The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  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.50

  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.51

  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.52

  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.53 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.”54

  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.55

  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 hideou
s 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.”56

  His successor, Taft, condemned lynching but only called for better law enforcement and, like Roosevelt, did not speak of the issue in the South.57 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.”58

  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.59 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.60 He also weakly supported the Dyer Antilynching Bill, although he thought it was unconstitutional and did very little to promote its passage.61

  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.”

  Still from the pro-KKK film, Birth of a Nation.

  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.62 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.”63 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.”64 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.”65

  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.66 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 D
emocrats 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.”67 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.68 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.”69 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.”70 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.71

  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.