The Black History of the White House Read online

  The government responded to these developments, on the one hand, with brutal repression and murderous attacks: local, state, and federal law enforcement collaborated to kill, jail, and marginalize black leaders and activists. On the other hand, the state was also forced to open up opportunities to African Americans, Latinos, women, and others who would no longer accept second-class status.

  It was within this context that even state institutions with a long history of racial insulation and white control were obligated to become more inclusive. The Secret Service would become one of them.

  President John F. Kennedy called Abraham Bolden the “Jackie Robinson” of the service.2 In June 1961, after one year with the agency, Bolden became the first African American Secret Service agent to be assigned to the White House detail directly responsible for the protection of the president. President Kennedy had personally requested him to consider the assignment, and he accepted. By the end of June 1966, Bolden was no longer at the White House, no longer with the Secret Service, and on his way to prison.

  In his riveting memoir, The Echo from Dealey Plaza: The True Story of the First African American on the White House Secret Service Detail and His Quest for Justice After the Assassination of JFK, Bolden weaves a tale of institutional racism, government cover-up, political intrigue, criminal frame-up, and eventually, personal enlightenment. He graphically chronicles not only the overt racial insults and bigotry on the part of many of his colleagues and supervisors in the Secret Service, but also the lack of professionalism and prejudice by White House agents that may have enabled Kennedy’s assassination. Bolden’s very vocal and public critique of the president’s assassination sparked a chain of events that culminated in his being charged with a felony, fired from the Service, railroaded by a conspiring judge, and eventually incarcerated for three years, including some time spent in a facility for the criminally insane. More than forty years after those incidents, Bolden continues to seek justice for his persecution by government officials who he believes sought to neutralize and discredit his explosive accusations.

  And he might just find that vindication, given new research into the Kennedy assassination focusing on nearly four million pages of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. Declassified documents from the Warren Commission, House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and Assassinations Records Review Board all support Bolden’s claim that an aborted plot to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago was a significant threat.3 Recent detailed research by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann appears to verify at least part of Bolden’s story.4 In addition, a lawsuit filed by black Secret Service agents initiated in 2000 charging racism on the part of the agency demonstrates that bigotry and discrimination continued long after Bolden was dismissed. Bolden was both the first of many black agents to work in the Secret Service and the first of many to experience racist harassment within the elite agency.

  One of the great historic presidential ironies is that President Lincoln formally authorized the creation of the Secret Service on the day of his assassination, April 14, 1865.5 The Secret Service began to operate on July 5, 1865, with the mission to investigate counterfeiting of U.S. currency, a major problem at the time carried out by defeated Confederates, the Ku Klux Klan, professional and petty criminals, and others. In 1883, it was formally established as part of the Department of Treasury. After September 11, 2001, the Secret Service was brought under the Department of Homeland Security.6

  It wasn’t until the 1901 assassination of President McKinley that the agency was given responsibility for full-time protection of the president. Before then, U.S. presidents were more or less on their own. By 1960, when Bolden was hired, protective services had grown to cover the president-elect, the president, the vice president–elect, the vice president, and their immediate families. It also continued its original work of going after those who committed fraud against the U.S. government and counterfeiters.

  For the first nearly 100 years of its existence, the Secret Service, like most of the federal intelligence and law enforcement organizations, had only employed white people. Yet, in an era when the U.S. government felt unavoidable domestic and international pressure to address the country’s pervasive racial inequities, and with a new president who understood the rapidly shifting calculations of race and political power, the time for change had come.

  The passion and courage of the sit-ins of 1960 were embedded and expanded into the determination and bravery of the “freedom rides” during spring 1961. Although the Supreme Court’s 1960 decision in Boynton v. Virginia had outlawed segregation in interstate travel, there was little enforcement of the policy by officials in the South. Committed to integrating interstate transportation, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched a series of bus rides of blacks and whites from the North to the deep South virtually challenging the Ku Klux Klan and other racists to attempt to stop them. The goal, whether successful in reaching their destination of New Orleans or not, was to force the nation, Congress, and the White House to acknowledge the shame of segregation and its brutal enforcement. The riders were arrested and harassed along the way, and in Alabama and Mississippi, groups of white people savagely beat them with baseball bats, iron pipes, and steel chains. Even a Department of Justice official, John Seigenthaler, who was sent personally by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was brutally beaten and left unconscious in the street. The new president, who delivered stirring words supporting equality and integration in speeches, weakly called for a “cooling-off” period and refused to intervene until the well-publicized viciousness of the assaults on the riders was too disturbing to ignore.7

  The Kennedys preferred to work behind the scenes rather than publicly denounce Southern officials’ refusal to carry out their sworn responsibilities. Eventually, by the end of May, the Kennedy White House made a deal with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett that it would not send federal troops if Mississippi’s state troopers and National Guard provided protection.8 The deal also allowed for the freedom riders to be arrested once they reached Jackson, Mississippi, which they were. Many were sent to the horrific Parchman Penitentiary, more a modern-day plantation than a prison. The racial crisis was escalating.

  Against this background, two weeks later, on June 6, 1961, the first black Secret Service agent appointed to White House duty, i.e., responsible for protecting the president and the First Family, went to work. Bolden was looking forward to a long career in the Secret Service and was overjoyed by the opportunity. It was hard for him to imagine how this appointment, one in which Kennedy himself was proud and boastful, could go so sour so quickly. But it did.

  In 1957, Bolden, a former music teacher, started his career in law enforcement in St. Louis by working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency (infamous for its strike-breaking work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century), and rose to become its first black detective. That position would lead to his next job as an Illinois state trooper the following year. In those days, state troopers would work with the local or nearest Secret Service office to provide security if the president or any other high-ranking officials were going to be in the area. Bolden’s path to making history was gradually unfolding.

  In 1960, while state troops were teamed with the Secret Service to provide security for then-candidate Kennedy, Bolden asked one of the agents if there were any blacks in the Secret Service. The agent, Fred Backstrom, said that he was not sure there were, but he was sure that the Secret Service was expanding and looking for new agents. He later sent Bolden an application, and by the end of October he was on the job in the Chicago office. Bolden states that there was another black or mixed-raced agent in the Secret Service that he worked with once. However, that agent strenuously denied that he was black, according to Bolden, telling him, “Don’t call me a Negro. I’m no Negro. I’m Puerto Rican, so don’t ever call me a Negro again!”9 This agent clearly had issues, and his relationship with Bol
den remained strained throughout their time together in the Service. Bolden also had to deal with racist antics in his Chicago office. One agent routinely told “colored boy” jokes to menace him, and although he complained, his supervisors took no action.10

  Bolden’s path to the White House began next to a toilet. In April 1961, when the president came to visit Chicago, Bolden had been assigned to guard a basement restroom reserved exclusively for Kennedy. At one point, Kennedy’s entourage came down to the area and the president spotted Bolden. After being told his name and learning that he was a Secret Service agent and not a local police officer, the president struck up a conversation. Kennedy asked, “Has there ever been a Negro agent on the Secret Service White House detail, Mr. Bolden?” Bolden replied, “Not to my acknowledge Mr. President.” Kennedy then asked, “Would you like to be the first?” Unhesitatingly, Bolden stated, “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”11

  Soon thereafter Bolden received an invitation for a thirty-day routine training at the White House. In Washington, D.C., Bolden quickly found himself in a racial vise. In his relatively brief time at the White House, he noted a significant number of racist incidents by other Secret Service agents, mostly directed at him. After only four days on the job, on June 9, 1961, someone left him a racist caricature in the Secret Service manual that he had been studying. Other offensive behavior included regular use of the word “nigger” by white agents.

  The Secret Service official in charge of the day shift, Harvey Henderson, was particularly hateful. On one occasion Henderson told Bolden in front of a room full of fellow agents, “You were born a nigger, and when you die, you’ll still be a nigger. You will always be nothing but a nigger. So act like one.”12

  Bolden was also forced to live in Jim Crow housing while traveling. He found out that he would be segregated on a trip to West Palm Beach, Florida. A memo stated that Woody’s South Wind Motel “would not accept a colored agent at this motel but that he could find housing at a first-class colored motel at Riviera Beach, Florida.”13 He also felt very uncomfortable professionally because some agents expressed ire toward Kennedy because of his civil rights agenda, some referring to him as “that nigger-lover,” and Bolden felt that they were compromised in their willingness or capacity to protect the president, some going as far to say, according to Bolden, that “they’d take no action to protect him” if he were targeted by gunfire.14

  Kennedy himself appeared to take a liking to Bolden in their few encounters at the White House and at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Kennedy’s Jackie Robinson reference was made when the president happily introduced him to his press secretary, Pierre Salinger and his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. President Kennedy also introduced Bolden to his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who congratulated him on the appointment and even tried to recruit him to join the FBI, which was then under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department.15

  Whatever the Kennedys might have felt about having a black Secret Service agent on detail in the White House, the atmosphere of bigotry and the personal pressure on Bolden was too much to bear, and he decided to return to the Chicago office rather than apply for a relocation within the president’s detail. Approximately one month after arriving at the White House, Bolden was already on his way home. This would turn out to be a significant turning point for him. His hope to return to a normal life and continue in his career without the issues he had confronted in Washington, D.C. would be short-lived.

  Two years later, in 1963, the nation experienced even more intense turmoil as the battle over black rights continued to dominate national politics. Across the entire country voices were calling for equality and inclusion for black people. A dramatic turning point in civil rights and U.S. history occurred when, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. electrified the nation with his magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in front of 250,000 people, the largest demonstration in the nation’s capital up to that point. Under the theme of “Jobs and Freedom,” the rally was organized by the so-called “big six” of the Civil Rights Movement—A. Philip Randolph (Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters); Whitney Young (National Urban League); Roy Wilkins (NAACP); James Farmer (Congress of Racial Equality); John Lewis, (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee); and Martin Luther King Jr. (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Held 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and one day after the tragic death of black historian, author, and radical leader W. E. B. Du Bois, it was the prophetic high point of the civil rights era, soon to be eclipsed by the black power movement, the urban rebellions of the mid to late 1960s, and a shift in focus to electoral politics.

  White reaction against extending civil rights to black people was aggressive and violent. Whites in the South constantly threatened, frequently attacked, and sometimes murdered civil rights organizers. In a particularly brutal case, earlier in 1963 the black community in Birmingham, Alabama, had been terrorized by the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and organized mobs that attacked men, women, children, and the leaders of the local movement. On May 2, 600 children marched for civil rights in Birmingham. Local white authorities attacked them with police dogs and fire hoses and arrested hundreds. The situation became even more barbaric when on Sunday morning, September 15, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The timed explosion was one of the worst terrorist atrocities of the period, and killed four young black girls—Denise McNair, eleven years old; Addie Mae Collins, fourteen; Cynthia Wesley, fourteen; and Carol Robertson, fourteen.16 The bombing was followed by acts of arson and shootings in other parts of the city during which racist whites killed two more black children.17

  Across the region these types of attacks were common, occurring on a daily basis. The KKK was active in every state in the South, as were other racist groups and individuals prepared to kill anyone who dared to challenge the region’s white supremacy power structure.

  Murder was also on the mind of some of those who opposed Kennedy. Documents released in 1992 reveal that the FBI had discovered a plot to assassinate Kennedy during an Army-Navy football game that the president planned to attend in Chicago in early November 1963. The FBI informed the Secret Service in Chicago, and an investigation was launched. Kennedy ended up canceling the trip, although it remains unclear whether or not this was due to security concerns. Meanwhile, reportedly the group of two to four Cuban suspects somehow got away without being arrested.18 Bolden became frustrated at the way the office had handled the case and let his feelings be known. An additional plot to kill Kennedy was discovered in Tampa, Florida, and again an investigation was begun.19 On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Information about both the Chicago and the Tampa plots would be hidden from investigators in the period immediately after the assassination.

  Bolden had been aware of the earlier plots and felt they were directly relevant to the investigation of President Kennedy’s murder. He also wanted investigators to know that some Secret Service agents had behaved in a compromised manner that may have contributed to the security failure—through their unprofessional drinking and partying while on duty or their open antagonism toward the president. Undeterred after his superiors in Chicago discouraged him from pursuing the matter further, he decided to independently report what he knew to the Warren Commission, the body established by Congress to officially investigate the assassination.

  Bolden seriously misjudged the forces lined up against him. Although he had not made direct contact with the Commission yet, he had planned to secretly give testimony while in Washington, D.C. for a training; however, he was arrested on the first day of training and charged with discussing taking a bribe from one of his former arrestees. This felony charge would lead to his eventual conviction and dismissal from the agency, and, of course, prevented him from testifying before the Warren Commission.

  When at the end of his trial the jury appeared that it was deadlocked, Ju
dge J. Sam Perry, incredibly, informed the jurors that Bolden was guilty. He stated, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will now exercise a prerogative that I have as a judge that I seldom exercise. I will express to you and comment upon the evidence. In my opinion, the evidence sustains a verdict of guilty on counts one, two, and three of the indictment. Now, with that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, you may now retire and reconsider the evidence in light of this court’s instructions.”20

  Judge Perry’s highly prejudicial intervention and other improprieties failed to work. One lone juror continued to hold out against the other eleven who had voted guilty, and eventually a mistrial was declared. Stunningly, the second trial was assigned to the same judge, and this time the jury came back with a conviction. On June 29, 1966, two U.S. marshals arrived at Bolden’s home. He was taken first to Cook County jail and then transferred to the Terre Haute prison. He would spend three years there, at Fort Leavenworth, and at other facilities before being released on parole on September 25, 1969.

  Over time, Bolden’s charge of a frame-up became increasingly credible. There were two main witnesses against him. One was Frank Jones, whom Bolden had once arrested in a counterfeiting case. The other was Joseph Spagnoli, who later recanted his story. It also appeared that one of the U.S. attorneys, Richard T. Sikes, knew that Spagnoli’s story was false, because he had put him up to it.21