The Black History of the White House (25 page)

President Johnson did have meetings with black leaders. On February 7, 1866, he held an antagonistic talk with Frederick Douglass and leaders of the Convention of Colored Men. In August 1865, the Convention published a piece in the
New York Times
criticizing Johnson's policies and stating that the president “in his efforts at the reconstruction of the civil government of the States, late in rebellion, left us entirely at the mercy of these subjugated but unconverted rebels, in everything save the privilege of bringing us, our wives and little ones, to the auction block.”
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The meeting was meant to discuss the role of the administration in protecting black voting rights, a subject the president largely dismissed. That gathering and other meetings of African Americans with Johnson were unproductive if not disastrous. After his conversation with Frederick Douglass, Johnson seethed, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap. I know that damned Douglass; he's just like any nigger and he would sooner cut a white man's throat than not.”
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In response to the racism of the White House, during the second phase of Reconstruction the radicals took over and went to war with President Johnson. On March 2, 1867, Congress overrode Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act, and in February 1868, it attempted to try to remove him from office. Offended that he had fired Lincoln's secretary of war, radical Republican Edwin Stanton, in explicit violation of the Tenure of Office Act passed the year before, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, 126 to 47, to impeach Johnson. However,
even though a majority of Senators, 35 to 19, voted against the president, under the Constitution it took a two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove him from office. The Senate fell short by one vote. Nevertheless, Johnson was politically weakened for the remainder of his tenure.

Given the radicals in Congress and the hostile political climate toward Johnson, one might have assumed that the Reconstruction agenda would continue. However, within a very short period, not only the White House but Congress would back away from the progressive policies that arose during Reconstruction, and a long period of neglect, compromise, retreat, and outright hostility toward the black community would set in.

CHAPTER 6

Prelude: Booker T. Washington's White House Story

A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters.
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—John McCain, concession speech, November 4, 2008

Parker knocked the assassin down, And to beat him, he began it; In order to save the President's life, Yes, the Negro truly was in it.
—Lena Doolin Mason poem honoring James Benjamin Parker
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The year 1901 was a pivotal and traumatic one for the White House. On September 6, Leon Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker and fervent anarchist from Detroit, stood in front of the twenty-fifth president of the United States at the Pan-American World Fair in Buffalo, New York, lined up with others ostensibly to greet the president. When his turn came, instead of shaking hands, Czolgosz fired two bullets at President William McKinley. One bullet knocked a button off McKinley's jacket, hitting his right breastbone but not penetrating further. The second shot pierced the president's abdomen and struck his liver and pancreas.

Panic ensued. Leaping into action, James Benjamin Parker, a large man who was standing immediately behind him in line, hit Czolgosz hard in the face. Parker's move prevented the assassin from firing a third shot.
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Czolgosz, who was of Polish heritage, was eventually subdued by Parker and the late-reacting Secret Service and other police assigned to protect McKinley. Reportedly, at least one Secret Service agent was distracted by focusing on Parker, an African American, ignoring Czolgosz and failing to detect the concealed gun he had just fired. Arguably, McKinley may have never been shot if Parker were not being racially profiled during the moment Czolgosz revealed his weapon.

In truth, by preventing Czolgosz from squeezing off a third shot, Parker might have saved McKinley's life. Although the president was seriously injured, competent medical attention should have prevented the wound from being fatal. However, the medical team that worked on McKinley made a number of critical errors and the president died eight days later as result. First, the medical team failed to use an X-ray machine that was available nearby, so they never located or removed the bullet that struck McKinley's stomach. Second, the doctor who performed the surgery to remove the bullet, Matthew Mann, was a gynecologist and an obstetrician who had never worked on a gunshot wound. Lastly, failure to drain the wound properly led to gangrene and infection that eventually killed McKinley. Initially, the president was recovering and expected to live, but he took a turn for the worse a few days later and passed on the morning of September 14, 1901.

James Benjamin Parker became a national hero in the black community overnight. Dozens of newspapers in both the black and white press ran stories about his daring intervention.
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He was honored with awards, and pieces of the clothes that
he wore when the incident happened were reportedly given or sold to strangers. Well over six feet tall, the forty-four-year-old Parker was an imposing figure. Known as “Big Jim,” he hailed from Atlanta but was working as a waiter in Buffalo at the time of the assassination.
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In this period of American history, racial segregation and lynchings were increasing as white backlash against African Americans gained momentum. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist groups were permitted to flourish. Only five years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the landmark
Plessy v. Ferguson
case that racial segregation was legal, thereby codifying into national law the “black codes” of exclusion that arose in the South during Reconstruction. George Henry White, a Republican from North Carolina and the only black remaining in the U.S. Congress in 1901, was departing.

Parker's spontaneous but unsuccessful effort to protect the president was held up by many blacks to demonstrate the sacrifices that African Americans were willing to make as citizens even if the nation sought to treat them as second-class and unequal. Parker himself humbly stated, “But I do say that the life of the head of this country is worth more than that of an ordinary citizen and I should have caught the bullets in my body rather than the President should get them. . . . I am a Negro, and am glad that the Ethiopian race has whatever credit comes with what I did. If I did anything, the colored people should get the credit.”
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It is unknown how many other African Americans felt the same way about giving up their life for the president, but it was clear that, Parker's charitable words notwithstanding, black racial pride and American national identity were at that moment in an unhappy marriage.

In official history, however, Parker was excised from the trial and downplayed in the Secret Service account of the
assassination. Embarrassed that they had been upstaged, the agency desperately sought to hide the fact that they had failed on the job. Parker was not called to testify in the court that convicted Czolgosz, nor was it even mentioned that he had played a central role in capturing the president's assassin.
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Before the trial, Secret Service agent Samuel Ireland told the Associated Press, “That colored man was quicker than we. He nearly killed the man.”
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In his testimony at the trial, along with that of Secret Service Agent George Foster, he denied any role for Parker in the event. Foster, who like Ireland had earlier stated that Parker helped capture Czolgosz, said under oath, “I never saw no colored man in the whole fracas.”
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As the
Atlanta Constitution
editorialized, “White men claimed all the credit, and only the names of white men were remembered.”
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There is no record that McKinley was even told about James Benjamin Parker's deed before he perished.

One of the individuals who celebrated Parker's heroics was the then undisputed, though not unchallenged, leader of black America at the time, Booker T. Washington. He included Parker's feats in a number of speeches that he gave in the period immediately following the shooting. According to the
Atlanta Constitution
, at a mass meeting of 5,000 African Americans on September 12, six days after the shooting and two days before McKinley actually died, Washington delivered an address and denounced the murderous action of the “red handed anarchist” and celebrated the fact that a Southern black “had saved President McKinley from death.”
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Ever eager as he was to present African Americans as willing—and sacrificial—patriots, it made sense that he would herald an act that demonstrated that black people were perhaps even more American than most whites. Others may have raised the impolitic question of how many whites were willing to risk taking a bullet for a black leader such
as, say, Washington, but he never broached the topic. He would discover rather quickly how much—or how little—impact Parker's risking his life to save the president of the United States would have on the racial consciousness of the nation. Within five weeks of McKinley's murder, Booker T. Washington would be at the center of another racial drama involving the presidency and the White House.

Since his infamous 1895 speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta—which W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed the “Atlanta Compromise”—Booker T. Washington had emerged as the black leader of choice for many whites in America, and for many blacks in America as well. In that speech, part of which was eerily prescient regarding James Benjamin Parker's actions, he stated:

As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
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After reassuring his white audience that he fully supported segregation, he went on to critique those African American leaders who did not, or who wanted to rush equality before blacks were ready for it. He elaborated:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.
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For conservative white political leaders both North and South, and a great deal of the white public, these were the welcome words of accommodation that echoed popular white supremacist sentiments and probably created a few tear-dimmed eyes themselves. By taking this route, Booker T. Washington became both the spokesperson for much of black America and a counsel to presidents, governors, local political officials, business leaders, academics, and other white power brokers. Virtually every major government program or business initiative involving African Americans would go through the Booker T. Washington patronage machine. Few African American leaders have held as much sway over community politics as he did in the twenty years after he delivered that speech. However, there were radical voices in the black community who quickly and strongly opposed its content. Booker T. Washington was harshly criticized by contemporary black leaders such as scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and agitator and journalist William Monroe Trotter. In a lacerating denunciation of Washington in his classic book
Souls of Black Folks
, Du Bois called Booker T.'s speech “a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political equality” and argued that he represented “the old attitude of adjustment and submission.”
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It is thus ironic that it would be Booker T. Washington's visit to the White House that would offend white society and trigger a racist backlash that shut down black access to the White House for decades to follow. McKinley's assassination unexpectedly catapulted his vice president of less than one year into the nation's highest office. Within hours of McKinley's tragic death in September 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as twenty-sixth president of the United States, and by the end of the month he was living in the White House.

On October 16, 1901, one month after McKinley's assassination, Roosevelt discovered that Booker T. Washington was going to be in town and invited him and Philip B. Stewart of Colorado to the White House for what was usually called
“family supper.”
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Naively, neither Roosevelt nor Washington foresaw any potential issue with the invite. When Roosevelt was governor of New York he had regularly had African Americans over for supper and even occasionally invited them to spend the night.
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Roosevelt had high regard for Booker T. Washington and patronizingly referred to him as “the most useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the world.”
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None of these gestures, however, should be interpreted to mean that President Roosevelt was either progressive or proactive on the issue of racial equality. In fact, he was a quite blatant racist in both word and deed. It was Roosevelt who set the Republican Party on the path to seizing the white South's anti-black vote, which over time evolved into the racially narrow political base that the party represents in contemporary U.S. politics. Roosevelt demeaned blacks in his writings and speeches. Prior to becoming president, he wrote that blacks were the “most utterly under-developed” of the races; that they were “suffering from laziness and shiftlessness”; and that “a perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the Negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else.”
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Becoming president and commander in chief of the United States did not change his views. Seeking what he thought was perhaps a middle ground between rights and racism, he stated at a Lincoln Day dinner in 1905 that “Civil law can not regulate social practices. Society, as such, is a law unto itself, and will always regulate its own practices and habits. Full recognition of the fundamental fact that all men should stand on an equal footing, as regards civil privileges, in no way interferes with recognition of the further fact that all reflecting men of both races are united in feeling that race purity must be maintained.”
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