The official naming of the president’s home “the White House” in 1901 coincided with the domestic and global perception of the residence as a symbol of a racially constructed nation in deep conflict with both its founding call and frequent international exhortations for freedom and democracy.
The era began with the murder of Reconstruction. Critically ill and on its deathbed for years, it received its death blow with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876, which determined who would control the White House after that year’s presidential election. As soon as Southern white leaders were able to return to power they began to institute “black codes” that segregated blacks and whites. These legalisms were enforced with coercive brutality inflicted on black communities by terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, Red Shirts, White League, Southern Cross, Knights of the White Camellia, and other groups driven by notions of white supremacy and hatred for people of color. However Lincoln may have equivocated in addressing the needs of African Americans, his successors in the White House demonstrated scarcely any courage in challenging the multiple levels of institutional racism that had run rampant in the nation from the day it was founded. Following Andrew Johnson, who openly fought to advance mechanisms of white domination to pre–Civil War levels, and down the line, the White House illustrated racial regression rather than racial progress.
Black woman working in the White House kitchen, circa 1892.
With African Americans freed from slavery but denied equality, black agitation and resistance grew in response to pervasive hostility, exclusion and abuse from white society. Black organizations such as the National Convention of Colored Men and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) built countrywide networks of activists who along with thousands of local groups organized and mobilized to overthrow systems of segregation. A central focus of the black community was the call for federal intervention to end lynching, a call that repeatedly fell on deaf ears. The movement for racial equality was also strengthened, for a time, by the presence of African Americans in the U.S. Congress. Nearly two dozen blacks served in Congress from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century.
Black workers continued to staff the White House as butlers, maids, and cooks and in other noninfluential service capacities. Like Paul Jennings and Elizabeth Keckly, some of these individuals went on to tell their stories in memoirs and other literature. While most of their writing was nonpolitical, it was not necessarily nonpartisan. Generations of butlers and maids were passing on their experiences and insights, providing voices of authenticity and alternative points of view on the history of their era. By the end of the segregation era, the White House would also have its first African American in an executive staff position.
Black musical presence at the White House also became more frequent and more diverse. For most black artists—from opera performers to classical musicians and gospel singers—the White House created opportunities to perform before dignitaries, world leaders, and others that did not exist outside of its doors. For some blacks, the only venue that gave them a chance to perform before prestigious audiences was the White House.
But these “advances” were nothing compared to the nightmare most black families experienced during the era. Overall, it was a time characterized by white disenfranchisement of black people, the introduction and enforcement of black codes and segregation, and terrorism from mob violence, lynching, organized groups, and corrupt law enforcement. President after president of the United States mostly ignored these developments and their impact on black families and communities. While the White House itself sometimes became the only site of non-discrimination in the city of Washington, in the main, it reflected all of the racial tensions, contradictions, and struggles of the segregationist period.
The Pre-Plessy Presidents
Andrew Johnson began a long line of U.S. presidents whose tenure in the White House reinforced rather than combated the re-imposition of near slave-like conditions on African Americans in the South. Black sharecropping, for example, in which black laborers were given a share of the crop they produced on white-owned land in lieu of wages, generally kept them in perpetual debt and unable to advance economically. Black families were forced to continue to work without pay for generations.31 Even worse conditions were not uncommon, from convict leasing to outright abduction and enslavement. Douglas A. Blackmon’s book Slavery By Another Name, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II documents these cases and demonstrates how whites were able to re-enslave blacks well into the twentieth century.
On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no interest. “Mr. Prassident,” wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. “They wont let me have him. . . . He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.” Like the vast majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case 12007.4 No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the National Archives.
A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged.32
W. E. B. Du Bois notes that the sharecropping system and convict-leasing system were interrelated, and that both amounted to the re-enslavement of African Americans. He argues that they are “the direct children of slavery, and to all intents and purposes are slavery itself.”33 He goes to state, “The South believed in slave labor, and was thoroughly convinced that free Negroes would not work steadily or effectively. The whites were determined after the war, therefore, to restore slavery in everything but in name.”34 Du Bois’s description of the conditions of convict-leasing is chilling:
The innocent were made bad, the bad worse; women were outraged and children tainted; whipping and torture were in vogue, and the death rate from cruelty, exposure, and the overwork rose to large percentages. . . . The prisoners often had scarcely any clothing, they were fed on a scanty diet of corn bread and fat meat, and worked twelve or more hours a day. After work each must do his own cooking.35
The battle between a radical Congress and a conservative White House would not endure. Due to partisan political interests, presidential politics, lack of popular support, and perhaps exhaustion, by the time of the disputed 1876 election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, black support in Congress had waned. Progressive, combative, and powerful legislators such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were gone or going.
Controversy over the black votes cast in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana sent the decision over the election to Congress. A bipartisan commission of fifteen representatives, senators, and Supreme Court members voted eight to seven to give the White House to Hayes, the infamous “Hayes-Tilden Compromise,” with the understanding that he would implement the Democrats’ anti-black agenda. By then, to a great degree, it did not matter much who won the presidency: Tilden, who clearly wanted to stop all progressive legislation and policies that favored African Americans, or Hayes, who quickly demonstrated his willingness to cast aside blacks within weeks of gaining the office. Congress’s refusal to provide troop funding, and Hayes’s order in the spring of 1877 to pull out the last of the troops that had been sent to the South to protect the right to vote for African Americans, merely symbolized the ongoing retrenchment of Southern racist domination that the White Houses of Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant, who both supported the restoration of political rights to the Confederates, had allowed to develop.36
Despite pre-presidential histories of support for abolition and black civil and voting rights by some presidents, including Republicans James A. Garfield, Chester A.
Arthur, and Benjamin H. Harrison, once in the White House, they showed virtually no courage in challenging the forces of white domination. Little was gained and much was lost during the administrations of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Democrat Grover Cleveland. Garfield’s 199 days in office, a term cut short by an assassin’s bullets, accomplished nothing to advance the racial equality agenda. In his March 4, 1881, inauguration speech, Garfield spoke strong words of support for educational inclusion and black civil and political rights stating:
The elevation of the negro [sic] race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. . . . There was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship. There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen. . . . The nation itself is responsible for the extension of the suffrage, and is under special obligations to aid in removing the illiteracy which it has added to the voting population. For the North and South alike there is but one remedy. All the constitutional power of the nation and of the States and all the volunteer forces of the people should be surrendered to meet this danger by the savory influence of universal education.37
African American school children and teacher, studying leaves out of doors, circa 1899.
Denial of education to blacks had been brutally enforced in the South during the era of slavery.
After the war, white views on black education did not change quickly. In his book Black Reconstruction in America: 1660–1880, W. E. B. Du Bois writes:
It was soon after the war that a white member of Johnson’s restored Louisiana legislature passed one of the schools set up by the Freedmen’s Bureau in New Orleans. The grounds were filled with children. He stopped and looked intently, and then asked, “Is this a school?” “Yes,” was the reply. “What, for niggers?” “Evidently.” He threw up his hands. “Well, well,” he said, “ I have seen many an absurdity in my lifetime, but this is the climax.”38
However, in his brief time at the White House, President Garfield defended states’ rights and thus abdicated any responsibility to address the increasing acts of terrorism by whites against black communities. Garfield’s commitment to an antiracist agenda was also suspect, given that he had once confided privately that he had “a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro [sic] being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way.”39
After Garfield had been sent to heaven or elsewhere by his assassin, he was replaced by Chester Arthur, who simply avoided the issue. Frederick Douglass states that when he learned that Arthur was going to be Garfield’s vice president, he “felt the hand of death” upon himself.40 President Arthur’s command of the White House was mostly inconsequential relative to black interests. However, it was on his watch in 1883 that the Supreme Court made its appalling decision that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (outlawing discrimination in public accommodations) was unconstitutional. Arthur meekly informed Congress that he would support remedial civil rights legislation to address the decision, but no such legislation was ever drafted or passed.41 Congress did not pass another civil rights bill until 1957.
Frustrated with the Republicans’ pace of reform and facing an economic crisis, the country elected the first Democrat to the White House since the period before Lincoln. Grover Cleveland (1885–1889, 1893–1897), who uniquely would lose his reelection and then win again in the next election, represented a transitional moment in the relationship between African Americans and the White House, and African Americans and the nation. In 1895, during Cleveland’s second term in office, the fearless and determined warrior Frederick Douglas passed, and within months Booker T. Washington rose to power, propelled by his aforementioned “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Cleveland attended the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition and heard Washington’s delivery. He met with Washington right after the speech and later sent him a letter stating, “Your words cannot fail to delight and encourage all who wish well for your race; and if our colored fellow-citizens do not from your utterances gather new hope and form new determination to gain every valuable advantage offered them by their citizenship, it will be strange indeed.”42
The blame-the-victim philosophy of Cleveland (and Washington) mixed comfortably with the former’s states’ rights approach. As historian Rayford Logan points out, President Cleveland “undoubtedly believed . . . that the Southern question should be handled by Southerners.”43 His hands-off approach, of course, left the black community vulnerable to every nefarious strategy, evil scheme, and murderous plot to reassert white control. And, fittingly, it was during Cleveland’s tenure that the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal under the spurious “separate but equal” premise, thereby giving Constitutional sanction for state-sponsored apartheid for the next six decades. The black community, however, would not concede the battle so easily.
The first black senator and representatives—in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States.
One source of opposition came from inside the government. Following the Civil War, black leadership expanded beyond civil and political rights activists like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to elected and appointed officials, including those who were elected to Congress. From 1870 to 1901, twenty-two blacks, all Republicans, served in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives.44 Many of them were newly freed, but all were articulate and educated on the issues confronting the black community and the nation. Among the group were “seven lawyers, three ministers, one banker, one publisher, two school teachers, and three college presidents.”45 As advocates of black civil rights, benefits for black veterans, halting Klan violence, advance of educational opportunities, and black land rights, they served as an oppositional voice to the conservative racial politics of the White House. Fittingly, the first black Senator in U.S. history, Mississippi’s Hiram Revels was elected in 1870 to finish out the term of the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.
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.”46 By the time Rep. White departed, one issue had arisen that would shape black politics for at least the next half century: lynching.47
Racism Continues to Hang Aro
und: 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.48 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.49
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 Black History of the White House Page 21