The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  72. Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, pp. 347–349.

  73. Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), p. 145.

  74. Douglass, Life and Times, p. 358.

  75. Ibid, 435.

  76. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 158; and Douglass, Life and Times, p. 366.

  77. Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Review, 1888), pp. 191–193.

  78. Bennett, Forced Into Glory, pp. 33–34.

  79. Douglass, Life and Times, pp. 370–372.

  80. P. Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 3, p. 314.

  81. Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech delivered at Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, 1851. Historian Nell Painter points out, significantly, that it is not altogether clear what Truth said at the convention. There were various reports issued claiming to present the speech verbatim but many were in racist black dialect and reflected the opposition that some women had at the gathering to Truth speaking and linking the feminist cause with abolition. See Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 164–175.

  82. Carleton Mabee and Susan Mabee, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 121–122.

  83. Ibid., Mabee and Mabee, p. 121.

  84. Ibid, p. 1,256.

  85. Bennett, Forced Into Glory, pp. 109–110.

  86. Carleton Mabee, “The Demise of Slavery,” in Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, eds., The Price of Freedom, Slavery and the Civil War, Vol. 1 (Naperville, IL: Cumberland House, 2000), p. 353.

  87. See Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, NY: W.J. Moses, 1869); Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, The Moses of Her People (NY: Geo. R. Lockwood & Son, 1886); and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (NY: Ballantine Books, December 2003).

  88. Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 2004), p. 147.

  89. William Friedheim, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution, American Social History Project (New York: The New Press, 1996), p. 62.

  90. At this writing, Congress has introduced legislation (S. 227, Harriet Tubman National Historical Park and Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park Act; and H.R. 1078, Harriet Tubman National Historical Park and Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park Act) to honor Tubman.

  91. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007); and Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

  92. See Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1999); and Paul A. Cimbala, The Freedmen’s Bureau: Reconstructing the American South After the Civil War (Malabar, FL: Krieger Pub., 2005).

  93. Ira Berlin, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: the Lower South (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 338–40.

  94. See Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).

  95. Douglass, Life and Times, p. 364.

  96. James E. Sefton, Andrew Johnson and the Uses of Constitutional Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 50.

  97. “The Late Convention of Colored Men,” New York Times, August 13, 1865.

  98. Albert Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), p. 64.

  Chapter 6

  1. “McCain Delivers Concession Speech,” Washington Post, November 4, 2008.

  2. Lena Doolin Mason, “A Negro In It,” in Daniel Wallace Culp, ed., Twentieth Century Negro Literature: or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro (Naperville, IL: J. L. Nichols & Co., 1902), pp. 447–448.

  3. Marshall Everett, Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), pp. 33–40.

  4. A sampling of the articles include “The Case of Jim Parker,” Atlanta Constitution, September 26, 1901; “Editorial and Publishers’ Announcements,” Colored American Magazine, October 190; “Editorial Mention,” Zion’s Herald, September 11, 1901; “Hanna Thanks ‘Big Jim,’ ” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 10, 1901; and “Savannah Remembers Him,” News and Courier, September 10, 1901.

  5. “Tells His Story in a Modest Way,” Afro-American-Ledger, September 28, 1901.

  6. Daryl Rasuli, “James B. Parker Revisited,” University of Buffalo Library website: http://library.buffalo.edu/exhibits/panam/essays/​rasuli/rasuli.html.

  7. Czolgosz was convicted and sentenced to death on September 23, 1901 and executed in the electric chair on October 29, 1901.

  8. “Editorial Mention,” Zion’s Herald, September 11, 1901.

  9. Rasuli, “Parker Revisited.”

  10. “The Case of Jim Parker,” Atlanta Constitution, September 26, 1901.

  11. “Negroes Applaud Parker,” Atlanta Constitution, September 13, 1901.

  12. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Philip S. Foner, The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797–1971 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), p. 581.

  13. Ibid., pp. 580–581.

  14. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks (New York: Signet Classic, 1995), pp. 80, 87.

  15. William Seale, The President’s House: A History (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 1986), p. 652.

  16. Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics From Washington to Clinton (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 66.

  17. Ibid., p. 67.

  18. Ibid., p. 65; Michael Chapman, “TR: No Friend of the Constitution,” Cato Policy Report, November/December 2002, p. 6; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), p. 276.

  19. Theodore Roosevelt, A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901–1905 (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906), p. 564.

  20. Seale, The President’s House, p. 652.

  21. Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Owner (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), p. 38. Also, see James P. P. Horn, Jan Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2002), p. 314; David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 519; and Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations During the Early Republic (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), p. 67.

  22. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, p. 68.

  23. Quoted in Gardiner Harris, “The Underside of the Welcome Mat,” New York Times, November 8, 2008.

  24. Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 4.

  25. Ibid., p. 5

  26. Ibid., p. 5.

  27. Ibid., p. 67.

  28. See John Riley, “White House Tea and No Sympathy: The DePriest Incident,” in National History Day 2006 Curriculum Book (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2006); White House Historical Association website: www.whitehousehistory.org/04/subs/images_subs/primary_1929.pdf; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 526.

  29. White House Historical Association, email to the author, October 15, 2010: According to the records at the White House curator’s office, President Roosevelt had the name officially changed from Executive Mansion to White House, but did not issue an executive order to make the changes. They have a letter dated October 17, 1901, from the president’s secretary to the Secretary of State which reads: My dear Sir
, I am directed by the President to bring to your attention his desire To change the headings, or date lines, of all official papers and Documents requiring his signature from “Executive Mansion” to “White House.” In view of the approaching session of Congress, it will become necessary in preparing nominations for the Senate, as well as messages for either House of Congress, to observe the above change.

  30. Ronald W. Walters, Black Presidential Politics: A Strategic Approach (Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press, 1988), p. 21.

  31. See Edward Cary Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1993).

  32. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, (New York, Anchor Books, Random House: 2008) pp. 8–9.

  33. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Spawn of Slavery: The Convict-Lease System in the South,” in Shaun L. Gabbidon and Helen Taylor Greene, Race, Crime, and Justice: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3.

  34. Ibid., p. 4.

  35. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

  36. For a detailed discussion of the controversy, see Paul Leland Haworth, The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Company, 1906).

  37. Robert Vincent Remini, Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Addresses (New York: Penguin Group, 2008), pp. 206–208.

  38. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 637, citing J.J. Alvord in Report of Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II, p. 247.

  39. Justus D. Doenecke, The Presidencies of James A. Garfield & Chester A. Arthur (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981), p. 48.

  40. Douglass, Life and Times, p. 522.

  41. Zachary Karabell, Chester Alan Arthur (New York: Macmillan, 2004), p. 127.

  42. Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro, From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), p. 83.

  43. Ibid., p. 82.

  44. U.S. Senate: Hiram Rhodes Revels (MS, 1870–71); Blanche Kelso Bruce (MS, 1875–81); and U.S. House of Representatives: Joseph Hayne Rainey (SC, 1870–1879), Jefferson Franklin Long (GA, 1871), Benjamin Sterling Turner (AL, 1871–73), Robert Carlos De Large (SC, 1871–73), Robert Brown Elliott (SC, 1871–1874), Josiah Thomas Walls (FL, 1871–76), Richard Harvey Cain (SC, 1873–75, 1877–79), Alonzo Jacob Ransier (SC, 1873–75), James Thomas Rapier (AL, 1873–75), John Roy Lynch (MS, 1873–77, 1882–83), Jeremiah Haralson (AL, 1875–77), John Adams Hyman (NC, 1875–1877), Charles Edmund Nash (LA, 1875–77), Robert Smalls (SC, 1875–79, 1882–87), James Edward O’Hara (NC, 1883–87), Henry Plummer Cheatham (NC, 1889–93), Thomas Ezekiel Miller (SC, 1890–91), John Mercer Langston (VA, 1890–91), George Washington Murray (SC, 1893–95, 1896–97), and George Henry White (NC, 1897–01). William L. Clay, Just Permanent Interests: Black Americans in Congress, 1870–1991 (New York: Amistad Press, 1992), pp. 355–356.

  45. Clay, Just Permanent Interests, p. 13.

  46. Ibid., p. 42.

  47. In 1900 White proposed one of the first anti-lynching bills in Congress, which would have made lynching a federal crime. It was ignored and died in the Judiciary Committee. See “George Henry White,” Black Americans in Congress website: http://baic.house.gov/member-profiles/​profile.html?intID=22.

  48. Thomas Walker Page, “The Real Judge Lynch,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1901, pp. 731–743.

  49. See “Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America,” Without Sanctuary website: www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.html.

  50. Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law,” in Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett (Robert W. Rydell, ed.), The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 32.

  51. See Catherine Welch, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Powerhouse With a Pen (Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 2000), p. 71; Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Macmillan, 2009), pp. 236–238; and Suzanne Freedman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Antilynching Crusade (Minneapolis: Millbrook Press, 1994), p. 21.

  52. See Tom Henderson Wells, “The Phoenix Election Riot,” Phylon, 1st Quarter, 1970, pp. 58–69; Daniel Levinson Wilk, “The Phoenix Riot and the Memories of Greenwood County,” Southern Cultures, Vol. 8, 2002, pp. 29–55; David S. Cecelski, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press Books, 1998).

  53. Eric Foner, John Arthur Garraty, and Society of American Historians, The Reader’s Companion to American History (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991), p. 685.

  54. Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 97.

  55. Herbert Shapirio, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 142–143.

  56. Theodore Roosevelt, IV, State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt (London: Echo Library, 2007), p. 165.

  57. “Taft Condemns Lynching: President Says Man That Pulls the Rope Should Hang by the Rope,” New York Times, April 10, 1912; and “Taft Deplores Lynching: The Remedy, He Tells The Times, Is Better Enforcement of the Law,” New York Times, June 27, 1912.

  58. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, p. 78.

  59. Germany would also raise the issue again during the Nazi era. Ernest Allen Jr., “‘Close Ranks’: Major Joel E. Spingarn and the Two Souls of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois,” Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 3, 1979, p. 6.

  60. See “Warren G. Harding,” Marion County Historical Society website: http://marionhistory.com/wgharding/harding-2.htm.

  61. “Harding for Kellogg Bill; President Prefers It to Dyer Anti-Lynching Measure,” New York Times, August 28, 1922.

  62. Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), p. 111.

  63. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, “J. Edgar Hoover Message Condemning Lynching,” American Presidency Project website: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=22360.

  64. Franklin, p. 526.

  65. Richard Polenberg, The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933–1945: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 30.

  66. Donald Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001), p. 331; and Garth E. Pauley, The Modern Presidency & Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 26–27.

  67. Ira Katznelson. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), p. 17.

  68. It should be noted here that during the nineteenth century, until the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Southern legislators received an advantage because of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. For the purposes of House representation, 60 percent of their black populations was counted as part of the overall state population, even though black people themselves were denied the right to vote. After the amendments and the reinstitution of black disenfranchisement, the entire black population was included in Southern population totals, although nearly all were denied the right to vote. The larger numbers increased Southern membership in Congress still further.

  69. Katznelson, An Untold Story, p. 22.

  70. Ibid., p. 32.

  71. Richard Sterner, The Negro’s Share: A Study of Income, Consumption, Housing, and Public Assistance (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), p. 214.

  72. Alferdteen Harrison, Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1992), pp. 10–11.

  73. David Bositis, Blacks and the 1992 Democratic National Convention (Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1992), p. 29; and David
Greenberg, “The Party of Lincoln . . . But not of Hayes, Harrison, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, or Bush,” Slate, August 10, 2000, Slate website: www.slate.com/id/87868.

  74. Bositis, Blacks and the 1992 Democratic National Convention, p. 29.

  75. Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974 (New York: Citadel Press, 1978), p. 173.

  76. For more information on lynchings and the anti-lynching campaigns, see James E. Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Walter F. White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); Ralph Ginsburg, 100 Years of Lynchings (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1996); Ida B. Wells, On Lynching; Southern Horrors; A Red Record; Mob Rule in New Orleans (New York: Arno Press, 1969); James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); and Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.

  77. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Senate Issues Apology Over Failure on Lynching Law,” New York Times, June 14, 2005.

  78. Daniel B. Wood, “Racist Acts at UC San Diego Underscore Deeper Tension on Campus,” Christian Science Monitor, March 2, 2010.

  79. Philip Dray, “Noose: The True History of a Resurgent Symbol of Hate,” Boston Globe, December 2, 2007.

  80. See Fisk Jubilee Singers website: www.fiskjubileesingers.org/music.html.

  81. Dominique-René de Lerma, “The Violin in Black Music History,” December 31, 2008, Myrtle Hart Society website: http://myrtlehart.org/content/view/275/5/

  82. James Oliver Horton, Landmarks of African American History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press US, 2005), p. 99.

  83. Email correspondence between Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. and author, September 30, 2010.

  84. Walter Christmas, Negroes in Public Affairs and Government Educational Heritage, 1966 p. 306.

  Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), p. 24.