The Black History of the White House (3 page)

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 response 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 free
⁶
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.

Yet the next series of crises would once again see a president—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945)—confront an issue he would have preferred to keep in the closet. By early 1933, unemployment had grown to 25 percent and more than 4,000 banks had collapsed.
¹⁰
The Dust Bowl drought destroyed tens of thousands of farms, rendering more than 500,000 people homeless. Roosevelt desperately launched a number of policies to address these emergencies. Blacks would benefit only partially and often indirectly from his economic rescue policies. Indeed, in some arenas, as more whites' economic and social standing advanced, blacks actually lost ground in one of the most legislatively and policy-generous periods in U.S. history. “The wide array of significant and far-reaching public policies that were shaped and administered during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s,” Ira Katznelson notes in his history-revising book,
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
, “were crafted and administered in a deeply discriminatory manner.”
¹¹

An equally critical factor was the qualitative transformation of the framework under which U.S. business and much of
global capitalism would operate. Keynesian economics, which called for decisive state intervention in managing and policing big business, would result in the opening of political space for working-class prerogatives to emerge. Given the working-class status of most African Americans at the time, they too made some economic and political gains during the period. Progress was more regional than national, however, as the still white-dominated South dug in and refused to budge on the issue of segregation.

Black resistance would not relent either, and soon ballooned into a full-blown uprising with millions of African Americans driving the civil rights campaigns that began to engulf the entire South. In courtrooms, classrooms, and even restrooms, black activists and ordinary people alike challenged the system of white control. The black freedom movement mushroomed, opening new fronts on various levels with wide-ranging tactics and perspectives. The battle streams of civil rights and urban resistance would soon join a mighty river of national turbulence expressing multiple demands upon the nation in general and the White House in particular. Black struggle, antiwar resistance, and a vibrant youth counterculture drove the crises between 1955 and 1974. As discussed in Chapter 7, the political status quo was further destabilized by one president's unexpected refusal to run for reelection, the assassination of a presidential candidate, the resignation of a vice president, the resignation to preempt impeachment of a president, and the installation of both a president and a vice president who had not been elected to the office, all within the span of six years.

The late-term Civil Rights Era presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961), John Kennedy (1961–1963), and Lyndon Johnson (1963–1968) were reluctant to assist the cause of black freedom yet began to champion policies and endorse
legislation that attacked Jim Crow. During the four-year period from 1964 to 1968, the black view of the White House became more favorable as presidential pressure helped defeat white opposition to bills that finally broke the back of formal segregation in the South.