Certain People (33 page)

He was a spellbinding speaker, with a gift for vivid metaphor. In one memorable speech before a black audience he held up his hand, spread his fingers wide, and said, “In all things social, we can be as separate as the fingers on a hand. But, as the palm of the hand, we must be as one when it comes to the good of the country.” But he was not pompous, and had a wry sense of humor. He once commented, “Whenever you see a Negro who's not a Baptist or a Methodist, you know some white man has been messin' with his religion.” Booker T. Washington's detractors often point out that while he may have been a great orator and teacher, none of his children amounted to much. The children of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did not amount to much either.

But Booker T. Washington died over sixty years ago. All the great charismatic leaders—DuBois, Douglass, Garvey, and the three named ladies, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Hawkins Brown—have gone. So has Martin Luther King, Jr. The closest thing to a black leader in recent times has been Elijah Muhammad, but he too has died, and his son, Wallace, who has succeeded his father as head of the Nation of Islam, possesses only a shadow of his father's electrifying personality and power. There is no single, unifying leader in black America today (to which blacks counter that neither is there a great white leader). Though Berry Gordy heads the leading black business in America, no one would call him America's greatest black business leader. John Johnson's magazines influence
many black people, but John Johnson himself could not be called a leading force in black American life. It has been suggested that, with the power of his publications behind him, John Johnson could run for President. But Johnson expresses no interest in politics, and his aloof and enigmatic personality make him seem unsuited to it. Who is the Great Black Hope today? If he exists, no one knows his name, or hers.

Instead of leaders, there are factions, and factions within factions. The Old Guard looks askance at the newer-rich, and the “visiting friends” just visit one another. The newer-rich ridicule the Old Guard. The blacks in the South think little of the blacks in the North, and vice versa. The educators and professional people disdain the businessmen. The Episcopalians and Congregationalists think little of the Methodists and Baptists. The rich dislike and distrust the poor, and the poor hate the rich. Well-to-do blacks often despair of the poor. In New York, Guichard Parris, a long-time Urban League official, says, “There are children growing up in Harlem today whose parents have never done a day's work in their lives. Their grandparents have never worked, and their
great
-grandparents have never worked. You have families who, for five generations, have survived on one form of charity or another. How can you talk about a ‘work ethic' to people who don't know what work is?” The talk, in this fractured world, of “Brotherhood” and “Sisterhood” has no real meaning, and these are terms that describe a situation that does not exist. A black traveler, returning from abroad, will not stand in a line that has a black customs inspector; he knows that his luggage will be more thoroughly ransacked for possible costly contraband than that of white travelers. Black entertainers and athletes exist in a social limbo of their own. Their success is assumed to have been based not on education or business acumen, but merely on good looks or muscle. Instead of racial unity there is disunity.

Blacks cannot agree on what to call themselves—black, Negro, colored, or something else. Guichard Parris uses the terms “black” and “Negro” interchangeably, but his wife, who is fairer-skinned, refuses to use either term and the Parrises have been at an impasse over this throughout their marriage of nearly fifty years. Blacks cannot agree on what white motives really are, whether whites really want to help the Negro race or hold it back. Some successful black men—like Chicago's late Dr. T. R. M. Howard—have given full credit to white benefactors for their achievements. Others, like George
Johnson, say they had to fight a white Establishment all the way. At an integrated party at the penthouse apartment of Dr. William Clarke, another prominent black Chicago physician, a discussion started on the subject of whether a white person “could ever really understand what it is like to be black.” The discussion quickly turned into a rout, with blacks shouting profanities at each other, and the white guests fleeing through the kitchen door.

Dr. Clarke's three slender, handsome, college-age sons, meanwhile, are models of good manners and decorum—full of bows, handshakes, “sirs,” and “thank yous.” Dr. Clarke drills his boys with the authority of a Marine sergeant; whenever they appear, he peppers them with questions about their studies, about current affairs, about politics, science, and the Bible. To be sure, he gambles with them, and once, when one of his sons had won quite a bit of money from his father at cards, Clarke would not let the boy leave the game until he had won the money back. Like parents everywhere, successful blacks worry about their children: What will become of the next generation? John Johnson's son, a high school dropout, got married at nineteen, and he and his wife live in his parents' vast apartment. John Johnson, Jr., is interested in motorcycles, fast cars, airplanes—“anything fast, man,” he says. The Johnsons' daughter, Linda, grumbles when the chauffeur is not available to take her where she wants to go. At a family luncheon party at the Johnsons', guests wondered why the young people, who were at home at the time, did not join the family at the table; they took their lunch on trays in their rooms.

Barbara Proctor's only son is a withdrawn, introspective, studious teenager. The Eugene Dibbles' children, on the other hand, are lively, outgoing, family-proud—having worked together to draw up the massive family tree connecting their family with their cousins in Africa—proud of their continuing connection with the Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts, each child firmly set on a future career: one to be a doctor, one already with his own car-washing business (the boy offers visitors his printed business card). In other words, successful blacks probably have the same degree of success—and failure—with their children as successful whites.

Blacks cannot agree on whether black businesses should employ blacks or whites. John Johnson's staff is almost a hundred percent black. Barbara Proctor, on the other hand, in her Chicago advertising agency, prefers to hire bright young whites right out of college for her copywriters. Blacks cannot agree on issues-of-the-moment such as
busing and integrated schools. Most of the Old Guard are opposed to busing, and consider it an absurd crusade conducted by misguided whites and lower-class blacks. They point to the distinguished and successful men and women who have come out of all-black schools like Palmer and Dunbar High School, and out of black colleges like Lincoln and Howard Universities. Guichard Parris says, “I just won't buy the idea that a Negro can't get a decent education unless he's in an integrated situation. If you say that, it's the same as saying there's no chance for anyone in black Africa.” Parris, however, a New Yorker since 1916, who went to Amherst—where he was one of nine blacks, six of them from Dunbar High School—never knew that there were black colleges in the South until he learned of them from his fellow blacks at Amherst. If there is one thing that there is some agreement on, it is that “we've got to change the system.” But no one is exactly sure what “the system” is.

Is it housing patterns? Is it discrimination within the labor unions? Housing patterns have been breaking down—albeit slowly—in many cities, and so has discrimination in the unions. Is it the “system” that prevents George Johnson from expanding his business into manufacturing cosmetics for white people? In fact, George Johnson's products could be sold to whites right now. It is a myth that skins of different colors require different cosmetics. A shade of mascara or face-powder tint will work equally well on a white face and on a black, and black hair-straightening products will straighten white curly hair also. All that Johnson would have to do, he admits, would be to start advertising his Ultra Sheen line to whites and, if that didn't work—if the “black” connotations proved too strong to make Ultra Sheen acceptable to whites—he could issue the same products under a different label. And yet he is timid. The system seems not quite ready for that, and besides, he is happy with the success he already has.

No one seems to agree on what success is, or how it is best attained. Is success money and possessions, as
Ebony
seems to say? Is it a good education, followed by a useful professional life, as Mary Gibson Hundley would insist? Is success achieved by dogged hard work and perseverance, as it was in the case of John and George Johnson, neither of whom went to college? Is it achieved by sheer luck, as seems to have been the case with Berry Gordy, who happened to have some lucky hits? For Barbara Proctor, success has alienated her from her mother and sister, neither of whom understands what she does or approves of it, since she leaves her son at
home with sitters. There is one thing, however, that nearly all blacks agree on: a great deal, in the end, depends upon the color of your skin, and the shape of your facial features. It is as the Jews often say: “If you have a cute nose, you smell like a rose.” Blacks agree that if you have light skin and white features—or, in the current vernacular, “keen” features—you have a better chance in business. Features are even more important than color of skin. People with
black
skin and keen features also have an advantage in the business world, and in the world of entertainment. Most blacks believe that it is best to have “a nice brown color in between,” minimized Negro features, and that the person with black skin and Negro features, or even light skin and Negro features, is at a disadvantage. Such a person should not attempt a career in business or show business, and should compromise by going into one of the professions, the clergy, or the civil service. The rule could almost be stated as a mathematical formula: fair skin plus white features equals money, social acceptance, integration. The unspoken corollary of this rule, of course, is that it is better to have white ancestors.

If having “Negro features” is still at least a psychological handicap for a black man or woman, it might be supposed that there would be a heavy demand for cosmetic surgery among these people, just as Jewish children born with prominent noses routinely have them bobbed at a certain age. There is no shortage of skilled black surgeons; in fact, some white doctors claim that blacks make particularly good surgeons because they have especially deft and agile hands. But the fact is that people with black skin have a tendency, for some reason, to develop keloids—white, welt-like scar tissue—as a result of surgery. The lighter the skin, the less chance there is of keloids developing. And so, ironically, the blacks most willing to take the risk of facial surgery are those with the least need for it. Light-skinned, white-featured Doris Zollar says that she would certainly consider having her face lifted “if and when the time comes.” A black-skinned friend would not. Many blacks, meanwhile, correct protruding teeth with orthodonture.

And yet why do some blacks achieve success while others, with similar background, equal intelligence, equal opportunities, and similar appearances, do not? In many cases, a kind of achievement drive seems to have been instilled in individuals by certain families for generations. Wade H. McCree, Jr., for example, is a United States circuit judge from Detroit who has honorary doctorate of laws degrees from
seven different universities, from Tuskegee to Harvard. He was the first black placed on Harvard's Board of Overseers. When Thurgood Marshall became the first black appointee to the United States Supreme Court, many people thought that Wade McCree was better qualified than Marshall and should have been the one appointed. (Was it because Mr. Justice Marshall has “whiter looks” than Judge McCree?) Achievement, a sense of justice, and a sense of history have been an integral part of the McCree family's life for a long time (a distant McCree ancestor is said to be Robert E. Lee). Wade McCree's mother graduated from Fisk and taught in the South for a while with Mary McLeod Bethune. At one point, McCree's mother and another teacher purchased a ticket for a black sharecropper who was being pursued for not paying a debt, and helped him escape north to Pittsburgh. At the time, Mary Bethune criticized the two women for “not being consistent with the system.”

Wade McCree's paternal grandfather escaped from slavery in the Carolinas by swimming the Ohio River near Evansville and made his way to Illinois, where he joined Thomas's army, and fought in the Battle of Franklin and Nashville. McCree's father had been a dining car porter, and, on his trips across the country, he fell in love with the State of Iowa and decided to settle there. With the help of a black doctor in Des Moines, the senior McCree attended pharmaceutical school and opened the first black drugstore in Des Moines. During World War I, a black Officer Candidate School was opened at Fort Des Moines, and Mr. McCree operated what amounted to a black U.S.O. from a big room that was available above his store. His sister, Wade McCree's Aunt Mary Ellen, knew all the local girls and so, as McCree says, “There isn't a black officer from World War One who doesn't know my family.”

After the war, however, there were business reverses, and the family moved back to Massachusetts, where McCree's mother had many relatives. In Boston, where Wade McCree attended Boston Latin School, where admission was by competitive examination only, McCree's father worked as a federal narcotics inspector, a job he disliked. With his training, he felt, he should have been made a supervisor, but instead he was moved here and there about the country on assignments, and kept in his place. Mr. McCree wanted to institute a narcotics education program; it was turned down by his superior. At one point he inspected a drugstore, found some discrepancies, and reported them. A Boston Congressman wanted him to
change his report. He refused and, for this, his son recalls, “He was given a lot of dirty jobs.”