SPECIAL REPORTS * Preserving ties to their heritage as they move to largely white suburbs can be difficult for black families. Cultural challenges of another sort await Latinos learning the ropes of voting, U.S.-style. : Groups Help Blacks Stay Connected to Their Roots

As more African Americans ascend the socioeconomic ladder and move into affluent communities, they are increasingly joining local chapters of venerable organizations such as the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women, as well as lesser known groups, to give them a sense of community where no traditional black neighborhood exists.

Members of The Links, a black women’s community service organization, tutor needy children on Saturday mornings.

Members of another group for black women and their children, Jack and Jill of America Inc., deliver food baskets to sickle cell anemia patients.

Black men and women discuss the state of black America at panel discussions hosted by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

And mentors from 100 Black Men help black boys navigate the difficult passage to manhood.

“Living here in the San Fernando Valley, there is a very distinct need to be connected [because] we just don’t have the community out here,” said Edi Gillery, a business consultant who moved from Detroit in 1979, first to Van Nuys and then to Northridge.

To get connected, Gillery transferred her membership to a local chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, a national service group for college-educated black women. She and her children later joined the Valley chapter of Jack and Jill.

Ethel Davis was looking for a home in the Valley when she stopped cold--she was looking at a newspaper ad featuring a black female real estate broker.

Only another African American woman, Davis believed, could fully understand her need to connect with other black families and her concerns about raising her two children in a predominantly white suburb.

“I kept that paper for two years,” said Davis, who moved with her husband, Kevin, from Philadelphia in 1982, first to Koreatown and then to the Valley. “When we had enough money to move, I called her.”

Davis’ instincts about the real estate agent proved right: Not only did she find Davis a home in Chatsworth, she also helped her tap into Jack and Jill.

Unlike middle-class black communities in Maryland and Atlanta and in Los Angeles’ View Park and Baldwin Hills--where there are blocks of black churches, barbershops and soul food restaurants set within clearly defined boundaries--there is no sizable, established black community in the Valley.

Organizations Linked to Privilege

Black parents raising children in wealthy but largely non-black communities worry that their children may not develop a strong cultural identity because they are often among only a handful of blacks in their schools or in their neighborhoods.

Jack and Jill helps black children to embrace their blackness and become leaders in society by exposing them to educational, cultural and social activities.

Named for the nursery rhyme depicting childhood whimsy, the group was founded in Philadelphia in 1938 by wealthy black mothers--wives of doctors, lawyers and politicians--intent on giving their children the same opportunities as their white counterparts despite living in a segregated society.

Over the years, the group was viewed by some blacks as an exclusive network of the black elite, a clique detached from the heart of the black community and struggling to assimilate into mainstream society.

Similarly, The Links, founded in Philadelphia in 1946, extended invitations for membership to mostly well-educated, socially connected black women with professional husbands.

Early generations of Links were mostly the daughters, nieces and granddaughters of privileged families presented into black society at the group’s debutante balls.

Even today, membership in The Links and Jack and Jill is considered by some blacks as a distinguishing credential separating the pedigreed from the common.

“These groups are seen as a symbol of status, prestige and elitism,” said David L. Horne, chairman of the pan-African studies department at Cal State Northridge.

At the height of the Harlem Renaissance a half-century ago, the black middle class emerged as a social and economic force, Horne said.

“They came out and said, ‘Do not measure all black people in the same way. We are educated. We know how to speak the language. We know which fork to use. We are different,’ ” he said.

Membership in these organizations waned during the civil rights and black nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as many African Americans rejected the groups as imitations of white society and instead turned toward more Afrocentric forms of cultural expression.

Memberships Rejuvenated

In recent years, however, a burgeoning black middle class fleeing urban blight and settling in suburban communities has rejuvenated membership in these groups.

The Links’ blended tradition of high society and community service was apparent at a recent scholarship dinner hosted by the Valley chapter at the Universal Hilton.

A jazz singer cooed “Misty.” Tuxedos and gowns glided across the dance floor. Diners chatted at tables lavishly decorated with fine china, shimmering flatware and fresh-cut flowers in crystal vases.

Not only do these groups provide a chance for blacks to get together socially, they also offer a safe place where members can speak openly about identity issues and racial incidents.

After an eye-opening comment from her 3-year-old son, Sheryll Cummings, a bank vice president from Northridge, knew she had to do something to instill in him a sense of black pride.

“My son came home and asked me if he could be white like me,” said Cummings, who moved from Queens, N.Y., to Orange County as a teenager. “I knew that was a problem, because my son thought I was white, and I’m not. He was confused because he is darker-skinned.”

So she joined Jack and Jill “to get my kids to look at other kids who look like them, and . . . realize that it’s OK to be black.”

Davis said that because of joining Jack and Jill, her children now have a greater awareness of their cultural identity.

“For several years, my children thought they were Jewish, because they attended a private school where most of the students were Jewish,” Davis recalled. “I want my children to know about other cultures. But I also want them to know that they have something too, and that it’s a shared experience.”

Through Jack and Jill, Davis said her children now know about Kwanzaa, Juneteenth and Black History Month, and they proudly tell other children at school.

A Tradition of Service

The black presence in Los Angeles dates back to 1781, when the pueblo was established by a group of settlers, nearly half of whom were African.

Los Angeles’ black population has grown from 8,000 in 1910 to 485,949 in 1990, with the greatest surge occurring in the 1940s as black migrants found work in defense industries and settled in Watts and South-Central, say Cal State Northridge geography professors James P. Allen and Eugene Turner in their book “The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California.”

In 1946, military housing was moved from Griffith Park to Pacoima and was established as temporary public housing for low-income people.

“Because a quarter of the initial 800 households were black,” Allen and Turner wrote, “[the project] became the nucleus of a new black community and served to make Los Angeles blacks aware for the first time of the Valley.”

Although the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1968 struck down legalized segregation in housing, desegregation began much earlier in the Valley.

Joseph Eichler, a Palo Alto builder, quietly pioneered the concept of open housing beginning in the 1950s. The man credited with integrating housing in California suburbs did some of his best and most difficult work in the Valley.

But in exchange for better homes, schools and municipal services, blacks faced isolation. So middle-class African Americans founded suburban chapters of national organizations, in part to bring together a disparate black community.

Today’s affluent African Americans are not just rubbing elbows with others within their comfort zone, they are rolling up their sleeves to better the communities they left behind.

“Middle-class African Americans do give back, and we tend to teach our children to do the same thing,” said Jacqueline Castillo, who regularly tutors elementary school children at Calvary Baptist Church in Pacoima. “There is a real commitment to service in our lives.”

The Valley chapter of Jack and Jill supported this year’s Stand for Children, a campaign of the Children’s Defense Fund to improve child care across the nation, by asking its members to send e-mail messages to policymakers.

The Valley Links has awarded more than $100,000 in scholarships since 1989, said Jackie Ramos, the group’s immediate past president.

And the NAACP’s Valley branch pushed the Los Angeles Police Department to ban the use of motorized battering rams, and helped win a moratorium on the use of chokeholds.

“The positive side of these groups is that they give blacks something to strive for, a sense of movement in one’s position in society and a feeling that education and a changing income will make one better respected,” said Horne, the Cal State professor.

“Just like whites and other groups look upon middle-class status as something to attain, we have the same aspirations,” he added.

In the future, black organizations will continue to bring together African Americans scattered across affluent communities and to serve as helping hands for needy blacks struggling to break down socioeconomic barriers, members say.

The organizations’ goals, members say, are to improve the earning power and educational achievement of all blacks.

“If you have a tight fist, you can’t get anywhere,” said Patricia Gibson, who moved from East Lansing, Mich., in 1958 to Pacoima and later to Compton and West Los Angeles before settling in Woodland Hills. “So you keep an open hand, and what you have, you give it.”