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Privilege and Prejudice
The Life Of A Black Pioneer
By Clifton R. Wharton Jr. Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2015 Clifton R. Wharton Jr.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-232-2
CHAPTER 1
The Beginning: Genesis and Youth
I was conceived in Monrovia, West Africa, on December 16, 1925, after a pre-Christmas ball hosted by the president of Liberia. We all know we were conceived, though rarely exactly how or when. But my mother kept a diary that described the ball, her almost immediate onset of morning sickness, and the doctor's diagnosis weeks later.
* * *
Infant memory can be chimerical, a dreamy movie watched from a great distance. Yet the images abide as tangled threads of what you truly recall and what your parents have told you. Among my earliest recollections are the smell of the sea, cold spray, and a tangy salt breeze. The ship is the SS Highbo, en route from the United States to Liberia in October 1927, a year after my birth in Boston. Holding my mother's hand, I am walking the deck. The ship rolls on a vast swell of green water under empty blue-washed sky — this picture is imprinted on my senses permanently. Ocean travel would become a lifelong pleasure.
I recall as well being on another ship, this time as a three-year-old, returning to the United States from Africa with a cargo of wild animals. I was familiar with animals — small aggressive monkeys infested the trees behind our home in Monrovia, sometimes leaping onto my back to snatch food from my hand. On the ship I soon noticed a baby gorilla that the sailors had made a pet. He was bigger than my backyard monkeys, but I was not afraid of him. One day, the baby gorilla unexpectedly broke away from the sailors and knocked me down to get a piece of fruit I had been eating. I can still remember his smell and breathing as he crouched over me. Except for a few scratches, I was unhurt.
In our backyard in Monrovia I can picture an enormous cashew tree whose fruit I was forbidden to eat when it dropped to the ground. One day nonetheless I bit into a fallen green cashew nut, and the acid burned my lips badly — I learned the penalty for disobedience.
Because fresh milk was unavailable, my mother fed me from a powdered product called "KLIM." Photographs of me with the large KLIM cans went back to relatives in the United States.
* * *
In my mind's eye I still conjure my parents dressing for formal dinner parties, my mother humming happily all the while. I had a child's tennis racquet that I treasured, though I could not hit very well. I loved even better my pint-sized pith helmet, like my father's. And I remember an afternoon standing with him on the edge of a large open field, watching a medicine man (a "juju") haranguing a large group of local people. I was puzzled that neither of us felt the mass hypnotist's spell, and wondered if our immunity came from being Americans and outsiders.
From my earliest days I always understood that my background was to a degree privileged — I suppose the impression came from my father, Clifton Reginald Wharton Sr., and his heritage. Peter Wharton, my paternal great-great-great-grandfather, was a "Freed Negro" from Accomack County, Virginia, in the late 1700s. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, freed Negroes owned land and earned their living with skills in numbers considerably larger than many people today realize. For example, in 1830 the three states with the largest free Negro populations were Maryland (52,938), Virginia (47,348), and New York (44,870). Peter was a "dark copper colour" mulatto, 5'11/4" tall, and "having a scar on the left hand and a scar on the end of the fourth finger of the left hand." My father said that Peter, a baker, was the son of a white man, John Wharton, who lived during the American Revolution. An article in a 1963 issue of Ladies Home Journal has a photograph of a "Wharton mansion" built by a John Wharton 3, still standing in Mappsville, Virginia. My father strongly suspected that this was his ancestor, a descendant of the Whartons from England. Francis Wharton Sr. was born in England, emigrated to Philadelphia, and then traveled to Accomack County before 1669. Born a slave, Peter was freed by John 3's widow, Elizabeth Williams Wharton, through her will in 1831. This was three decades before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Peter's granddaughter, Maria (b. 1850) was my great-grandmother.
* * *
I don't know much about the early years of my paternal grandfather, William Bowman Wharton, Maria's son (b. July 15, 1877). His father was Louis C. H. Finney, a white lawyer and lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army, from a distinguished family in Accomack County. All Maria's children, however, kept the surname Wharton, not Finney.
My grandfather left home at age sixteen for Baltimore. There he joined his brother Heber, a public school supervisor, with his son Heber Jr., a physician, and his three daughters, all schoolteachers. William was light-skinned enough to "pass" for white, and he worked for a time as a hotel bellman, then a clerk. In 1895 he married Mary Roselind Griffin, of the prominent Negro O'Neill family. Roselind, or Rosie, had bronze skin, strong Indian features, straight jet-black hair, and limpid dark eyes. After six years in Baltimore, William and Rosie moved to Atlantic City, then in 1903 to Boston. By then the couple had seven children, of whom only my father Clifton (born May 11, 1899) and his older sister Ianthia Enola (November 10, 1897) lived beyond age three.
Because my grandfather could easily have passed as white, I can't say to what extent my grandfather's odyssey was shaped by discrimination. He left no recorded opinions of the Jim Crow era, though in a small town such as Accomac (the town nearest his Accomack County home) his Negro blood would have been common knowledge. Over the decades after the Reconstruction, dogged racial progress had taken place in the South, and substantial numbers of Negroes became successful artisans, established profitable businesses, and accumulated wealth. Some were even elected to public office, such as Jasper Wright (the South Carolina Supreme Court) and P. B. S. Pinchback (governor of Louisiana). By the 1880s, however, a series of court decisions had begun to erode the rights of former slaves, and the U.S. Supreme Court had held that the Fourteenth Amendment restricted states but not individuals or private organizations from discriminating against people on the basis of race. By 1896, when my grandfather and his family reached Baltimore, the Court held in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" accommodations were sufficient to ensure Negroes their constitutional rights. Alongside resurgent discrimination was also the pervasive violence of the period, the beatings, shootings, and lynchings that, the Tuskegee Institute estimates, took the lives of 4,730 Negroes between the early 1890s and 1951. White southerners institutionalized lynching as a means of terrorizing, intimidating, and controlling Negroes after Reconstruction. Most lynchings involved hanging, but other victims were shot, burned at the stake, dismembered, castrated, or in other ways tortured to death. Racism was the major force behind most lynchings. These numbers cannot adequately capture the horrific acts of destroying so many human lives through racial hatred.
Such forces must have buffeted my grandfather, despite his light skin and the modest prosperity he had accumulated in Accomack and Baltimore. Better jobs and education for the children may have been even more powerful lures in his steady northward exodus. In Boston, then known as the Acropolis of American education, primary and secondary public schooling was available to people from all backgrounds and walks of life, a fact in which the city took great civic pride and which was by no means lost on Negroes who migrated there.
When my grandfather (along with his oldest brother Charles and younger brother Samuel) arrived in Boston in 1910, Negroes or "coloreds" numbered 13,564, some 2 percent of the population — though the census certainly missed many who were clandestinely blending among the majority. As in the South, there was undoubtedly prejudice, but the range of opportunities was decidedly wider in Boston. Moreover, my grandfather had accumulated some financial assets in Baltimore, and the fact that his brother, my great-uncle Charles, could immediately start a grocery store in Boston indicates that he had brought capital as well.
Only a year after settling in Boston, the William Whartons were struck by tragedy. On March 11, 1911, both Rosalind and my father's sister Enola died in a house fire that raised front-page headlines in the Boston Globe — "Two Women, a Girl and an Infant, Cut Off by Rapidly Spreading Midnight Flames." My grandfather saved my father Clifton, then eleven, but he could not save his wife and daughter.
"Pop," as we grandchildren called him, never completely recovered from the calamity. He lost his ambition. Ever mild and pleasant, he always avoided any conversation about the fire, but you could feel his constant underlying pain. For the rest of his life he worked as a building superintendent in the Boston suburb of Alston.
My father was undoubtedly aware of the accomplishments of his relatives, especially the Baltimore Whartons, such as his uncle Heber's family. Pop's working-class status didn't seem to have mattered to Dad, and he was an unfailingly dutiful son. But my father had an incredible intellect and a desire to prove himself in everything he undertook.
A few years after the fire my father enrolled in Boston's English High School. He took after his light-skinned father rather than his bronzed mother Roselind, with straight hair, thin lips, and a Hispanic or Spanish sort of complexion. For pocket money he worked as a hotel bellboy and for a time as a fishmonger, which explained his lifelong aversion to seafood. He learned to play piano and trumpet, and ran track at 600 yards. In June 1917 he graduated with honors and as battalion adjutant of the high school's Cadet Corps. He never spoke to me of any racial unpleasantness during his youth, though given his temperament he wouldn't have.
* * *
Following a path that was not unusual at the time, Dad skipped a bachelor's degree program and enrolled directly in Boston University School of Law. I never was able to determine if my father knew that his white paternal grandfather, Louis C. H. Finney, was a graduate of Harvard Law School. If he had, this may explain my father becoming a lawyer. Both in high school and law school, he lived in the Back Bay, neighborhoods quite integrated at the time. He was one of two Negroes in a BU law class of eighty-eight — interestingly, there were six women. Since Pop could provide only modest help, my father took a part-time job as a hotel bellman and a full-time position as an evening elevator operator — the infrequency of nighttime passengers made it easy to study on the job. He was on the swimming and boxing teams and was captain of the track team.
Two months after completing his LLB cum laude, he passed the Massachusetts bar, on September 24, 1920. His cum laude honor was due to outstanding grades. On exams he hardly ever received less than 85 percent, and in twenty-four courses his grades were 90 or higher; he even received a 99 in a bankruptcy class. While in law school, my father joined the army during World War I. He served only three months and, when the war ended, was discharged without fighting abroad and returned to law school. I don't know whether he served in a segregated unit.
Both in high school and the university, I suspect that my father honed his lifelong practice of not denying his racial heritage, but not flaunting it as a flag or banner. Hence he moved easily in two worlds. At the turn of the century, Black fraternities were a newly emerging social institution at both Black and predominantly white colleges and universities. The first Black fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi, or "Boulé," was founded in 1904 and was followed over the next ten years by the creation of another five Black fraternities. In 1923, my father helped found and was the first president of the Boston Sigma Chapter of the national Negro fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. The chapter was composed of twenty-one Negro men then enrolled in major New England universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Suffolk University, Tufts University, and Dartmouth College. Often the only Negroes on their campuses, they formed an elite group of their day — five of the fraternity brothers were studying medicine, four law, and two dentistry.
* * *
At BU my father met my mother, Harriette Mae Banks, born in Portsmouth, Virginia. Unlike the Whartons, she was dark-skinned, with tightly curled hair, a large nose, and strong features. She took after her father, Albert R. Banks, a large dark man who had played high school football in Virginia. I never met him, though years later I found that he and his brothers had operated a restaurant in Harlem until his death in 1939.
My maternal grandmother, Mary Magdalene Pratt, was born in 1882 in Edenton, North Carolina. She was light-skinned, what Negroes often call "high yellow," with wavy hair and sharp facial features — nose, chin, and forehead. Her most distinctive feature was her amber eyes, which could love you or cut you to the quick. She had married Albert when he was twenty-five and she was seventeen, but in 1905 she left him to move to Boston with Harriette and her younger brother Hubert. In Boston she worked for a while as a live-in cook in a white residence where she couldn't have her children with her. She first placed them in a children's home, then boarded them with a Negro family in nearby Medford.
In 1911 my grandmother legally divorced Albert Banks; a year later she married Thomas Hicks, a steward first class in the navy. "Pa," as the children were to call him, was a man of medium height, coffee-skinned, with a heavy mustache and a dour view of life. After the wedding, the new family of four settled at 96 Camden Street. Although Pa and my grandmother seemed always to be bickering, they remained married for fifty-one years, until he died in 1963.
"Nana," as all the grandkids later called her, was a disciplinarian. Woe unto any of us who scuffed our feet while walking. "Step smartly!" was a command that galvanized us all. In contrast, my mother was sweet and gentle. Slightly pigeon-toed at her right foot, my mother always walked as if tip-toeing. She was such a fine student that when she was about to graduate from Girls High School in June 1919, Elizabeth Richardson, her white math teacher, urged my grandmother to send her to college — something rarely dreamed of at the time by women, Negro women especially. As a result, my mother applied and was admitted to BU. My grandmother, typically, pledged the needed financial support.
My parents' courtship began during their college days. At BU my mother majored in chemistry. She was 5'6", very thin, with straightened black hair worn slightly over the right side of her face. Dad was two inches taller, wiry but strong. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and soon grew the thin triangular mustache that he would have for the rest of his life. Before long my father became a favorite of Nana's; his letters to her sounded like those of a loving son. In July 1923 my parents received their BU degrees in the same ceremony, a BS for my mother and an LLM for my father. My father proposed to my mother while they sat on the rock fence of a graveyard in Arlington.
In the final year of study for his first law degree, my father's torts class had been visited by the head of a small Boston law firm, who had magnanimously offered to consider for employment any of the students who later got over the hurdle of the Massachusetts bar. Two months later, my father didn't hesitate to show up at the surprised lawyer's door. After being hired, he began immediately to work on his second law degree.
Four years later, frustrated by a lack of advancement, my father decided to explore federal government employment. In 1924 he quit the law firm to become an examiner in the Veterans Bureau in Washington, D.C. But he also applied to the U.S. Department of State, and in August he was appointed a law clerk in the Consular Commercial Section at a salary of $1,860 per annum. Meanwhile, Harriette had joined the faculty of Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute, a historically Black college that eventually became Virginia State University. Despite her degree in chemistry, she was assigned to teach Latin and French.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Privilege and Prejudice by Clifton R. Wharton Jr.. Copyright © 2015 Clifton R. Wharton Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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