Margo Jefferson - Author on Black Aristocracy.

Pulitzer-winning writer and cultural critic Margo Jefferson’s new memoir, Negroland, maps this very terrain, one on which money, privilege, and racism intersect in sometimes insidious ways. In Negroland—what Jefferson terms “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty”—lived the best of Afro-America: doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and all-around strivers of the Third Race, the black aristocracy. Here in this community there were national and local clubs like Boule, Jack and Jill, the Guardsmen, Links, and black sororities and fraternities like Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Phi Alpha, founded to ensure that blacks of a certain pedigree would “embody and perpetuate the values of the Negro elite.”