By the mid-19th century, slavery had become a seeping sore on U.S. society. For a nation founded on the principles of liberty, African enslavement was contradictory, even embarrassing. And so the Union took on the abolition cause in its war with the southern states—though the stance was based more on economics and political expediency than on moral conviction. Still, when the Civil War ended in 1865 with a Union victory, the 200-year-old cell doors of slavery were opened, and 4 million slaves stepped into what promised to be a brand new life. So too did the estimated half million free Blacks, who, though “free” lived circumscribed existences fraught with thwarted economic and educational advancement and the threat of re-enslavement.
“Many Blacks went from being slaves to Civil War soldiers and politicians,” said Frank Smith, director of the African American War Museum in Washington, D.C., in a 2011 AFRO article. “The Civil War changed the lives of Black people dramatically.”
For the next decade, a period known as the Reconstruction, Blacks prospered, politically, economically and otherwise. Though Whites chafed at the new status of the former slaves—with Southern Whites even attempting to reinstate “Black codes”—Congress offered unprecedented civil rights protection. Between 1865 and 1873, Congress passed three important legislations: the 13th amendment abolishing slavery; the 14th Amendment–ratified in 1868—that guaranteed citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, except Native Americans, and granting them federal civil rights and the 15th Amendment passed in 1870, decreeing that the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
But those halcyon days were fleeting. And, by the 1880s Blacks were once again being pressed into second-class citizenship. Economic depression turned public opinion away from the sociopolitical plight of the Negro, and soon the former Confederate states began to reassert their power. Jim Crow began to cast an oppressive shadow over the Black community, and the Ku Klux Klan unleashed a campaign of terror against Blacks, often with impunity.
The 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and sanctioned de jure segregation, sounded the final death knell, signaling racism and discrimination for Blacks in the North and a separate and unequal existence for Blacks in the South.
Forced into their own enclaves, African Americans created their own.
“My doctor, my lawyer, my dentist, everyone lived in my community,” the late Frances Murphy, former publisher emerita of the Washington AFRO American Newspaper and a former longtime resident of Morgan Park, one of Baltimore’s oldest Black neighborhoods, said in a 2006 AFRO article. “You talk about a closed community, we had our own pharmacist, we all went to our own Black doctors; we had our own Black lawyers and our own judges.”
It was in these dark days that Black social organizations emerged as solid and effective change agents in the community. The goals of these fraternal groups were not merely to socialize but also to uplift their community.
Groups such as the Prince Hall Freemasons, Order of the Eastern Star, United Order of the True Reformers and the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks of the World pooled together their resources and raised funds to provide scholarships for students, care to widows, emergency insurance in times of sickness and death, food and other charity for the poor.
“At every level there were people who found ways to help provide for the community,” said Debra Ham, professor of history, Morgan State University. “It was just a way of making sure that what was needed was provided because we knew we could not always depend on the mainstream society to help.”
Benevolent associations, which cared for widows and orphans and provided sick and death benefits, were also common. Perhaps the oldest was the Free African Society, formed in 1787 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, who would later found the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
In 1867, the International Order of St. Luke was founded as a burial society in Baltimore. By 1889, it had moved to Richmond, where it was headed by Baltimore native Margaret Walker, who expanded the order’s mission to include the establishment of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903. As its president, Walker became the first female bank president in the United States.
In addition to providing direct services, many of these groups also supported the battles for economic, political and social parity. They supported groups such as the NAACP, National Urban League and other civil rights groups. More importantly, they brought their organizing skills and their human resources to the movement. Many of the Civil Rights Movement’s leaders were groomed by fraternal organizations such as the Masons. And that became even more evident with the rise of Black fraternities and sororities at the beginning of the 20th century.
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity showed the way, when the “Seven Jewels”– Henry Arthur Callis, Charles
Henry Chapman, Eugene Kinckle Jones, George, Biddle Kelley, Nathaniel Allison Murray, Robert Harold Ogle and Vertner Woodson Tandy—established the group at Cornell University on Dec. 4, 1906.
They were soon followed by Alpha Kappa Alpha (Howard University), Kappa Alpha Psi (Indiana University), Omega Psi Phi (Howard University), Delta Sigma Theta (Howard University), Phi Beta Sigma (Howard University), Zeta Phi Beta (Howard University), Sigma Gamma Rho (Butler University) and Iota Phi Theta (Morgan State University).
“These were leadership factories,” said Walter Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., and author of Black Greek 101: The Customs, Cultures and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities.
The nine groups, who together comprise the Pan-Hellenic Council, were also instrumental in propelling campaigns such as voter registration and sit-ins.
But the rise of Black Greek organizations also highlighted a pervasive and controversial element that seemed to be built into the bedrock of most of the Black social groups—elitism.
“Elitist attitudes began early on and began to flourish with the rise of HBCUs,” said Ham, the history professor.
As certain Blacks began to matriculate at institutions such as Fisk University, Hampton Institute, Tuskegee Institute, Tougaloo College, Howard University, Morehouse College and Spelman College, they acquired skills and academic knowledge that put them in a distinctly different class.
But even before then, elitism–like many African American ills—has its root in the institution of slavery. House slaves—who were often of a lighter complexion than field slaves—were able to acquire education and other skills because of their close association with their owners. After Emancipation, some were able to parlay those skills—such as sewing and cooking—into businesses. Other Blacks—often the biracial children of slaves and their owners—were not enslaved at all. And these free men and women—in the South and the North—were able to start businesses such as newspapers and insurance agencies, giving them a head start on the others of their race.
These Blacks—the professionals, the business owners, the wealthy mulatto landowners of the South—they were the Black upper class, a group that guarded its ranks closely.
“All my life, for as long as I can remember, I grew up thinking that there existed only two types of Black people: those who passed the ‘brown paper bag and ruler test’ and those who didn’t. Those who were members of the Black elite and those who weren’t,” wrote Lawrence Otis Graham in Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class.
As Graham explained, the Black elite were those whose mothers graduated from Spelman or Fisk and joined the AKAs, Deltas, the Links and the Girl Friends; whose fathers were dentists, lawyers and physicians from Howard or Meharry and who were Alphas, Kappas, or Omegas and members of Comus, the Boulé, or the Guardsmen. There were the ones whose children belonged to Jack and Jill, an invitation-only club for wealthy Black kids, and attended special camps, boarding schools and debutante cotillions. They were obsessed with Episcopal churches, “good hair,” light complexions, and summered on Martha’s Vineyard.
“Some Black folks may be uncomfortable to learn there are several generations of elite Blacks who live in a separate world, but like White people, Blacks also have to learn to accept the facts of our history,” said Graham, who belongs to the so-called elite. “I don’t think the Black upper-class crowd should be ashamed of its success any more than the WASP elite, Italian elite, or Jewish elite.”
But neither should they believe that their successes make them superior to other Blacks, Ham said.
“There are always people who want to be more important—they’re brighter, richer, more educated…,” the professors said. But, she added, “When people said I’m light-skinned or I have good hair so I’m better, when the bathroom door said ‘White’ or ‘Colored’ even light-skinned Blacks could not go through the White door.”
Despite their exclusivity, elite Black social groups do contribute to the advancement of the African-American community.
Ham said she herself came from a militant-activist background and had looked down on exclusive organizations, but she eventually changed her perspective.
“As I grew older and saw all the programs, scholarships, youth programs, that the so-called elitist organizations have done I changed my opinion,” she said. “They are just as important in aiding the Black community, especially in modeling professionalism and giving opportunities to young people and proving vitally important services.”
