The Black History of the White House (28 page)

Ultimately, however, black legislators were unable to have much collective impact on either Congress or the White House. Unlike the contemporary Congressional Black Caucus, they did not and could not form a strong bloc in Congress. After the 1870s, the number of black members in each Congress declined significantly and often boiled down to one or two members. Lacking seniority, they were not positioned to do anything more than challenge legislation, often alone. All were from the South and faced strong antagonism from whites—and at least five of the African Americans who were elected during the period were prevented from being seated. Many of them served only two years. The longest tenure, nine years, was served by Rep. Joseph Hayne Rainey (SC, 1870–1879); South Carolina elected the most with eight, followed by North Carolina (four), Alabama and Mississippi (three each), Florida (two), and Georgia and Virginia (one each).

Following the purge of black voters with disenfranchisement strategies such as “grandfather clauses” and literacy tests, and of elected officials through intimidation, election fraud, and violence, it would be over 100 years in most of these states before another African American would be elected. In 1901, Rep. George White was the lone African American congressmember, and in his final speech before the House of Representatives on January 29, he prophetically stated, “This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' [
sic
] temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday
and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heartbroken, bruised and bleeding people, but God fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people . . . rising people full of potential.”
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By the time Rep. White departed, one issue had arisen that would shape black politics for at least the next half century: lynching.
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Racism Continues to Hang Around: Jim Crow Presidents and the Anti-Lynching Campaigns

Charles Lynch was a Virginian justice of the peace during the Revolutionary War. He was also a Quaker. During the war he punished those who were loyal to the British with imprisonment and worse, including acts of punishment outside the law. After the war, when some of those who had been mistreated by Lynch's rulings sought to bring suit, the Virginia legislature passed a special law exonerating and pardoning him for any excessive activities or lawbreaking he had committed.
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Given his Quaker background and the heroic role of Quakers in helping escaped slaves and free blacks, it is ironic that the term employed for extrajudicial retribution meted out by mobs or hate groups was derived from his name.

Lynching African Americans and others became the ultimate act of racial domination by whites who were frightened by the social, political, and economic changes posed by an emancipated black population. Hangings, shootings, decapitations, drownings, and beatings were carried out against black men, women, and even children as violence became the key means for the reinstatement of white power. Victims were often publicly tortured, mutilated, and burned, their body parts taken as souvenirs by members of the crowd. The barbaric gatherings sometimes took on a festival atmosphere, occasionally announced in advance, and entire white families
would often attend. Photos of the dead victims were made into postcards.
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Naturally, the black community demanded federal action against lynchings and the local and state officials who did nothing to intervene. From the end of Reconstruction to well into the twentieth century, white mobs murdered more than 4,700 blacks and other people. Virtually no perpetrators were held accountable, as in many cases local and state law enforcement officials watched or participated in the atrocities.

The movement against lynchings lasted for decades, and one of its most outspoken leaders was journalist and activist Ida B. Wells. Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white individual and sparked the 1955 bus boycott that brought down segregation in transportation, Ida B. Wells launched and initially won a lawsuit against a Tennessee train company that forcefully removed her from a whites-only area on one of the company's trains. Her lower-court victory was reversed by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Already active in the struggle for equality, she joined the campaign against lynching after her friend Tom Moss and his two business partners, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, were killed in 1882 by a racist mob incensed by the success of their grocery business. Born two months before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Wells became a fierce leader who constantly faced danger as she campaigned for justice. Wells worked with and sometimes fought against the famous black leaders of the period, including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington. She was one of the cofounders of the Niagara Movement/National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but later fell out with Du Bois and the organization due to disagreements over strategy.

The gun-packing Wells chronicled the incidents of lynchings that occurred in the years and decades after the murder of Moss and his partners. She demonstrated, significantly, that the apologists who claimed that black men had provoked these attacks by raping or harming white women were wrong, and she exposed the lies behind those rationalizations. In 1893 Ida Wells, Frederick Douglass, educator Irvine Garland Penn, and lawyer and publisher (and Wells's future husband) Ferdinand L. Barnett published a blistering critique of U.S. race relations in response to the exclusion of African Americans from the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They contended, correctly, that the deliberate exclusion of blacks—except for an exhibit featuring “Aunt Jemima” pancakes and other insulting displays—from the Exposition mirrored the status of blacks in the country. In her article in the pamphlet, Wells graphically and empirically documents the rise in lynchings from 1882 to the time of the Exposition. She demonstrates that the incidents grew in numbers and became more brutal and barbaric over time. She also notes that black women were among those killed, citing murders in Jackson, Tennessee; Rayville, Louisiana; and Hollendale, Mississippi.
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In 1898, Wells led a delegation from Chicago that met with President McKinley after the black postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, was killed by a mob enraged by the prospect of an African American commanding such a high public rank. Postmaster Frazier B. Baker had been appointed by McKinley in Fall 1897 and was under attack from the moment he took office. On February 22, 1898, an armed mob of more than 100 white people burned down the local post office and attacked Baker's home. The mob shot into the house, killing Baker and his three-year-old daughter. The Baker family was only one of many to be assaulted by racist violence in that era.

Wells had campaigned for McKinley in the 1896 election and had recently been elected chairperson of the Anti-Lynching Bureau of the National African Council. She felt an obligation to meet directly with the president to demand that a federal investigation be launched into the killing of the Bakers and others. President McKinley promised that he would do something, but once again there was no follow-up from the White House.
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McKinley also failed to intervene in or investigate two significant race riots that occurred during his presidency. On election day, November 8, 1898, in Phoenix, South Carolina, whites disgruntled about the prospect of black voters asserting their voting rights attacked African Americans and other whites who supported them. On that date and in several days to follow more than a dozen people were killed, homes were vandalized, and a number of African Americans were publicly whipped. On November 11, 1898, Robert “Red” Tolbert, a member of a prominent white South Carolina Republican clan whose family were leaders in promoting the black vote, met with President McKinley in Washington, D.C. He asked for a federal investigation into the riot and for more protection for black voters
in the South. Meanwhile, in Wilmington, North Carolina, on November 10, 1898, white Democrats violently took back the local government. They forced all Republican officeholders, including the mayor and the multi-racial city council, to resign from office and had Democrats in place by the end of the day. In the days that followed, dozens of African Americans were killed and many others forced to flee the area. An appeal was made to the McKinley administration to intervene. In both the Phoenix and Wilmington cases, McKinley failed to act, come to the defense of fellow black and white Republicans, or even allow federal investigations of the incidents.
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Lynchings would continue well into the twentieth century. According to the Society of American Historians, there were ninety-seven reported in 1908, eighty-three in 1919, thirty in 1926, and twenty-eight in 1933 involving the killing of mostly African Americans but also whites, Latinos, Jews, and others.
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Like Wells, Du Bois recognized that these murders were not fundamentally caused by any criminality on the part of blacks. There was “one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency,” wrote Du Bois, “and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.”
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Many organizations from the black community and beyond campaigned and mobilized against lynching for decades. Among the key groups involved were the NAACP, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Council for Interracial Cooperation (CIC), and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). These organizations relentlessly lobbied the White House and Congress to address the issue. While progressive and liberal members of Congress proposed legislation, from the White House came empty symbols, calculated silence, or condemnation of anti-lynching activists. In 1911, in Livermore, Kentucky, a black man was snatched
from the local jail, taken to the opera house, and hanged from the ceiling. Town residents paid an admission to be allowed to shoot the body as it hung. Those in orchestra seats could shoot as many as six shots while those in the cheaper gallery seats only got one shot. The NAACP sent an emergency message to President William Howard Taft to urge Congress to respond to this and other lynching atrocities. Taft never answered.
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More than 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, most never receiving a vote or serious debate. In January 1922, the House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which would have made lynching and officials' failure to prevent it a federal crime, but it died in the U.S. Senate under the unyielding threat of a Southern filibuster. Supported by the NAACP, it was introduced in subsequent Congresses but never garnered sufficient support. In 1935, the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill also passed in the House but did not receive support from President Roosevelt, and it too was killed by the filibuster menace. If passed, the new law would have punished sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners. In a final effort to establish legislation, the Wagner–Van Nuys Bill was passed by the House in 1938, but after a thirty-day filibuster by Southern Senators, it was tabled by a fifty-eight to twenty-two vote and was never revived. In essence, white lawmakers were granting immunity to white people to commit hate crimes, murder, and terrorism against black communities.

Plessy
provided a convenient cover for presidents to either avoid direct confrontation with the South over systemic racial injustice perpetrated by whites, or even to give succor to Southern racism under the aegis of constitutional authority. While some U.S. presidents spoke in favor of anti-lynching legislation, not a single one made it a priority or decisively pushed for the passage of any of the bills that were offered. In line
with their overall stance on Jim Crow, passing the issue on to the next White House became the preferred and implemented strategy.

In his 1903 State of the Union address, President Theodore Roosevelt addressed the issue of lynching, but instead of holding whites accountable, he blamed black men. “The greatest existing cause of lynching,” said Roosevelt, “is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder. Mobs frequently avenge the commission of this crime by themselves torturing to death the man committing it; thus avenging in bestial fashion a bestial deed, and reducing themselves to a level with the criminal.”
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His successor, Taft, condemned lynching but only called for better law enforcement and, like Roosevelt, did not speak of the issue in the South.
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President Taft backpedaled, however, when it came to making any kind of serious intervention, stating, “It is not the disposition or within the province of the Federal Government to interfere with the regulation by the Southern States of their domestic affairs.”
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During World War I, Germany raised the issue of lynching to embarrass the United States, thus forcing the Wilson White House to release a statement of condemnation in response.
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On October 26, 1921, the twenty-ninth President of the United States Warren G. Harding became the first sitting president to deliver a speech against lynching while in the deep South—Birmingham, Alabama.
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He also weakly supported the Dyer Antilynching Bill, although he thought it was unconstitutional and did very little to promote its passage.
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