January is national tea month. Here’s a related story. In Black Metropolis, the classic study of Black Chicago in the 1920s and 1940s, Anthropologist St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton had this to say about black elites and tea parties. Where and with whom they had tea served as important class identifiers. Upper class African Americans most often had tea within their closed elite cliques at invitation only private tea parties. They carefully planned the parties as they did their financial investments. Dr. Fulton migrated from Tennessee to Chicago after World War II and started her business there. She received invitations to similar kind of teas described here.
