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  Because Jack and Jill is very selective and admits members by invitation-only, it provides a great opportunity for professional parents to introduce their kids to children of similar families. Whether one is in Boston, Atlanta, Houston, or Beverly Hills, the children of a community’s most prominent black families will be found in the local Jack and Jill chapter. For generations, it has served as a network for parents who want play groups for their children, as well as a network for young adults who want companionship, dating relationships, and ultimately marriage partners.

  William Pickens, who was first enrolled in Jack and Jill as a two-year-old in 1938, says he wasn’t surprised that he eventually married a Jack and Jiller. “My parents wanted me and my brother in the organization so we’d be introduced to other black kids who came from similar backgrounds,” explains Pickens, while recalling the friendships he has maintained from the organization. Pickens, whose father, William, was a lawyer and whose mother, Emilie, was national president of the group in the early 1950s, came from the kind of family lineage for which Jack and Jill became famous. His father was Langston Hughes’s roommate at Lincoln University, and his grandfather, a class-of-1904 graduate of Yale, was the first black dean of Morgan State University and a friend of W. E. B. Du Bois. His mother was a class-of-1923 graduate of the University of Washington and a descendant of one of the oldest black families in Pennsylvania.

  Now president of the Paul Robeson Foundation in New York, Pickens recalls that many of his friendships, as well as his marriage, grew out of ties to Jack and Jill. “My wife, Audrey Brannen Pickens, had been teen president of her chapter in Queens. I had been social chairman in my New York chapter. We had a lot in common. Like many kids in the group, we grew up spending our summers in Sag Harbor and going to the same cotillions. And the Jack and Jill tradition continues. All three of our kids were members while growing up, and now we also have grandchildren in the group.” Since Pickens’s sister-in-law, Barbara Brannen Newton, is the group’s national secretary, he still feels close ties to the organization.

  Few can deny the early educational and cultural benefits that one gains from growing up in this organization. Most of the kids who grew up with me in my chapter of Jack and Jill lived an almost completely white existence during the week. Unlike most of our parents, who had grown up in segregated towns and school systems with black neighbors and teachers, we lived in all-white neighborhoods and attended classes that had never seen a black face beyond the custodian’s closet. We played with white kids who claimed us as their “favorite” (read “only”) black friend. In fact, so nonintegrated was our Monday-to-Friday schoolday experience that we rarely heard racial issues discussed outside of the house.

  My white friends knew that I was different, but except for the occasional slip on their part, there was an almost unspoken gentleman’s agreement between me and my white friends that nobody would remark on my blackness except to ask me for a translation of the occasional black slang words they heard on The Flip Wilson Show or to answer some dumb question like whether we tanned in the sun or put starch in our Afros. In a sense, we were all on our best “guarded” behavior—politely answering naive kids with nonthreatening responses that carefully disguised our annoyance. We were black kids living in a white world that had strict rules on conformity.

  But when Saturday came, there was a collective sigh of relief as we could remove the masks and settle into our black upper-class reality. We had our Jack and Jill gatherings: carpools of black mothers and fathers pulling up to museums or riding stables in Ford and Buick station wagons, or groups of kids getting off a plane in order to visit our congressmen in Washington. No matter how different all of our weekend activities were, we were around other black kids, where we black children could be ourselves and tell each other exactly what we thought. We could talk about racist incidents just the way we talked about baseball and coin collecting. We could talk about how we were sick of all the What’s Happening!! ghetto dwellers on TV while also talking about some new remote-control airplane we were building at home.

  Shortly before she died, former national president Nellie Thornton told me, “Jack and Jill is especially important for children who are growing up in suburban communities who have a foot in two different worlds.” Thornton, an elementary school principal who had been one of my mother’s closest friends, was concerned about keeping herself, her husband, and her two daughters connected to the black community and black history. Living in a large white stucco mansion in a Westchester county suburb, she wanted her daughters to know blacks like themselves. A graduate of Fisk, Thornton divided her time between being president of her Links chapter, membership with the AKAs, and bringing her kids to monthly Jack and Jill events.

  Black suburbanites have leaned on Jack and Jill for generations because the bucolic streets outside their home failed to reflect the racial diversity of the cities. Elsie Ashley remembers being inducted into a suburban Connecticut chapter at the same time as Rachel Robinson, the widow of baseball player Jackie Robinson. “It was 1958, and there were just no other opportunities for my children to meet black role models in suburban Stamford, Greenwich, or Norwalk,” says Ashley as she sits in her spacious kitchen. Even though she and her husband were also eventually to buy a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, like many other Jack and Jill parents, she and her kids got some occasional reality checks from her white suburban neighbors. “Even though the world saw our community as a progressive part of New England,” explains Ashley, a native of Connecticut’s Fairfield County, “my children and I still remember the day the neighbors burned a cross on the Robinsons’ lawn.”

  Ashley’s daughter, Yvonne, doesn’t allow such incidents to cloud her memory of being black in such settings. As she recalls the Jack and Jill picnics they used to enjoy on the Robinsons’ five-acre estate, she points out, “Four of my closest girlfriends are girls that I met through that organization. That makes it all worth it.”

  Even though the Jack and Jill kids were, in general, a bit wealthier and far more cynical and sophisticated than my well-to-do white friends in my neighborhood, I felt a lot more secure around the Jack and Jill kids. I felt I knew where I stood with them: even the ones whom I didn’t like and who didn’t like me. There was no hidden racial agenda, as there was among some of my white classmates at school. In Jack and Jill, we all said what we thought. Not as at school or in the neighborhood, where whites were curious about racial issues but talked around them by asking instead about some black sitcom character or making a reference to some new dance move they saw on Soul Train. As white classmates avoided the real issues, much of what we thought went unspoken.

  For example, if a white kid at school didn’t invite me to a birthday party or bar mitzvah, I didn’t know if it was because he didn’t like me or if it was because he and his parents didn’t want a black in their house or at their club. If someone didn’t want to trade sandwiches in the lunchroom, I wasn’t sure it was because he didn’t like tuna fish or because he thought black food would poison him. If someone didn’t want to bob for apples after me at a school PTA bazaar, I wasn’t sure if he was tired of the game, or if it was a fear of mixing black and white germs. These are all real incidents that happened to me, and although they occurred thirty years ago, they still hurt as if they had happened yesterday.

  At school and in the neighborhood, race was always part of the unspoken subtext. Maybe it was paranoia, but it was clearly something the other Jack and Jill kids saw Monday to Friday too. On the weekend, we could all escape. In our elementary and junior-high years, it was not something we could articulate, but as we got older we became more aware that our experiences—no matter what city or town we lived in—were not that different. And being able to talk about them was a kind of salvation.

  Savannah’s Shirley Barber James says that Jack and Jill kids are introduced to a variety of important issues and experiences through the group’s programs. “Many of our chapters have taken the children to Africa and other plac
es where they can learn about our people’s history,” says James, who raised three children in the organization. “My husband and I sent our kids to the best private schools in our city, but we realized that their socialization would not be fully realized in an academic setting. We needed the church, the family, and Jack and Jill.” Because James’s children attended the academically competitive Savannah Country Day School, she was comfortable with their academic experiences, but she wanted to strike a balance with leadership and cultural programs that included greater racial diversity. “And I also wanted them to attend cotillions and parties with other black children,” the Savannah native adds.

  While the organization operates with local chapters or branches, Jack and Jill is actually controlled by a national office, with each local chapter chartered under the group’s constitution and bylaws. Each chapter, in turn, is broken down into special age groups consisting of toddlers aged two to four; young children aged five to eight; preteens aged nine to eleven; junior teens, who are twelve to fourteen; and senior teens, who are in high school. Age-appropriate activities are provided for each of the different groups. The parents and the officers (usually the mothers, although fathers are allowed to participate) chaperone their child’s groups to museums, theater performances, sporting events, and overnight trips to historic places in the United States and abroad. There is an activity at least once each month and there is often a focus on learning about black history. Most of what I know today about the early accomplishments of blacks I learned by growing up in Jack and Jill.

  Depending on the size of each chapter’s separate age groups, monthly organizing meetings are held at members’ homes or at local clubs or hotels. During the year, there are usually two or three parties just for the kids (at least two will be semiformal or formal). And at least twice a year, there will be a semiformal or formal party given at a private club or hotel just for the parents and their invited guests. Many of the Jack and Jill chapters also sponsor debutante cotillions for those young girls who have reached their senior year in high school and who will simultaneously graduate from their chapters. Regardless of their age, the members get a heavy dose of tradition and organizational history. When I was growing up, I was always aware of the group’s history. At local conferences, there were always photo displays of past officers. At national conventions, there were always speeches by officers. Knowing who started the group and who was still around was something we were compelled to know and remember.

  When Jack and Jill’s official founder, Marion Turner Stubbs Thomas, first developed the idea of the organization with Louise Dench in Marion’s Philadelphia home with several other mothers in her city, she had the same concerns for her children as did other well-to-do black women who saw their kids growing up during a period when blacks had access to few positive black images and to few activities that brought them into contact with other middle-and upper-class black families. The daughter of Dr. John P. Turner, a surgeon who was the first black on Philadelphia’s board of education, Marion was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1930. A child of affluent and worldly parents, she attended the Sorbonne, then returned to the United States and married a thoracic surgeon, Frederick Douglas Stubbs, in 1934. After Stubbs died, Marion married Detroit physician Alf Thomas, and the two became a celebrated couple in that city’s black elite. They raised three daughters in Jack and Jill—and the daughters went on to raise their own children in the organization as well.

  Like Thomas, the other women in Jack and Jill’s organizing chapter of 1938 came from well-to-do families. Among them was Helen Dickens, a physician who later became a professor and associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; Sadie T. M. Alexander, an attorney who had also earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921 and whose husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, was a Philadelphia judge; and Dorothy Wright, who was married to Emanuel Crogman Wright, son of the founder of the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company. Dorothy Wright, who was also pivotal in the later creation of the elite black women’s group, the Links, was the first national president of Jack and Jill.

  Today, most parents are attracted to the organization for the same reasons that inspired these founding mothers. “Of course, some of the parents see it as a way to establish themselves among the black elite in their communities,” says a former Oakland Jack and Jill mother as she tells me about the culprits in her own chapter, “but most simply recognize the need to introduce their children to role models, since many of them live in or utilize schools in predominately white settings and want their kids to meet other blacks who understand their experience.” Anita Lyons Bond of St. Louis agrees. “Our three kids were in a predominately white private school—St. Louis Country Day—and they needed the socialization skills that this group teaches.” Bond, a former chapter president, and her husband, a prominent surgeon, both believe the group teaches confidence.

  “Jack and Jill was extremely important to my sisters and me because it constantly reinforced the role of education and excellence in the black family,” says Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of slain civil rights leader Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz. “When you are attending competitive schools that are predominately white, and when you are raised in a world that only profiles white success stories,” says Shabazz, who grew up in the same Jack and Jill chapter as me while she attended the exclusive, all-girls Masters School in suburban Dobbs Ferry, New York, “you need to be exposed to black success stories.”

  Many non–Jack and Jillers would probably be surprised to learn of the number of “celebrity” families who participated in Jack and Jill. But for a lot of the kids of famous blacks, a place in Jack and Jill was a safe harbor. Even though some of us whispered about the celebrity of the Shabazz family, for the most part they were just another group of kids in our play group. It was a situation that offered much more normalcy and much less scrutiny than they would ever find in white schools and neighborhoods.

  Now working as a public relations director in the New York area, Shabazz recalls her Jack and Jill years fondly and continues to give back to black children through her activities in the Links and its various programs that support young people. “It was a challenge growing up in the spotlight,” says the attractive and popular Shabazz, “but thank goodness my mother realized that Jack and Jill would expose us to educational activities and to role models and other black families who wanted the best for their kids.”

  The impeccable résumés of the organization’s past presidents demonstrated to local chapter members and others that professional accomplishments were crucial to Jack and Jill’s success. I never heard this stated explicitly, but I was always aware that the women who had been running the organization were completely and fanatically attached to what the elite valued most. The fact that these women had the best social connections was another indicator that the organization wanted to represent the most elite families in each city. Not coincidentally, almost all of the past national presidents had been members of the exclusive Links group as well as the Deltas or AKAs—long considered the choice college sororities of the black elite. As Nellie Gordon Roulhac’s history book on Jack and Jill, The First Fifty Years, reveals, many of the women held doctorates in medicine or teaching and most were members of prominent families.

  For example, Dorothy Bell Wright, the group’s first president, was an accountant with the IRS whose great-grandfather, Private John Henson Swails, joined the Union Army in 1864. Her husband’s family had founded one of the most respected black banks in the country. Dorothy’s daughter, Gwynne Wright, remembers growing up in a home where famous names and faces were always passing through. “Because of my parents’ activities in black organizations and businesses,” says the Philadelphia native, who also belongs to the Links, “many influential people like Mary McLeod Bethune visited or stayed with us. Jack and Jill attracted an incredible network of leaders and families.”

  Emilie Pickens, the second president of the
group, was descended from John Montier, a Philadelphia resident who appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s 1790 census and built a historic home that has stood since the 1770s. A class-of-1923 graduate of the University of Washington, she was married to a successful attorney. Her son, Bill, still visits with Jack and Jill kids whom he met in the late 1930s and 1940s. “Most of my oldest friends are the children of the Jack and Jill mothers that my mom worked with,” says Pickens, a resident of New York City.

  Other early national presidents of Jack and Jill attracted intellectual prestige: a quality that brought depth to the group. The next three presidents, Alberta Banner Turner, Nellie Gordon Roulhac, and Ruth Brown Howard, all held doctorates: Turner had been the first black to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Ohio State before serving as professor of psychology at several universities, including Wilberforce and Lincoln Universities. Roulhac, who sat on the board of directors of the United Cerebral Palsy Association, had earned master’s and doctorate degrees from Columbia University and the University of Sarasota. She was the child of an old Philadelphia family, and her father and grandfather also had doctorates. Her successor, Ruth Howard, was a graduate of Wellesley and Columbia and received her Ph.D. from Catholic University before writing several college textbooks and joining the faculty of San Francisco State University.

  The leadership’s progression from socially elite to intellectual elite and then to professional elite was evident by the late 1960s. Ninth and tenth presidents Mirian Chivers Shropshire and Pearl Boschulte, both graduates of Howard Medical School, were physicians who practiced, respectively, internal medicine and ophthalmology.