First Class Page 17

  On moving out June 30, 1942, Mr. Gillian has arranged with the US Marshal to accept the keys from you and hold the premises. You should call Deputy Marshal Kearny, US District Court House and arrange for a convenient time for him to come to the premises June 30 and for you and your tenants to leave the same. As the property passes into and under control of the law, you cannot enter the premises after the Marshal takes possession, whatever you need to remove you should do so beforehand, and the same applies to your tenants.

  The letter also requested $257 for printing so Houston could begin revisions on an appeal.6

  It took a year and a half, but the Hundleys did return to their home. They technically won their case, but in terms of advancing civil rights, this one could go in the loss column. The judge did not rule on the basis of any of their lawyer’s arguments about the Constitution or his clients’ rights. The judge ruled that the covenant was a moot point because of the changing neighborhood, so they might as well be able to move in. The judge ruled that the neighborhood had “so changed in its character and environment” and that

  the present appellees are not now enjoying the advantages which the covenant sought to confer. The obvious purpose was to keep the neighborhood white. But the strict enforcement of all five covenants will not alter the fact that the purpose has been essentially defeated by the presence of a Negro family now living in an unrestricted house in the midst of the restricted group, and as well by the ownership by another Negro of a house almost directly across the street. And this is just the beginning.

  Joe Stewart and Carol Graham were married in Washington on August 7, 1954. The reception was held in the backyard of 1509 Evarts Street, the home their parents had acquired in the middle of the night. They were well on their way, both eager to leave Washington.

  Carol went off to Sarah Lawrence on a scholarship, as Hazel Markel had predicted she would. Carol wanted to be a teacher, so she earned her master’s at Columbia. One of her first teaching assignments was at New Rochelle High School in New York, where she was the first black academic teacher. “I remember one parent saying, ‘Oh she must be from the Caribbean because she’s probably been trained in British schools.’ British schools? Oh brother. Do I have a British accent? No. I just spoke English.” She made the local paper when a group described as “Southern students from Washington and Baltimore” made a field trip up north to see what an integrated school looked like. A photo appeared in a local paper of Carol talking to the teenagers. Three are smiling, one is frowning, and one has her arms crossed. The caption read,

  Southerners see integrated schools. They were invited by the student body of New Rochelle High School to observe the various activities in which both Negro and White pupils articipate. Biology teacher Mrs. Carol Graham Stewart, the first Negro teacher at New Rochelle High School, greeting [sic] the student to her classroom. The students were surprised to learn from Mrs. Stewart that she was originally from Washington, DC, and attended Dunbar High School. Two of the boys expressed their special interest in the integrated activities of the football team. One of the girls said that she didn’t come to New York to be photographed but to find out how the northern school handled the problems of their prom and other social events.

  At this point in the story, her husband—my father—jumped in, clearly proud of his wife. “The best thing Mom did was that there are literally hundreds of bright kinds of people who spread out throughout the society who learned something of great importance to them from a person of color. And a whole lot of white folks have not had that experience.”

  “Many of them, the only people of color they knew were the maids in the kitchen,” Carol finished the thought.

  And then she suddenly recalled one confrontation with a young man who had not done his homework. She walked over to him and let him have it. “You are smart. And you are just being lazy. And you just want to go ride your motorcycle, and you should do your work. Now you sit down there and do that work, because I know you can do it and you know you can do it.”

  The boy stood up. “You don’t talk to me like that!”

  Carol was thrown for a moment, but just a moment. “What do you mean I don’t talk to you ‘like that’? Sit down!”

  “My father says you never allow a woman to speak to you that way. No matter who it is.”

  “Well, you father isn’t here, son. Now sit down and do your work.” At seventy-nine she laughed remembering it all. “I’m sure they felt they had to test me.”

  Joe’s tests came in a different form. He attended Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy. “In the plebe year, you got kids coming in from all over the country. And some of them came from places like Mississippi, and they had a bad attitude. And they had to undergo attitude correction, some of which I helped administer.”

  Joe spent his whole sophomore year at sea, sailing all around the world, which was transformative for all involved. “You come back juniors, changed. More mature, especially those with the bad attitudes. You’d seen the world.” His worldview changed seeing the coast of Italy and North Africa. He learned discipline, naval etiquette, and “how to behave.” His teenage edginess matured into a strong sense of right and wrong. He would send Carol long letters about their plans for the future along with gifts—small cameo earrings from Italy or a coral necklace from Spain.

  While sailing abroad was liberating, Joe Stewart still faced racism in the States. By his last year he was an honors student and third officer on a military sea transport. Still, he found himself being detained at a New Orleans port trying to reboard his ship. The local official wanted to know where the “boy,” the six-foot, two-inch twenty-four-year-old, had gotten the uniform. The captain came down with some stern words for the man who had detained one of his deck officers.

  When Stewart returned home, he was accepted to the Harvard Business School, though he almost did not attend because he didn’t have enough money. Carol searched and searched for scholarships for him. She’d done it a year earlier for herself. With his grades and experience, Joe was able to obtain a Whitney Fellowship and a Harvard scholarship. He graduated in 1952 and was one of three Negro students out of six hundred. Close to graduation, he was called to the dean’s office. At HBS there was a tradition among graduates to only apply for four or five jobs because it was assumed that many offers would go out, and it was the gentlemanly thing to do.

  The dean sat Joe down and was direct. “Look, we know you are going to have a bit of trouble finding a job. And while everybody is restricted to five applications, Joe, you can talk to as many people as you need to talk to.”

  Joe Stewart, future Harvard MBA, spoke to sixty companies. No from Raytheon. No from Union Carbide. Form letter after form letter appeared after his interviews, thanking him for his interest and regretting to inform him there were no openings at that time. Joe received two job offers. One was to run a family department store in Saint Croix, and the other was with a steamship company that he said “wouldn’t pay me enough to starve on.” Knowing of his troubles, his finance professor Charlie Williams asked Joe to come to his office.

  Professor Williams said, “Look I think you’d probably be good at securities analysis, and I have a very, very good friend—old friend, good guy—down in Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. I want you to go. You are from New York, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Joe. He was excited. This could be the one break he needed.

  “Good. I want you to go down to the Met. I’ve called him, and all you have to do is call and set a date.” Encouraged at the possibility of returning home with a job and a lovely new wife, he called.

  The interview went well, or so he thought.

  “Now Mr. Stewart, I want you to go to one other gentlemen.” Joe and his potential boss went down about four flights of stairs and shook hands. The man pointed him toward an office before leaving.

  In the little office was a small, older Negro man in a gray Salvation Army uniform. Joe thought, “OK. Fine.” Joe realized his profe
ssor had never mentioned to his contact that the student he was sending was a Negro.

  “I understand you are here, son, for a job, but we are very sorry to tell you that we just don’t have an opening for you in this company.”

  Joe asked him one question. “Look, is it your job to tell every Negro that comes in here that there aren’t any jobs in MetLife at this professional level for Negroes?”

  The man looked at him for a long time without saying anything.

  “Never mind.” Joe got up to leave.

  Hearing the story again, his wife of over fifty years, Carol, smiled and said, “Best thing that never happened to you.”

  Carol went on to teach for thirty years, becoming the kind of teacher you admire—and fear just a bit. She was described by her superintendent as the definition of a master teacher. Occassionally she would get a letter from a university informing her that a student named her as as someone who had shaped her life. She believed in her students. Once she channeled Hazel Markel when she gently (and not so gently) suggested one of her students, a smart, quirky guy, go to Sarah Lawrence.

  “Carol Stewart’s influence on my life is immeasurable,” said David Kessler (Sarah Lawrence 1975), who has been a biologist at the National Zoo for thirty-four years and counting. “A week doesn’t go by when I don’t think of her and the lessons I learned from her. Aside from my parents, Carol Stewart was the most influential person in my life.”

  And Joseph Stewart? He spent his life climbing the corporate ladder and broke glass ceilings in a way that seemed effortless. And he never forgot to reach back. He was on the board of directors of large companies and civil rights groups. He would often speak to young students at innercity schools. For example, he met one young man and made it his mission to help the bright teenager get into college. Stewart assisted him in filling out all his college applications, because both of the young man’s parents were holding down two jobs. Joe Stewart helped pay for other people’s children to go to college and would always find a way to help if he could. He was a naturally generous person on all levels. I received an e-mail shortly after my father died: “For what it’s worth, Joseph Stewart was one of the most influential people in my life. He hired me in 1989. It was my second job out of school. At the time, he was a board member, and I was amazed when he came down to reception to collect me instead of sending an assistant for my first interview with him. He was a gem.” The young woman who sent this note was fortunate to meet a man who never forgot what it feels like when someone believes in you.

  He, like many black men of his generation, occasionally bumped into institutional racism and faced the silly displays of other people’s prejudice that make a person either bitter or more determined. He was once mistaken for Senator Bob Dole’s driver when he had personally invited the senator to lunch that day. Once a young junior executive came rushing into a hotel conference room looking for the very senior executive who was going to run a meeting, looked around, and then yelled to Joe, “Hey you, have you seen Mr. Stewart?” He replied, “Every day when I shave.” Joseph Turner Stewart Jr., the young man who had been sent to the MetLife janitor only to be dismissed went on to become a senior vice president and member of the board of directors of a Fortune 500 company. The CEO of a competitor, number 231 on the Fortune 500, once wrote to Joe Stewart, “Let me say that in the world of class and accomplishment, whether it be relating to analysts, politicians, scientists, business people, corporate gameplayers, you name it—you have no peer.”

  9 RIGHT TO SERVE

  “I DIDN’T HAVE A roommate. I didn’t want a roommate. And they didn’t want to make somebody room with me, although a couple of guys offered.” Even as a teenager Wesley Brown was wise enough to know that no good would come of the only Negro cadet at Annapolis living in close quarters with any other newly arrived white plebes.

  “At the time, I said if I had a roommate, my roommates would be catching the same hell, or more, just for the fact that they live with me. And then I’d feel guilty, and it would be like the king’s whipping boy,” Brown said. “When the king was bad, he went over and beat the hell out of the whipping boy. And that was an incentive for the king to be good because he didn’t want his friend, the whipping boy, to be whipped. So I said, I don’t need that; I’m going to be busy enough as is.”

  In 1945, a year after he graduated from Dunbar High School, Wesley Brown was nominated for, appointed to, and enrolled in the US Naval Academy, a full three years before President Truman issued the order to desegregate the armed services. The navy, as a 1944 issue of Time magazine put it, “is not celebrated for liberalism in handling its race problem.”1 Originally, colored men could enlist but would be assigned to some sort of low-level duty. From 1919 to 1932, during a time of relative peace, Negro men couldn’t enlist in the navy at all.

  By the 1940s, despite being at war again, the navy continued to be particularly inhospitable to Negroes, from the top down. In the early 1940s, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox continued to uphold the policy that firmly stated segregation was the best thing for all parties involved. The concept of Negroes and whites serving on the same ship and in close quarters was unthinkable to most sailors.

  Knox saw nothing wrong with the fact that all Negroes in the navy thus far had been relegated to the role of stewards, cooks, or cleaners. He said it afforded them their best opportunity to serve, even though the positions were subservient, and grown men were often addressed as “boy” by other naval members.2 That practice didn’t become officially against the rules until the late 1940s.

  FDR made a halfhearted move toward equality by allowing Negroes to enlist in 1942. They did, despite knowing that they would be assigned menial labor. In a few rare cases, a Negro enlisted man was given an assignment. Most notably, thirteen men, who became known as the Golden Thirteen, were chosen to train as officers but had to do so at a segregated facility. Secretary Knox barely went along with the plan, despite prodding from Adlai Stevenson, who was then special assistant to the navy. Stevenson suggested to his bosses, Knox and Roosevelt, that a navy with sixty thousand Negroes in the service but not one officer might be a problem.3 Who knows what would have happened if Knox hadn’t died in 1944? He was replaced with his philosophical opposite, James Forrestal, a true believer in pursuing equality in the services. The next year Wesley Brown arrived at Annapolis.

  Five others like him had tried to penetrate the Naval Academy, and not one reached graduation, for various reasons including bad eyesight, flunking exams, and mental exhaustion from harassment.4 The first colored cadets had been swept in and swept out during the short-lived hopefulness of Reconstruction. Sixty years passed before another Negro person attempted to enroll.

  In the 1930s and ’40s, as part of the emerging civil rights movement, Negro congressmen were intent on nominating a young Negro man for the academy. Congressman Arthur Mitchell of Chicago, the first Negro Democrat in Congress, vowed to search for appropriate candidates and to keep nominating them until one made it, even if the candidate did not live in his district.

  Representative Mitchell was in close contact with the head of Dunbar’s military training instructors. Because of the Naval Academy’s intense academic entrance program, Dunbar High School was the natural choice to be the go-to incubator for Annapolis. In the 1930s three Dunbar graduates had attempted to complete “fours years by the bay.” James Lee Johnson (Dunbar 1933), flunked out, despite an excellent high school record. “They mistreated him. Tearing up paper and pushing it through the transom so when his room was inspected it was unkempt.”

  Dr. Adelaide Cromwell (Dunbar 1936) remembers it. “They dropped him out of the academy because they said he couldn’t read or speak English. James Johnson! He went to Dunbar High School, so you know full well he knew how to speak and write!” James Minor (Dunbar 1933), the son of a school principal, was said not to have passed the entrance exam. However, George Trivers (Dunbar 1933), looked promising.

  Trivers was mature, having already gradua
ted from college. He passed the entrance exam, and the day he walked into the academy and registered, it made the Negro papers.5 That was the last bit of good news to come out of the experience. Trivers was spat upon. He was called a nigger. Young men who had joined the academy and were expected to develop “morally, mentally, and physically and to imbue with them the highest ideas of duty, honor, and loyalty” pounded Trivers’s walls at night to keep him awake.6 He left Annapolis when the physical abuse became too much and because he realized the instructors let it all happen.7 When an inquiry was made about the treatment of Trivers, Congressman Mitchell was told by the navy, “There was no unpleasantness in the resignation of George J. Trivers.”8 For the next nine years, not one Negro applicant made it to the Naval Academy.

  As a teenager, Wesley Brown thought he might attend West Point. After Dunbar he enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Unit at Howard. The odds of succeeding at West Point seemed a little better than Annapolis. While no Negroes had made it through the Naval Academy, twelve black men had graduated from the United States Military Academy.9 But Brown was on the radar of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York. Powell had nominated ten young Negro men to be considered for Annapolis, and Wesley Brown was one of them. He was the only one who got into the program.10

  Being a good student, Brown did his homework before getting to the campus in Maryland. He spoke to Trivers and Johnson about the isolation and the lack of support they endured. He read the biography of the first black West Point cadet for inspiration.11 He tried to prepare mentally and control what he could. He empowered himself by choosing to live alone at the academy, turning down one or two offers for a roommate.

  Brown was not that concerned about the academics. He felt confident in his high school training, especially after witnessing some of his classmates.

  “When I went to the academy, I noticed there were a lot of guys who had straight As in high school and so forth who weren’t doing too well. And I concluded that a lot of them were not challenged because their schools were not competitive.”