The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  At that point the organization was in profound turmoil. Garvey had created the Black Star Steamship Line to purchase ships to transport people to Africa and other areas. Much of the funding had been raised through mail solicitations. Long seeking a case against Garvey, the federal government finally charged him and UNIA with mail fraud related to the sale of Black Star Line stock. By 1921, the company was having massive financial and accountability difficulties and was forced to close down although three ships had been purchased. This crisis provided an opening for Garvey’s foes, which were numerous. Using perjured witnesses and information from informants, as well as eager support from most of the black leadership, Garvey was convicted on the charge.

  Garvey’s conviction was not the first time that mail fraud charges had been used to repress a surging black political movement. At the end of the nineteenth century, a movement arose to win pensions for those who had been formerly enslaved. The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association was founded in 1894 and led by Callie House, a Nashville-based laundress and other black activists.19

  She was inspired by a pamphlet entitled, Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen promoting passage of a bill introduced by Rep. William J. Connell in Congress in 1890. Modeled after the pension bill that paid veterans of the Civil War, the bill proposed inclusion of every black person alive before 1861 who had been enslaved, with older individuals receiving slightly more than their younger counterparts.20 Other versions of the bill would appear in later years.

  House deeply believed in the cause. In her first letter to the membership after being elected Secretary in 1898, she wrote that it was “but a question of time when those of our race who have borne the burden and heat of the day, will receive some recompense for honest labor performed during the dark and bitter days of slavery.”21 The Association held conventions, organized local chapters, and lobbied Congress. It was financed by member dues that, importantly, were paid mostly by mail.

  One objective of the Ex-Slave Association was to send a petition to Congress in support of a pension bill with the names of every ex-slave in the United States. In 1899, the number of living ex-slaves constituted about 21 percent of all African Americans. At the local level, the Association provided aid to the elderly and infirm, and helped with burial services.

  The movement grew despite fierce hostility from much of the black elite. While Frederick Douglass, before his death in 1895, endorsed the idea, other black leaders, elected officials, and newspaper publishers opposed the legislation and the movement for pensions. The three black Representatives in Congress at the time the legislation was introduced—Henry P. Cheatham (R-NC), Thomas E. Miller (R-SC), and John Mercer Langston (R-VA)—sought to focus their energies on education and voting rights for African Americans, efforts that were painfully unsuccessful. Both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who agreed on little between them, rejected the struggle for reparations in the form of pensions.

  It was estimated that the movement expanded to over 300,000 and ominously drew the attention of several U.S. government agencies. According to researcher Mary Francis Berry, “the Justice Department and the Post Office Department, at the behest of the Pension Bureau decided to declare war on the Association.”22 In the mid-to-late 19th century, the Post Office Department had accumulated enormous and arguably unconstitutional authority to stop the mail service of individuals or organizations it deemed engaged in fraudulent activities. Furthermore, decisions by the Post Office Department were not reviewable or subject to appeal to a higher authority.23

  During the presidency of William McKinley, in 1898 the Pension Department convinced the Post Office Department to send letters to House and other Association officers denying them use of the mails because the Association was supposedly engaging in fraudulent activities. Signed by acting Assistant Attorney General Harrison Barrett, he warned that House and the others could face a maximum $1,000 fine or up to three years in prison or both if they continued their activities. It was clear, however, that Barrett, the Post Office and the Pension Bureau were not concerned about illegalities, but the advance of a radical black movement that was challenging white power. The real agenda of the government was expressed in the words of Pension Bureau Inspector W. L. Reid who wrote to his superiors that the efforts of the ex-slave pension movement “is setting the negroes wild, robbing them of their money and making anarchists of them” and will lead to “some very serious questions to settle in connection with the control of the race.”24

  The U.S. Post Office’s attacks and stalled congressional legislation were successful in eroding the movement’s efforts. Undeterred, however, House changed tactics and initiated a lawsuit campaign to sue the Treasury Department for $68,073,388.99 in cotton taxes traceable to slave labor in Texas. The suit was thrown out in 1915 and one year later the Postmaster General A. S. Burleson indicted House and other Association leaders on mail fraud accusing them of collecting money from ex-slaves under the false claim that pensions were forthcoming. Although the government’s case did not include a single named victim and was generally weak, an all-white, all-male jury found House guilty, and she would spend nearly a year, from November 1917 to August 1918, in the Jefferson City, Missouri penitentiary. Upon her release, she went back to working as a laundress and was never active again in the reparations effort. The pension movement and the Association more or less died when House and the others went to prison, and House herself passed on June 6, 1928.

  What happened to Garvey was not the beginning of government-coordinated attacks on black activists using dubious laws and questionable authority. It was the continuation of a disturbing pattern of official repression against peaceful and lawful social movements who organized to confront injustices perpetrated by the white-dominated system.

  With Garvey in and out of prison or on trial, diminished popular support and membership, internal strife, relentless attacks by other black leaders, and wide criticism over Garvey’s June 1922 meeting with Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Edward M. Clarke, the movement was experiencing escalating problems.

  It must also be noted that whatever internal conflicts existed within the Garvey movement, there was a concerted effort on the part of U.S. federal law enforcement agencies and local authorities to destroy his organization and that of other black radical groups. Even though he was an anti-communist, U.S. authorities saw Garvey and his movement as part of the “New Negro Crowd” of militants in the late teens and early 1920s who they believed were being influenced by the Communist Party. Garvey’s international reach through his newspaper, Negro World, was seen as inspired, if not funded and controlled, by Bolsheviks. As early as September 1919, the U.S. Justice Department was seeking a way to deport Garvey.25 By 1923, the Garvey organization was thoroughly infiltrated with black agents and the federal government was manipulating the conflicts between the League and its black rivals.26 Indeed, the very first black agent, James Wormley Jones, to be hired by the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the precursor to the FBI, was brought on explicitly to infiltrate Garvey’s movement. At least four other agents would soon be working to covertly subvert other militant groups with the expressed purpose of devastating their operations and their leadership.

  The Bureau of Investigation was run by an ambitious and ruthless federal employee named J. Edgar Hoover, who would stop at nothing to root out and annihilate communists and any blacks influenced by them. The Post Office’s Translation Bureau, working with the Bureau of Investigation, was brought in to stop the spread of Garvey’s Negro World whose great crime was that it sought “to instill into the minds of the negroes [sic] of this and other countries that they have been greatly wronged and oppressed by the white races and that they can only hope for relief and redress through concerted and aggressive action on their part.”27

  The combined efforts of the federal government and Garvey’s political adversaries, internal conflicts, and mass black opposition to emigration ultimately brought down Garvey
and his dream of black repatriation to Africa and of a Black House in the United States. Garvey was sent to prison in February 1925. However, after two years, in 1927, President Coolidge commuted his sentence and he was deported to Jamaica. He continued to be active there and later in London where he relocated in 1935. He died in London on June 10, 1940.

  Black Presidential Aspirations: Political and Cultural Challenges to the White House

  I’ve seen levels of compliance with the civil rights bill and changes that have been most surprising. So, on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than 40 years. I would think that this could come in 25 years or less.28—Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in an interview with the BBC in 1964 while on his way to Oslo, Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

  By the 1960s, black activists not only wanted to meet with the president, they wanted to be the president. Within both major parties as well as through third parties and independent runs, African Americans sought to use the vehicle of a presidential or vice-presidential campaign to raise issues important to the black community, put pressure on the major party candidates to address black concerns, or expose the political system as hopelessly racist, sexist, anti-working class, and geared to the demands of an economic and political elite. These efforts were limited by the reality that the overwhelming majority of whites (and perhaps other minorities) was not willing to vote for a black candidate for president. Indeed, until the Jesse Jackson campaigns in the 1980s, neither were most African Americans. And since most black elected officials and civil rights leaders practiced leverage politics, i.e., whereby black votes are traded for policy favors, they were reluctant to support a candidate that could not win.

  Black presidential campaigns flowed from two political streams. In the two major political parties, procedural or formal objection to a black candidate no longer existed by the early 1960s. The struggles led by activists such as Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer had torn down barriers to black participation inside of the Democratic Party and people of color were able to achieve more leadership roles in the party. And although the overwhelming majority of blacks had switched to the Democratic Party, there was still a black presence inside of the Republican Party. Both parties, however, for all practical purposes were still overwhelmingly white-only in terms of holding statewide and national offices. The Civil Rights Movement rightfully targeted black voting rights as a central objective of the struggle, and many died fighting for that cause. It would take the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and a willingness to enforce it to change the racial dynamics of U.S. elections.

  As a consequence, by 1971, in the U.S. House of Representatives, there were thirteen African Americans, enough to form the Congressional Black Caucus. Most were from major urban areas in the North. There were none from the deep South until 1973 when Andrew Young was elected from Atlanta. In other parts of the region where there were significant numbers of black voters, obstacles to voting, party participation, independent candidacies, and outright violence diluted black voting strength to nearly nil. Even after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it would take almost another twenty years for the fruit of that struggle to produce forty or so House members, many from the South. Some breakthroughs would happen in the North. The first black person to be elected to the U.S. Senate after a century of absence was Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, in 1966, a moderate politician from a liberal state who served for two terms. Brooke refused to join the Congressional Black Caucus, though he often fought against the conservative and anti-civil rights policies of Nixon.

  For aspiring black presidential candidates, white attempts to suppress and dilute the impact of black voting was only the beginning of the problems. Candidacies run on money, media, and mobilization. Fundraising for the White House has historically been a big-money process. Despite an extremely complex regime of rules that have existed over the years, there has been little debate that corporate and elite funds dominate the fundraising process. That pool of funding, naturally, has been situated with white and generally moderate-to-conservative candidates with many corporate donors giving to both parties. These doors were closed to genuine liberal candidates not to mention more progressive and radical ones.

  Many, though not all, media access issues flowed from a lack of funding. Without large financial resources, candidates cannot buy media time, hire media consultants, or convince big-audience media that they are viable. When you add in the race dynamic and the prevailing view that a black presidential candidate hasn’t a ghost of a chance, it is not surprising that few, including most African Americans, were even aware of most of the black candidates who have run for president. Without this awareness, it becomes almost impossible to mobilize the millions that would be needed to offset the other issues. In the pre-Internet era, direct communication was costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. In today’s world of instant email, text messaging, and Facebook, it is hard to imagine that voters rarely heard from candidates unless they were directly pivotal to their election chances.

  Despite all these issues, black presidential candidates running in the major parties’ primaries and caucuses made a number of important contributions that in the long run were pivotal to the campaign and election of the first black president of the United States, Barack Obama. While none won the nomination, they laid the groundwork in some critical ways that opened the door for his victory in 2008.

  In the Mainstream: Black Democratic and Republican Candidates

  Shirley Chisholm

  The most important though under-acknowledged pioneer of a serious run for the presidency by an African American was Representative Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (NY-D) who ran for president in 1972. Ahead of her time, she challenged the prevailing notions of gender, race, and, due to her Caribbean background, ethnic stereotypes. Chisholm had been a teacher prior to becoming involved in politics, winning a seat in the New York State Assembly in 1964. She initially made history by being the first black woman to be elected to Congress when she won in Brooklyn’s Twelfth Congressional District in 1968. In her first speech before the House of Representatives on March 26, 1969, she began by pointing out the contradiction between millions being spent on defense by Nixon and the social needs of the nation, “Mr. Speaker, on the same day President Nixon announced he had decided the United States will not be safe unless we start to build a defense system against missiles, the Headstart program in the District of Columbia was cut back for lack of money.”29

  After asserting that she was not a pacifist, she sharply objected to the war priorities of the Nixon administration and famously vowed:

  to vote “No” on every money bill that comes to the floor or this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been turned right side up again, until the monstrous waste and the shocking profits in the defense budget have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war.30

  Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm announcing her candidacy for presidential nomination, January 25, 1972.

  In January 1972, Chisholm audaciously declared herself a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In her declaration, she stated, “I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people.”31

  Dismissed by many as a whimsical run, she received scant support from women’s organizations, black groups or prominent individuals. A multitude of variables existed that harmed her effort, including committed black political support for George McGovern or Hubert Humphrey, inability to raise funds, and lack of a national base. But nearly all of these issue
s could be linked into perceptions regarding her race and gender, as well as her ideologically progressive views. Virtually unknown outside of New York and black political circles, Chisholm had little chance to win white votes, particularly those of men. While she did win endorsements from some women’s groups, such as the National Organization of Women, most did not support her. And there were some black men who felt it was an affront that a black woman should run for president before a black male. She did receive the endorsement of the Black Panther Party, and when she was pressured to reject their support, she refused to do so.32 Despite all the forces against her, Chisholm opened the door and made the contemporary notion of a black person running for president normal. She campaigned in twelve states and won more than 400,000 votes, and had 151 delegate votes at the National Democratic Convention.33 She won the New Jersey primary with 66.9 percent of the vote, and got 23 percent of the vote in Massachusetts.34

  In reflecting back on her campaign, she wrote, “I ran because someone had to do it first. In this country everybody is supposed to be able to run for President, but that’s never been really true. I ran because most people think the country is not ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate.”35 Referring to herself as “unbought” and “unbossed,” the title of her book on her campaign, she was a genuine groundbreaker.36