The Black History of the White House (27 page)

Black workers continued to staff the White House as
butlers, maids, and cooks and in other noninfluential service capacities. Like Paul Jennings and Elizabeth Keckly, some of these individuals went on to tell their stories in memoirs and other literature. While most of their writing was nonpolitical, it was not necessarily nonpartisan. Generations of butlers and maids were passing on their experiences and insights, providing voices of authenticity and alternative points of view on the history of their era. By the end of the segregation era, the White House would also have its first African American in an executive staff position.

Black musical presence at the White House also became more frequent and more diverse. For most black artists—from opera performers to classical musicians and gospel singers—the White House created opportunities to perform before dignitaries, world leaders, and others that did not exist outside of its doors. For some blacks, the only venue that gave them a chance to perform before prestigious audiences was the White House.

But these “advances” were nothing compared to the nightmare most black families experienced during the era. Overall, it was a time characterized by white disenfranchisement of black people, the introduction and enforcement of black codes and segregation, and terrorism from mob violence, lynching, organized groups, and corrupt law enforcement. President after president of the United States mostly ignored these developments and their impact on black families and communities. While the White House itself sometimes became the only site of non-discrimination in the city of Washington, in the main, it reflected all of the racial tensions, contradictions, and struggles of the segregationist period.

The Pre-Plessy Presidents

Andrew Johnson began a long line of U.S. presidents whose
tenure in the White House reinforced rather than combated the re-imposition of near slave-like conditions on African Americans in the South. Black sharecropping, for example, in which black laborers were given a share of the crop they produced on white-owned land in lieu of wages, generally kept them in perpetual debt and unable to advance economically. Black families were forced to continue to work without pay for generations.
³¹
Even worse conditions were not uncommon, from convict leasing to outright abduction and enslavement. Douglas A. Blackmon's book
Slavery By Another Name, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
documents these cases and demonstrates how whites were able to re-enslave blacks well into the twentieth century.

W. E. B. Du Bois notes that the sharecropping system and convict-leasing system were interrelated, and that both amounted to the re-enslavement of African Americans. He argues that they are “the direct children of slavery, and to all intents and purposes are slavery itself.”
³³
He goes to state, “The South believed in slave labor, and was thoroughly convinced that free Negroes would not work steadily or effectively. The whites were determined after the war, therefore, to restore slavery in everything but in name.”
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Du Bois's description of the conditions of convict-leasing is chilling:

The innocent were made bad, the bad worse; women were outraged and children tainted; whipping and torture were in vogue, and the death rate from cruelty, exposure, and the overwork rose to large percentages. . . . The prisoners often had scarcely any clothing, they were fed on a scanty diet of corn bread and fat meat, and worked twelve or more hours a day. After work each must do his own cooking.
³⁵

The battle between a radical Congress and a conservative White House would not endure. Due to partisan political interests, presidential politics, lack of popular support, and perhaps exhaustion, by the time of the disputed 1876 election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, black support in Congress had waned. Progressive, combative, and powerful legislators such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were gone or going.

Controversy over the black votes cast in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana sent the decision over the election to Congress. A bipartisan commission of fifteen representatives, senators, and Supreme Court members voted eight to seven to give the White House to Hayes, the infamous “Hayes-Tilden
Compromise,” with the understanding that he would implement the Democrats' anti-black agenda. By then, to a great degree, it did not matter much who won the presidency: Tilden, who clearly wanted to stop all progressive legislation and policies that favored African Americans, or Hayes, who quickly demonstrated his willingness to cast aside blacks within weeks of gaining the office. Congress's refusal to provide troop funding, and Hayes's order in the spring of 1877 to pull out the last of the troops that had been sent to the South to protect the right to vote for African Americans, merely symbolized the ongoing retrenchment of Southern racist domination that the White Houses of Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant, who both supported the restoration of political rights to the Confederates, had allowed to develop.
³⁶

Despite pre-presidential histories of support for abolition and black civil and voting rights by some presidents, including Republicans James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin H. Harrison, once in the White House, they showed virtually no courage in challenging the forces of white domination. Little was gained and much was lost during the administrations of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Democrat Grover Cleveland. Garfield's 199 days in office, a term cut short by an assassin's bullets, accomplished nothing to advance the racial equality agenda. In his March 4, 1881, inauguration speech, Garfield spoke strong words of support for educational inclusion and black civil and political rights stating:

The elevation of the negro [
sic
] race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. . . . There was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship. There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen. . . . The nation itself is responsible for the extension of the suffrage, and is under special obligations to aid in removing the illiteracy which it has added to the voting population. For the North and South alike there is but one remedy. All the constitutional power of the nation and of the States and all the volunteer forces of the people should be surrendered to meet this danger by the savory influence of universal education.
³⁷

Denial of education to blacks had been brutally enforced in the South during the era of slavery.

After the war, white views on black education did not change quickly. In his book
Black Reconstruction in America: 1660–1880
, W. E. B. Du Bois writes:

It was soon after the war that a white member of Johnson's restored Louisiana legislature passed one of the schools set up by the Freedmen's Bureau in New Orleans. The grounds were filled with children. He stopped and looked intently, and then asked, “Is this a school?” “Yes,” was the reply. “What, for niggers?” “Evidently.” He threw up his hands. “Well, well,” he said, “ I have seen many an absurdity in my lifetime,
but this is the climax
.”
³⁸

However, in his brief time at the White House, President Garfield defended states' rights and thus abdicated any responsibility to address the increasing acts of terrorism by whites against black communities. Garfield's commitment to an antiracist agenda was also suspect, given that he had once confided privately that he had “a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro [
sic
] being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way.”
³⁹

After Garfield had been sent to heaven or elsewhere by his assassin, he was replaced by Chester Arthur, who simply avoided the issue. Frederick Douglass states that when he learned that Arthur was going to be Garfield's vice president, he “felt the hand of death” upon himself.
⁴⁰
President Arthur's command of the White House was mostly inconsequential relative to black interests. However, it was on his watch in 1883 that the Supreme Court made its appalling decision that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (outlawing discrimination in public accommodations) was unconstitutional. Arthur meekly
informed Congress that he would support remedial civil rights legislation to address the decision, but no such legislation was ever drafted or passed.
⁴¹
Congress did not pass another civil rights bill until 1957.

Frustrated with the Republicans' pace of reform and facing an economic crisis, the country elected the first Democrat to the White House since the period before Lincoln. Grover Cleveland (1885–1889, 1893–1897), who uniquely would lose his reelection and then win again in the next election, represented a transitional moment in the relationship between African Americans and the White House, and African Americans and the nation. In 1895, during Cleveland's second term in office, the fearless and determined warrior Frederick Douglas passed, and within months Booker T. Washington rose to power, propelled by his aforementioned “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Cleveland attended the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition and heard Washington's delivery. He met with Washington right after the speech and later sent him a letter stating, “Your words cannot fail to delight and encourage all who wish well for your race; and if our colored fellow-citizens do not from your utterances gather new hope and form new determination to gain every valuable advantage offered them by their citizenship, it will be strange indeed.”
⁴²

The blame-the-victim philosophy of Cleveland (and Washington) mixed comfortably with the former's states' rights approach. As historian Rayford Logan points out, President Cleveland “undoubtedly believed . . . that the Southern question should be handled by Southerners.”
⁴³
His hands-off approach, of course, left the black community vulnerable to every nefarious strategy, evil scheme, and murderous plot to reassert white control. And, fittingly, it was during Cleveland's tenure that the Supreme Court ruled in
Plessy v. Ferguson
that segregation was legal under the spurious “separate but equal” premise, thereby giving Constitutional sanction for state-sponsored apartheid for the next six decades. The black community, however, would not concede the battle so easily.

One source of opposition came from inside the government. Following the Civil War, black leadership expanded beyond civil and political rights activists like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to elected and appointed officials, including those who were elected to Congress. From 1870 to 1901, twenty-two blacks, all Republicans, served in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives.
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Many of them were newly freed, but all were articulate and educated on the issues confronting the black community and the nation. Among the group were “seven lawyers, three ministers, one banker, one publisher, two school teachers, and three college presidents.”
⁴⁵
As advocates of black civil rights, benefits for black veterans, halting
Klan violence, advance of educational opportunities, and black land rights, they served as an oppositional voice to the conservative racial politics of the White House. Fittingly, the first black Senator in U.S. history, Mississippi's Hiram Revels was elected in 1870 to finish out the term of the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.