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  “Sure, some people might have thought of it as elitist, but my mother and father just saw it as an additional part of my exposure as a child,” says Stevenson, whose parents also insisted that she be exposed to annual summer trips to the elite black Sag Harbor resort community. “My parents started going there in the 1930s.”

  “I don’t think any child actually asks to be a debutante or an escort at a cotillion,” says Alberta Campbell Colbert, a Washingtonian whose daughter, Doris, was presented in 1962 by the Bachelor-Benedicts with twenty other girls. “Quite simply, she did it only to please her father.”

  Historically, because of segregation or because northern Junior Leagues and other white groups—prior to the 1970s—shut them out with their unwritten rules of bias, the black elite were limited to presenting their daughters at cotillions that were sponsored by their own clubs and organizations.

  But of course the best families wanted their daughters to be presented only by certain groups within the black community; the local church group or YWCA would never have been satisfactory. The favored national groups have always been the AKAs or the Deltas, the Links, the Girl Friends, the Smart Set, Jack and Jill, or certain local or regional clubs like the Royal Snakes in Chicago, the Co-Ettes in Detroit, or Washington’s Bachelor-Benedicts.

  “When I was presented by the Smart Set in Houston in the early eighties, I didn’t really find the event that intimidating,” says Kimberly Webb, an attorney who graduated from Wellesley and Duke Law School and grew up in one of those stellar families where the parents held memberships in the Boulé, the Links, and the Girl Friends. But even if a debutante is as unfazed as Webb was, there is another component to the debutante scene: the escort.

  Whether a debutante’s parents are hunting for the right young escort, or a young man’s parents are jockeying to steer their son to the right debutante, the whole scene can be both maddening and exciting for the sons who get thrown into the mix. Many of them are used like pawns to curry favor between families and friends. Because I came of age in the late 1970s—a time when the New York area groups had abandoned debutante balls—I missed playing the role. My parents received numerous requests for me to be sent to Memphis to serve as an escort for the neighbors of my relatives, but it would have required no fewer than three plane trips to attend the escort training sessions that preceded the actual ball.

  “I got stuck acting as an escort for three different balls simply because my parents had to pay back favors they’d gotten when my two older sisters had come out two years earlier,” says a Morehouse graduate from Cleveland. “It’s not that I didn’t like the three girls, but they were all so afraid that I would embarrass them—so afraid I wouldn’t know how to do all the bowing, parading, and dancing. It just wasn’t any fun after all the lessons and practicing. Just a lot of profiling.”

  “It wasn’t such a bad experience,” says one of my friends, John Evans, now a New York dentist, who recalls serving as an escort at a Girl Friends ball in the mid-1970s. “There was a lot of rehearsing on the weekends leading up to the cotillion. We had this humorless old guy who drilled us on how to hold a lady’s hand, how to bow, and how to lead in a waltz.”

  Finding a good escort for a debutante is de rigueur for parents who want to look good in front of the guests they’ve invited to the cotillion—a black-tie event where tickets sell for around $150 per person. The parents of debutantes rely on the sons of their college roommates, the boys who belong to their Jack and Jill chapter, even cousins and nephews. “Just so long as he has one or two good credentials you can brag about, and a different last name,” says a mother who had her nephew escort her daughter to her debut in Dallas, “you can pull it off.” Still mostly a southern tradition, the black debutante balls were not very different from the balls I have heard my white college friends describe: lots of tulle, black ties, patent leather shoes, and female angst.

  Some boys are dream escorts because they are good-looking, credentialed, and completely unfazed by the whole routine of dance lessons, formal dress, and social fanfare. Such was the case for Henry Kennedy, who was a favored Washington escort back in 1965—before he went off to Princeton and Harvard Law School and became a judge in the superior court of Washington, D.C. “Most of us didn’t admit it, but it was a badge of honor to be an escort at certain cotillions—particularly at the Girl Friends Cotillion,” acknowledges Kennedy, who escorted Virginia Brown, the daughter of the archbishop of Liberia. “She was a student at the National Cathedral School and we met at a Jack and Jill skating party.”

  Escorts, like the debutantes, are required to go through weeks of dance classes learning to waltz, bow, and present. In many cities, the black elite go to a particular dance studio that also teaches etiquette for formal parties. In fact, a new component has been added to the boys’ regimen now that some organizations have established “beautillions” where young men are presented to society at extravagant black-tie affairs.

  “When I was an escort, the debutante scene consisted of a year-long chain of parties,” says Judge Kennedy, who remembers that he and the other teenage escorts were required to wear not just black tie, but tails, to the Girl Friends Cotillion, which was held in the main ballroom of the Washington Hilton.

  “For the young women to get accepted into a prestigious cotillion, they usually had to be sponsored by a respected organization or social group,” adds real estate developer E. T. Williams, who grew up in New York and was an escort in both New York and Washington for the different Girl Friends cotillions. Long before he became a board member at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and joined the Comus Social Club and the Boulé, he remembers forming a social club that kept a careful watch over and sponsored some of the popular debutantes like Esquire cartoonist E. Simms Campbell’s daughter Liz, who later married photographer Gordon Parks.

  Other popular debutantes during the heyday of cotillions included New York’s Carol Coleman, who attended boarding school at Northfield Mount Hermon; Chicago’s Karen Gibson, whose grandfather was Truman Gibson, the chairman of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company; Norma Jean Darden, whose parents were Montclair, New Jersey, socialites; Chicago’s Diane Dickerson, daughter of attorney and businessman Earl B. Dickerson; and Detroit’s Gail Burton, the daughter of hospital founder Dr. DeWitt Burton.

  Mary-Agnes Miller Davis of Detroit still remembers Gail Burton’s debut from the 1950s. “The whole event was so elegant, Ebony magazine put Gail on the cover,” says Davis, who has been an important figure in the Detroit cotillion world since the 1940s, when she founded the Co-Ette Club. “Gail Burton’s debut included a formal at the Book Cadillac Hotel as well as an elegant tea party at their home on Arden Park where there were five hundred guests.”

  Davis acknowledges that cotillions should be seen as more than just lavish parties. This is why she established the Co-Ette Club in 1941. “I wanted to establish an actual club for high-school-aged girls where we would emphasize community volunteerism and scholarship,” says Davis, who started the exclusive group while she was still a student at Wayne State University. Now operating in other cities as well, the Co-Ette chapters have up to thirty-five high-school-age members, who are required to maintain a B-plus GPA and to volunteer a certain number of hours on community projects. “We now have more than two thousand former Co-Ette Club members,” says Davis, “and many of them are judges, physicians, attorneys, and politicians.”

  Barbara Anderson Edwards’s parents placed such importance on a debut that they sent her from her hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, to Raleigh, North Carolina, for the AKA cotillion. “My father was president of the Alphas and my mother was in the Links as well as president of the AKAs in Greenville,” explains the New York attorney, “but there was no local AKA cotillion, and they weren’t going to let that fact get in their way. In retrospect, I am glad they did it for me.”

  Marianne Savare Walter of Memphis is glad that her Links chapter has brought back the debutante cotillion for the young ladies i
n her city. “There are a lot of parents—particularly in Jack and Jill—who want the debutante experience for their kids, so we brought the cotillion back seven years ago,” says Walter, whose 1987 society wedding to TV executive Ron Walter drew over one thousand members of the city’s elite. As the second black to join the Memphis Junior League, Marianne has insight on both the black and the white elite cotillion crowd. “When we had our first Links cotillion at the Peabody Hotel, we had only ten young ladies. Now, we actually have a waiting list of fifty,” she says as she stands in the sprawling living room of her redbrick colonial in Memphis, “so it is obvious that people are hungry for the experience in this town.”

  Judge Kennedy evaluates the Washington scene and says, “Although the popularity of those events has faded somewhat in D.C., a lot of kids develop confidence and build self-esteem by participating in such activities. I’d be surprised if my daughter would want to be a debutante when she gets to high school. I would be happy to support her because I saw the benefits, but I realize that era has passed.”

  E. T. Williams agrees that in spite of the confidence that cotillions offer, he sees that today’s new generation of elite young people are less interested in the tradition. He was not surprised that his two daughters, both graduates of Manhattan’s Spence School and Harvard, turned down the opportunity. “My daughters had no desire to be debutantes even though my wife, Auldlyn, was presented with big fanfare in 1957 as the queen of the Me-De-So Cotillion in Baltimore,” he says. Auldlyn was the daughter of one of Baltimore’s most famous black surgeons, Dr. I. Bradshaw Higgins, and was an alumnus of the Westover School, Bennington College, and Fisk, so it was expected that she would be presented. Today, such prestigious credentials might, instead, lead one to other activities.

  In recent years, certain elite white organizations have opened up a space for a black debutante who often has credentials that equal or outshine those of white participants. Such was the case when Harvard graduate Candace Bond became the first black to be presented by St. Louis’s exclusive, all-white Veiled Prophet debutante ball; when Yale graduate Elizabeth Alexander became queen of the mostly white Azalea Festival in Washington; and when Auldlyn Higgins became the first black in the Baltimore Junior League. Candace and Auldlyn were the daughters of prominent surgeons, and Elizabeth was the daughter of Clifford Alexander, who not only was a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School but was also serving as secretary of the United States Army.

  While there are some well-to-do blacks who would strive to have their daughters debut in a prestigious white cotillion in order to enhance their own professional ties to the larger white community, these opportunities are rare and typically involve the daughters of downtown attorneys and bankers rather than the typical black entrepreneurs, physicians, and dentists who depend less on ties to white institutions.

  In the rare circumstance where a black debutante debuts in a white cotillion, it often takes place because the white sponsoring organization has specifically sought out one black candidate to fill out a “black space” in the cotillion. When St. Louis debutante Candace Bond became the first black to be presented at the Veiled Prophet Ball in the early 1980s, some blacks said it was done so that the previously all-white event could avoid accusations of bigotry. Others acknowledged that the Bond family’s prominence and Candace’s academic success—she later went to Wellesley—were the credentials that precipitated her selection for the event.

  Among many old elite families, there simply is no value in introducing a daughter to society through a nonblack club or group. Explains a black mother in New Orleans, “It makes no sense to be introduced by them if you’re not going to be a meaningful part of the white community.”

  In recent years, the coming-out scene has changed dramatically in ways that go beyond race. First of all, because fewer daughters are interested and because more mothers are working at busy jobs and have little free time, fewer groups—particularly those in the Northeast—are sponsoring debutante balls. Some say it’s sexist and paternalistic, while others say that young women should be focusing on academic achievement rather than social ambition. Another change that seems to be having an impact on the black elite’s outlook on the black society cotillion is that more and more traditionally white balls are welcoming young black women from prominent families into their cotillion presentations. While most black elite parents would never choose a white cotillion in favor of one sponsored by one of the cherished black groups, scheduling conflicts are making some young women decide to forgo the tradition altogether.

  Perhaps the best example of how old-guard parents from around the country have unified to preserve, yet update, the black-tie cotillion concept for their children is seen in the Tuxedo Ball that was started in the 1980s in Washington. Dr. Carlotta “Buff” Miles, a Washington psychiatrist, has worked to establish committees of parents in each major city so that a variety of young people and parents from elite families will attend the elite Washington-based ball.

  “The Tuxedo Ball might be compared to a cotillion, but it’s actually a formal dance for young people and their parents,” says Fredrika Hill Stubbs, who has attended the ball with her husband and sons. “Each year the ball issues a directory with the names of the participants along with their home and college addresses so that the kids can keep in touch with each other,” explains Hill, who sees the importance for young black adults to network with each other before they move so far apart.

  “Many of the participants are between eighteen and twenty-five,” says Paul Thornell, who has served on the organizing committee and attended the ball since graduating from Sidwell Friends School in Washington. His grandmother, Frances Vashon Atkinson, was one of the nine charter members of the Links in 1946. “Dr. Miles wanted an event that brought together young people from many cities along the East Coast, and we get as many as six hundred people each year.” The invitation-only ball has become such a strong support system that the group has begun offering workshops to participants on practical subjects such as improving college study habits and preparing for a first job.

  Cotillions continue to be important events in the lives of young adults in the black elite even if the formality of the occasion has lessened over time. My wife and I expect that our children would participate in these events with even less enthusiasm than the prior generation of young people, but we feel that such experiences offer a view of the past that is worth repeating.

  Summer camps are an important complement to the school-year activities of Jack and Jill. Founded in 1921 with forty young campers by the late Dr. William DeBerry, Camp Atwater has historically been the only “right” camp for children of the black elite. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the seventy-acre camp with its twenty-four buildings and a three-acre island is located on Lake Lashaway in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, just an hour west of Boston.

  Held in high esteem for more than three generations, the camp has a dazzling list of people on its national advisory board, including Vernon Jordan, Senator Ted Kennedy, Philip Morris executive George Knox, former Walt Disney president Dennis Hightower, National Council of Negro Women founder Dorothy Height, Abyssinian Baptist Church minister Reverend Calvin Butts, and former assistant secretary of state Clifton Wharton.

  “Kids came from all over the country to go to that camp when I was growing up,” says Gladys Scott Redhead, who attended Atwater in the 1940s and then sent her sons while they were growing up in Scarsdale, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. “My husband and I knew lots of childhood friends who went to Atwater. Some of them I saw again when I went to Howard, and some I run into today at conventions and social get-togethers.”

  The daughter of a successful dentist, Redhead was typical of the privileged children who returned each year to the camp from all over the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. One of her fellow campers, Eileen Williams Johnson, is also still a fan of Atwater. “We met new girlfriends from all over the country at that camp,” says Johnson, whose fa
ther was a New York physician when she was attending. “And the staff ran it like true professionals.” A Los Angeles physician who sent his daughter there in the early 1960s after she had first gone to a mostly white camp in Connecticut says, “My wife and I made the biggest mistake when we passed up Atwater the first year our daughter, Michelle, went away. We figured that a white camp would introduce her to the real world. The only problem is that she had no protection at all. She called us crying every day about some new racial incident. Either they were making fun of her hair or laughing at the idea that she could tan in the sun, or telling jungle jokes, watermelon jokes, Martin Luther King jokes. And the last straw was the midsummer dance where all the boys were white and no one would ask her to dance. White counselors at white camps don’t know how to deal with this. And we were crazy to think that they could,” says the father. “A camp is supposed to help build your kids’ esteem and give them freedom. Michelle didn’t find that experience until she got to Atwater.”

  Redhead and Johnson, who are, respectively, active in the Girl Friends and the Links, had no illusions about the racial benefits of Atwater. “It was nice to be around kids who understood who you were and who could make you feel like you belonged,” says Johnson.

  Just as it did when Redhead and Johnson were visitors, Camp Atwater still maintains the same schedule of running a boys’ season from June 30 to July 27 and a girls’ season from July 28 to August 24, so that the two groups are never at the camp at the same time. Each season, two hundred campers ranging in age from six to fifteen years old participate in such activities as soccer, swimming, tennis, studying African history, horseback riding, golf, and building leadership skills. Redhead and Williams remember Atwater’s famous seventy-five-year-old “Moho Story,” which is a nighttime tale about a mythical monster that haunts the woods around the campers’ cabins.