The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  While Bush’s White House ignored jazz, it was a subject of discussion and policy in the U.S. Congress, principally due to the relentless efforts of jazz enthusiast Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Conyers, who was also instrumental in the passage of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Holiday bill in 1983, proposed House Concurrent Resolution 57, which declared jazz a “national treasure.”112 It was passed by the House of Representatives on September 23, 1987, and by the Senate on December 4, 1987. As a Congressional Resolution, rather than a bill, it did not require a presidential signature or approval.

  During the presidential campaign of 1992, Bill Clinton demonstrated his jazz credentials when he went on the popular Arsenio Hall Show and played the saxophone with the show’s band. On June 18, 1993, the White House set up a large tent and kicked off the “In Performance at the White House” series with a rousing evening of jazz by some its greatest performers, including trumpeters Clark Terry and Red Rodney, saxophonists Illinois Jacquet and Joe Henderson, pianists Dorothy Donegan and John Lewis, and singers Rosemary Clooney and Joe Williams. The event, subtitled, “A Salute to the Newport Jazz Festival,” was the first major musical event for the Clintons.113

  In September 1998, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the The-lonious Monk Institute put together a workshop on jazz and a concert at Clinton’s White House. The event occurred as the Republican-controlled Congress was moving to impeach and try Clinton on charges related to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. While talking to a reporter at the event, he seemed to make an oblique reference to it when, in response to a question about the relationship between art and democracy, Clinton replied, “Art is part of our better selves. So much of public life is destructive nowadays. Things like this allow us to show our better side, not the dark, evil part of ourselves.”114

  Wynton Marsalis, who helped to revive jazz in the United States through his efforts at Lincoln Center in New York, and Marian McPartland hosted about 100 U.S. and foreign guests including the president and First Lady, Czech President Vaclav Havel; Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Rep. John Conyers, and NEA Chairman William J. Ivey; saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Illinois Jacquet; bassist Ron Carter; Institute of Jazz Studies head Dan Morgenstern; and jazz and social critic Stanley Crouch. Speeches and lectures were given by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Havel, Marsalis, McPartland, and two jazz educators, Billy Taylor and David Baker. Havel reminisced about “how jazz had been a symbol of freedom in Czechoslovakia, how first the Nazis, then the Communists, had driven the music underground” and remarked, “Music is the enemy of totalitarianism.”115

  Eli Yamin, Todd Williams, Stephen Massey, Sean Jones, First Lady Michelle Obama, Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Branford Marsalis, Jason Marsalis, Ellis Marsalis, Delfaeyo Marsalis at the White House, June 2009.

  Jazz was also performed at the White House during the George W. Bush administration on a number of occasions. In 2004, in recognition of the NEA Jazz Masters program, a concert took place in the White House’s East Room with a jazz trio consisting of Billy Taylor (piano), Chico Hamilton (drums), and James Moody (saxophone). Also performing was Other Jazz and a New Generation, jazz students that included Eldar Djangirov, pianist; Philip Kuehn, bassist; Caley Monahon-Ward, violinist; Matt Marantz, saxophonist; and Crystal Torres, vocalist. At the event, Bush stated, “These performers and many others carried forward the tradition of black music in our country. We take great pride in this heritage. We’re grateful to every musician who keeps that heritage so rich and so vital today.”116 In March 2007, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, celebrating its twentieth anniversary, provided a jazz showcase at the White House featuring Herbie Hancock, Anita Baker, Wayne Shorter, Nnenna Freelon, Clark Terry, Lisa Henry, and Bobby Watson, among others.

  Although Capitol Hill Republicans continued to attack what they perceived to be liberal dominance in the arts and levied budget cuts on the NEA, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution, the environment was not completely hostile to jazz. On August 18, 2003, Bush signed Public Law 108-72, which among other things endorsed jazz, commended the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History for establishing a “Jazz Appreciation Month,” and urged “musicians, schools, colleges, libraries, concert halls, museums, radio and television stations, and other organizations to develop programs that explore, perpetuate, and honor jazz as a national and world treasure.”117

  The Obamas are big jazz fans as well. In his first year in office, a large number of jazz musicians visited the White House. In June 2009, the Obamas brought 150 talented young jazz musicians to rehearse, participate in a workshop, and perform before the first family. The jazz-playing Marsalis family—father Ellis and sons Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason—also attended the event. Other jazz artists included Cuban trumpeter Paquito D’Rivera and Washington, D.C.–based saxophonist and Washington Jazz Arts Institute Director Davey Yarborough. Michelle Obama, her mother, and her daughters attended the event. She stated that she wanted her daughters to be “aware of all kinds of music other than hip hop.”118

  The program was part of a series of arts education activities held at the White House that included other music genres and other art forms. In commenting on the occasion and linking the music to politics, Michelle Obama stated, “There’s probably no better example of democracy than a jazz ensemble—individual freedom, but with responsibility to the group.”119 She also discussed the relationship between America’s “classic music” and America’s presidential resident. She stated,

  Today’s event exemplifies what I think the White House, the People’s House, should be about. This is a place to honor America’s past, celebrate its present and create its future. And that’s why all of you are here today. It’s about you, the future. And what better example of this . . . than jazz, America’s indigenous art form. . . . It’s essential that we preserve, develop and expand this treasured art form for our future generations by recognizing and elevating the importance of our jazz education programs in every single school across America.120

  CHAPTER 8

  Black Challenges to the White House: The Campaigns to Make the White House Black

  Prelude: Marcus Garvey’s Black House Story

  Barack Obama was not America’s first black president. Well, at least not in the broader realm of black politics and popular culture. There has been at least one claim to a presidency that sought to create a black alternative to the all-white, anti-black system which for centuries had brutally denied black people their rights in the United States. This effort appropriated the mantle, if not the structure, of government in its effort to put forth an alternative to the racist system that repressed and excluded African Americans from all venues of social, economic, cultural, and political power.

  In 1920, at its New York convention, the Universal Negro Improvement Association/African Communities League (UNIA), headed by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, took several steps in declaring its—and black America—independence from the United States. It adopted a constitution and a “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Race.” The Declaration is a long and detailed list of grievances, from segregation and lynching to land seizures and taxation without representation, regarding the treatment of African Americans and other black people around the world.1

  Marcus Garvey, August 5, 1924

  The Declaration also designates a flag with the colors red, black, and green—red for the blood that African-descent people have shed, black for the people, and green for the land that will be the basis for freedom—as the official symbol of the League, and an anthem, “Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers” for the global black community. Reflecting the organization’s goal of returning to a free Africa, the anthem says, in part, “Advance, advance to victory, Let Africa be free; Advance to meet the foe, with the might Of the red, the black and the green.”2

  Garvey spoke of the political frustration felt by millions of African Americans. He stated compellingly to the 20,000 ga
thered, “We are unable to elect a leader to the White House, but we intend to have a Black House in Washington where one of our race will serve us four years.”3 He announced that Dr. J. W. H. Eason had been elected president of Black America. Garvey himself was proclaimed the “Provisional President of Africa.”

  Given the events of the previous year, it was understandable why the League would feel that it had little choice but to seek other options outside the U.S. political system as it existed. Dubbed the “Red Summer” by National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader James Weldon Johnson, in 1919 there were more than twenty-five deadly race riots around the United States in which white mobs attacked blacks. In Longview, Texas white people invaded a black community and burned homes, flogged a black school principal, and forced some blacks to leave town.

  In Washington, D.C. one week later, U.S. marines, sailors, and soldiers killed several blacks after rumors of black men assaulting white women circulated. One of the worst riots occurred in Chicago, a city whose black population had doubled over the preceding ten years. For thirteen days, mobs of whites and blacks attacked each other before order was finally restored. The casualty list was extensive: 15 whites and 23 blacks were killed, and 178 whites and 342 blacks were seriously injured officially. Over 1,000 were made homeless. Most experts assume that the numbers were really much higher. These disturbances were just the prelude. Over the rest of the summer, racial disorder burst out in Omaha, Nebraska; Elaine, Texas; Lexington, Kentucky; Knoxville, Tennessee; and elsewhere.4 The heroic exploits of many black soldiers in World War I were eviscerated as they became targets of racist mobs across the country. Some were attacked and killed while in uniform.5

  As the riots demonstrated, white hostility to black progress had intensified in many parts of the country. The nation was experiencing rapid change. Industrialization was opening up opportunities for jobs in the North that could not be filled by either the white population or, due to new laws, a restricted immigrant influx. At the same time, racism was driving tens of thousands of black families out of the South. New black communities were sprouting from Chicago to New York and everywhere in-between. By some estimates, nearly 500,000 African Americans migrated North during the war years between 1916 and 1918.6

  Another factor was the more assertive attitude of a black generation that had been to war for the nation and was much less tolerant of racial abuse. Almost 400,000 blacks served in the military in some capacity during the war, including 140,000 black soldiers that went to France. All of these factors drove many whites to violence in attempt to subjugate blacks and prevent progress.

  But black resistance also grew. One response was the emergence of the NAACP in 1909 and its mobilizations and education campaigns against inequality and abuse perpetrated by whites. Another was Cyril Briggs’ socialist-oriented, Harlem-based African Blood Brotherhood.7 And still another was Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association/African Communities League (UNIA). Garvey had originally come to the United States from Jamaica in 1916, seeking support for his Industrial Farm and Institute, and hoping to get guidance from and to work with Booker T. Washington. However, Washington had died a year earlier and Garvey found himself left to his own political devices.8

  Garvey’s U.S.-based League was created in 1917 with the express purpose of uniting people of African descent around the world. Within a relatively short period, he built the organization into dozens of chapters across the United States and eventually into several thousand chapters around the world. The League’s base constituency was working-class African Americans and black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. In the United States, many of his supporters were African Americans who had left the South after World War I looking for a better life up North but only found more racism and denial of opportunity.

  Despite the popularity of Garvey’s movement, he found himself in conflict with many in the black community. In the racially difficult period of the late teens and early 1920s, Garvey and his League would grow to clash with scholar and NAACP activist W. E. B. Du Bois and other black leaders over objectives, strategy and personality differences. Differences arose that were not only political but also personal. Garvey’s dark skin was a source of ridicule, and Du Bois’s elitist appetites were mocked.

  On September 24, after the convention, Garvey went to Washington, D.C. to meet with supporters and others to inform them about the results of the New York gathering and that they now had a black president. Garvey was in a feisty and combative mood, and opened the discussion with a warning to the D.C. crowd. He started saying,

  I have appeared here more than once—many times—and it would appear that every time I speak to you, you hear me and you go away forgetting all I say. I trust you are not going to forget what I say tonight: otherwise I better not come back to Washington. I will leave Washington out and we will redeem the great cause, I suppose, without Washington.9

  Garvey’s remarks seem to indicate that the D.C. chapter or network was not as engaged as other parts of the country, and clearly members of the audience had not attended the convention. However, Washington was deemed too important to ignore, so he personally came to speak to the group. Noting the importance of the League’s global effort, he continued:

  [The] political apportionment of the world means for the people in this age who fail to find a place for themselves, such a people is doomed forever. That is why I waste the time and make the opportunity to come to Washington so often, to speak to you and to make you understand what we are endeavoring to do in other parts of the world. In New York, in Philadelphia, in Boston, in the great eastern states, we have already rolled up an organization of over a million and a half men and women in these United States of America, and the cry is the slogan of AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS.10

  By all indications, Garvey’s claim of a million and a half members was correct. By 1920, the League had more than 1,100 chapters or divisions in the United States and around the world including in more than forty countries. Among the nations were Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Liberia, Nigeria, Panama, South Africa, and Venezuela.

  After Garvey describes the broad objectives of the movement, he asks those in attendance for their solidarity:

  We are asking you to lend your sympathy and your moral and financial and physical support to the building of Africa and the making of Africa a great republic. Make it a first-class nation, a first-rate power, and when Africa becomes a first-rate power, if you live in Georgia, if you live in Mississippi, if you live in Texas, as a black man I will dare them to lynch you, because you are an African citizen and you will have a great army and a great navy to protect your rights. In concluding I want you to realize this: I am not talking for an untried organization. I am here representing an organization that is a power in the world. The Universal Negro Improvement Association is the only movement among Negroes now that is striking fear in the breast of the nations of the world.11

  Garvey went on to announce that the convention had created its own government but not just for African Americans, but for Africans and people of African descent globally. Garvey proudly states,

  Washington, I say to you, ‘awake, awake because the world of Negroes around you is asserting itself to throw off the yoke of the white man of 300 years.’ We, in the convention of August, have elected leaders, and on the first of November we will send into the District of Columbia the first Negro ever elected by the Negroes of the United States of America to lead them. In August we elected the Hon. J. W. H. Eason as the leader of the 15,000,000 Negroes of America. Eason has proved to be one of the ablest men of the race, and we will send him up here in November to occupy the Black House of Washington. And around him we will have men who will be able to rank in the Diplomatic Circle, just as at the French Embassy they have men. As Provisional President of Africa I hope, also, in a few months, to have a Minister Plenipotentiary as an ambassador in Washington. We are going to have representatives of the Negro in Washington, but after Novembe
r we are going to have a minister plenipotentiary and ambassador in England, Germany, France, and Italy to protect the rights of the Negro.12

  There is little known about J. W. H. Eason’s background other than he was a minister of a church in New Orleans. In an address given in Chicago on September 30, 1919, he stated, “[T]he Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League has [sic] come into existence for the express purpose, primarily, of uniting all the black folks throughout the world, that we, in turn, might see to it that all wickedness and all discrimination, and all segregation, and all wrongs be forever banished from the earth.”13 Speaking in universal terms, he argued “there is no African Negro, there is no East Indian Negro, there is no French Negro, there is no German Negro, and there is no American Negro; but there is just simply one Negro the world over.14 At this meeting he also announced his candidacy for “presidency of the African Republic.”15 It is unclear if the “presidency of the African Republic” refers to the position that Garvey would eventually obtain as president of the African world, which Eason competed with him for and lost, or if Eason is referring to the position of president of black America. Before finishing his talk, Eason took a personal and political swipe at Garvey’s adversaries stating, “If the white folks hire DuBois [sic] and Moton . . . did not do what those white folks told them to do, they would cut off their beard [sic]. But we have decided that they have served their day and generation.”16

  Eason never made it to the Black House. And the Black House itself was never established. Eason’s tenure as president and member of the Garvey movement did not turn out well. Within two years of being selected Black America’s president, he had a falling out with the League, and, like President Andrew Johnson in 1868, was impeached. Unlike Johnson, he was removed from office and became one of Garvey’s most bitter foes. Eason was actually set to testify against Garvey at his trial on mail fraud charges. However, before that could happen he was gunned down in New Orleans on January 1, 1923. Two of Garvey’s associates, Fred Dyer and William Shakespeare, who Eason reportedly identified with his dying words, were charged and convicted of the murder but were acquitted on appeal.17 There were rumors, certainly spread by government intelligence and his black opponents, that Garvey had somehow been involved. There was no concrete evidence, however, to support the allegation.18