Is 'The Gilded Age' depiction of Black wealth accurate? What a Newport historian says

SPOILER ALERT: While this story broadly discusses a topic that's expected to be covered in Season 3 of "The Gilded Age," it does not divulge any plot developments.

NEWPORT – In one of the first scenes of the first season of the HBO drama "The Gilded Age," Marian Brook, a young white woman, is rescued from being stranded at a rural Pennsylvania train station by Peggy Scott, a young Black woman who buys Marian a train ticket to New York after Marian's is stolen along with her purse.

As the Julian Fellowes series unfolds, wealthy white New Yorkers are surprised again and again by Peggy Scott, the daughter of a well-to-do Black businessman, herself with a business-skills education, looking to pursue a career as a professional journalist.

But Keith W. Stokes, a modern-day Black historian in Newport, doesn't find that character surprising in the least. There were plenty of "Peggy Scotts" in real-life Gilded Age Newport and throughout cities in the North.

Among them were Lillian Susie Fitts Jeter, a Newporter whose biography bears similarities to that of Peggy Scott.

Born in Newport in 1885, Jeter was the daughter of a Baptist pastor and granddaughter of a Black newspaper editor. She was college-educated and, while working as a music teacher, also became a journalist of note, writing for the Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post and McCall's magazine.

"The Peggy Scott character is very accurate," Stokes told The Providence Journal this summer. "It's a composite of many real people who once existed and thrived in Newport."

Those who follow the production expect that Black wealth in Newport and Peggy's place in that community will feature in Season 3 of the series, which is scheduled to shoot this summer and take place in Long Island and Rhode Island.

Black wealth in Gilded Age Newport

The Northern Black experience contrasted sharply with what was happening in the South, Stokes noted. And that goes beyond issues dealing directly with slavery.

Southern society was largely agrarian, while the North had been industrialized. While Southern society generally discouraged educating Black residents and higher education was all but closed off, educational opportunities at all levels were more open to Black Northerners.

With slavery outlawed in Northern states long before emancipation came to the South, Black society had time to develop educated entrepreneurs who accumulated wealth.

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"This didn't happen haphazardly. It wasn't a coincidence," said Stokes. "Newport was already known as a place for Black freedom, Black opportunity – as was Boston, Philadelphia, New York. And now, with this new market, this Gilded Age market driving summer cottage industries ... it creates so much wealth."

A new type of capitalism

"Very realistically, when we think about Black wealth, the difference between Black wealth and white wealth – if we want to be that simplistic – in the 1880s, there's a significant difference," said Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a history professor at Rutgers University and co-executive producer of “The Gilded Age,” who has been a historical consultant for other TV and movie projects. "We get to kind of walk different paths at the same moment to compare and contrast. What does it mean to be fighting for, to hold on to wealth? That wealth means different things to different people."

The actor who plays Peggy Scott, Tony Award-nominated Denée Benton, concurred during a press conference last month in the Salon of Newport's Rosecliff mansion.

"I felt obviously you have the Gilded Age wealth that amounted in places like this," said Benton, "and then you also had a type of wealth within the Black community that was much more insular. The communities really were for-us by-us in a way and kind of fed into each other."

When the Astors and the Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age elites made Newport their summer playground, it was only natural that the Black business community seize on this opportunity.

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"Not one Black hand worked on building or working in those mansions," said Stokes. "Those were Irish, Swedish, European immigrants coming and working in the mansions. The Black community ran the professional trades, the service trades."

Stokes added: "If an elite woman needed to have a dress made – from design to creation – or repaired, it's Mary H. Dickerson, one of the finest Black dressmakers in the country at that time. And she creates so much wealth, she's buying property in Newport, leasing it out to other Black entrepreneurs."

But Black business leaders didn't seek to follow in the footsteps of the white capitalists.

"They did not see themselves as chocolate-covered Vanderbilts," said Stokes. "They weren't trying to emulate or assimilate. They were using their wealth to reinvest in their community and their families. It's a new type of capitalism. It's a capitalism that reinvests in the people in the community, not in personal wealth."

'New' capitalism helped Black women avoid 'golden handcuffs'

"Peggy's dealing with a different type of systemic oppression," said Benton. "But the way patriarchy worked at that time, and what it meant to be elite, especially white elite, is there were these extreme rules: You couldn't work. You couldn't, you know, really take a walk down the street by yourself."

Those rules didn't apply as stringently to Black women.

"Peggy, existing within the Black elite but not necessarily having the same rights and access, almost creates this little pigeonhole for her to become a professional," said Benton. "Because the path to inheriting [property] from a man she married is not the same path, she doesn't quite have the same golden handcuffs. She almost has to make her own path."

Rather than simply marrying well, Peggy has the opportunity to get ahead by following her father in the business world.

"There was still this effort to create a generational wealth path for Black families within their particular lineage," Benton said. "And so it's interesting that that creates a type of freedom of mobility for her."

The end of wealth

The days were numbered for the mobility that Black wealth created during the Gilded Age – and for many white residents, too.

"The Gilded Age stops because of the disruptions of World War I, but, more importantly, the enactment of the income tax," said Stokes. "Now this frivolous wealth is just not readily available anymore."

As America looked to spread the wealth after the Great Depression and two World Wars, government programs did not always share that wealth equally with Black Americans. One notable instance, according to Stokes, was federal mortgage insurance, which helped Americans buy homes and build generational wealth. But with the insurance programs came the now-infamous "redline" map, which delineated some neighborhoods as ineligible.

"That happens to be where all the people of color are living," said Stokes. "So during the 1930s and '40s coming out of the Depression, coming through World War II, if you were a person of color, you could not be eligible for those loans, and this went on across the country."

Given the wealth that Black business owners had accumulated during the Gilded Age in Northern cities such as Newport, Stokes added, "It's almost ironic today, because the number-one issue in the Black community is the racial wealth and equity gaps," said Stokes.

But the successes of the 1880s left their mark on the City by the Sea.

"In fact, many of the structures and homes of that time still stand. I mean, they might be an Airbnb or some other use, but they still stand," said Stokes. "I have to always remind people that these were once Black households or places of worship and businesses, and they wouldn't be the great properties they are today if it wasn't for those men and women."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: 'Gilded Age' and Black wealth: Newport historian says HBO gets it right