Among the individuals he encountered over the years were Winston Churchill, England’s Princess Elizabeth, Thomas Alva Edison, and John D. Rockefeller as well as cabinet members, senators, representatives, Supreme Court justices, and governors. Black leaders such as educator and diplomat Ralph Bunche, radical Paul Robeson, and educator Mary McCleod Bethune, also visited the White House during Fields’s tenure.107 Similar to the fictional butler James Stevens in The Remains of the Day, Fields served the Roosevelts and Trumans through turbulent times including wars, presidents’ deaths, the Great Depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the massive protests and mobilizations of the Civil Rights Movement.
Fields also provides insight into the racial politics of the White House. Few outside the White House, for example, were aware of the segregation that existed within it. According to Fields, prior to the Roosevelts, “even in the White House we had separate dining rooms. They had a Black and a White kitchen for the servants, yet they were working all together, all the time. But to me that shouldn’t have been—not in the White House of all places. The White House should have been taking the lead on that.” Eleanor Roosevelt had a simple solution to the problem: she fired all the white staffers, “so all the help was colored, and there was only one dining room.”108 Fields seemed to like the Roosevelts most, although like many African Americans at the time, he was critical of the fact that Roosevelt would not speak out strongly against lynching until two whites were killed in California.109
He says that Hoover told his cabinet, “I had my colored brethren in last night after dinner for a talk. . . . With our convention due soon, I wanted to talk to them about the related conditions of the races on employment and the Depression. . . . I told them that as their people are representative of 10 percent of our citizens, I couldn’t see why they couldn’t take a share in equal proportions in contributions to the nation.”110 Hoover, he claims, thought that long-term racial inequality would be harmful to the nation.
On Truman, he notes that the president was rebuked by the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin when they met in Germany, with the latter asking, “Why are you so interested in the Poles when you have American citizens who are not getting their voting rights?” An infuriated Truman later stated, “I’ll never go anywhere to meet anybody again until we get these situations cleared up because I will never have anyone throw that up in my face again, that I’m far more interested in other people’s voting rights than I am in the people in my nation.”111 Fields retired shortly after Eisenhower came to the White House in 1953.
Tenures of White House servant staff have tended to be long, spanning multiple administrations. John Ficklin served at the White House for more than forty-three years and worked for nine U.S. presidents. He first came to work for Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and stayed until Ronald Reagan’s administration, retiring in 1983. Jet magazine noted that he had been called the “soul of the White House.”112 Like Fields, he worked as a butler and supervisor during his career.113 Over the years, nine members of the Ficklin family worked at the White House, including John’s brothers Charles and Samuel. Eugene Allen, who worked as a pantryman, butler, and maître d’hôtel, worked at the White House from the Truman administration until 1986, leaving during Reagan’s second term. Staff careers are long in part due to the collegiality among the workers. Allen stated, “I had a good relationship with all the butlers. You know, it’s closer than your relatives, because you work so close together. You see them every day. You eat together, you work together. It’s every day.”114
Butlers were not the only workers to write their stories—so did the maids. In 1961, Lillian Rogers Parks published her memoir, My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House.115 The book, written with author Frances Spatz Leighton, was actually the story not only of her own work life as a seamstress and maid in the White House from Hoover to Eisenhower, but also of the experiences of her mother, Maggie Rogers, who worked there from Taft years into the Roosevelt era. Maggie Rogers regularly took her daughter with her to work, and, like Alonzo Fields and other staffers, wrote of her experiences both from notes and from memory. She encouraged Parks to write a book about their unique observations. Rogers rose to become the first black maid to work on the presidential floor of the White House.
As the New York Times wrote, the book was quite tame although extremely popular when it came out. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-six weeks. In 1979, Parks’s book led to a nine-part NBC mini-series. Reportedly, the book’s popularity was so far-reaching that incoming First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy made all the staff sign nondisclosure agreements stipulating that they would not write about their experiences at the White House once they left. Unfortunately, the person put in charge of getting the signatures, Jacqueline’s white secretary Mary Gallagher, conveniently did not sign one herself and in 1969 published a book about her White House life, titled My Boss.116
Perhaps for reasons of discretion, My Thirty Years provides only minimum insight into the racial politics of the various presidents. The Roosevelts, particularly Eleanor, come across as the most consistent about racial equality inside the White House. When Eleanor’s mother-in-law came to visit the White House and criticized her “for using colored help instead of white help,” she reportedly responded, “You run your house and I’ll run mine.”
Despite the writings that later appeared after their leaving the White House, the household staff members were meant to be seen and not heard, and, under no circumstances were they to demonstrate partisan politics. For more than 150 years, the White House had never employed a black person in any position outside the servant staff. Things were finally about to change.
Morrow, Eisenhower, and the Power of Symbolism
Black political engagement with the White House was hampered by the fact that the only African Americans on the presidential payroll were household staff. It was not until 1955 that the first African American—E. Frederic Morrow—was officially employed as a presidential aide. As always with such racial firsts, the question is raised of whether or not having a black face in a high place necessarily constitutes genuine racial progress. Symbolism aside, black appointments are defined by the substance of the position, the use of the position by the individual involved, and the social and political context within which the position must operate to effectively address the consensus concerns of the black community. These concerns are generally not only racial but also center on broader issues of economic fairness, political inclusion, social justice, human rights, and other areas of life and society. While expectations are often high that a black person who becomes a first will deliver the maximum change possible, experience has shown that ultimately it is the nuts and bolts of organizing, politicking, negotiating, educating, mobilizing, and bringing as much pressure to bear as possible that leads to substantial transformation. The degree to which the breakthrough is an authentic reflection of these processes, rather than an appeasement or ploy to deflect criticism, determines whether real progress occurs. While Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed E. Frederic Morrow to be the first African American to hold an executive position on the president’s White House staff, he also sought to do as little as possible to advance civil rights during his two terms in office, and Morrow, despite his personal aims, could do very little to change that fact.
Civil rights leaders, 1958. From left to right: Lester Granger, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, E. Frederic Morrow (White House Staff), President Eisenhower, Asa Phillip Randolph, William Rogers (Attorney General), Rocco Siciliano (White House Staff), Roy Wilkins.
On July 10, 1955, the White House officially announced that Morrow had been appointed to serve as a top aide to Eisenhower.117 He brought with him high qualifications, including a law degree from Rutgers University Law School. In black politics, he had served a stint as field secretary for the NAACP. In most ways, however, Morrow’s politics were more party oriented than racial. As a committed Republican who had had to endure twenty years of Democratic administratio
ns, he eagerly took a leave of absence from his public affairs position at CBS to work on Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign. In that period, when the black vote was wavering between the two major parties, it would not have been unusual for an African American to work for a Republican presidential candidate. Morrow apparently labored hard enough to be recognized by the campaign’s leadership, particularly Sherman Adams, who became Eisenhower’s chief of staff. After the election, Adams not only promised Morrow a White House job but, somewhat irresponsibly, it seems, recommended that he quit his CBS position in the interim and move to Washington, D.C.
Morrow naively took Adams’ suggestion and then waited. And waited and waited. After six months of putting him off, presidential adviser Bernard Shanley finally told Morrow that there was no job for him, and offered no explanation as to why. As it turned out, not everyone on Eisenhower’s staff was as racially enlightened as Adams. One aide, Wilton B. Persons, an Alabama native and staunch segregationist, had threatened to lead a walkout of presidential staff, particularly of white women staffers, if Morrow—or any black person—was given such a high-level position.118 The threat worked, and Morrow was forced to seek employment elsewhere. He finally landed a position at the Commerce Department as a business adviser.
More than two years later, in July 1955, he did get a call and was officially appointed administrative officer for special projects, a purposely vague title referring to equally vague work. Morrow himself called the job “just plain housekeeping.”119 Reflective of the deliberate ambiguity of the position and the president’s own hesitancy, Morrow was not officially sworn in to the position until January 27, 1959, at a ceremony the president usually attended, but Eisenhower did not go. Thus, seven years after the election, and heading towards the end of Eisenhower’s second term, Morrow made history.
Although Morrow took the stance that he was not there specifically to address civil rights, i.e., he did not want to be the “black man in the White House,” in fact, he was. He was often sent to speak to black groups or be present at state functions to demonstrate the diversity of the administration and the advanced state of black progress.
As times changed and his tenure wore on, Morrow grew more militant regarding racial issues. His own civil rights concerns lead him to continually advocate for the administration to address the explosive state of race relations of the 1950s. He sent memos to Adams requesting that the president speak out about the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.120 He suggested that the White House invite a dozen black leaders to the White House for a conversation about the nation’s civil rights issues.121 In February 1956, as the Montgomery Bus Boycott was becoming more intense and violent, its leaders increasingly under attack, Morrow asked to go to Alabama to unofficially represent the administration and talk to the movement’s organizers. All of these requests were politely but unambiguously rejected. Like almost every other administration before it, the White House made it clear that appeasing Southern whites took priority over any substantial action regarding rights and protection for the black community.
All the while, Morrow was Jim Crowed at the White House and, like the White House’s black servant staff, in the city of Washington as well. Initially none of the White House secretaries were willing to work for him. That only changed when a woman volunteer agreed to work for him as an expression of her religious practice of nondiscrimination. It became an unspoken policy that women would only enter his office in twos. Life was not much better outside the walls of the White House. Washington, D.C. was segregated at the time, so Morrow’s historic appointment notwithstanding, he lived, ate, and moved around only within strictly racially determined divisions of the city.
After Eisenhower was reelected with 47 percent of the black vote, his administration seemed satisfied that its do-nothing strategy on civil rights had paid off, despite the fact that racial tensions were escalating by the hour. In June 1957, Morrow fired off yet another memo to Sherman Adams, stating truthfully that black leaders were being “ignored, snubbed, and belittled by the president and his staff.”122 Morrow strongly suggested that Eisenhower meet with Montgomery Bus Boycott leader Martin Luther King, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and NAACP head Roy Wilkins all together. Adams agreed, and a meeting was set up for later that fall. However, the school integration crisis in Little Rock postponed the gathering as Eisenhower gave preference to meeting with Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. Rather than sit down with those who could have provided a progressive insight and a peaceful solution to the conflagration, Eisenhower choose to meet with the person who was the chief obstacle to a resolution.
Finally, on June 23, 1958, after almost a year of delays, the Morrow-initiated meeting occurred, with Lester Granger of the National Urban League added to the group. It was the first presidential sit-down with black leaders since Eisenhower was elected president in 1952. The meeting lasted less than an hour and consisted mostly of Randolph reading a nine-point list of recommendations. The participants felt that the president had listened civilly and indicated some sympathy for their cause.
Following the meeting, there is no indication that Eisenhower made any change in his cautious, hesitant, publicity-concerned, Southern-favoring approach to civil rights. There were changes for Morrow, however. For a short time he was reluctantly moved to a position as an assistant to Arthur Lawson, the president’s speechwriter, and later he was named White House Officer for Special Projects, which seemed little different from his original position except that this time he was explicitly tasked to work only on White House policy and politics regarding civil rights. The surreal nature of his tenure was further amplified when his nemesis, Wilton Persons, replaced the man who was nearly his only supporter, Adams, as White House chief of staff. Before either of them assumed their new positions, Persons at one point had told Morrow never to approach him with anything involving civil rights, because, being from Alabama, he had experienced personal conflicts within his family due to “the administration and its stand on civil rights.”123 In other words, even the mildest of efforts by Eisenhower regarding civil rights was so offensive to the Persons clan that any discussion on the issue was a non-starter for him. If Morrow had been marginalized before, now he was completely shut out.
As if he did not have enough troubles, a few months later he tried to convince baseball great Jackie Robinson that he should not participate in a youth march being organized by Harry Belafonte, A. Philip Randolph, and others in Washington, D.C.’s radical black network. In the post–Little Rock atmosphere, the integrated march was set to forcefully criticize the woefully poor efforts of state and federal integration policies. The attempt to pressure Robinson backfired when Robinson went to the media with the threat, and Morrow came under severe criticism from the black community. Up to that point, despite Eisenhower’s tepid policies and weak responses, Morrow had generally been given a pass by African Americans, a kind of credit card for being the first, but now it had cashed out. The walls were caving in on Morrow.
On occasion Morrow would publicly speak out against racism in brutally frank terms, such as when he admonished the Republican Women’s Conference for its segregationist policy prohibiting black women from joining the organization. However, he rarely criticized the administration’s nonfunctional civil rights policy in any public manner. In fact, one of his key responsibilities was to sell White House policy without qualification to an understandably and increasingly skeptical black public. The banality of his position was brought home full force when he gave a speech honoring Eisenhower at the 1960 Republican National Convention during which he thanked him for “bringing equality to all” and ludicrously added, “No man has done more to bring the truth about real democracy to the world than Dwight David Eisenhower.”124
Although it is unknown if Morrow would have continued working in the White House if Nixon had won, with John F. Kennedy’s victory the question was moot. At that point, Morrow had little utility for the Republican Party, which would soon turn Eisenhower’s
conciliation to Southern white racism into its principal strategy. The sea change in which black voters shifted to the Democratic Party, and the growing, increasingly militant black movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also marginalized Morrow. The first black person in U.S. history to work in the White House in a position of power soon faded into obscurity.
CHAPTER 7
The 1960s and the Crisis of Power: The White House and Black Mobilization
Prologue: Abraham Bolden’s White House Story
The black struggle for freedom and equality reached new heights and intensity in the 1960s and early 1970s. As activist Stokely Carmichael noted, the desire was for black power because “With power, the masses could make or participate in making the decisions which govern their destinies, and thus create basic change in their day-to-day lives.”1 Black activists and the black community targeted racism on all fronts; no area of society in which discrimination and bigotry existed was immune. The direct-action politics of the decade was launched on February 1, 1960, when four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that refused to serve blacks. Within five years, the call for “black power” was a national cry of the black community. By the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, radical and revolutionary black organizations such as the Black Panther Party, Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and League of Revolutionary Black Workers were calling for the establishment of a socialist United States where racism would no longer exist nor its resurgence be tolerated. Black nationalist organizations and movements such as the Nation of Islam (NOI), Congress of African People, United Slaves (US), and many local groups were demanding black control of black communities. Civil rights leaders were shifting from protest strategies to electoral ones, taking advantage of the hard-won Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Black History of the White House Page 24