The Black History of the White House (29 page)

During the election of 1912, W. E. B. Du Bois broke with the history of black support for the Republican nominee by endorsing Democrat Woodrow Wilson, but along with other black leaders would eventually break with him over his lack of support for antidiscrimination policies. Wilson issued a statement supporting black voting rights, and it won him approximately 5 to 7 percent of the African American vote. Progressive on international affairs, Wilson's positions on human equality however, were hardly enlightened. He referred to blacks as an “ignorant and inferior race.”

In a clear manifestation of that mentality, on February 18, 1915, Wilson screened the first film ever shown in the White House, the vehmently racist
Birth of a Nation
. The film was based on Thomas Dixon's
The Clansman,
a novel and play that portrays the “knights” of the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. Dixon was a former schoolmate of Wilson's and through his relationship with Wilson arranged for the screening at the White House.
Wilson is reported to have commented that the film was “like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true,” a statement Wilson later vehemently denied making. However, as
Birth of a Nation
researcher Melvyn Stokes points out, whether or not Wilson made the statement, the film undeniably reflected his sensibilities and even directly quoted his earlier writings praising the Ku Klux Klan.
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It should also be noted that the bloody months of 1919, when whites attacked blacks in more than two dozen U.S. cities—what James Weldon Johnson called “Red Summer”—occurred on Wilson's watch.

His successor, William G. Harding, whose presidency was cut short when he died after a little more than two years in office, had earlier spoken out against lynching but as president railed against social equality between the races. Continuing the behavior of Wilson and Harding, Calvin Coolidge also refused to intervene and stop white atrocities against African American communities, citing the protection of states' rights in the Constitution.

As part of its anti-lynching campaign, the NAACP circulated an August 13, 1930, letter from thirty-first President of the United States Herbert Hoover in which he stated, “Every decent citizen must condemn the lynching evil as an undermining of the very essence of justice and democracy.”
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Hoover, however, was unwilling to do much else. His unresponsive attitude toward black interests drove blacks to switch to the Democratic Party. Considered one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, Hoover allowed the party's Southern white wing to enforce segregation.

During this period, one of the bitterest battles to be waged between the black community and the White House broke out over President Hoover's 1930 nomination of John Parker to the Supreme Court. During Parker's 1920 gubernatorial campaign
he was reported to have said, “The participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil and danger to both races.”
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The effort to stop Parker from reaching the Supreme Court became one of the signature struggles for the NAACP. It also represented a shift in the organization's tactics: for the first time the NAACP launched a campaign that sought to engage every branch of the federal government—an assertion of the very African Americans rights of citizenship that were being denied at the local and state levels. After intense lobbying and mobilization by the NAACP and the American Federation of Labor, which objected to his views on labor, Parker's nomination was rejected on May 21, 1930, in a forty-one to thirty-nine vote in the Senate.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration is often cited as the one bright light in the long dark history of White House collusion with the forces of white racism. And it is true that the Roosevelt White House, principally due to the activities of Eleanor Roosevelt, broke a number of political and social taboos on interracial socializing at the White House.

On the issue of lynching, little progress was made. Franklin Roosevelt initially refused to address the issue in an effort to keep the support of white Southerners. He told the NAACP, “I did not choose the tools with which I must work. Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk.”
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On December 6, 1933, President Roosevelt finally moved to speak against lynching—not in response to the ongoing mob killings of African Americans, however, but as a reaction
to California Governor James Rolph's celebration of the lynching of two whites in San Jose. Roosevelt's comments marked the end of his anti-lynching efforts. He did not support legislation in Congress nor did he use his link to millions of Americans with his radio broadcasts to raise the issue.
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During this dark period in our nation's history, black families lived in a lawless society in which the menace of white terror and mob violence went unaddressed by officials on every level of authority, from the local sheriff's office to the White House. In the South and beyond, hate crimes against blacks were being committed with impunity.

During the Roosevelt era, jazz singer Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” her haunting cry against lynching, and released the song on her own record label. Despite death threats, she sang the song in cities around the country. The song opens with the following lines:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Beyond the lynching issue, the reputed progressive nature of the Roosevelt years are cited as a time of black political awakening when black voters abandoned the Republican Party for the Democratic Party. While President Roosevelt did not create any policy initiatives intended specifically to assist the black community, it is argued that blacks benefited from the overall policies that generated hundreds of thousands of jobs during the Great Depression and, for the first time, created a safety net for millions of Americans who were unemployed, veterans, or aged. Many profound changes occurred as a result of the multiple crises President Roosevelt faced during the Depression
and World War II. Unfortunately, upon closer examination, documentation clearly shows that not only did President Roosevelt's most famous projects not benefit black people, but they created harmful precedents that still resonate in the black community today.

The most astute and searing critique of the impact of Roosevelt's policies on the black community is found in the research of political scientist Ira Katznelson. In his pivotal and legend-shattering book,
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
, he details the means by which legislators in the South ensured that Roosevelt and congressional Democrats instituted the new policies in a manner that privileged whites. Katznelson soberly writes, “The wide array of significant and far-reaching public policies that were shaped and administered during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were crafted and administered in a deeply discriminatory manner.”
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The impact on black workers and black veterans was devastating.

Although they had fewer numbers than other regions, because of seniority and other mechanisms, Southern legislators dominated the power centers of the U.S. Congress.
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They were determined that any legislation to address the nation's economic crisis would not touch the structure of racial control that existed in the South or benefit African Americans.

To achieve these objectives, Katznelson notes, three strategies were employed that were accepted by Roosevelt and congressional Democrats. First, the Southerners were able to exclude categories of work where most blacks were employed, such as farm workers and maids, “from the legislation that created modern unions, from laws that set minimum wages and regulated the hours of work, and from Social Security until the 1950s.”
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In the 1930s, approximately 85 percent of black
women worked either in agriculture or in domestic household service. Earning from $2.00 to $5.00 for seventy-hour workweeks, they were truly “the most exploited group of workers in the country.”
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Although Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security strongly and clearly recommended that no categories of work be excluded from the proposed Social Security legislation, Congress wrote in the exclusions anyway, and in August 1935 Roosevelt signed the bill. At the time, 65 percent of blacks fell outside of the program nationally, and 70 to 80 percent or more in the South, where the majority of African Americans lived.
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Second, the White House and Democrats allowed the programs to be supervised by local and state officials. This basically guaranteed that any loopholes to antidiscrimination would be fully exploited. And third, no antidiscrimination amendments were allowed or attached to any of the legislation.

Event though Roosevelt's signature programs failed to address the needs of most of the black community, the fact that it addressed the needs of some was a giant leap forward and helped define his presidency as a transition in the political life of African Americans. Between the 1910s and the end of World War II, close to four million blacks left the South and migrated North.
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In cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, newly arriving blacks found a more receptive and open Democratic Party that eagerly wanted their votes and were willing to advocate policies and use political patronage toward that end. In addition, civil rights and human rights activism on the part of Eleanor Roosevelt cast a favorable light on an administration that did very little for the black community. Although Democrats from the South continued to be the principal obstacle to black political and social inclusion there, Republicans in the North had abdicated their responsibility to meet the interests of blacks and working people. For these reasons, for
many in the black community a shift to the Democratic Party seemed warranted and logical.

In 1932, Roosevelt received just 23 percent of the black vote. By 1936, that number skyrocketed to 71 percent.
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More important, in 1932 the percent of blacks who identified themselves as Democrats was in single digits; by 1936 the number grew to 44 percent. By the time Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, was elected president in 1948, 56 percent of blacks identified themselves as Democrats, and the numbers continued to increase.
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The anti-lynching campaign continued, and in September 1946, activist, actor, and internationally renowned human rights activist Paul Robeson led a delegation to meet with President Truman and urge that he take federal action.
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Robeson also charged that President Truman's program for African development would mean “new slavery” for millions of Africans. Although Truman rebuffed Robeson's group, one year later the Truman White House circulated a report,
To Secure These Rights
, that advocated national civil rights reforms, including making lynching a federal crime.
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It was not until 1968 that the first federal anti-lynching law was passed as part of the Civil Rights Act. On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate officially apologized for its failure to enact anti-lynching bills. A
New York Times
article published the following day reported:

Though state-allowed and mob-driven lynchings have disappeared, symbols of lynchings still pack a powerful emotional punch as racial threats. Conservative and anti–civil rights Justice Clarence Thomas memorably used the term “high-tech lynching” to describe his opponents' actions during his combative nomination battle in 1991. As the
Boston Globe
reported in 2007, nooses or pictures of nooses as acts of hate have appeared as late as 2007 on campuses, work sites, and other places from Boston, New York, Pennsylvania, and Jena, Louisiana. Even more recently, in early 2010 a noose appeared in the library of the University of California at San Diego.
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It is clear that as long as racial discrimination and hate exists, the symbolic power of lynching will as well. The
Boston Globe
notes correctly, “Lynching is not a footnote to American history, but integral to the text.”
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