On Martha's Vineyard, black elites ponder the past year

EDGARTOWN, Mass. – For America's black elite, this year's seasonal sojourn to Martha's Vineyard turned into a soul-searching retreat.

The shooting of a young, unarmed black man in Ferguson, Mo., last year did little to disrupt the annual idyll of upper-class blacks on this island 1,200 miles away. Photos showed President Barack Obama dancing at a soiree for political power couple Vernon and Ann Jordan as Ferguson burned. The next afternoon he delivered an anodyne statement urging calm without mentioning race.

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Obama returned this year for his sixth summer in office on Martha's Vineyard, the island off the Massachusetts coast that has been a vacation destination for upwardly mobile African Americans for more than a century. But this year, many of the black doctors, lawyers, executives, professors and politicians who gather here to enjoy the sunshine, surf and cultural events are grappling with the realization that there may not be quite as much to celebrate as they once hoped.

Yes, the country has been led by a black president for nearly seven years. But images from body cameras and smart phones that have splashed police killings of unarmed black men across televisions and the Internet over the past year have forced the black elite to recognize — along with the rest of America — that their highest tide has left some boats sinking faster than ever.

"Middle-class African-Americans, the upper echelon, need to be cognizant of that," said Linda D. Gaines, a regular summer resident of Martha's Vineyard. "We cannot go back to our comfortable abodes and forget the struggle even though we don't live next-door to less fortunate communities."

The strides African Americans have taken in the American political establishment are on full display here each year. While Martha's Vineyard has played host to black leaders for generations – Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X vacationed here – the top figures no longer lead protests. They lead the government.

Ten days ago, amid the starched white tablecloths, polished wood banquettes and French windows at the contemporary American restaurant Alchemy in tony Edgartown, the president and first lady may have been enticed by a cold summer squash soup with lump crab, fried oysters with remoulade and NY Strip-frites. They dined with close friends who happened to be the former attorney general (Eric Holder), the former U.S. trade representative (Ron Kirk) and the current national security adviser (Susan Rice).

The island doesn't just offer fun and games. Every year, in mid-August, the Vineyard also turns into think tank in paradise, convening discussions on issues relevant to the black community, who started flocking here more than a century ago. This year, four events in four days focused on policing reform, mass incarceration and how the protesters on the streets of cities including Ferguson and Baltimore (and the resulting hashtags on Twitter) are changing the face of the civil rights movement. Regular attendees couldn't recall such such consistent themes in the past.

Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. At the time, recalled Gaines, who currently works in political advocacy in Ohio, there wasn't a great sense of urgency on the island, as many believed "that somehow [in] what we see as a post-racial Obama era, that situations would begin to have an accountability."

But then a cop shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice on a playground. Video showed Eric Garner gasping for air. Freddie Gray died after a ride in a police van and Sandra Bland in a prison cell.

King-era civil rights activists said they were struck by the threat of violence so many young blacks face today.

"We didn't feel that there was a bulls-eye on our back," said Joyce Wilson Harley, 64, a vice president at Essex Community College and former mayor of South Orange, N.J., where she lives during the off-season. "There were doors closed to us that needed to be opened," she said, but the underlying problem of inequality has "taken on a deadliness that it didn't have before."

Obama and his friends at Alchemy reflect the success of the "politics of respectability" practiced by the older civil rights generation, Harley said. They went to elite universities, got prestigious jobs, built stable families (not uncommonly marrying into white ones) and eventually ascended to the traditional seats of political power.

By contrast, the Black Lives Matter movement is "coming from black folks at the margins," one of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, told a crowd of several hundred gathered at the elegant Harbor View Hotel, which looks out on Edgartown's quaint lighthouse.

"We're a generation that wore baggy pants and sagged them," said Cullors, 31, visiting the Vineyard for the first time.

For some, the inadequacy of the respectability approach has become clear in recent years.

"We as black people were kind of lulled," said Bithiah Carter, president of New England Blacks in Philanthropy, which seeks to increase the leverage of black donors. "We were lulled into thinking, I moved to the suburbs, I put my kids in good schools, I climbed my corporate ladder, I'm now making $200,000 a year. I'm a good Negro."

But after Trayvon Martin was killed, it became clear that even well-to-do black children could face discrimination – or worse — because of the color of their skin. "You just found out you really didn't matter," said Carter, in her late 40s, speaking at a forum organized by Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree in Oak Bluffs.

Others dismissed the idea that this was some sort of new discovery, even for the affluent.

"I don't think any of us feel we are at a place where we think, 'Oh, that wouldn't happen,'" said Michael Weekes, 62, CEO of the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers.

"That's a great equalizer. No matter how rich you are as an African American, you're still vulnerable," said Alan Jenkins, 52, executive director of the Opportunity Agenda, which co-hosted the forum with Cullors.

Indeed, the Vineyard set played a role in launching a discussion of race in America early in Obama's administration. In 2009, Harvard black history scholar Henry Louis Gates — a fixture on the summer scene — was arrested when he was locked out of his own Cambridge, Mass., home, and police thought he was an invader. In an offhand comment, Obama said the cops acted "stupidly," prompting a backlash so harsh that he barely talked about race again until Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012.

"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," Obama said in March of that year. He has increasingly talked about race in his second term, speaking in equally personal terms about the prisoners and ex-cons he's met as part of his push for sentencing reform to reduce mandatory criminal sentences that have disproportionately affected African-Americans.

But last year, when he delivered a statement urging calm in Ferguson from his vacation rental in Chilmark, Obama made no reference to the racial underpinnings of the unrest.

"I think he's been caught off guard, the way we have. He believed that once he got in, things would change," said Harley.

Even for those who didn't share that expectation, said Jenkins, the emerging national consensus around criminal justice reform is an "awakening for folks here who might have been a little jaded about the possibility."

The Black Lives Matter movement and its confrontational tactics also has the potential to shake the complacency of black donors, said Carter of New England Blacks in Philanthropy in an interview. For the most part, as blacks have moved up in conventional society, they've given to the same causes other affluent Americans traditionally have: the symphony, art museums.

"We have not always had a racial lens for those things," Carter said, adding that many "had taken for granted" that racial advocacy issues would get covered some other way.

"This is high time that we not take that for granted anymore and we ensure that our interest is served," Carter said.

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