The Black History of the White House Page 2
What the White House looked like while human trafficking and enslavement of black people was thriving in Washington, D.C., 1858.
Centuries of slavery, brutally enforced apartheid, and powerful social movements that ended both, are all part of the historical continuum preceding the American people’s election of Barack Obama. Few people, black or otherwise, genuinely thought that they would live to see what exists today: a black man commanding the presidency of the United States and a black family running the White House. Despite important advances in public policy and popular attitude since the social movements of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, for the many people of color who lived through the segregation era and experienced the viciousness of racists, the complicity of most of their white neighbors, and the callous disregard and participation of city, state, and national authorities, Obama’s election was a moment never imagined. It was never imagined, in part, because of the misleading and unbalanced history we have been taught.
The Struggle over Historical Perspective
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.3—George Santayana
U.S. history is taught—and for the most part, learned—through filters. In everything from schoolbooks and movies to oral traditions, historical markers, and museums, we are presented with narratives of the nation’s history and evolution. For generations, the dominant stories have validated a view that overly centralizes the experiences, lives, and issues of privileged, white male Americans and silences the voice of others. It has been as though some have an entitlement to historic representation and everyone else does not.
But it is more than a matter of marginalization and silencing. History is not just a series of dates and facts, but more important, involves interpretation, analysis, and point of view. Historic understanding shapes public consciousness, and thus politics and policy decisions, social relations, and access to resources and opportunity. The dominant narratives of U.S. history elevate the nation’s development through a perspective that reduces the vast scale and consequences of white enslavement of blacks, “Indian removal,” violent conquest, genocide, racism, sexism, and class power. The generations of lives, experiences, and voices of marginalized and silenced Americans offer an array of diverse interpretations of U.S. history that have largely gone unheard, unacknowledged, and unrewarded. Without their perspectives, we are presented with an incomplete and incongruent story that is at best a disservice to the historical record and at worst a means of maintaining an unjust status quo.
African American school children facing the Horatio Greenough statue of George Washington at the U.S. Capitol, circa 1899.
In education, the field of Black History and other areas of what are generally referred to as Ethnic Studies have attempted to serve as counter-histories, seeking to include the communities and individuals that have too often been written out of the national story. Scholars have attempted not only to correct the record but also to restore a dignity and respect obliterated in official chronicles. These efforts have met with fierce resistance, from the beginning up to the present moment. In spring 2010, conservatives in Arizona not only passed SB 1070, which authorized—in fact, demanded—that law enforcement officers question the immigration status of anyone they deemed suspicious and who looked like they did not belong in the country, but also enacted HB 2281, which bans schools from teaching Ethnic Studies courses. While the former promotes racial profiling, the latter guarantees a continuing ignorance of the social diversity, history, and interests of everyone except white Americans. Framing education about the history of people of color in the worst possible manner, the law states, “Public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.”4 Specifically aimed at Mexican, indigenous, and black studies, the law generated copycat efforts elsewhere, just as attempts to reproduce the anti-immigrant SB 1070 spread to other U.S. states in the expanding culture war over whose history deserves state and political support and promotion.
The challenge of presenting an alternative and more inclusive history of the White House lies not so much in finding the details and facts of other voices, in this instance black voices, but in challenging the long-standing views and dominant discourses that permeate all aspects of our public and popular education. The White House itself is figuratively constructed as a repository of democratic aspirations, high principles, and ethical values. For many Americans, it is an act of unacceptable subversion to criticize the nation’s founders, the founding documents, the presidency, the president’s house, and other institutions that have come to symbolize the official story of the United States. Understandably, it is uncomfortable to give up long-held and even meaningful beliefs that in many ways build both collective and personal identities. However, partial and distorted knowledge is detrimental, and only through a more diverse voicing of the nation’s experience and history, in this case of the White House, can the country—as a people—move forward.
Race, the Presidency, and Grand Crises
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.5—Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff
Even after the celebrations of Obama’s historic triumph, achieved with nearly unanimous support from African Americans and the votes of tens of millions of progressives, a nagging question remained: What would the Obama White House mean for racial progress in the United States? Will the Obama presidency generate the kind of historic policies that emerged under Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to create greater racial equality, or will Obama’s contribution be more symbolic, as Bill Clinton’s was? Will having a black president make a difference, and if so, what kind of difference?
United States history has shown that opportunity for sustainable and qualitative social reform, including in the area of race relations, typically arises from a crisis leveraged by massive social and political organizing, i.e., a crisis that threatens the ability of those in power to maintain governability and control. Presidents, and political leaders in general, are captives of the period and circumstances they inherit. Elected leaders have the potential to advance a political and policy agenda, but only within the limits of the social and broader historical constraints of their times. The political status quo is stubborn and, within a system of checks and balances such as exists in the United States, rarely elastic enough to answer civil society’s incessant call for change. It is only under extraordinary conditions, such as when the efforts of ordinary citizens are focused on social movements whose demands threaten the elites with crisis, that massive and fundamental social transformation occurs. This trend is particularly pronounced throughout the history of race relations in the United States. In other words, whether Obama will have the opportunity for major advancements in the area of race relations and social equality will depend much more on the evolution of the political balance of forces, the state of the economy, the viability of political and social institutions, and the ideological atmosphere than simply his will (or lack thereof).
The black history of the White House is one in which the institution of the U.S. presidency has, generally speaking, only seriously and qualitatively responded to the nation’s unjust racial divide in the face of crisis, when an uncertain future loomed, critical and divisive decisions had to be made, and black and anti-racist resistance were focused, intense, and spreading. Whether the White House response led to progressive social advances, conservative rollback—or both—has been determined by each era’s particular factors, the personal predilections of the president in command being only one such element. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson faced crises, arguably, under which the coherence and very existence of the nation itself was at stake. Civil war, economic catastrophe, and urban unrest challenged the legitimacy and power of the state, creating opportunities for radical social proposals that were normally ignored and dismissed.
It is hardly a given that the state’s resp
onse to crisis will result in progressive democratic change. The Bush White House, for example, responding to the September 11 attacks, instituted antidemocratic, authoritarian, ultraconservative policies that would have been impossible to implement under normal circumstances. These included launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; curtailing civil liberties with the harsh USA Patriot Act; violating international human rights conventions with opened-ended detentions, military tribunals, the legal limbo of Guantánamo Bay prison, secret prisons, torture, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassinations, and negligent killing of foreign civilians; and other legally and morally reprehensible actions.
Black Challenges to the White House
There is a long history of both black challenge and black accommodation to the White House. Every point in this country’s past has seen black resistance to social injustice, including direct calls to the president for relief from, reparations for, and remediation of institutional racism. The black challenge has taken the form of slave escapes, revolts, underground networks, creation of maroon societies, literacy campaigns, petitions, participation in the Revolution (on both sides) and the Civil War, grassroots Reconstruction efforts, sit-ins, sit-outs, mass mobilizations (and threats thereof), voter registration drives, leadership in massive social movements, campaigns for political office including the offices of president and vice president, and countless other collective and individual counterassaults against white domination and discrimination. All have factored into the policy and political decisions made by U.S. presidents. The squeezing of the president for the juice of justice has been indispensable to black political and social movements in the enduring struggle for equality.
It could not be any other way. Racism and the exercise of white racial hegemony were at the core of the American Revolution and the founding of the nation itself. The establishment of a racial hierarchy was neither unconscious, secondary, an afterthought, nor even what many have called an unfortunate but necessary compromise. Rather than a compromise—implying that both sides gave up something fundamental—it was a surrender by Northern leaders, who set aside their publicly stated antislavery principles and dishonorably granted the South the legally protected business of human trafficking and enslavement of black people, some arguing that abolition was a battle to be fought another day.
As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1, Southern leaders joined the armed revolutionary movement not so much to fight British domination of the colonies as to protect themselves from the British Crown’s foreshadowed intent to liberate blacks from bondage. For the South, the nonnegotiable price of joining the armed revolt was the prolongation of white people’s power to buy, sell, breed, and enslave black people in the post-revolution nation.
Perceiving this profound moral and political disjuncture, many free6 and enslaved blacks joined the war on the side of the British. At the very center of this turbulent mix were the men who would become the first four presidents of the United States—George Washington (1789–1797), John Adams (1797–1801), Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809), and James Madison (1809–1817)—all of whom helped to define the duties, roles, responsibilities, and powers of the presidency itself. Their engagement with the moral and economic questions of slavery and race was complex, and their individual will, private interests, and political courage were as much an influence upon as influenced by social forces and the still gestating processes and structures of state authority. Ultimately, all would fail to rise above the popular racist views of their times and were unwilling and unable to advance egalitarian relations among races. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, their vacillations would only postpone the nation’s inexorable drive toward civil war and further crises of legitimacy.
Alternative voices, however, would be raised by blacks and others during the Revolutionary period and ever afterward. By all the means at black organizers’ disposal, from petitions and direct lobbying to local community organizing and national mass movements, presidents were challenged to live up to their oath of office and the promises of the nation’s founding documents. Despite these calls for justice and freedom, until the Civil War, president after president would ratify white people’s power to own and traffic blacks by signing laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. James Buchanan (1857–1861), the last president before the Civil War, stated that slavery was “a great political and moral evil” but nonetheless (as president-elect) supported the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott vs. Sandford decision, which ruled that no person of African descent could become a citizen of the United States, that blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro [sic] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”7 As is discussed in Chapter 5, it would take a horrific civil war and a hesitating but ultimately reformist president to resolve the nation’s dilemma by illegalizing slavery.
The reluctance of the pre–Civil War presidents to address and assist the abolition movement only fueled the surging black resistance and directed its outrage at the White House. During the Civil War there was a massive desertion of plantations and work sites by millions of enslaved people—what W. E. B. Du Bois termed a black general strike. Fearing that a Southern victory would maintain the slave system and hoping a Northern win would abolish it, African Americans joined the Southern guerrilla underground and Union Army and fought valiantly to crush the pro-slavery forces.8 Under pressure from the abolitionist movement, from influential public figures like Frederick Douglass, and simply out of military necessity, President Lincoln eventually permitted blacks to join the armed combat and enlist in the Union Army.
Beyond the military imperatives of winning the war, the Lincoln White House found itself forced to address the black cause; racial issues had become so urgent they could no longer be ignored. The escalating crisis opened up the political space to allow not just piecemeal reforms on human trafficking or another Faustian compromise with politicians representing white enslavers from the South, but the dismantling of the system of slavery once and for all. President Lincoln’s personal views on the matter—whether those of a late convert to abolitionism, as argued by historian James M. McPherson, or of an unrepentant defender of the system who was “forced into glory,” as historian Lerone Bennett Jr. contends—ultimately became secondary as circumstances demanded he take action on whites’ legal right to enslave blacks, a demand that previous presidents had not had to address in a fundamental manner.9 Although the Emancipation Proclamation, as a strategy against the South, freed only blacks enslaved to Confederate states that were in rebellion at the time, it nevertheless marked the beginning of a series of profound and irrevocable legal and societal shifts away from the barbarity of white domination and toward the democratic equality promised by the American Revolution.
The Lincoln White House resolved the issue of slavery, but not that of racism. Among the other variables that led to the war was the rise of Northern financial interests, which supported the Republican Party and were in competition with the interests of the Southern agricultural-based aristocracy. The push by the Republican Party for “free” labor in an increasingly industrializing nation—meaning a mobile, wage-paid workforce—was not the equivalent of fairness to workers or labor equality between whites and people of color. To advance its agenda and that of its sponsors, the Republican Party needed to break the economic power of the South as well as its dominance in Congress.
In the political openings created by the crisis and the transition of power from Southern interests to Northern ones, the experiment of Reconstruction was launched, wherein state authorities intervened on behalf of newly liberated women, men, and children, addressing the crisis of exclusion with political enfranchisement (for men), economic reparations (through the Freedmen’s Bank), and social inclusion (through educational opportunities at all levels).
After the April 14, 1865, assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth—the pro-slavery extremist who was impelled to commit
the crime by the president’s promise of voting rights for blacks—Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, began almost immediately to roll back the commitments Lincoln had made to black Americans. Republican Party radicals in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens, countered the Johnson White House and for nearly nine years pushed through groundbreaking legislation that granted new political rights and protection to blacks.
However, the crisis of the 1876 presidential election, in which a dispute arose over the legality of black votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, redrew the political balance of power and once again saw the White House facilitate the subordination of blacks in U.S. society. The Hayes-Tilden Compromise was about more than just an election fiasco; it represented the reemergence of a modernized, post-slavery South that made an accommodation with its Northern counterpart. Once the urgent dispute over economic authority was resolved, there was little motivation on the part of the Republican Party to continue alienating large numbers of whites.
Jim Crow segregation policies and their legal and extralegal enforcement were well in place prior to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that gave de jure cover to systemic, institutional, and private forms of racism. The Jim Crow presidents, from Rutherford Hayes (1877–1881) to Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961), did little to support the black challenge to segregation and white domination over U.S. social and economic life. As I discuss in Chapter 5, during this period the White House, with a few notable exceptions, did little to further the cause of full citizenship and equal rights for blacks in America.