycle to get to his office and, on one of his long bicycle trips, he was struck by an automobile and killed. Children of Mrs. Hamilton's generation were forbidden to ride the streetcars, and were not allowed to go to movies in the Jim Crow theatres—though Mrs. Hamilton confesses that she and some of her young friends covertly sneaked off to the movies whenever they could, where they met their beaux. Blacks could not use the same drinking fountains as whites. In department stores, where they were allowed to shop, they could not ride on the elevators and—in the days before escalators—had to use the stairs. A black mother, Mrs. Hamilton recalls, who had to take a brood of children to Rich's for back-to-school clothes usually made a shopping day of it. But if one of the children wanted to go to the toilet, there were no black rest rooms in the store. The nearest were located blocks away, at the railroad station. There was no restaurant in downtown Atlanta where blacks could eat. “Still, we were very protected, all of us,” Mrs. Hamilton says. “If we passed an ice cream counter, and wanted something to eat, the excuse was never ‘We can't eat there because we're colored.' Mother would just say, ‘Oh, let's wait till we get home—the food's better there, anyway.'”