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  Others like Lillian Adams Park, Margaret Simms, Eleanor DeLoache Brown, Ramona Arnold, Nellie Thornton, Shirley Barber James, and Eva Wanton were all educators with master’s degrees or Ph.D.’s. Not surprisingly, most of them were also members of other black groups such as the Links, as well as predominately white groups like the Junior League.

  “The credentials of the people that have been running this organization can be unique and quite intimidating,” says Jack and Jill alumnus Henry Kennedy, a judge in Washington, D.C.’s superior court. “The families that belong to the organization and the mothers that hold the offices reflect a unique mix of black and white social credentials and political activism. They represent the very best that black America has to offer, and this is a great standard to set for kids who are looking for role models,” adds Kennedy, who grew up in the Washington chapter before leaving for Princeton and Harvard Law School. As one of three siblings who went to Princeton, he knows that being a member of the group made a difference in their lives.

  Like Kennedy, I would agree that the credentials of Jack and Jill members in particular, and the accomplishments of black people in general, were dished out at all times to us as kids, no matter what events we participated in.

  MEMBERSHIP

  So how does one get in? By the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I was pretty well aware that Jack and Jill was something that distinguished me from the other kids—even the black kids—at school. Because many of the black kids, in addition to the white students and the white teachers, had never even heard of the group, it was like belonging to a secret club. It was something that I could rarely talk about at school because only about two other kids in my class belonged to my chapter of the organization. One was the son of a physician and the other was the son of an IBM executive. The other black kids at school—some who lived in public housing or modest homes—were outside the Jack and Jill circle, and their absence made me quickly draw the obvious connection between wealth and membership. The conversations I overheard between my parents and their friends confirmed my suspicions. But these are conversations that few will own up to today.

  “There are no applications or request forms,” says a mother who has two children enrolled in the Los Angeles chapter. “Membership is by invitation. You get in by being asked to join. But it’s not about money.”

  In more recent years, I’ve discovered that many parents who are on the outside of Jack and Jill find the admissions process highly frustrating. For well-to-do professionals, who are accustomed to paying for any house, car, or summer camp that they want, it is particularly disturbing to be told that admission is not for sale. Membership in Jack and Jill is coveted by these parents because they know that the organization will provide their children and themselves with a network of activities and friendships that will last for a lifetime. But it is a most exclusive club.

  The way one gets into Jack and Jill is by knowing someone who already belongs. And that is how we got in: my parents’ attorney and his wife, a pharmacist, proposed us in the early 1960s. But it’s even more complicated because after one is sponsored by a current member one may not even be interviewed or considered if there is no open space for a new family to join. In fact, the only individuals guaranteed membership are those whose parents were Jack and Jill members as children. To this day, my mother gets great pleasure in recommending names of young parents who would be great candidates for membership. Even though she is now more than a generation older than these young mothers and fathers, I have seen her display great zeal as she extols the virtues of Jack and Jill membership to these couples—most of them physicians: “You’ll never find a better safety net for your children if you’re going to raise them in non-integrated neighborhoods and schools.”

  But wanting in and getting in are two different things. As I have been told repeatedly, there is no minimum family income threshold required of those being considered for membership. But because members are often required to entertain fellow chapter families in their homes, in between larger events that take place at country clubs, hotels, and restaurants, it is no surprise that the most successful applicants are the ones who have the space, the money, and the time to entertain and host parties and fund-raisers.

  My own experience in the group belies the notion that the wealth of members isn’t noticed. Even if it wasn’t explicitly focused on by parents, I definitely remember its significance to me and my peers. I still remember the day I came home feeling bereft after a backyard Jack and Jill picnic at a friend’s house. I was approximately twelve years old at the time, and the friend had been bragging that his family had two live-in workers—a maid and a caretaker—in addition to a part-time worker who was on hand at their private dock for the family yacht moored at the base of their Tudor estate on New York’s Long Island Sound.

  “How are we going to compete with that?” I asked my father when he suggested that we host next year’s picnic in our own comparatively small backyard.

  What I now recall was lacking—at least in my own Jack and Jill experience—was any real sense of the anger and dissatisfaction that the rest of black America was expressing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Martin Luther King had been shot, cities had been burned, Nixon and Agnew were in the White House, and yet we were learning how to ride horses, make leather belts, or commandeer a small yacht.

  In retrospect, it all seemed as if we were operating in a world that was separate from what we saw on TV news or in local newspapers. Of course parents would make vague remarks about “giving back to the community,” “appreciating the struggle,” or “advancing the black cause,” but to suburban kids like me and my brother, the “community,” the “struggle,” and the “cause” were just terms we nodded at before we turned to the Jack and Jill kid next to us and politely said, “It’s my turn to drive the boat.”

  Politeness reigned supreme in the preteen divisions of Jack and Jill. Since most of the mothers stood on ceremony—regardless of the activity planned for the day—children were expected to be polite no matter how dull a project might be. The “black anger” and “black slang” that we heard in the halls from other kids at school had no place at Jack and Jill events. I remember one afternoon in the contemporary home of a Jack and Jill family who lived in ritzy Chappaqua, New York. The mother was an artist and she was teaching us something I had no interest in—something like the history of origami or Japanese flower-arranging.

  As we sat around the living room of the mostly glass house, the mothers sat quietly with the children until an unruly set of twin brothers started arguing. Rather than be embarrassed in front of the group, the mother took the two boys out a sliding glass door, and I don’t remember them coming back inside that afternoon. As I came to learn, politeness was the paramount virtue.

  Many a Jack and Jill activity dazzled me as an adolescent. Although it has left me feeling proud to have known so many successful black families, at the time the effect was to distract me from the many privileges my parents had bestowed upon me and leave me feeling that I was somehow disadvantaged. Of course, I could have made these same comparisons with some of the white kids I grew up with, but their wealth seemed less relevant to me. For one thing, the yardstick for white success was far different: they talked about country clubs, third-generation family businesses—accoutrements that were impossible for a black person to gather given the de jure discrimination that had ended only twenty years earlier.

  Attracting high-profile families to the group was probably not an end in itself, but I always got the sense that it was an extension of the group’s overzealous focus on its reputation and stature in the hierarchy of black organizations.

  “They say income and professional status don’t matter,” remarked a woman who told me that her kids were members of a Dallas chapter, “but I distinctly remember us turning down someone whose husband wasn’t a professional. Everybody was polite about it—because there are no rules on it—but we all voted ‘no’ because we all kind of knew that
the family didn’t have the kind of money to support the activities, dues, and social demands. Depending on the chapter, you can find some really tough members out there. I know of people whose standards have gotten higher as black people have gotten richer. More and more, they are looking for people with summer houses, country club memberships, large yachts, or ties to corporations who can donate to the group. They want the works!”

  Each year, the organization publishes an annual yearbook called Up the Hill, which features photos and reports from the local chapters as they detail their service, cultural, and social activities of the prior year. The pink-and-blue book is as thick as a big-city phone directory and serves as a chronicle of growing up in the black elite, coast-to-coast. Many think of it as a black children’s version of the Social Register.

  “Frankly, I think those Up the Hill books help to stir up competition between the different cities,” says a second-generation Jack and Jiller who is a student at Spelman College. “It was always a big deal each year they came out. We’d see my mother rush home from the monthly meetings where they handed them out. She and my father would then, out loud, read the three or four pages that had been dedicated to our chapter—specifically noting the accomplishments of the various kids who were growing up with me and my brother. Then Mom and Dad would flip to the front of the book and go through, page-by-page, city-by-city, trying to see how their chapter and their children measured up to the other chapters and children around the country.”

  The Spelman student, who says she liked most of her thirteen years in the organization, adds, “I’m sure they intended it to be an innocent little yearbook, but it brought out the worst in my parents. They’d sit there, at the kitchen table, with a box of paper clips, marking pages in the book of kids from other cities who were winning awards we hadn’t won or going to camps they wanted us to attend, or being presented at balls that they wanted me to debut at. And we didn’t even know half of the people.” The nineteen-year-old laughs as she sits in her dorm room staring up at the Jack and Jill commemorative plaque that she had received upon graduation. “I guess you can call it healthy competition, but sometimes I wanted to burn that book.”

  By the time I was in the ninth grade, I too began to comb through the data listed in Up the Hill. Finding attractive girls to meet and reading about interesting summer experiences or unusual internships to apply for were just a few of the benefits to be gained from the book.

  Notwithstanding the annual Up the Hill, the most comprehensive chronicle of the group was written by Philadelphia grande dame Dr. Nellie Gordon Roulhac, in her book The First Fifty Years. Roulhac, who served as the group’s fifth national president from 1954 to 1958, says, “Jack and Jill has a rich history of contributing to generations of families, as well as to important social and civic causes.” While relocating the family twice with her husband as he moved to different positions, Roulhac raised her children in Jack and Jill chapters in Tennessee, in Pennsylvania, and then in Georgia, where she helped found a chapter in 1950. “My husband and I found ourselves in Albany, Georgia, a southern segregated town, in 1950 and suddenly realized how different it was from Philadelphia,” says the University of Pennsylvania graduate, who recognizes that the Pennsylvania city’s black elite had always had the major black society groups like Jack and Jill, the Links, and the Boulé. “We liked Georgia, but we knew our kids needed organized social programming in that segregated environment—so we pulled together a group of parents. I’m proud to see our grandchildren in it too. They have an incredible network of role models and mentors at their fingertips.”

  I could always identify with the suburban kids I met in Jack and Jill. They were always rather bland and “safe,” with little interest in testing the authenticity of my blackness. The members who gave me a difficult time were the ones who had grown up in all-black neighborhoods in large urban areas. Initially, I was surprised that their parents saw a need for the group, since their kids were already surrounded by neighbors who valued their black identity.

  Berecia Canton Boyce’s experience demonstrated the need. “After my husband and I left a mostly white, affluent section of the Upper West Side and moved to Harlem,” explains Boyce, a graduate of New York University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, “we found a great diversity of black people—working-class, middle-class, and affluent. But instead of dealing with white kids who didn’t understand him, my youngest son found himself around black kids who teased him by calling him ‘the rich kid’ or ‘the professor.’ Moving to Harlem was the best thing we ever did, but I also still needed to surround my children with as many high-achieving kids as possible.”

  Boyce is president of the New York chapter, fifty-nine years old and famous for the annual dance it sponsors at the city’s Copacabana Club each year for about one thousand Jack and Jill teenagers as well as for its contributions to Hale House and the Studio Museum of Harlem. The chapter roster has included graduates of all the best private schools and selective public schools (and lists the children of Mayor David Dinkins and Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton as alumni). Boyce has three children: one, a graduate of the Bronx School of Science; a second who graduated from Brooklyn Polyprep; and the youngest, Brent, a student at the exclusive Collegiate School, who has been there since first grade and is setting his sights on attending a top college. “Our kids have done everything from summering in France and the Caribbean to skiing in Switzerland,” explains this proud mother as she considers the benefits of belonging to a group where such activities are the norm.

  Although Jack and Jill’s earliest chapters began in urban areas similar to Philadelphia and New York City, the greater trend today is toward developing chapters within suburban communities where black parents are hard-pressed to find black friendships for their children, who are reaching a crucial social development stage in their lives.

  “I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, I attended a virtually all-white suburban elementary school, and it became obvious to my parents that I knew nothing about black people or other black kids by the time I hit the third grade,” explained a Jack and Jill alumnus who recently graduated from Yale and admits that he had so internalized white attitudes that he was afraid of blacks at his elementary school. “I’m sure my parents were also looking ahead to that time when kids start separating on the basis of race, and they knew I’d be left out by the white kids. If it wasn’t for Jack and Jill, I wouldn’t have known any black kids until I got to college.”

  “My oldest daughter didn’t get asked on a single date until she was a senior in high school,” explains a mother whose daughter was the only black in her suburban Virginia high school’s class twenty years ago. “And when she did go, it was with a white boy. It just killed me, but how could I tell her to stay home?”

  Interracial dating is still an uncomfortable issue for even the most open-minded black families. Many black families living in predominately white settings like the one I grew up in point to the fast-growing chapters in suburban communities as a means of addressing the conflicts of interracial dating. Or—more frankly—as a means of avoiding interracial dating.

  “I got so tired of hearing my friends tell me about their older black sons—boys from good families—who were bringing home these white girlfriends from school because they supposedly didn’t know any well-bred black girls,” explains a mother who had just returned from a teen summit conference in Oklahoma City. “I got busy and put my son in Jack and Jill. I know it sounds desperate, but it was the best move I could make in order to let him know that there are black girls who are smart, attractive, well-to-do, and well-bred. In Jack and Jill, we’ve got debutantes, intellectuals, athletes, politicos, artists, everything you could imagine.”

  Whether one makes this argument because of racial pride or just outright bigotry, it has always been an uncomfortable subject for Jack and Jill members. Of the girls I dated while growing up, all of them were black, and all but two were in Jack and Jill. I now questio
n the wisdom of such a narrow experience. Given many of the parents’ initial aversion to interracial dating, the group’s early response to children of interracial parents is unsurprising. Some chapters have taken in mixed-race families who want to raise their kids around black children. It remains an unusual phenomenon that is only rarely attempted in most chapters—it is usually done only when the mother is black. I never knew interracial kids in Jack and Jill when I was a child, and while I’d like to think they would have been welcomed, I’m not sure. Today, the attitudes are more progressive.

  “Sometimes they make me feel uncomfortable,” said a black tenth-grader who has gone to teen conferences and met fellow Jack and Jillers who are biracial. “This group’s focus is a problack one, and I feel like I’ve got to walk on eggs when the interracial kids are around because although I’m not saying anything negative about whites, I always feel like I can’t say anything that sounds too positive about blacks.”

  Since it is not a political organization, the group has never taken a public stand on controversial issues such as interracial relationships in the way that groups like the NAACP or the Association of Black Social Workers will. Many members do say that if the group is going to see any changes in the near future, it will be in deciding how far it will go to address the needs and concerns of the interracial family.

  TAKING THE BAD WITH THE GOOD

  “I was always the last girl to be asked to dance, or to be invited to parties,” says a late-1980s Jack and Jill graduate from northern Virginia. “I can’t tell you how many Jack and Jill gatherings I went to where somebody would say something like, ‘You’re pretty attractive for somebody so dark. You have nice white teeth.’ It was excruciating, and it happened not just at the Jack and Jill events, but it would happen when I saw these same people at other places—like at the Howard homecoming, the Tuxedo Ball, even at the AKA cotillion where I came out. The Jack and Jill crowd was so into the long, pretty hair–light skin–nice features scene that it really devastated me.”