Good Morning POU!
The historic nomination of Kamala Harris has again raised the conversation around the “black elite”. Ironically, she herself would never be considered among that social realm even though she graduated from “The Mecca” and is a member of the oldest black sorority in the country.
Family histories and social status dictate who is…and who isn’t, part of this “club”. The late Lawrence Otis Graham shined a bright light on the families and institutions that created this community, and it is an interesting and entertaining read.
This week, we will repost our series on excerpts from the original book for those that want to know more about the real history of the “black elite.”
This week’s open threads will be excerpts from the book Our Kind Of People. The book is a who’s who (and oh my’s) of the “black elite” class. Interestingly enough, the author himself came to see how some of the attitudes and traditions of the “elite” simply did not mean what he thought growing up. In 2014, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled “I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong.”
The sad ingrained bigotry of paper bag tests and straight hair aside, there were actually many accomplishments from this group that furthered the progress for all African Americans and some of the “secrets” that they didn’t want to get out, well, let’s just say some very good movies could be made from the lives of these families.
The author Lawrence Otis Graham, first came up with the idea for this book because of a conversation with then, the wealthiest black man in America, Reginald Lewis. Lewis noticed that Graham was more connected than he with “black elite” organizations. Lewis was not from an Our Kind Of People (OKOP) background and wanted to make sure his own daughters were exposed to other African Americans of his (or a fraction of his) stature as opposed to only being exposed to white schools and organizations.
Helping Reginald Lewis
It was the mid-1980s, and the businessman was Reginald Lewis, the wealthiest black man in America. A Harvard Law alumnus who was then only forty-two years old, Lewis had recently purchased the $55 million McCall Pattern Company in a leveraged buyout and had begun appearing in national business articles. We had met several months earlier during a visit that he and his young daughter, Leslie, had made to the campus, and since that time, he had been offering me occasional academic and career advice.
None of us knew it at that moment, but within three years, Lewis was to become many times richer through his 1987 purchase of Beatrice Foods, the $2.5 billion international packaged goods company, in what was at that time the largest leveraged buyout in U.S. history. Within the next six years, he and his wife, Loida, would amass an enormous art collection, as well as homes in Paris and East Hampton and on New York’s Fifth Avenue. He would also give $3 million to Harvard Law School, $1 million to Howard University, $2 million to the NAACP, and hundreds of thousands to many other institutions and charities. But on this particular afternoon, in 1984, we left his office at 99 Wall Street and headed for India House, a private club on Hanover Square in the financial district. We chatted about his role as chairman and owner of the 114-year-old sewing pattern company, his rising profile within the mostly white business world, and the Park Avenue law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison, a firm he wanted me to consider once I left Harvard. Then he changed the subject. “Now I need your advice on something,” Lewis said, with his perpetually furrowed brow even more pronounced.
“Sure,” I responded, even though I was quite certain that there was almost nothing about which I could counsel this man. “You’ve grown up around upper-class whites, you’ve attended white schools, and you are comfortable around wealthy whites, yet you still seem to be balanced from a black perspective.” I shrugged. “I’m saying that you seem to also have a black orientation that lets you mix among blacks and whites comfortably. I have two daughters and I want them to do that.” I suddenly knew where he was taking this conversation. Reginald Lewis was becoming wealthier and more powerful each year. Increasingly, with each new business deal, he was working, socializing, and living less among black people. “I didn’t grow up wealthy, but my daughters are growing up that way,” he said while tapping his cigar into a porcelain ashtray, “and I don’t want them to grow away from their black heritage.” I nodded with understanding.
“They don’t interact with working-class or middle-class black kids, and I’m afraid they may get rejected by the white kids.” He shook his head with mild frustration. “I’m thinking there needs to be someplace where they can meet other well-to-do black kids and not feel caught in between two worlds and rejected by both.” Lewis knew that my family did not have the incredible wealth or contacts he was amassing. But through our past conversations, he also knew that I had long-term relations with the well-to-do blacks I had grown up with and known all my life. “I know there’s a whole history and world of wealthy, professional black people,” explained Lewis as we completed lunch and walked to his waiting limousine outside, “but I don’t know how to crack it and introduce my kids to it.”
Once I got over the initial shock that this multimillionaire was, on the one hand, hobnobbing with white millionaire investment bankers, yet was stuck outside of black elite circles, I told him about the elite black organizations and activities that he should immediately introduce to his children. I told him about the old-guard families dating back to the 1860s and about how they lived and where they lived today. I told him about the sixty-year-old Jack and Jill organization, a national invitation-only social group for black kids from well-to-do families. My brother and I had grown up in it and met our closest black friends there. I also talked to Lewis about the Boulé and the Links, considered to be the most prestigious private social groups for, respectively, black men and black women. And though he was somewhat familiar with the topic, I talked in detail about the proper summer resorts, sleepaway camps, boarding schools, and black debutante cotillions. “You oughtta turn all of this into a book,” Lewis said as he jotted down some of my suggestions.
I laughed at the time because his remark seemed like a subtle mocking of my detailed knowledge of all the issues and groups he should consider. Then, as we rode north up Park Avenue in the black limousine, I thought that a book about the black elite and its history of thriving in the awkward position between two worlds—one black and one white—would be interesting indeed, but probably only to the wealthy blacks who already knew the stories and the rules. These black individuals already knew the distinctions between the old-guard blacks from Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles. They already knew about the obsession our group had with Episcopal churches, “good hair,” light complexions, the AKAs, and Martha’s Vineyard.
But as I thought more about the idea of this book and discussed it with people outside the insular circle who belonged, I discovered that there was a broader audience. I discovered that having grown up within the circle, I had been too close to see that the experiences really were unique. There was a story here that began as early as the 1870s with the nation’s first black congressmen and the first black millionaires.
The real in-depth research on this book did not begin until the early days of 1993. Ironically, it was the same month that I was to receive the tragic news that this friend and mentor, Reginald Lewis, had died suddenly of a brain tumor. It was announced on the front page of the New York Times on the day of President Clinton’s inauguration.
As I began the first of more than 350 interviews, and the research that would take me throughout the country visiting libraries, manuscript collections, newspaper archives, and private homes, I had in my mind what Reginald Lewis had said to me several years earlier: There needed to be a chronicle of a community that was hidden from so many people. Although it’s a world I’ve known all of my life, and although it’s an important part of our nation’s history, it’s a world that is filled with irony and conflict. This book was an opportunity to reveal a rarely discussed aspect of American history. It was an opportunity to capture the stories and lives of people like Lewis and many others, who have lived at the boundary of two worlds and been misunderstood by both.