Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham

Author:Lawrence Otis Graham [Graham, Lawrence Otis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061870811
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

People on the South Side were the ones who belonged to the right black social clubs like Jack and Jill, the Boulé, the Links, and the Girl Friends. “We have also always had an inordinate number of elite men’s social groups,” says South Side resident Vivian Patton Durham, a friend of my parents, “like the Royal Snakes, the Druids, the Assembly, the Original Forty Club, and the Capricorns, which always included professional men who lived on the South Side.” Married to Charles Durham, an attorney and former municipal judge, Vivian is a member of the Carousels, an elite black woman’s club that includes many South Side women.

“It was the South Side men who controlled black society in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s,” explained Theresa Fambro Hooks, a longtime friend of the Durhams. “In fact, if you were a girl from a good family on the South Side, it was the men’s clubs who would sponsor your coming-out party. Most of the groups gave formal dinner dances, but it was the Royal Coterie of Snakes—a group of black doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—who gave a formal debutante cotillion every Christmas.” As Hooks and Durham point out, the women’s groups—the Links, Drifters, Royalites, Girl Friends, and Carousels—took over the social scene after the men’s clubs moved in other directions. Most of the members today come out of the South Side.

In addition to the right black social groups, the South Side community had the stores, restaurants, churches, and activities that black elites cared about in Chicago. Of course they didn’t have Marshall Field’s, Sears, or Mandel’s as the whites did on State Street, but they did have The Parkway Ballroom, the Regal Theater, the Tiki Room, the Savoy, and night clubs like the DeLisa. These were all destinations for black celebrities who performed in or visited the city. They also had smaller, black-owned establishments—law offices, insurance firms, medical and dental offices, beauty salons, record shops, and pharmacies. And Provident Hospital, the South Side’s black hospital at Fifty-first Street, was a popular employer for old-guard black physicians who eschewed ties to Cook County Hospital, where the poor blacks were more likely to be treated.

Further differentiating the South Side from the West Side was the fact that South Side blacks with means had access to activities that were particularly favored by, and more associated with, wealthy whites. Tennis courts, indoor swimming, and riding stables were an example of this. During her high-school years, my mother was one of the young South Side blacks who kept a horse at a black-owned stable located near Fiftieth Street and Forrestville, where a handful of whites also boarded their horses. Although the groups of young people socialized at different parks and beaches—the blacks at Jackson Park and the whites on virtually every other beach north and south of Jackson—one could see both races riding through trails near the University of Chicago.

With these opportunities on the South Side, it was rarely necessary to venture to the West Side. In fact, whenever my mother did head in that direction, during the 1940s, the experiences were not pleasant ones.

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