Certain People (3 page)

In a particularly touching chapter on “Correct Letter Writing,” Mr. Green takes up the case of a fictional Edgar H. Wilkins, who is writing, humbly, to ask his friend, the equally fictional John H. Edwards, for a loan. The loan is for $15.00. Mr. Green offers an example of how Mr. Wilkins might compose his letter (“There are few of my friends to whom I should write for financial assistance, but I feel that you will understand and appreciate …”) and how Mr. Edwards might turn him down (“I have not half the amount you desire now on deposit”). Next, the author considers the possibility that Edwards has given Wilkins his loan, but that Wilkins has failed to repay it. Less than three weeks have gone by, but the tone of the correspondence changes considerably—from “Dear Ed” to “My dear Wilkins”—as Edwards's reminder letter (“I should appreciate your courtesy in giving this your early attention”) goes out to his friend. Still Wilkins does not respond and, by September 10, Edwards has had enough and writes as follows:

Mr. Edgar H. Wilkins,

1440 Kennard St., City

Dear Sir:

Over a month ago, I wrote you courteously concerning the $15.00 loaned you early in July. You are of course aware that this should have been paid long ago. Your failure to meet your obligation and your continued silence concerning the matter, if persisted in, will eventually destroy the respect and confidence I have always held for you.

My patience is becoming exhausted and I shall expect a satisfactory reply from you by return mail.

Yours very respectfully,

J
OHN
H. E
DWARDS

The reader of
The Capital Code of Etiquette
is left in suspense as to the final outcome of the Wilkins-Edwards affair.

Reaching her stride nearly a generation after the publication of Mr. Green's little volume, Charlotte Hawkins Brown was an advocate of much more pride on the part of blacks, even though, along with
pride, she advised a certain amount of caution. Today, it might be easy to assume that what Charlotte Hawkins Brown stood for has disappeared entirely. It is true that many blacks would now label Dr. Brown an “Aunt Tom,” or an “Oreo”—referring to the cookie that is black on the outside, but white within. Many blacks would ridicule her attitudes and pronouncements. It is because of people like Charlotte Hawkins Brown that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the backbone of which was formed by many of her former elite-minded students—has been sneeringly labeled (by less affluent blacks) “The National Association for the Advancement of
Certain
People.” There was no doubt in Charlotte Hawkins Brown's mind that
certain
people were better than other people, and more “fit” for themselves to know. What Dr. Brown stood for were the subtle but nonetheless powerful forces that differentiate social classes. She separated the black
haves
from the white
haves
, and she also separated the black
haves
from the black
have-nots
. Even more important, she separated the old-line black families and their children from a newer generation of blacks who were struggling out of poverty and, in one way or another, managing to achieve a certain degree of affluence. Self-made blacks she considered the gauche
nouveau riche
. They were simply not in the same class as her
crème de la crème
. One might suppose that, in this day and age, the distinctions of class that she drew, and the differences she represented, no longer pertain to the black community. Alas, that is not quite the case—not yet.

II

The Bootstrappers

2

“How I Got Over”

An old Negro gospel song is called “how I got over,” and it celebrates “getting over” to Jesus. But the phrase also has a more general, secular meaning in the black world, which, in the modern idiom, could be translated to mean “how I made it”—in a business sense—from next to nothing at all to huge success and riches. A small, wizened, very black lady of eighty-five sits today in a large, carpeted office behind a big desk, high above Chicago's bustling Michigan Avenue, with an imposing view of the lake beyond, and talks, in a richly Southern accent, of “how I got over.” She owns the modern eleven-story tower of steel and glass in which her office sits, and much more—including an AM radio station, part of a cosmetics business, and the big house in East Drexel Square in which she lives. She is Mrs. Gertrude Johnson Williams—“Miz Gert” to her friends—vice president of the Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes
Ebony
and several other magazines, of which her son, John H. Johnson, is president and chief executive officer. John Johnson is often called the wealthiest black man in America, but his mother, Mrs. Williams, takes full and unabashed credit for her son's success. “That's right, I did it!” she says cheerfully. “I'm the woman behind the man! I put everything I had into him. I had strength, and I had health, and I had determination. I had faith in myself and in the Lord, and now”—she makes a sweeping gesture—“just you look and see how it's all come back to us. Every day, I look around, at this beautiful building and all we've done, and I just sit back and look at how I got over, and I thank the Lord.” Mrs. Williams has never heard of Charlotte Hawkins Brown,
nor of the Palmer Memorial Institute, and if she had she would be unimpressed. On the other hand, she likes to remind visitors that not long ago, when she visited Atlanta, she was invited to dinner by the governor of Georgia at the Executive Mansion, and that the leading citizens of the town gave her a surprise birthday party. “The Lord brought me over,” she says. “And now, it's like an old saying the old folks had in the South—all I have to do now is sit back and spit in the ashes!”

A conducted tour of high school students, exclusively black, who are being shown around the offices of Johnson Publishing, pauses outside Mrs. Williams's office door, and the tour guide says, in hushed tones, “This is the office of Mrs. Gertrude Johnson Williams, Mr. John Johnson's mother, who got him started with a loan of five hundred dollars and put her furniture up for collateral.” “That's right, honey!” Mrs. Williams calls out. “I'm the one, I'm the one that did it! I'm the mother, and with the Lord's help I got us over.”

Though Mrs. Williams gives a major share of credit to the Lord, a certain amount of mortal business acumen must not be ruled out, nor should a good deal of restless ambition and a certain vision. In the little town of Arkansas City, Arkansas, where Gertrude Johnson Williams grew up (Williams was her second husband; John Johnson's father was killed in a sawmill accident when John was six years old) there was not much to offer her only son. There was not even a local high school that blacks could attend. And Mr. Williams was not much help. “Oh, he always made money—he always
worked
,” Gertrude Williams says. “But the trouble was, Williams just couldn't
hold on
to any money. He spent the whole of it on drink and gambling.” In order to scrape together tuition money to send young John to high school in a nearby city, his mother went to work, running a field kitchen for a dredging company crew, where the boss was kind enough to let her take home food to feed her family, “tote privileges,” as it was called in the South. At one point, when things looked particularly dark, Gertrude Williams's mother offered to take the boy. The proposition was placed before young John, who had also fallen into the habit of calling his mother “Miz Gert,” and he said firmly, “I want to stay with Miz Gert.” His grandmother was indignant, and said, “Who
is
this Miz Gert?” He replied, “Miz Gert is my mother.” It was at this point that Gertrude Williams began to realize that her son might possess spunk and determination to match her own.

Still, when John graduated from the eighth grade in Arkansas City, there was not enough money for the high school tuition the following year. So his mother made him go back to grade school in the fall and take the eighth grade all over again—much to his displeasure.

In 1933, Gertrude Williams was fed up—both with Arkansas City and with Mr. Williams. She was in her early forties and her son was fifteen, and she saw no future for either of them where they were. “I had a friend in Chicago,” Mrs. Williams says, “and she wrote me and said that things were better for colored folks up there. So I said to Williams, ‘I'm going. You can come too if you like, but if you don't like I'm going anyway. You can't stop me, and nobody can stop me.' He said he was staying, so I said good-bye, and Johnny and me got us on the bus.” In Chicago, despite the Depression, she got a job “working days for a white lady,” worked evenings as a seamstress, and rented a tiny flat. Six months later, Mr. Williams showed up. “I told him he could stay if he wanted, but he wasn't going to tell
me
what to do, and I told him, ‘I'm not going to be
responsible
for you. You can stay on my terms, but if you don't like my terms, out you go, 'cause it's
my
name that's on this lease!'” He stayed, and on her terms.

Chicago in the twenties and thirties had become a Mecca for upwardly mobile blacks. In those days, Chicago was the railroad capital of America, and railroad lines fanned out from Chicago like filaments of a spider's web. The railroads, with their demand for conductors, brakemen, and Pullman car porters, had attracted blacks to the city, and there was already a large black community that was stable, prospering, and displaying many of the attributes of a solid middle class. (To be a Pullman car porter in those days was a mark of great status for a black man; to work the Pullman cars, a man had to be trustworthy, a “gentleman,” the work was steady and the pay, with tips, was good; similarly, it was a mark of status to work for the Post Office, and the Post Office in those days relied primarily on the railroads.) In Chicago, before it happened significantly elsewhere, many black families already owned their own homes, had automobiles, and were sending their children to college. The hopes of Chicago's blacks were high.

Gertrude Williams already knew her son was smart. When he was three she had taught him the alphabet, and he could read before he entered the first grade. At Chicago's black DuSable High School, still pushed and encouraged by the relentless Gertrude, young John was
an honor student. He became president of his class, then president of the student council, editor of the school newspaper, and editor of the senior class yearbook. (For many years, since he never graduated from college—though he has received a number of honorary degrees—John Johnson listed these achievements in his paragraph in
Who's Who
.) At John Johnson's high school commencement, the speaker was one Earl B. Dickerson, an executive of the Supreme Life Insurance Company of America, one of the largest black-owned insurance companies in the country. Dickerson was impressed with the young student body president, and hired him as an office boy for $6 a week. That was in 1936, when jobs of any sort, for young men of any color, were not easy to get.

Part of Johnson's job at Supreme Life was to comb through magazines and newspapers for black news items, and to compile a summary of these for the company president. He was also, as a result of his high school newspaper experience, placed in charge of putting out the company house organ. As he collected news items on blacks, he noticed a significant fact. Whenever a black made an important achievement, or outdid a white man, that made news. Similarly, it was news whenever a black man committed a crime. But no national publication devoted itself to the day-to-day existences, and problems, of normal black people who led routine, unheralded lives. He discussed this with friends, who agreed that there appeared to be a need for a black news digest. Moonlighting after hours at Supreme Life, and quietly “borrowing” the use of the company's printing equipment, Johnson began putting together a dummy issue of the kind of publication he had in mind. To seek subscribers, he decided he would have to send out direct-mail fliers, but that would require money. It is still not easy for a black to borrow money, and it was much harder in 1942. After several unfruitful visits to loan companies, he went to his mother.

“I didn't have any money,” Gertrude Williams says, “but I said, ‘I'll pray on it.'” Typically, her husband was unwilling to help. “He just wasn't interested,” she says. “I told John the only thing I owned was my furniture.” Would she be willing to sell some of her furniture? “I'll have to pray on that,” she told him. A week or so later, he came to her again. He had learned of a man who would loan him the money if the furniture were put up as collateral. Again, she said she would first have to pray. When he came to her a third time, she agreed to let the man come to appraise her furniture. He came, and
told her that $500 was the most money he could offer her, and, with that, every bit of property Gertrude Williams owned was mortgaged.

The $500 worth of advertising fliers, however, quickly yielded $6,000 worth of subscription orders. John Johnson's monthly
Negro Digest
, as he called it, was on its way, and the Johnson Publishing Company was born. Still, in the first months, the sledding was not always easy. At one point, $100 was desperately needed and John Johnson and his mother went to a well-to-do black friend and asked to borrow the money. They were refused, and so Gertrude Williams went to her white employer, who loaned her the money. “She trusted me, she knew I was reliable.” (Later on, when the same black friend saw that Johnson Publishing was beginning to be successful, “He tried to get on the bandwagon,” Gertrude Williams says, “and I told him, ‘You wouldn't give us money when we needed it. Now we don't need your money.'”) Today, the Johnson Publishing Company, conservatively estimated to be worth between $50,000,000 and $60,000,000, is solely owned by John Johnson, his mother, and his wife, Eunice. When John Johnson's stepfather also tried to get on the bandwagon, he was given a job as a building superintendent.