Certain People Read online

  10

  Business Ups and Downs

  Though it is common for blacks to attribute their woes to slavery, it is important to remember that not all blacks were slaves, and that there were free blacks in America from pre-Revolutionary days.

  And, though it is common for blacks to lay the blame for their lack of great economic success at the feet of Jews and other “foreigners,” it is interesting to note that there were free black entrepreneurs who were prospering in the New World before any Jews had set foot on these shores. In 1634, the year when the first tiny band of twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in what is now New York, a black landowner in New Amsterdam already had a large parcel of real estate. In 1644, a group of eleven blacks was given acreage comprising what is now New York’s Greenwich Village, and this area remained a black settlement for the next two hundred years. Outside Boston, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a black man known simply as “Boston Ken” owned a house and lot and several acres of wheat fields that same year. Several years later, a man named Abijah Prince owned a hundred acres of farmland in Guilford, Vermont, and received equal shares of land in all six divisions of the township. These pioneer landowners made their money raising and selling staple crops—corn, wheat, rice, and tobacco. These black farmers bought and sold in the same markets as their white competitors, owned black and white indentured servants and, in at least one recorded instance, a black slave.

  But, throughout the colonial period, days of relatively easy times for blacks were inevitably followed by periods of harsh reaction and repression. As more and more blacks were freed, or were able to purchase the freedom of others, and migrated into heavily settled areas, they began to be seen as an economic threat to the white majority. Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, nearly every colony started passing discriminatory laws and slave codes designed to limit the business opportunities of “free” blacks. In 1660, the Boston town meeting passed a law which forbade the use of black artisans. Ten years later, the Virginia legislature made it illegal for blacks to have white indentured servants. In 1712, the Connecticut Assembly decreed that no free black person could buy land or carry on a business in any town without the permission of the white residents.

  Still, despite these pressures, some black businessmen persevered and prospered. In 1736, Emanuel Manna Bernoon and his wife, Mary, opened up the first oyster and ale house in Providence, Rhode Island (using, it was said, his wife’s money; she had made a small fortune in the illegal whiskey trade). In pre-Revolutionary Newport, a black woman called “Duchess” Quamino became the seaport’s leading caterer. During this period, blacks were also becoming the founding fathers of a number of American cities. Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Haitian trapper and explorer, became the first non-Indian settler and landholder in what is now Chicago in the early 1770s. Of the forty-four founders of Los Angeles, twenty-six were black, and the heirs of these men inherited large tracts of land. Maria Rita Valdez, a granddaughter of one of these early California blacks, owned Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, which is better known today as Beverly Hills. Another black, Francisco Reyes, owned the entire San Fernando Valley. Unfortunately, he sold his property in 1790 and became the mayor of Los Angeles. Had he held onto the valley, his heirs would be among the richest people in the world today.

  Free blacks virtually invented the catering business in America. After the Revolution, a black Philadelphian named Robert Bogle was said to be “the first man to advocate the organization of domestic service into a business.” Bogle, before 1810, opened a restaurant on Eighth Street near Sansom and, from his establishment, ran all of Philadelphia’s great weddings, banquets and balls, and became not only an arbiter of food but an arbiter of taste in other matters such as decor, flower arrangement and dress. Philadelphia matrons consulted Mr. Bogle, the Ward McAllister of his day, not only before planning their menus but also before composing their guest lists. “The Bogle touch” at Philadelphia social events was adopted and enhanced by a number of succeeding caterers, including Peter Augustin and James Prosser—both black—and of the latter it was said that “the name of James Prosser, among the merchants of Philadelphia, is inseparable with their daily hours of recreation and pleasure.” In 1845, Philadelphia society became the virtual slave of three more black caterers, all operating in the great tradition established by Bogle and Prosser. The leader of this trio was Thomas J. Dorsey, of whom a Philadelphia reporter wrote, “Dorsey was one of the triumvirate of colored caterers—the other two being Henry Jones and Henry Minton—who some years ago might have been said to rule the social world of Philadelphia through its stomach. Time was when lobster salad, chicken croquettes, deviled crabs, and terrapin composed the edible display at every Philadelphia gathering, and none of these dishes were thought to be perfectly prepared unless they came from the hands of one of the three men named.” Dorsey, like most of these black businessmen, was an ardent Abolitionist and, because he could afford to be choosy and “had the sway of an imperial dictator,” he refused to offer his services in the homes of Democrats, saying, “I cannot wait on a party of persons who are disloyal to the government, and”—pointing to the portrait that dominated his reception room—“Lincoln is the government.” Nor were these successful black men unphilanthropic. Henry Gordon, another Philadelphia caterer, contributed $66,000 to a home for “aged and infirm colored people.” Stephen Smith, who at the time was probably the richest black in America—from his lumber and money-lending business he amassed an estate worth half a million nineteenth-century dollars—gave $150,000 to the same fund.

  In New York, from the turn of the century well into the 1850s, the gustatory scene was dominated by a number of talented black caterers, including Thomas Downing, who ran a restaurant on Broad Street near Wall Street, and the partnership of George Bell and George Alexander, who operated a similar establishment in Church Street nearby. For many years, New York’s most exclusive parties and weddings were put on by Thomas Jackson, who, according to James Weldon Johnson, was “in his day … the arbiter of New York.”

  For some reason, nineteenth-century blacks also excelled in matters pertaining to hair, and for many years the leading barbers and hairdressers in most eastern American cities were black. In New York, the most fashionable hairdresser was Pierre Toussaint, a former slave, who, according to his biographer, Hannah F. S. Lee, was held in such high regard for his tonsorial skills that “he had all of the custom and patronage of the French families … [and] many of the distinguished ladies of the city employed him.” Still, however successful these tradespeople might be, they tended to keep a low profile, just as the nineteenth-century Jews did, and were aware that they were “outsiders.” As a French traveler of the period, Jacques Brissot de Warville, noted, “Those Negroes who keep shops live moderately, and never augment their business beyond a certain point. The reason is obvious; the whites … like not to give them credit to undertake any extensive commerce nor even to give them the means of a common education by receiving them into their counting houses.” Still, there were waves of reaction. In 1834, when the whites of both New York and Philadelphia rose up against black workers and black businessmen, there were major race riots. Philadelphia erupted again in 1838 and 1843, and there were black-white riots in Pittsburgh in 1839.

  There were also wealthy free blacks in the South, including black planters like Cyprian Ricard, who owned a Louisiana plantation worth $225,000 and no less than ninety-one black slaves. In New Orleans in the 1840s there were at least eight black brokers who dealt in cotton futures and offered some of the services of commercial banks. There were prosperous cigar-makers in New Orleans too, such as George Alcés, who had a factory that employed two hundred workers, and a black inventor and engineer named Norbert Rillieux, who patented a vacuum cup that revolutionized the sugar industry. In Berne, North Carolina, a barber named John C. Stanley managed to accumulate properties worth $40,000, and a New Orleans merchant who loaned money at interest left an estate worth $500,000.

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p; Though black wealth before the Civil War may not have been sufficient to constitute a great economic force, there were many blacks who were far from impoverished. In New York in 1853, it was estimated that blacks owned property worth $1,000,000 and had invested $839,000 in businesses in and around New York City. In Philadelphia, by 1856, blacks owned real estate worth $800,000. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, blacks in Washington, D.C., owned property valued at $630,000. New Orleans, interestingly enough, was at that point the richest black city in America, with blacks in 1860 owning $15,000,000 worth of taxable property. The total personal and real wealth of free blacks in America that year has been placed at $50,000,000, and this is considered an estimate on the conservative side. Blacks owned nine thousand homes, fifteen thousand farms, and two thousand businesses.

  But what happened? One might suppose, with their early lead in catering, that blacks by the 1970s would control the United States catering industry, and that they would dominate the barbering and hairdressing professions. Nineteenth-century blacks were also strong in New York’s fashion industry, yet black designers and manufacturers are insignificant on Seventh Avenue today. They had also, at one point, prospered in the wholesale and retail grocery business, and yet they do not—as might have been expected—control major food or chainstore operations today. Racism is not the single, simple answer. To begin with, America’s early black businessmen tended to concentrate in service businesses which depended on whites as customers. They had not yet discovered, as men like John Johnson did later on, that there was money to be made selling products to their “own kind.” An element of snobbery had also entered the world of the free blacks in the 1850s. Perhaps because they had been spoiled by the attentions of white society ladies, black hairdressers would not dress the hair of other blacks. Black caterers did not care to cater parties at black homes, since their white trade carried more cachet. As for barbers, by the mid-1800s the “colored barber” had become a kind of ethnic joke, and he appeared in cartoons with a comb in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. Many black barbers became self-conscious and embarrassed by their profession, and quietly withdrew from it. The barber’s son did not want to be a barber like his father, and a promising family enterprise would be abandoned by the second generation in favor of something else. Something else, it often turned out, in which there was much stiffer competition. In the nineteenth century, competition was arriving in the form of some five million white immigrants from Europe who were hungry, ambitious, eager to hustle and to form trade unions that restricted blacks to menial occupations. All these forces combined to push black entrepreneurs backward from what had seemed a promising head start.

  Ironically, the Civil War, which freed all blacks, was also a force that kept them economically imprisoned. Before the war, black businessmen in the North and South had had white competitors who were somewhat, but only somewhat, better off. The war, however, proved to be a field day for the profiteer and robber baron. All the great American fortunes—Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Gould, Lehman, Schiff, Armour, Morgan—were amassed during the war years through government loans, war contracts, the expansion of the railroads, and the enormously inflated price of manufactured goods. It was open season for the speculator and the unscrupulous manipulator, and the Civil War made moguls out of men who had been small-time merchants and manufacturers. Yet, for some reason, no black moguls emerged from the war. Perhaps it was because, as has been argued, blacks found it distasteful to engage in profiteering from a war that was ostensibly being fought to free the slaves, though such scruples in such an amoral era are somewhat hard to credit. Perhaps it was because, at the war’s outset, the economic position of the free blacks was still too weak. Perhaps it was because early black businessmen had received a poorer education than their white contemporaries and were, in some cases, illiterate—though men like Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the original John D. Rockefeller were hardly intellectual giants and had had little formal schooling. (“If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else,” Vanderbilt once said.) Probably it was a combination of these factors, but the fact is that, at the war’s end, black businessmen ended up with the same small businesses they had started out with, while their white competitors had improved their fortunes, and their arenas of power, enormously.

  And of course white supremacist attitudes and racism cannot be ruled out as causes for the generally discouraging record of blacks in business. There were instances, like the case of the Freedmen’s Bank, in which black enterprises were forced out of business through white chicanery, or even taken over by whites at gunpoint. In Cincinnati, a black furniture manufacturer named Robert Boyd did a thriving business throughout the South and West. One nineteenth-century night, a band of whites, angered at and jealous of Boyd’s success, set fire to his factory and it burned to the ground. Boyd rebuilt his plant, and it was burned again. He rebuilt it a third time, and it was burned a third time. His fourth factory was his last. When that, too, was burned he could no longer get insurance and was forced to go out of business.

  In Chicago, Mrs. Doris Lowe Zollar is very much a social leader in the black and white communities, and her name adorns the boards of some eighteen different civic, cultural, and social organizations. Her husband is a successful pediatrician with his own private clinic, and Mrs. Zollar is able to fly to Rome and Paris twice a year to shop for clothes. (Ebony voted Doris Zollar one of the ten best-dressed black women in America, an honor which she takes seriously, and for a while she served as Fashion Editor for Bettie Pullen-Walker’s MsTique.) Dr. Zollar, the son of a laborer, is a self-made man, but Doris Zollar—fair-skinned, with ash blond hair and green eyes—is of the Old Guard South, and there has been money in the family for three generations. Her family, the Lowes, are prominent in Arkansas, where Grandpa Lowe owned a large tract of land outside Little Rock and ran an extensive farming and lumbering operation. As Little Rock grew, white developers began eyeing Grandpa Lowe’s property, and presently a group of whites came to him with an offer to buy the land. But Grandpa Lowe refused to sell and, less than a month later, his house was set to the torch. He rebuilt the house, and it was burned again. Stubbornly, he rebuilt it a third time, and this time his white antagonists permitted it to stand. The Lowe family still has its Little Rock property, and Doris Zollar derives an income from the family lumbering operations.

  But the family has suffered a misfortune common to many black families of property. Grandpa Lowe’s will, when it was written, was vague and imprecise—the work, it seems, of a black attorney who lacked real expertise in such matters. There were at least two members of the family, for example, with the nickname “Buddy.” It is impossible to tell, from Grandpa Lowe’s will, which Buddy was intended to be his heir. There were also two Ernests in the family and, though an Ernest is mentioned in the will, the will does not specify which one. Grandpa Lowe’s estate has now been in litigation for more than twenty years, and the family has begun to wonder if it will ever be settled and, if it is—after legal and court costs—whether there will be anything left.

  V

  Pride and Prejudice

  11

  Embattled Washington

  Perhaps nowhere in America is a black Old Guard more well grounded than in Washington, D.C. And almost nowhere else has the Old Guard come into such sharp conflict with the more newly moneyed black middle class.

  In Washington, which is now 75 percent black, one speaks discreetly of “the black presence.” It might be more accurate to call it a black omnipresence. There are, however, within the omnipresence, at least three distinct and separate presences. There is, to begin with, the mass of poor blacks at the bottom. They are the most visible—idling on street corners in the southeast quarter of the city, in vacant lots, sitting on cracked stoops, and leaning against boarded-up storefronts of the ghetto. A white feels uncomfortable in these streets, where the blacks give him daunting looks, and mutter unintelligible words to him as he passes by.
It is said, however, that a “foreign” black in these neighborhoods is in even greater danger than a white outsider; he might be a policeman in plain clothes, or a narcotics agent. He might be armed.

  Then there is a much smaller group, which might be called the New Black Achievers—men and women who, in recent years, have attained power, prestige, and no small amount of money in politics (Mayor Walter E. Washington, for one), business, education and the professions. In large, expensive homes along such racially integrated streets as Blagden Avenue—the main artery of Washington’s so-called Gold Coast, which nestles between Rock Creek Park and Sixteenth Street—or on Kalmia Road, Argyle Terrace, and Colorado Avenue, these affluent blacks are less conspicuous behind their carefully pruned hedges and manicured lawns. They have, however, a significant voice in the community.

  Then there is the Old Guard, Washington’s black “cave-dwellers,” people whose roots in Washington go back three, four, even five generations. These families, who have had money, social position, and—most important—education, since the turn of the century and earlier, live in three-or four-story town houses in quiet, tree-shaded streets in sections such as the Logan Circle area, a neighborhood that was once quite fashionable, went through a period of having seen better days, and is now on its way up again. Quiet, conservative, devoted to thrift, probity, and, for the most part, to the Episcopal Church, these families generally have not, though they could have, moved to glossier, newer neighborhoods. They have stayed where they are because their friends and relatives are there, just as their grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ friends were there. They might be said to form the backbone of the Washington chapter of Links. Some of the newer-rich blacks might like to join the Links but, since no Links chapter may contain more than thirty women, it is not easy, and the Links selects its membership strictly from the top. (The newer-rich blacks sniff, “A Link is a fur-bearing animal.”)