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  “It is evident that the fixation on skin color by both upper-class whites and blacks derives from the fact that light-skinned blacks were given a favored status by white slave owners from their very early interaction during the slavery period,” explains Professor Alexander. In her book Ambiguous Lives, Alexander explores her own family’s roots in Georgia as free, light-skinned blacks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The phenomenon was not limited to southern blacks. Although the South was the most notorious for its use of slaves, blacks were owned and used as slaves in the northern states well into the 1800s. For example, although Pennsylvania was the first state to establish a law abolishing slavery, with its 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, the weak terms of the act allowed some blacks to remain enslaved until 1850, when the Federal Census ultimately found no slaves living in the state. Over time, then, the caste system took on a third dimension: free blacks versus enslaved blacks. For example, in Pennsylvania, the Federal Census of 1790 reveals that of the 10,274 blacks living in the state, more than one-third of them were slaves, with the remaining group labeled as “free blacks” or “free people of color.”

  There were many arguments used by white government officials, religious leaders, and highly esteemed landowners to justify the continued enslavement of blacks in North America. Just as they had done when attempting to enslave the Native Americans, the white population insisted that Africans should be enslaved because they were not Christians—and so long as they did not embrace such religious tenets, they needed to be ruled by civilized whites who did. Upon the conversion of some of the blacks to Christianity—and after a certain number of years of indentured servitude—a very small percentage of slaves were set free, thus creating a population of free blacks in North America. This practice of freeing slaves was sporadic and was ultimately halted in the South. In fact, it was as early as the 1660s, in Virginia, that blacks would legally be made slaves in perpetuity. Many white landowners and government officials elsewhere quickly came to agree with this decision as they realized how much the economies of their communities had benefited from the free labor.

  While their numbers were inconsequential, free blacks in the South became an elite group with a status somewhere between their enslaved brethren and white citizens. For example, in the state of Georgia in 1800, there were 1,019 free blacks, and by 1860 that number had grown only to 3,500. In the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, out of a population of 40,522 people, close to 14,000 were black slaves, and only 3,200 were free blacks. Free blacks in the South were generally required to carry papers proving that they were not slaves and were required to register annually in their counties, listing their white guardians. However, they were permitted to work for money and to own property, thus creating the first opportunity for blacks to establish their families with some moderate wealth. The nucleus of the black elite was formed around these families.

  One of my first encounters with an early pioneering family in the black upper class was meeting members of the aristocratic Syphax family from Virginia. I had grown up hearing my father tell me about their family history, as one of his father’s business associates had known several family members. Talking to Evelyn Reid Syphax at a Links meeting that my mother had brought me to, I learned one way in which some black families—including her own—gained wealth and a place among the upper class. “My family had owned fifteen acres of the land where the Arlington National Cemetery now sits,” Syphax explained as she recounted the history of her family, which can be traced back to Maria Custis, the mulatto child of First Lady Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who owned the mansion that sits on the cemetery today. “Custis fathered Maria with Ariana Carter, one of his female house slaves,” explained Syphax, a well-to-do, retired real estate broker who lives in Virginia, “and when Maria asked her father, who was also still her owner, for permission to marry Charles Syphax, a black slave who worked for her father, he released both from slavery, gave her a wedding in the mansion, and offered her and her new husband fifteen acres of the Arlington estate. That mansion and the surrounding property—minus Maria Syphax’s fifteen acres—was later given by Custis to his white daughter, Mary Custis, who eventually married Confederate soldier Robert E. Lee—thus making the house a famous building in the southern state.”

  On my first trip to Washington with my family in the late 1960s, I remember my parents remarking that the Syphax story was evidence that a black family’s genealogy could be as relevant to our country’s history as any white family’s that I might read about in school. The fact that the Syphaxes were still residing in the community today made their story even more real to me at that age. Since that time, the Syphax family has continued to gain wealth through other real estate holdings and through businesses that involved commercial and residential development and sales.

  Whether they began as free people of color or as enslaved house servants, those blacks who came to make up the black aristocracy were typically those who were able to gain an education and various professional skills. Access to a college education was clearly the earliest and surest method for earning respect among progressive whites who were willing to teach blacks various trades and offer them limited work.

  A college education was made possible for blacks around the time of the Civil War by the generosity of religious groups like the American Missionary Association, an association of liberal whites who had initially opened elementary schools for blacks in the South before the war. As the abolitionist group raised funds in the North and attracted northern white and black teachers to the South in the 1860s, they established secondary schools and colleges like Fisk University in Nashville, Hampton Institute in Virginia, Tougaloo College in Mississippi, and many other universities that exist today. By 1865, the American Missionary Association had recruited more than three hundred teachers to its black southern schools.

  Another group that made it possible for blacks to receive formal education at this time was the Freedmen’s Aid Society, which was established by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1866.

  By the 1870s, not even a decade beyond slavery, handfuls of blacks were breaking into their own middle class by attending the earliest established black colleges like Howard University, Fisk University, Atlanta University, and Morehouse College—all founded in the 1860s—and later Spelman College, founded in the 1880s for black women. Not coincidentally, these are among the six or seven schools that the old-guard black elite still consider to be most appropriate for their children today. Specifically not included are dozens of other black colleges—schools like Alabama State and Tougaloo College—because they were state-sponsored or populated by poorer students from the Deep South. There are also examples of blacks attending white northeastern universities like Harvard and Amherst, and prep schools like Phillips Exeter, as early as the late 1800s. Another white school that was also known to admit blacks in this early period was Oberlin College in Ohio, which African Americans attended in small numbers as early as the mid-1860s.

  Although Oberlin is still spoken of fondly by well-to-do blacks who went to college in the 1950s and prior to that time, its popularity among the black elite has been eclipsed by the top black colleges and by the more prestigious and better-endowed white East Coast colleges like Harvard, Brown, and Wellesley. Although Oberlin was notoriously abolitionist during the 1800s and remains extremely liberal to this day, there is a preference among upper-class blacks to attend schools that have more of a worldwide reputation.

  Another factor in the elevation of a handful of black families was the possibility of attaining political office. This happened initially in the South during the reconstruction that lasted from 1865 until 1877. In southern states where large black populations had suddenly gained the status of free men and women, black men began to run for seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 emboldened them to attend political conventions and join political clubs.

  In 187
0, Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black elected to the U.S. Senate. Senator Blanche K. Bruce, a black U.S. senator elected in 1874, also from Mississippi, had been born a slave in Farmville, Virginia, in 1841. While rebuffed by some in Washington’s white society, he and his wife, Josephine Willson Bruce, a prominent dentist’s daughter, were early leaders in Washington’s black society during the late nineteenth century.

  Other blacks who were elected to the U.S. Congress at this time included Robert Smalls and Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, Jefferson Long of Georgia, Benjamin Turner of Alabama, Josiah Wells of Florida, and John Lynch of Mississippi. Between 1870 and the late 1890s, nearly two dozen blacks served in the U.S. Congress. And while elected office did not promise wealth or acceptance within the white social structure, it did bring lasting prestige to certain family names.

  Prominent families socialized with one another, built businesses with one another, and intermarried, establishing well-to-do and well-respected dynasties. These included names like Terrell, Pinchback, and Grimké in Washington; Herndon and Rucker in Atlanta; Minton and Purvis in Philadelphia; Bishop, White, and Delany in New York; Wheeler and Williams in Chicago; and many others.

  Although very large post–Civil War black populations were found in the rural sections of southern states like South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, these were not necessarily where the black upper-class families built their foundations for work and education. Instead, they built their futures in more progressive cities, close to black universities and removed from rural poverty. The cities where they established and built businesses and institutions in the South were Atlanta, Washington, Nashville, Charleston, and Memphis, where my father’s family began a variety of businesses.

  And both preceding and following the path of the post–World War I and II migrations of blacks to the North, the black elite also established themselves in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. There were also pockets of the black upper class—particularly physicians—in Tuskegee, Alabama, that grew up around the nation’s only black Veterans Administration hospital and Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute; in Nashville, centered on the campuses of Fisk University, Tennessee State, and Meharry Medical College; and later, to a lesser extent, in Los Angeles.

  Although some prominent families established their roots in positions with important church congregations or universities, the more common paths to success in the black elite have been through careers in medicine, dentistry, and law. In addition, examples of early and continuing black wealth can be found in individual entrepreneurship that served either the black or the white communities. For example, in most cities with large black populations, black funeral home owners formed a core part of the elite, along with the founders of local black banks, insurance companies, and newspapers. Wealthy and influential Atlanta families like the Herndons and the Scotts, for example, can point to Atlanta Life Insurance and the Atlanta Daily World, respectively, as the source of their wealth and influence.

  Radcliffe graduate and Washington, D.C., TV news producer A’Lelia Perry Bundles is the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C. J. Walker, the nation’s first self-made woman millionaire. “Many people are surprised to learn that a black woman who was developing hair care products and cosmetics in the late 1800s would actually be the first self-made woman millionaire in this country,” says Bundles, as she looks through photos of Walker standing with Booker T. Washington and other prominent black businesspeople. In addition to building homes in Indianapolis and Harlem and a twenty-thousand-square-foot stone mansion that still stands near the Hudson River in suburban Westchester County in New York, Walker used her millions to help the NAACP’s antilynching campaign.

  Members of the black elite have historically given generously to charities like the Urban League, the United Negro College Fund, and the NAACP, a ninety-year-old organization that has its roots among this group. The irony is that while today most of these successful people will still write checks for the NAACP, they do not consider it part of their social circle in the way they would have done before the 1960s. “We’ll see what Myrlie Evers can do with it, because she has a lot of class, but that NAACP is a bit too grassroots for people like us,” explains a Chicago matron as she sits in the dining room of a large home in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The woman holds a graduate degree and belongs to several boards and elite black organizations. “The NAACP did wonderful things for us in the South—and up here too—and I’m happy to give to them because they help all of us, but you just don’t find a whole lot of professional blacks socializing among the NAACP. We’ve got our own groups.”

  As the woman pulls out her family photo albums, she points to herself, her parents, her husband, and their friends who hold memberships in the Alphas, AKAs, Deltas, Links, Drifters, Girl Friends, Boulé, and Guardsmen. There are photos of gatherings at the Ink Well in Martha’s Vineyard; relatives playing tennis at a summer home in Idlewild, Michigan; photos from an important Detroit wedding reception that included nearly one thousand guests; and, of course, snapshots from a family member’s black-tie debutante cotillion. “I have a graduate degree and my friends have degrees from Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, and Meharry. Why would I be socializing with some caseworker or mailman who goes to NAACP events? I’d have as much in common with them as a rich white person has with his gardener.”

  And it is because of these real or imagined differences that the black elite in every major city and suburb has its own churches as well.

  “The black upper class has most often been associated with the Episcopal Church,” says Rev. Harold T. Lewis, the author of Yet with a Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church and rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. Despite earlier affiliations with the Baptist and Methodist denominations and the larger numbers of blacks who currently make up those congregations, the black elite have often selected the more formal high Episcopal Church or Congregational Church.

  The Episcopal faith was attractive because of its formality, and both faiths were appealing because they were known for having well-educated clergy and a small number of members. Well-to-do black Americans with roots in the West Indies had natural historic ties to the Episcopal Church, which had served a major role in Jamaica and other former British colonies for several generations. The Congregational Church’s popularity among the black elite grew from the fact that it was the denomination that had given the greatest support to the American Missionary Association’s efforts in establishing secondary schools and colleges for southern blacks in the late 1800s.

  And for some of the most cynical and status-conscious members of the black elite, the two denominations were particularly appealing simply because most blacks were not of that faith.

  In every city where there are members of the black elite, there is an Episcopal or a Congregational Church that dominates the upper-class black religious scene: In Chicago, it is St. Edmund’s or Good Shepherd; in Detroit, St. Matthew’s; in Philadelphia, St. Thomas; in Memphis, Second Congregational; in Charleston, St. Mark’s; in Washington, St. Luke’s; in Atlanta, First Congregational; and in New York, St. Philip’s. Some say that the black upper class disdains the open display of emotions that are often shared in Baptist and AME churches, while others say that Episcopal and Congregational denominations have better-educated church leaders.

  For whatever the reason, the choice does keep the elite separated. And just as there have been special churches for the black upper class, so are there special social groups that separate men, women, and children of different classes.

  As a child, I grew up in Jack and Jill, the ultimate membership-by-invitation-only social group for black children and their families. Founded in 1938 by seven well-to-do black women who were establishing a play group for their kids, the elite national organization now has 220 chapters throughout the United States and Germany. “The purpose of the group,” explains Dr. Nellie Gordon Roulhac, a Ja
ck and Jill mother who served as the organization’s national president from 1954 to 1958, “is to introduce black children and their families to other children who are interested in social service activities, educational programs, and other projects that improve the lives of people in the black community.”

  As a child going to Jack and Jill weekend excursions, fund-raisers, black-tie dances, or backyard tennis parties, I was introduced to the fact that there was a national network of black children who grew up smart, ambitious, well-to-do, and proud of their black heritage. Whether or not the group was intended to serve as such, it also introduced young boys and girls as future dates and spouses. “I grew up in Jack and Jill during the 1940s,” explains New York resident William Pickens, whose mother, Emilie, was a national president of the group, “and I eventually married a Jack and Jill alum in the 1960s. It was a tight circle of people who all had a lot in common. Our fathers were lawyers or doctors and our mothers had gone to college together. This was where we were expected to find our friends and dates.” I knew exactly what Pickens meant, because while I was a student at Princeton, I dated women at Harvard, Brown, and Mount Holyoke—all girls I knew through Jack and Jill. Armed with Jack and Jill’s annual yearbook Up the Hill, I had a coast-to-coast directory of boys, girls, and parents who were just like me.

  Other popular groups among the black elite are separated on the basis of gender. For the women, there is the nine-thousand-member Links, which was founded in 1946 and is populated by professionals, socialites, educators, and well-to-do matrons. Several years ago, my mother was inducted as a member, along with Dr. Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, and a host of other accomplished women. The chapters—which allow no more than fifty-five members—are highly selective and include such women as former Washington mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, Children’s Defense Fund head Marian Wright Edelman, former Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole, Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary, and many other prominent names. Another highly selective and socially elite group is the Girl Friends, founded in 1933. The black-tie debutante cotillions the group sponsors in different cities for charity and for the introduction of young girls to society are among the most sought-after tickets on the black elite social calendar. Other groups include the Drifters, the Northeasterners, and the Smart Set. And for college women, there are two particular sororities that are favored above all others. They are the AKAs and the Deltas—primarily because they were founded over eighty years ago at Howard, and also because they took only the right girls from the right families.