The Black History of the White House (31 page)

Bumbry was invited to the White House twice. Her first appearance came during the Kennedy administration in response to a direct invitation from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. She returned in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan, whose musical tastes were more country-western than classical, invited her to perform for the Chinese premier. In December 2009, President Obama awarded Bumbry a Kennedy Center honor.
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Black Staffers at the White House: Butlers and Maids

By the turn of the twentieth century, several generations of African Americans had worked at the White House. Similar to Paul Jennings and Elizabeth Keckly before them, some black staffers wrote memoirs and autobiographies.

From 1933 to 1955, Alonzo Fields was butler, chief butler, and eventually maître d'hôtel, for the White House during the administrations of Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. He had initially wanted to be a professional singer but was unable to fulfill that ambition. Fields also had training in domestic and household skills, however, that led to a chance to work for the Hoovers. His social and personal talents allowed him to stay and rise in the household structure of the White House. Fields captured all of his experiences and reflections in his book,
My 21 Years at the White House
.
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Fields was originally from the all-black town of Lyles Station, Indiana. His father, a general store owner, headed an all-black brass band. Alonzo learned to play many brass instruments and was reputed to have “a beautiful singing voice.”
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Unable to afford the musical education needed to make it as a concert singer, Fields, under the pressure of family responsibilities, joined the White House staff as a butler in 1931.

One of the many requirements of working at the White House was discretion—staff could not publicly discuss the things they saw and heard while at work. Fields respected that obligation, but secretly keep a diary recording his experiences in private code. He also saved mementos and souvenirs, including White House menus and special invitations. Many of the documents and other items he collected he later donated to the Truman Library after he retired.

Fields' job as chief butler entailed being “responsible for keeping track of all White House tablecloths, napkins, silverware,
glassware, and china. Also, he made menu suggestions to the first lady for important state dinners, receptions, teas, and family dinners. He supervised the chefs and servers. . . . He had to learn what would and would not please each president and his family.”
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Often the job was extremely personal, such as when he served breakfast to President Hoover.
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He also reminded his staff that their work was historically significant. He told them, “Boys, remember that we are helping to make history. We have a small part, perhaps a menial part, but they can't do much here without us. They've got to eat, you know.”
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Among the individuals he encountered over the years were Winston Churchill, England's Princess Elizabeth, Thomas Alva Edison, and John D. Rockefeller as well as cabinet members, senators, representatives, Supreme Court justices, and governors. Black leaders such as educator and diplomat Ralph Bunche, radical Paul Robeson, and educator Mary McCleod Bethune, also visited the White House during Fields's tenure.
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Similar to the fictional butler James Stevens in
The Remains of the Day
, Fields served the Roosevelts and Trumans through turbulent times including wars, presidents' deaths, the Great Depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the massive protests and mobilizations of the Civil Rights Movement.

Fields also provides insight into the racial politics of the White House. Few outside the White House, for example, were aware of the segregation that existed within it. According to Fields, prior to the Roosevelts, “even in the White House we had separate dining rooms. They had a Black and a White kitchen for the servants, yet they were working all together, all the time. But to me that shouldn't have been—not in the White House of all places. The White House should have been taking the lead on that.” Eleanor Roosevelt had a simple solution to the problem: she fired all the white staffers, “so all the help was
colored, and there was only one dining room.”
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Fields seemed to like the Roosevelts most, although like many African Americans at the time, he was critical of the fact that Roosevelt would not speak out strongly against lynching until two whites were killed in California.
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He says that Hoover told his cabinet, “I had my colored brethren in last night after dinner for a talk. . . . With our convention due soon, I wanted to talk to them about the related conditions of the races on employment and the Depression. . . . I told them that as their people are representative of 10 percent of our citizens, I couldn't see why they couldn't take a share in equal proportions in contributions to the nation.”
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Hoover, he claims, thought that long-term racial inequality would be harmful to the nation.

On Truman, he notes that the president was rebuked by the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin when they met in Germany, with the latter asking, “Why are you so interested in the Poles when you have American citizens who are not getting their voting rights?” An infuriated Truman later stated, “I'll never go anywhere to meet anybody again until we get these situations cleared up because I will never have anyone throw that up in my face again, that I'm far more interested in other people's voting rights than I am in the people in my nation.”
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Fields retired shortly after Eisenhower came to the White House in 1953.

Tenures of White House servant staff have tended to be long, spanning multiple administrations. John Ficklin served at the White House for more than forty-three years and worked for nine U.S. presidents. He first came to work for Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and stayed until Ronald Reagan's administration, retiring in 1983.
Jet
magazine noted that he had been called the “soul of the White House.”
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Like Fields, he worked as a butler and supervisor during his career.
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Over the
years, nine members of the Ficklin family worked at the White House, including John's brothers Charles and Samuel. Eugene Allen, who worked as a pantryman, butler, and maître d'hôtel, worked at the White House from the Truman administration until 1986, leaving during Reagan's second term. Staff careers are long in part due to the collegiality among the workers. Allen stated, “I had a good relationship with all the butlers. You know, it's closer than your relatives, because you work so close together. You see them every day. You eat together, you work together. It's every day.”
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Butlers were not the only workers to write their stories—so did the maids. In 1961, Lillian Rogers Parks published her memoir,
My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House
.
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The book, written with author Frances Spatz Leighton, was actually the story not only of her own work life as a seamstress and maid in the White House from Hoover to Eisenhower, but also of the experiences of her mother, Maggie Rogers, who worked there from Taft years into the Roosevelt era. Maggie Rogers regularly took her daughter with her to work, and, like Alonzo Fields and other staffers, wrote of her experiences both from notes and from memory. She encouraged Parks to write a book about their unique observations. Rogers rose to become the first black maid to work on the presidential floor of the White House.

As the
New York Times
wrote, the book was quite tame although extremely popular when it came out. It was on the
New York Times
best-seller list for twenty-six weeks. In 1979, Parks's book led to a nine-part NBC mini-series. Reportedly, the book's popularity was so far-reaching that incoming First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy made all the staff sign nondisclosure agreements stipulating that they would not write about their experiences at the White House once they left. Unfortunately,
the person put in charge of getting the signatures, Jacqueline's white secretary Mary Gallagher, conveniently did not sign one herself and in 1969 published a book about her White House life, titled
My Boss
.
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Perhaps for reasons of discretion,
My Thirty Years
provides only minimum insight into the racial politics of the various presidents. The Roosevelts, particularly Eleanor, come across as the most consistent about racial equality inside the White House. When Eleanor's mother-in-law came to visit the White House and criticized her “for using colored help instead of white help,” she reportedly responded, “You run your house and I'll run mine.”

Despite the writings that later appeared after their leaving the White House, the household staff members were meant to be seen and not heard, and, under no circumstances were they to demonstrate partisan politics. For more than 150 years, the White House had never employed a black person in any position outside the servant staff. Things were finally about to change.

Morrow, Eisenhower, and the Power of Symbolism

Black political engagement with the White House was hampered by the fact that the only African Americans on the presidential payroll were household staff. It was not until 1955 that the first African American—E. Frederic Morrow—was officially employed as a presidential aide. As always with such racial firsts, the question is raised of whether or not having a black face in a high place necessarily constitutes genuine racial progress. Symbolism aside, black appointments are defined by the substance of the position, the use of the position by the individual involved, and the social and political context within which the position must operate to effectively address the consensus concerns of the black community. These concerns are generally not only racial but also center on broader issues of economic fairness, political inclusion, social justice, human rights, and other areas of life and society. While expectations are often high that a black person who becomes a first will deliver the maximum change possible, experience has shown that ultimately it is the nuts and bolts of organizing, politicking, negotiating, educating, mobilizing, and bringing as much pressure to bear as possible that leads to substantial transformation. The degree to which the breakthrough is an authentic reflection of these processes, rather than an appeasement or ploy to deflect criticism, determines whether real progress occurs. While Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed E. Frederic Morrow to be the first African American to hold an executive position on the president's White House staff, he also
sought to do as little as possible to advance civil rights during his two terms in office, and Morrow, despite his personal aims, could do very little to change that fact.

On July 10, 1955, the White House officially announced that Morrow had been appointed to serve as a top aide to Eisenhower.
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He brought with him high qualifications, including a law degree from Rutgers University Law School. In black politics, he had served a stint as field secretary for the NAACP. In most ways, however, Morrow's politics were more party oriented than racial. As a committed Republican who had had to endure twenty years of Democratic administrations, he eagerly took a leave of absence from his public affairs position at CBS to work on Eisenhower's 1952 campaign. In that period, when the black vote was wavering between the two major parties, it would not have been unusual for an African American to work for a Republican presidential candidate. Morrow apparently labored hard enough to be recognized by the campaign's leadership, particularly Sherman Adams, who became Eisenhower's chief of staff. After the election, Adams not only promised Morrow a White House job but, somewhat irresponsibly, it seems, recommended that he quit his CBS position in the interim and move to Washington, D.C.

Morrow naively took Adams' suggestion and then waited. And waited and waited. After six months of putting him off, presidential adviser Bernard Shanley finally told Morrow that there was no job for him, and offered no explanation as to why. As it turned out, not everyone on Eisenhower's staff was as racially enlightened as Adams. One aide, Wilton B. Persons, an Alabama native and staunch segregationist, had threatened to lead a walkout of presidential staff, particularly of white women staffers, if Morrow—or any black person—was given such a high-level position.
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The threat worked, and Morrow was
forced to seek employment elsewhere. He finally landed a position at the Commerce Department as a business adviser.

More than two years later, in July 1955, he did get a call and was officially appointed administrative officer for special projects, a purposely vague title referring to equally vague work. Morrow himself called the job “just plain housekeeping.”
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Reflective of the deliberate ambiguity of the position and the president's own hesitancy, Morrow was not officially sworn in to the position until January 27, 1959, at a ceremony the president usually attended, but Eisenhower did not go. Thus, seven years after the election, and heading towards the end of Eisenhower's second term, Morrow made history.