Our Kind of People :
Inside America's Black Upper Class

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Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha’s Vineyard and Sag Harbor. Membership in the Links, Jack and Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, churches, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group.

Lawrence Otis Graham’s controversial bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, was selected by the Book of the Month Club and landed on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Essence Magazine. The book traces the history of black America’s well-to-do, going back to the first black millionaires of the 1890s. The detailed book explains why one needs to have more than money and celebrity to be accepted by this exclusive old-guard black elite crowd. One needs to have the right parents, school credentials, fraternity, club memberships, summer house, profession—and in some cases, the right physical features.

Written by a Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in many of the oldest black elite organizations, Graham is best known for his undercover work as a busboy at an all-white Connecticut country club, where he exposed its social practices of exclusion.
Graham’s controversial book not only profiles some of the most prominent black names and institutions in twelve different U.S. cities, but it also gives the inside scoop on such by-invitation-only black society groups like Jack & Jill, the Links, the Boulé, the Girl Friends and the Guardsmen. After his six years of research, Graham shares information on the right fraternities and sororities, the right black boarding schools, the right black churches in each city, as well as which prominent black families continue to give back to the black community and which now exploit their light complexions to “pass” as white.
A second-generation alumnus of the Jack & Jill children’s group, a member of the 90 year old Boulé and the son of a Link, Graham offers a perspective that only an insider would have.

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