The Black History of the White House Page 20

  One of the individuals who celebrated Parker’s heroics was the then undisputed, though not unchallenged, leader of black America at the time, Booker T. Washington. He included Parker’s feats in a number of speeches that he gave in the period immediately following the shooting. According to the Atlanta Constitution, at a mass meeting of 5,000 African Americans on September 12, six days after the shooting and two days before McKinley actually died, Washington delivered an address and denounced the murderous action of the “red handed anarchist” and celebrated the fact that a Southern black “had saved President McKinley from death.”11 Ever eager as he was to present African Americans as willing—and sacrificial—patriots, it made sense that he would herald an act that demonstrated that black people were perhaps even more American than most whites. Others may have raised the impolitic question of how many whites were willing to risk taking a bullet for a black leader such as, say, Washington, but he never broached the topic. He would discover rather quickly how much—or how little—impact Parker’s risking his life to save the president of the United States would have on the racial consciousness of the nation. Within five weeks of McKinley’s murder, Booker T. Washington would be at the center of another racial drama involving the presidency and the White House.

  Since his infamous 1895 speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta—which W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed the “Atlanta Compromise”—Booker T. Washington had emerged as the black leader of choice for many whites in America, and for many blacks in America as well. In that speech, part of which was eerily prescient regarding James Benjamin Parker’s actions, he stated:

  As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.12

  After reassuring his white audience that he fully supported segregation, he went on to critique those African American leaders who did not, or who wanted to rush equality before blacks were ready for it. He elaborated:

  The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.13

  For conservative white political leaders both North and South, and a great deal of the white public, these were the welcome words of accommodation that echoed popular white supremacist sentiments and probably created a few tear-dimmed eyes themselves. By taking this route, Booker T. Washington became both the spokesperson for much of black America and a counsel to presidents, governors, local political officials, business leaders, academics, and other white power brokers. Virtually every major government program or business initiative involving African Americans would go through the Booker T. Washington patronage machine. Few African American leaders have held as much sway over community politics as he did in the twenty years after he delivered that speech. However, there were radical voices in the black community who quickly and strongly opposed its content. Booker T. Washington was harshly criticized by contemporary black leaders such as scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and agitator and journalist William Monroe Trotter. In a lacerating denunciation of Washington in his classic book Souls of Black Folks, Du Bois called Booker T.’s speech “a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political equality” and argued that he represented “the old attitude of adjustment and submission.”14

  Booker T. Washington, circa 1895.

  It is thus ironic that it would be Booker T. Washington’s visit to the White House that would offend white society and trigger a racist backlash that shut down black access to the White House for decades to follow. McKinley’s assassination unexpectedly catapulted his vice president of less than one year into the nation’s highest office. Within hours of McKinley’s tragic death in September 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as twenty-sixth president of the United States, and by the end of the month he was living in the White House.

  On October 16, 1901, one month after McKinley’s assassination, Roosevelt discovered that Booker T. Washington was going to be in town and invited him and Philip B. Stewart of Colorado to the White House for what was usually called “family supper.”15 Naively, neither Roosevelt nor Washington foresaw any potential issue with the invite. When Roosevelt was governor of New York he had regularly had African Americans over for supper and even occasionally invited them to spend the night.16 Roosevelt had high regard for Booker T. Washington and patronizingly referred to him as “the most useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the world.”17

  None of these gestures, however, should be interpreted to mean that President Roosevelt was either progressive or proactive on the issue of racial equality. In fact, he was a quite blatant racist in both word and deed. It was Roosevelt who set the Republican Party on the path to seizing the white South’s anti-black vote, which over time evolved into the racially narrow political base that the party represents in contemporary U.S. politics. Roosevelt demeaned blacks in his writings and speeches. Prior to becoming president, he wrote that blacks were the “most utterly under-developed” of the races; that they were “suffering from laziness and shiftlessness”; and that “a perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the Negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else.”18

  Becoming president and commander in chief of the United States did not change his views. Seeking what he thought was perhaps a middle ground between rights and racism, he stated at a Lincoln Day dinner in 1905 that “Civil law can not regulate social practices. Society, as such, is a law unto itself, and will always regulate its own practices and habits. Full recognition of the fundamental fact that all men should stand on an equal footing, as regards civil privileges, in no way interferes with recognition of the further fact that all reflecting men of both races are united in feeling that race purity must be maintained.”19

  Indeed, Roosevelt’s firm belief in the superiority of the white race over all others likely fed his delusion that his paternalistic relationship with Booker T. Washington reflected a moral capacity that blacks did not and could not have. His softer form of racism may also have been driven by reciprocating political interests as well. While Roosevelt could claim that he provided black access to the White House (via Booker T. Washington), Washington received patronage positions (via Roosevelt) that he doled out to supporters as a power broker, accruing enough authority to create problems for his black rivals and enemies.

  Thus, on the eve of the infamous White House family supper, neither Roosevelt nor Washington was prepared for the level of racist outrage that their dining together would unleash. While the event was certainly not a state dinner—the highest social occasion to which a guest may be formally invited to the White House—it may have been even more egregious to white supremacists, because it lacked the cover of political necessity or obligation. Dining with a black man was a personal choice of the president. In an indication of White House political obtuseness, the next day White House Secretary George Bruce Cortelyou issued a routine press release headlined “Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with
the President last evening.”20 The political and social reaction was immediate, thunderous, and explosive.

  Southern newspapers and political leaders unequivocally condemned both President Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington for violating racial boundaries that had been established not only by previous presidents but by the entire edifice of white social propriety. While during the latter half of the nineteenth century the White House had opened its doors to black political leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and others, it was unheard-of that a black person of any standing would be granted the honor of a White House dinner (or any meal), perhaps the most powerful gesture of social equality that could be imagined. That grand gastronomical opportunity clearly had a “whites-only” label on it.

  Southern memory was short. In 1798, during the administration of John Adams, Haitian President Toussaint Louverture had sent his representative, Joseph Bunel, to meet with the U.S. president to discuss a trade-related issue. One of the leaders of the 1791 Haitian revolution, Louverture wanted to win support from the United States as the new nation faced French and British threats. He offered to protect U.S. ships that came into the area on trading missions. Adams sought greater influence in the region and agreed to meet Louverture’s representative. Bunel, who was mulatto, and his wife, who was black, had dinner with Adams, “the first-ever breaking of bread between an American president and a man [and woman] of color.” Southerners and even some Northerners were livid. The Bunels also dined with Adams’s secretary of state, Timothy Pickering.21

  President Roosevelt had clearly misread the praise lavished on Booker T. Washington by whites to mean that he might be an exception to the prevailing social etiquette of white domination.

  The viciousness of the attacks and calls for retribution against Roosevelt were unrelenting and offer a hideous portrait of the extent of white animus toward black people. Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman said that after the dinner, the White House was “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.”22 The Memphis Scimitar called the dinner “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.”23 Former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan wrote, “It is to be hoped that both of them will upon reflection realize the wisdom of abandoning their purpose to wipe out race lines, if they entertain such a purpose.”24

  The reaction in the black community was a bit different. Perhaps most blacks, if they thought about it at all, viewed the occasion as a mild though irrelevant honor, especially given that the White House was doing nothing to address the rampant acts of terrorism being perpetrated against black communities. There were some who celebrated the event—though not necessarily Booker T. Washington himself—such as activist and black emigration organizer Bishop Henry Turner, who stated paradoxically, “You are about to be the great representative and hero of the Negro race, not withstanding you have been very conservative. I thank you, thank you, thank you.”25 Turner’s overdrawn ebullience contrasted with the responses of other black leaders. The radical and longtime Booker T. opponent William Monroe Trotter rebuked the wizard of Tuskegee and called him a hypocrite for supporting social segregation between the races and then going to sup at the White House.26 For Trotter and other black radicals, Booker T. Washington got his just deserts.

  Washington himself appeared both perplexed and traumatized by the controversy. Only a few days after the White House dinner, he dined with Roosevelt once again, this time at Yale University after he and the president both received honorary degrees, an event that sparked no criticism. But he seemed not to understand that dining at the White House was a different issue altogether. Accustomed only to accolades and praise from whites, he was dumbfounded to find himself the target of racial hatred. His role as mediator of all things black was suddenly in jeopardy.

  Back at the White House, the president and his staff went into urgent damage-control mode. The White House first sought to deny that the event had taken place at all, contradicting its own press release that had reported the exact opposite. Further confusing matters, some White House staffers spread rumors that there had been a luncheon rather than a dinner, though it seems the difference would matter little to hard-core white supremacists. The press was also told that the Roosevelt women, the president’s wife and daughters, absolutely had not been part of a dinner with a black man—failing to mention that Washington had just sat next to Roosevelt’s daughter Alice as they all dined together at the Yale supper.

  Though Booker T. was not invited back to the White House, Roosevelt continued to work and consult with him, but more often behind closed doors or through intermediaries. And despite the public backlash from the supper scandal, Roosevelt would still call upon Washington to edit parts of his speeches that addressed racial concerns and later accepted an invitation to serve as a trustee at Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.27

  Although the controversy eventually died down, its impact shaped White House politics for decades. No black person would be invited to dinner at the White House again for nearly thirty years. Ironically, that would occur during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt’s distant relative, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The whites-only eating policy remained unbreached until 1929. Early that year, Herbert Hoover’s wife, Lou, faced a dilemma involving the holding of her traditional tea at the White House for the wives of congressional members. She had to decide whether to invite Jessie Williams De Priest, the wife of Rep. Oscar De Priest, who had become the first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century with his 1928 victory in Illinois. With the Booker T. Washington–Theodore Roosevelt dinner still echoing, to invite her to sit down with white Southern women would have undoubtedly infuriated white Southern leaders and voters. But not to invite her would insult not only the De Priests but the black community as a whole, as well as many whites outside of the South. A tactically brilliant though racially cautious solution was found. Lou decided to have four sets of teas, the last of which, on June 19, 1929, would include Jessie De Priest and congressional wives whom she had consulted who did not object to having tea with an African American. She was still sharply criticized for that gesture, some Southern legislatures passing resolutions “condemning certain social policies of the administration in entertaining Negroes in the White House on a parity with white ladies.”28

  The Washington-Roosevelt incident signaled the full and complete lockout of millions of blacks from the nation’s official political channels. If the president of the United States could be attacked for merely having supper with an accommodating black leader and then be seen to distance himself from that leader publicly, clearly other strategies were necessary to move issues of racial justice forward. Soon, thanks to Du Bois and other progressive blacks, the Niagara Movement would evolve into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some African Americans would embrace socialism, and the Garvey movement would emerge as well. The real legacy of the Booker T. Washington dinner has been that it catalyzed a new and more radical path for the black movement for freedom.

  One final mockery redounded from the affair. On October 17, 1901, the day after the Washington dinner fiasco, Roosevelt issued an order officially naming the president’s residence “the White House.”29

  Jim Crow in the White House (and Congress)

  Any black man who votes for the present Republican Party out of gratitude . . . is born a fool. Equally no Negro Democrat can for a moment forget that his party depends primarily on the lynching, mobbing, disfranchising South. Toward any Third Party advocates the intelligent Negro must be receptive. . . .30— W. E. B. Du Bois

  The White House dinner controversy, however dramatic, should not have been unexpected. It occurred in the period following Reconstruction, when white Americans broadly and often forcefully suppressed the rights of Americans of color. The White House was not immune to the social, cultural, and political dictates of the period, and the growth of segregation went hand in hand
with the political aspirations, agendas, and strategies of each of the White House occupants from Andrew Johnson to Dwight Eisenhower, with a few notable exceptions along the way. While a number of presidents expressed personal feelings of opposition to Jim Crow and the oppression of blacks, none used the power of the office to substantially confront Southern segregation and advance black rights. Indeed, many of the presidents during this period did all they could to perpetuate the racial power structure that kept whites at the top and everyone else on the bottom. For decades, the White House felt whiter than ever to most African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other racially marginalized groups.

  Racial politics at the White House, however, were more complicated than at the regional or state level. Unlike local and state seats of government, the White House had to project its leadership over the entire nation, which included not only a growing and organized black electorate but also progressives and radicals who were brown, red, white, and yellow and who were increasingly organizing for racial justice and equality. In addition, as the United States’s role in the global arena grew, particularly after World War I, foreign policy considerations had to be taken into account. Racial issues had manifested in the struggle to create the League of Nations and were critical to the objectives and themes of the United Nations. The Cold War would be particularly challenging to the segregationists and those who accommodated them, as the Soviets and newly independent African and Caribbean nations would point to the audacious racial hypocrisy of the South to undermine the U.S. claim to be the world’s leading democracy.