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  “Many of our campers are accustomed to spending part of their summers in Martha’s Vineyard or Sag Harbor,” says Atwater’s executive director Wanda Johnson, “so a lot of them get here and renew friendships that they had already formed during previous summers in those resort areas. Nobody feels like an outsider.”

  Although the Vineyard and Sag Harbor crowd are still present, the camp now shies away from the old label of being designed for well-to-do black children and, in fact, works very hard to ensure that one-third of its campers are not from middle-or upper-income families. Some members of the old guard say the camp lost its upper-class cachet after the late 1950s, when it got “too egalitarian.” Since the camp is run by the Urban League of Springfield, there is a commitment to including less-advantaged children in the camp’s programs and activities. For some members of the elite, this is a negative factor because they like the idea of insulating their kids from inner-city children who might confirm certain negative stereotypes, or worse, mock their children, but for many other parents the diversity helps them introduce their affluent children to the “real world.”

  Today, many of my friends are raising young children and simultaneously hoping that there will be some way to re-create what Camp Atwater used to be. They agree that it is wonderful to provide less-fortunate children with a camp experience, but they are still left with the desire to have what affluent white parents have: camps for their children that are filled with children who are just like them.

  The right private school is another mechanism that has aided the black elite family’s child-rearing goals. The very earliest members of the elite usually attended private schools for one of two reasons: either they lived in southern cities with segregated school districts that didn’t offer a decent—or in many cases any—school for blacks, or their parents wanted to introduce them to other children from black elite families and create further distinctions between their kids and the local blacks who were not considered to be from prominent lineage. For the most ambitious black parents, a private boarding school was the solution.

  The idea of the black boarding school grew out of the segregated South’s refusal, in many communities, to build public high schools for black students. When many non-upper-class black children advanced beyond the eighth grade in the late 1800s or the early 1900s, they would usually do so by traveling great distances on a daily basis to the closest city that offered blacks a high school education. Another popular alternative was to send the children out of town for the entire school year so that they could live with a relative who resided in the North, where high schools were integrated, or with a relative who resided in a large, more cosmopolitan southern town with a wider selection of black secondary schools.

  While there were a handful of affluent blacks who sent their children to such prestigious northeastern white boarding schools as Phillips Exeter, Northfield Mount Hermon, and Phillips Academy as early as the late 1800s, most upper-class blacks living in the South—and a few in the North as well—sought out top black boarding schools for their children. With plans of sending their children to top colleges like Howard or Spelman, and with an ultimate goal of preparing them for graduate degrees and promising careers, these families wanted schools that not only taught what the local white high schools were teaching but also offered lessons in refinement. Many wanted both the academic challenges of chemistry or Latin and instruction in such stereotypically “upper-class subjects” as opera, dance, foreign literature, and the like. And they wanted an environment that would produce ladies and gentlemen. Many members of the old black elite presumed that such results could never be produced in a private day school where kids were present only a few hours each day. They wanted their child’s entire experience to be managed and cultivated. The boarding school that did this better than any other was Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina.

  “As kids, we were all a little intimidated by our headmistress, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, because she expected so much from us,” says Manhattan resident Herman Robinson, who entered the Palmer Memorial Institute boarding school in 1930. “Not only did she want excellence from us in the classroom but she wanted us to be setting a good example in the dormitory and in the dining hall. She modeled the school after Andover, Mount Hermon, and her other favorite prep schools, and she was determined to outdo them.”

  Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brown was a black woman who named her school after a white friend and benefactor, Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been president of Wellesley College. Brown’s school began at a time when the American Missionary Association was creating schools to teach black children throughout the South, and Brown operated it on a forty-acre campus with a philosophy that differed dramatically from the other black boarding schools. It was more expensive, more selective, and decidedly elitist in its approach to training students.

  Herman Robinson remembers his first impressions of the school. “Although it was an imposing campus with a long driveway that led up to redbrick school buildings and dormitories, I don’t think that many of us initially knew how important the school was. But within a few days you really got the idea,” says Robinson, who began boarding at Palmer after leaving a private school in Vermont that his family felt he had outgrown intellectually. “Mrs. Brown lived in a canary-yellow, wood-framed house on campus with her three nieces. One of them, named Marie, later ended up marrying the singer Nat King Cole and sent her own kids to boarding schools. From that house, Mrs. Brown would make periodic visits to our classrooms, the dining hall, and dormitories—always commenting on what it took to be a successful lady or gentleman.”

  Robinson remembers it all as if it were last week. In addition to giving lessons on dining etiquette that were reinforced by the teacher who sat in the dining hall at the students’ assigned tables (“Elbows off the table,” “Don’t create a bridge with your utensils from the plate to the table top,” “Don’t cut all your meat at once,” “Don’t blow on your hot food,” “Never push your plate away when done eating”), there was dancing etiquette for boys (“Always keep an open handkerchief in your right hand when dancing with a lady so your palm doesn’t touch her back”), as well as specific rules on how to properly open and close a door when assisting a female student.

  “After I graduated, Mrs. Brown published her rules of etiquette in a book called The Correct Thing,” says Robinson, who remembers that the school’s endowment, reputation, and popularity among affluent blacks grew particularly quickly in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s and 1950s. During this period, Brown became extremely aggressive in her approach to raising the children of black society. She implemented mandatory piano and French lessons and the formal tea service, and she designed several different uniforms for the boys and the girls. Weekly formal dinners required that boys be in black tie and girls wear long white dresses and gloves.

  At the time Robinson was attending Palmer, it had approximately one hundred students in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades—with girls outnumbering boys three to one. “Although Mrs. Brown was a real stickler for good manners, she did emphasize the importance of learning about blacks like Crispus Attucks and Sojourner Truth. We didn’t call it ‘black history’ back then, because Mrs. Brown never liked the term ‘black,’ but the teachers always taught us about blacks who had contributed to society,” recalls Robinson, who later graduated from City College in New York.

  Over the years, many well-to-do blacks attended the school, including A’Lelia Robinson, daughter of Madam C. J. Walker, the country’s first self-made woman millionaire; and relatives of actor Paul Robeson as well as singer Carol Brice and her two siblings, who were there in the early 1930s. “I remember that several of the kids who grew up in wealthy Atlanta families were sent up to Palmer Memorial,” recalls Ella Yates, who grew up in Atlanta and graduated from Spelman in the late 1940s.

  Although Brown stepped down as head of the school in 1952, the school stayed in operation until 1971, when it was still a
ttracting children of the black elite. “We all called her ‘The Big Wheel’ behind her back because there was nothing that could stop that woman,” says Robinson as he recalls how hard she worked to win over supporters from the North or among wealthy white families in nearby Raleigh or Greensboro. “I have great respect for her because she wanted the best for us, and that was a hard thing to get as blacks in the South during those times.”

  Dressed in a blue skirt, white blouse, and white stockings and shoes like the rest of her female classmates, my godmother, Mirian Calhoun Hinds, spent seven years at the private Mather Academy, which served as a breeding ground for smart children of families who wanted their kids to attend top schools. I grew up hearing stories of Mirian’s experiences, and because the school remained open until the late 1980s, lived under the fear that she might convince my parents that I or my brother should go there. By the time I reached boarding school age, though, most members of the northern black elite had access to top public and private day schools in our own communities. And we were living in much more integrated school experiences than our parents. “I went away to Mather Academy when I was in the sixth grade because my hometown of Orangeburg, South Carolina, didn’t have a high school that blacks were allowed to attend,” says Hinds, who now holds a Ph.D. from New York University, “and my family decided that my brother and I should attend a boarding school that set high standards for blacks.”

  Run by a white headmistress, Lulu Belle Brown, Mather Academy had been founded by the United Methodist Church and established in Camden, South Carolina, about thirty-two miles outside Columbia. “My class had forty-seven students—and we came mostly from southern states, but there were also kids from New York and New Jersey,” says Hinds, who recalls how protected she and her brother were from the real world on the fully fenced and gated campus. “Mrs. Brown made that campus feel like a community. We were escorted to church every week, we grew many of the vegetables that we ate, we studied together in our dormitories, and we helped each other choose our majors,” says Hinds, who remembers that the teaching staff was racially integrated and very serious about the students’ futures. “We weren’t as ritzy or as socially conscious as Palmer—with all the white gloves and tea service—but everyone took us seriously and worked hard to motivate us,” she adds, recalling that students were expected to attend college and graduate school. Like herself, Hinds’s brother, Thomas Calhoun, continued beyond college and is now a surgeon in Alabama.

  My generation and the generation of children that followed in my godmother’s family—particularly if they lived in the South or in large northern cities—were much more likely to serve as the transition group that integrated white boarding schools in the northeastern part of the country. When my godmother’s niece Dolly was sent from Tuskegee, Alabama, up to Northfield Mount Hermon and my cousin Bill was sent from Memphis to Phillips Exeter in the early 1970s, my brother, myself, and our other young northern cousins pitied them for having to serve as guinea pigs in what we felt was a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week white environment with no “black buffer zone”: no black parents, no black church, no Jack and Jill, and no visible means by which they would be protected from verbal or physical bigotry.

  “I went to Northfield Mount Hermon in the 1970s primarily because my dad and uncle had come up from Louisiana to go there in the 1940s,” explains Eric Chatman, one of my brother’s closest friends, who grew up in Chicago and attended the private Latin School of Chicago before leaving to board at the exclusive prep school in Massachusetts.

  Before the two schools merged, Northfield and Mount Hermon had been among the first white boarding schools to accept blacks with any regularity. In fact, one family—the Dibbles of Tuskegee and Chicago—has sent more than two dozen family members spread across three generations to the exclusive school. “I was there at the same time as a couple of the Dibble children,” says Chatman, who grew up with members of the family in Chicago, “and we all knew that the school had a different history for blacks than the other boarding schools. We expected it to be a friendlier place for blacks because it had always been very international and very liberal.”

  Some black families have so completely embraced boarding school education that they don’t even consider public or private day school education beyond junior high. Sam Watkins, a graduate of the Groton School and Harvard, practices law in New York and grew up in a family where five children attended white northeastern boarding schools. “I grew up in Queens, where the public schools were fairly good, but my father felt we could do better,” explains Watkins, who acknowledges that his father was concerned about his kids losing a positive black self-image. “My father was very conscious of the racial differences that would be exaggerated at these schools, and he worked very hard to create a support system by visiting every month and talking to us about our black identity,” says Watkins, whose oldest sister, Theresa, was the first black woman to attend the elite Milton Academy in Massachusetts in 1965.

  The Watkins family experience is what most blacks are seeking for their children when they choose the private school route. Each one of the children became a private school success story, outdoing many of his or her white classmates. For example, oldest brother LeRoy, who is now an attorney, entered Groton in 1965, then went on to Yale. Theresa, who is now a pediatrician in Washington, graduated from Milton Academy, Harvard, and Howard Medical School. She is now on Milton’s board of trustees. Brother Joe, who has run for Congress, graduated from Middlesex School and the University of Pennsylvania. He, too, is on his prep school’s board of trustees. Younger sister Dorothy graduated from Milton Academy before going to Wellesley.

  “Of course it was an awkward transition for us to move from a grammar school with other black kids to schools and dorms with virtually no other blacks,” says Watkins, who remembers being the only black student in his eighth-grade class at Groton, “but parents have to think of the educational benefits of getting a top education. I can’t tell you how much the boarding school network helps in college and in the workplace.”

  Few blacks debate the academic and career benefits that come out of a white boarding school experience, but even the most integrated blacks acknowledge the gap that remains between their children and the overwhelmingly conservative white classmates who leave them out of social groups and fail to share their interests, politics, hobbies, or music. In her book Black Ice, black journalist Lorene Cary wrote about the rocky time she experienced as a student trying to fit into the ultra-WASP St. Paul’s School. She points out that hair, clothes, music, and family background were all reasons for the barriers between herself and her white classmates. “I did not, however, tell the girls what I was thinking,” says Cary about her white female classmates. “We did not talk about how differently we saw the world. Indeed my black and their white heritage was not a starting point for our relationship, but rather was the outer boundary.”

  “Of course she didn’t fit in,” snaps a Boston physician, who sent his son to Hotchkiss in Connecticut and dismisses Cary’s strikingly poignant story. “She was a scholarship student from Philadelphia. If your black child grows up in a privileged home, the transition is not so hard. My son had no problem fitting in or maintaining his identity because he grew up with everything those white kids had. Of course, he has yet to date a black girl—but this interracial stuff could have happened in the local public school.”

  For the majority of the black elite, however, the stories fall somewhere in between, with a lot more tending toward Lorene Cary’s experiences. More than a few say that the affluent black child has no problem adjusting to settings with affluent whites but that many of the white kids who attend these schools come from conservative families who are actually trying to “buy their way” out of integration. “One white mother expressed outrage when her daughter was assigned to room with my daughter at her boarding school,” says a black parent who received a call from the parent within a day of their daughters moving in together. “‘Now don’t get
me wrong,’ the woman said to me after about five minutes of friendly conversation, ‘but my husband and I are paying seventeen thousand dollars a year for our daughter—and for her to end up with an African American roommate was a little shocking.’ She expected me to appreciate her disappointment. She assumed that my daughter must be some inner-city scholarship child. So the net result is that you may find that the school works hard to encourage their students to mix, but many of these boarding school kids grew up in homes that are far more insulated and bigoted than that of the kid who goes to the run-of-the-mill private day school.”

  Some black parents go to great lengths to prepare their children for an experience that they acknowledge may be fraught with negatives. For example, Groton alumnus Sam Watkins recalls how his father sent him to the expensive, all-white Camp Timanous in Maine for two summers to prepare him for the experience of being at a white boarding school. “My dad didn’t want me to be shocked or intimidated by those kids, so he created every possible safety net.”

  But no matter what the outcome, it is wrong to suggest that most of the black kids who go to these schools—and the parents who send them—are running away from their black identity. In fact, many of the families who choose these schools are people who are extremely active in the black social and civic worlds and maintain a strong sense of their black culture. Dr. William Curry, a prominent vascular surgeon at New York Hospital, sent his sons to a northeastern boarding school, but the boys were also spending their summers in the black Sag Harbor resort community. Similarly, Curry and his wife Katherine spend much of their own time as members of black civic groups like the Reveille Club and the Links.