Valley Blacks Nurture Sense of Community
Ethel Davis stopped cold when she saw a newspaper ad featuring a black woman real estate broker.
In her search for a home in the San Fernando Valley, Davis believed only another African American woman could fully understand her need to connect with other black families and her concerns about raising her two children in the 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, but she also helped her tap into a group for black women and their children called Jack and Jill of America Inc.
As African Americans ascend the socioeconomic ladder and move into affluent communities, they, like the Davises, don’t necessarily want to leave their culture behind.
Successful suburban blacks are increasingly joining local chapters of venerable organizations such as the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women, as well as such lesser known groups as Jack and Jill and the Links, a black women’s community service organization, to give them a sense of community where no traditional black neighborhood exists.
Links members tutor needy children on Saturday mornings. Jack and Jill members 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 100 Black Men mentors help black boys navigate the difficult passage to manhood.
Unlike the upscale communities of Brook Glen, Panola Mill and Wyndham Park around Atlanta, where there are blocks and blocks of black churches, barbershops and soul food restaurants set within clearly defined boundaries, the Valley offers no sizable, established black community.
“Living here in the 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 in Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority to a local chapter of the national service group for college-educated black women. She and her children later joined the Valley chapter of Jack and Jill.
Links member Jacqueline Castillo joined the group’s Valley chapter soon after she moved from Jacksonville, Fla., to Calabasas three years ago.
“Everybody knows the struggle and everybody has come from the same place,” said Castillo, an office systems consultant. “It would be foolish to forget where we came from. We all have the same history.”
Castillo is African American. Her husband is of Mexican descent.
Black parents raising children in middle-class 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 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 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.
Membership 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.
In recent years, however, a burgeoning modern black middle class fleeing inner-city blight and settling in suburban communities has rejuvenated membership.
The Valley Jack and Jill chapter, for example, has grown from 20 to 32 families since it began in 1978. And the local Links chapter’s membership has increased from 12 to 34 members in 25 years.
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.
The jazz singer cooed “Misty.” Couples clad in tuxedos and gowns glided across the dance floor. Diners chatted at tables lavishly decorated with fine china, shimmering flatware, and fresh-cut flowers.
“The fund-raisers, although they appear to be very social and elegant, are about the bottom line: raising money to help our kids,” said Carol Hall of Los Angeles, a former Link who attended the $100-a-plate affair.
These groups 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 when a friend called and told me about Jack and Jill, I said, ‘Yes! I’ll do it! Just tell me where to sign!’ ” Cummings said. “I figured Jack and Jill was the place to get my kids to look at other kids who look like them, and for them to realize that it’s OK to be black.”
Davis agreed, saying that because she joined 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.
Davis said her son and daughter learned about Hanukkah and Passover from their classmates, but they weren’t quite able to share traditions from their own culture.
“I want my children to know about other cultures,” Davis said. “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.
Thomas and Patricia Gibson’s color brought them face-to-face with racial stereotypes when they made an offer on a Woodland Hills house. A veterinarian married to a college-educated, socially connected wife, and the father of four children, Thomas Gibson had “made it” by nearly all measures.
Even as the African American couple prospered, moving from East Lansing, Mich., in 1958 to Pacoima and later to Compton and Brentwood Park, they kept in touch with the black community by volunteering with numerous groups.
The Gibsons decided to move back to the Valley in 1987 after their son Troy was accepted at Crespi Carmelite High School, a private boys’ prep school in Encino.
A listing for an eight-bedroom, six-bathroom custom-built home caught their attention and they requested a showing.
When they liked what they saw, they decided to make an offer. Patricia Gibson met with the real estate agent the next day; she dressed casually, believing that the un-moneyed look would give her leverage during negotiations.
The agent quoted the $1.8 million asking price. Gibson countered with a “ridiculous” offer, a list of 20 contingencies and a $5,000 check.
A confused look crossed the agent’s face, she said, and he blurted, “Lady, where do you get your money from?”
“I said, ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’
“That was not his business. You don’t ask people where they get their money from,” Gibson told Links members Castillo and Jackie Ramos, sitting in the great room of the home that is now hers.
“No matter what we do to be part of mainstream society, we’re still seen as a single group without distinctions,” said Ramos, a middle school teacher who moved from Nashville, Tenn., to Los Angeles in 1957 before settling in Encino.
“Whether you are down and out, or whether you have reached the pinnacle in life,” she continued, “we are all treated the same.”
Ramos is African American. Her husband is of Filipino descent.
The black presence in Los Angeles extends 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, wrote 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 1968 Civil Rights Act struck down legalized segregation in housing, desegregation had begun 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.
However, in exchange for better homes, schools and municipal services, blacks faced isolation. 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, but also are working to better their former communities.
“Middle-class African Americans do give back, and we tend to teach our children to do the same thing,” said Castillo, who tutors elementary schoolchildren at Calvary Baptist Church in Pacoima.
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 local Links has awarded more than $100,000 in scholarships since 1989, said Ramos, the group’s immediate past president.
“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.
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 of Woodland Hills. “So you keep an open hand, and what you have, you give it.”
