Authors: Eugene Robinson
More than length of experience alone was at play, however. The first Transcendent black Americans—Vernon Jordan’s generation, men and women now mostly in their sixties and seventies—successfully forced, cajoled, wheedled, or otherwise inserted themselves into places where they did not belong. Their achievement overcame, but did not erase, the fact that their exalted status was unauthorized, and thus precarious. All the confidence and smooth bluster in the world couldn’t change that—and all of the comforts, privileges, and prerogatives in the world were not enough, for some Transcendents, to foster a proper sense of entitlement. In the luxurious but not entirely serene precincts of Transcendent black America, Hillary Clinton was the smart, conservative play, the best that could be hoped for. Only those foolish enough not to steal nervous glances over their shoulders were able to look at the field and conclude that yes, Obama could.
* * *
There have been Transcendent black Americans since before black Americans were free. Until quite recently, however, there were never more than a handful at a time.
Frederick Douglass, born a slave, was one of the nation’s best-known and most influential abolitionists, a statesman whose counsel was valued by President Lincoln. During Reconstruction, the first African Americans were elected to Congress. Around the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington
was known across the country as a leader of, and spokesman for, black Americans—his fame, at least in the South, due in no small part to his prescription of slow, don’t-rock-the-boat progress that did not involve a demand for integration. W. E. B. DuBois, during this same period, was recognized as a towering intellectual and a fiery activist. Joe Louis ruled as heavyweight champion of the world, the first of a succession of African American boxers whose skill elevated them to the Transcendent realm. Toward midcentury, African Americans like Ralph Bunche, the diplomat who served as principal secretary of the United Nations and received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, and the most prominent musicians and athletes—Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown—had Transcendent status, as did Roy Wilkins when he headed the NAACP and, of course, the young Dr. King in his prime.
But these luminaries of the past were isolated individuals, and their wealth, power, and influence were relative. An example would be John H. Johnson, the grandson of slaves, who created a publishing empire in Chicago. Johnson’s magazines,
Ebony
and
Jet
, were enormously important to African Americans and thoroughly saturated their marketplace; when I was young, it was rare to go into a black household and not see at least one of the two magazines lying around somewhere. Johnson’s publications were brave and authoritative in covering civil rights, and in an important way they helped knit pre-disintegration black America together. But Johnson had no peer group of black media barons—there was no black William Randolph Hearst or Joseph Pulitzer to complement his version of Henry Luce. And while Johnson was virtually a monopolist, the market he owned consisted exclusively of African Americans. At my house, we subscribed to Luce’s iconic titles—
Time
and
Life
—as well as Johnson’s. But are there
any
white Americans my age who grew up with
Ebony
or
Jet
on the coffee table?
Now, for the first time, there is a large enough cohort of Transcendent black Americans to form a critical mass. This group is wealthy, powerful, and influential not just in comparison to other African Americans but in absolute terms.
This meant that the first African American president, confronting the direst financial crisis since the Great Depression, was able to summon an experienced African American CEO (Richard Parsons) out of retirement to oversee troubled Citigroup. It meant that when the president went to work on his campaign promise to bring the treatment of terrorism suspects back into line with civilized norms, he could task an African American attorney general (Eric Holder) with the job. It meant that as President Obama decided on diplomatic steps he could take to rid the United States of its Crazy Cowboy image in the world and chart a new course, he could pick up the phone and call
two
African American former secretaries of state (Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) for advice—although the president had to keep in mind that one of them had been the Chief Cowgirl.
The critical mass that makes Transcendent black America real and important is a direct consequence of the successes of the 1960s—civil rights, desegregation, affirmative action, black political empowerment. These achievements pushed open long-sealed doors, just a crack, and exceptional individuals bulled their way through. It was a natural process: First a few individuals managed to poke their heads above the Mainstream, and then a few more, and eventually there were enough to have real impact—not just on black America but on the nation and the world.
I watched the process happen. I was hired by
The Washington Post
in 1980 to cover the city’s charismatic mayor Marion Barry during his first term. This was long before Barry’s crack-smoking downfall and eventual semi-redemption. He had been elected with the support of constituencies that eventually became disillusioned and bitter foes—liberal whites, the growing gay population, young and highly educated black professionals, the editorial board of the
Post
—and he promised new competence and efficiency.
And believe it or not, he delivered: Under Barry, the city government had the first clean audit of its finances and floated its first bond issue. This was a big step, since the books had been such a mess, and to get it done Barry hired the investment bank Lazard Freres. The adviser that Lazard sent was a razor-sharp young black man named Franklin Raines—the same man who, nearly three decades later, would be accused of helping create the subprime mortgage mess as the Transcendent chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae.
When I met him, Raines was in his early thirties. Born in Seattle, he had humble, working-class origins; his father was a janitor. I remember a story he told me at the time: His mother had decided that he would be called “Frank Delno Raines” in honor of family members with those names. But when she wrote that down at the hospital, a white clerk assumed that she was an ignorant black woman who didn’t know how to spell the name of the thirty-second president properly. The baby’s name was recorded as “Franklin Delano Raines” instead.
Raines was born in 1949. Had he been born in, say, 1929, he still would certainly have been a success—he’s too smart and driven not to have made a mark. But his life surely would have been different.
Two decades earlier, it would have been much less likely for even a young black man as bright as Raines to attend Harvard College—black students didn’t arrive on Ivy League campuses in substantial numbers until the late 1960s. It would have been unlikely for him to study at Oxford’s Magdalen College as a Rhodes scholar, since there were no black American Rhodes Scholars for five decades, between in 1907 and 1963. It’s highly unlikely that he would have been able to graduate from Harvard Law.
Raines got his credentials just in time to join the first sizable group of black professionals who were allowed to climb the well-trod ladder that zigzags between government and high finance. He started in the Carter administration, then took refuge at Lazard, then was recruited through his Democratic Party connections to jump to Fannie Mae, then was lured back into government under the Clinton administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget—one of the most powerful jobs in a city that worships power the way other cities worship money—and then finally went back to Fannie Mae in 1999 as the first black CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Other African Americans would soon follow him in that distinction—Kenneth Chenault at American Express, Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch—but Raines was the one who planted the flag.
The Fannie Mae job did not end well. In December 2004, Raines took what he called “early retirement” after Fannie Mae was accused of overstating its profits over several years by more than $6 billion. Four years later, Fannie Mae’s aggressive expansion on Raines’s watch was blamed as a major cause of the subprime mortgage meltdown. O’Neal, too, was cited for his role in the financial collapse—of all the large investment
banks, Merrill had made the biggest and most irresponsible bet on subprimes. It was a milestone, albeit not one that would be universally celebrated: For the first time, two African Americans had become big enough players in the financial world to have major roles—I should say allegedly—in triggering a global economic crisis. Genuine entitlement includes the privilege to fail.
Another Marion Barry initiative was to bring the new technology called cable television to the District of Columbia. This required awarding a lucrative contract for cable service in the city, and groups of well-connected insiders were formed to compete for the concession. Most big-city African American mayors have tried to foster African American economic development through the awarding of municipal contracts and concessions; few have done this as effectively as Barry. When he took office, Washington’s business community was old, white, established, clubby, and complacent. Barry used his power over city contracts to create a new class of millionaire black developers, lawyers, and consultants. Among them was Robert Johnson.
Johnson was born in Mississippi in 1946—the ninth of ten children—and grew up mostly in Illinois, graduating from the University of Illinois and later earning a master’s degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. While Raines bounced back and forth between money and politics, Johnson went straight for the intersection of the two: lobbying. More specifically, he worked for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, where he gained the knowledge and contacts that he would eventually put to spectacularly lucrative use. Like all great salesmen, he is unnaturally persistent and persuasive.
And like few human beings I’ve ever met, he has an amazing ability to quickly and effortlessly manipulate numbers in his head.
When I first met him in 1980, Johnson was a smart young entrepreneur hanging around the mayor’s office and the press room, trying to land a contract that would make his company Washington’s first cable-television provider. He had no chance—other groups bidding on the lucrative contract had better connections and more juice—but somehow he prevailed. He told anyone who would listen that the cable franchise would be just a start, that he intended to use it as a launching pad for a national cable network aimed at African American viewers. A colleague of mine in the city hall press corps pulled him aside, with genuine concern, and soberly advised him to forget the Don Quixote routine and get a real job. Fortunately, Johnson ignored him. He and his wife, Sheila, built District Cablevision into BET and BET into an empire, ultimately selling it to Viacom in 2001 for a reported $3 billion.
Johnson lost his billionaire status when he and Sheila divorced in 2002, splitting the fortune into roughly half-billion-dollar chunks. The separation had the effect of making Sheila Johnson a Transcendent figure in her own right. And it was thanks to her that I saw for the first time what Transcendent status looks like in the social world.
Before the split, the Johnsons bought a two-hundred-acre estate near Middleburg in the Virginia hunt country west of Washington. Gatsby-esque doesn’t do justice to the night in December 2001 when Sheila, a café-au-lait-skinned woman with a disarmingly sweet smile, hosted a little fund-raiser for her favorite cause: preventing Washington’s rapacious suburban sprawl from encroaching on the bucolic Johnson spread,
which they had named Salamander Farm. The event took place after Bob had already moved out.
Arriving guests were relieved of their car keys by an army of valet-parking attendants and welcomed into what looked at first like a wing of a great mansion. It turned out, though, that this wasn’t the big house, which was out of sight on the other side of a hill. We were being herded into the stables, which had stalls made of a wood that looked like cherry. An antique clock hung on the wall. The stalls were occupied, and fellow guests who knew about such things pronounced the horses magnificent.
The stables led to an indoor equestrian ring that the Johnsons had built for their daughter, Paige, a talented rider who had her eye on the Olympics. What should have been a muddy, smelly place had been transformed for the evening. At the door, each guest was dusted with an individual sprinkling of artificial snow—a way of announcing the “winter wonderland” theme. Each table had an elaborate, towering centerpiece that looked like a bare branch of a snowbound tree. A performance stage had been erected and an enormous dance floor laid: the entertainment was Ashford and Simpson, complete with their full band, sound and lighting technicians, the works. We had reached the day when a black woman could throw the biggest, flashiest party of the year in a town of millionaires.
A few years later, Sheila Johnson was an early believer in the proposition that we had reached the day when a black man could be elected president. But many of her fellow Transcendents vehemently disagreed.
Bob Johnson, as we’ve seen, scoffed at the early rumors of an Obama candidacy and told friends he didn’t think the country was “ready” for a black president. Johnson was an old friend
of the Clintons, and perhaps that friendship meant there was never any real question of which camp he would join. But I believe there was more to it than that. Ever since I met Johnson all those years ago at the District Building, his business model had always been explicitly race-conscious. He didn’t just start a television network; he started a
black
television network. As a CEO, he always kept a sharp eye on the bottom line; one reason BET became so valuable was that it resisted the temptation to produce lots of expensive original programming that the potential audience—limited by the African American focus—might not be able to support. Yet on the frequent occasions when Johnson was criticized by African Americans for the dearth of news and public affairs on BET’s schedule, and the lavish overabundance of booty-shaking hip-hop videos, he seemed genuinely hurt. After he sold the network, as his “second act” he established a conglomerate, RLJ Companies, that invested in banking, finance, hotels—an oddly diverse assortment of businesses. I once asked him how he decided where to invest his money, and he answered with a maxim: “I like to look for business sectors where African Americans are not represented, and I go there.”