On being a ‘dark-skinned Negro’ in 1956

Some years ago in Tampa, FL, I was in a fabric store when I heard a tiny voice say “She black.” I looked up and saw an African American woman carrying a toddler on her hip. The little girl looked to be only about 2 or 3 years old.

I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her correctly, because at that age kids are still trying to put words together. She repeated it: “She black.” Was she referring to me, I wondered. I could see a smile on the mother’s face, but she never looked up from the fabric table or try to shush the girl. The child’s description was clearly not meant to be complimentary.

The three of us were the only ones in the store, so I was certain the child was referring to me. I am a dark-skinned African American woman, and the child apparently had heard her family refer to people like me in simple but powerful words aimed at erasing us as people. The little girl and her mother were a few shades lighter than me, but I don’t recall them being what we used to call “high yellow” – a skin tone without much pigment.

That incident from the early 1980s came to mind recently when I came across a copy of Sepia magazine at auction. It was an August 1956 issue with jazz singer Sarah Vaughan on the cover. Beneath her was the title of one of the featured articles:

“The Real Truth About Dark Negroes”

I was very familiar with Sepia magazine, which I always considered a step cousin to the more popular and sophisticated Ebony. The latter was designed to extol the virtues of being black and moneyed, filling its cover and pages with celebrities and other black achievers. Founded by John H. and Eunice Johnson in 1945, it sought to counter the stereotypical portrayal of African Americans in the mainstream media by celebrating them as people.

Founded two years later, Sepia seemed to take on thornier issues in the African American community. John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book “Black Like Me” started out as a series in Sepia in 1960 when he was a writer for the magazine.

The articles in the 1956 issue were in the same vein. One was titled “There’s No Heaven Up North,” about how African American “migrants” from “Dixie” found that the American Dream still eluded them in Chicago, and “Ministers Who Pick Numbers,” about how ministers slyly offered numbers from the pulpit, also featuring Prophet Jones who gave out lucky numbers from his office in Philadelphia.

In its next issue, the magazine promised, would be a behind-the-scenes look at dope peddlers, along with a story about “Negroes Who Don’t Think They’re Negroes.”

You weren’t likely to find these types of articles in Ebony (but you would in its half-pint sister publication Jet) nor the story about discrimination among blacks against blacks. The premise of the Sepia article was that dark-skinned black people were finally arriving, and Vaughan was a good example. As a child who wanted to grow up to be a singer, she was told that she would never be successful because she was too dark. In the old saying, she was among those who fell into the category “If you’re black, get back.”

In 1956, according to the magazine, she and Eartha Kitt had “cracked through the color curtain.” I had never considered Kitt a dark-skinned woman.

“The success of these two dark girls is symbolic of a new trend in race – an end to color prejudice among Negroes that once relegated dark-skinned people to the bottom of the social scale and even caused Negro parents to look down upon their darker children.”

It was not much unlike the prejudice that all African Americans experienced in general, the magazine noted.

“I was called black countless times,” said Vaughan in the magazine article. “I often wished I was a medium brown-skin color.” Even after she had come into her own, she still had internal doubts: “I sometimes have to fight off the depressing feeling that I am day-dreaming, that a pinch will awaken me to the realization that I am not what I am but a black little ugly duckling.”

There was also Mahalia Jackson, whose presence at a tea party of light-skinned women caused eyebrows to raise, according to Sepia. She had accompanied her light-skinned aunt to the party. That type of reception changed, though, when she became famous. Nat King Cole, growing up on Chicago’s South Side, endured the same – but by 1956 he was revered.

The article noted the color hue of top leaders in African American organizations, including the NAACP (light-skinned men), and members of some of Chicago’s social clubs. It told of “blue-vein” churches in various parts of the country where dark-skinned African Americans (including ministers) were not embraced, and social organizations with local and national membership, such as the Gay Northeasterners, that it said excluded dark-skinned people.

I had never heard of the Northeasterners and was instantly curious about the organization. It was founded in 1930 in Harlem, with chapters in Philadelphia and Washington, DC. The original idea came from Agnes Scott Davis, wife of Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who would later become commander of the Tuskegee Airmen. In her travels, she had met a number of black debutants, and thought that this group of women with similar interests and backgrounds should get to know each other. Debutants back then were normally light-skinned young women from middle-class families.

A vintage photo of three charter members of the New York chapter showed three light-skinned black women who were fashionably dressed. Here’s a 1930 photo of chapter members in Washington.

Clubs like these across the country were “suspected” of being paper-bag clubs (if you were darker than a brown paper bag you couldn’t join), according to the 2006 book “The Paper Bag Principle.” These included such national clubs as the Links, Jack and Jill, and Girl Friends.

In Chicago, according to Sepia magazine, a men’s club called the Snakes refused to admit dark-skinned men until the Chicago Defender newspaper pressured the group. In Washington, it was the Mus-O-Lit Club and What Good Are We Club. Audrey Elisa Kerr, author of “The Paper Bag Principle,” noted that she could find no mention of this so-called test in written documentation in Washington but only through oral histories.

Today, much of that has changed in the clubs that still exist (A friend mentioned that she had attended a Links garden party recently where members were of all colors). Despite their membership-limiting criteria in the past, the clubs also raised money for various causes.

For the most part, the “I’m Black and I’m Proud” movement finger-laced with the civil rights movement helped topple the paper bag-test, but there will always be stragglers around. Some parents still want their sons and daughters to marry light for the sake of the children’s skin color, and some light-skinned people are still presumed to be better and are treated as such.

The parents of that little girl in the fabric shop were indoctrinating her at a young vulnerable age. As she grew older, I hope she learned that black is indeed beautiful.