The Black History of the White House (32 page)

Although Morrow took the stance that he was not there specifically to address civil rights, i.e., he did not want to be the “black man in the White House,” in fact, he was. He was often sent to speak to black groups or be present at state functions to demonstrate the diversity of the administration and the advanced state of black progress.

As times changed and his tenure wore on, Morrow grew more militant regarding racial issues. His own civil rights concerns lead him to continually advocate for the administration to address the explosive state of race relations of the 1950s. He sent memos to Adams requesting that the president speak out about the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.
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He suggested that the White House invite a dozen black leaders to the White House for a conversation about the nation's civil rights issues.
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In February 1956, as the Montgomery Bus Boycott was becoming more intense and violent, its leaders increasingly under attack, Morrow asked to go to Alabama to unofficially represent the administration and talk to the movement's organizers. All of these requests were politely but unambiguously rejected. Like almost every other administration before it, the
White House made it clear that appeasing Southern whites took priority over any substantial action regarding rights and protection for the black community.

All the while, Morrow was Jim Crowed at the White House and, like the White House's black servant staff, in the city of Washington as well. Initially none of the White House secretaries were willing to work for him. That only changed when a woman volunteer agreed to work for him as an expression of her religious practice of nondiscrimination. It became an unspoken policy that women would only enter his office in twos. Life was not much better outside the walls of the White House. Washington, D.C. was segregated at the time, so Morrow's historic appointment notwithstanding, he lived, ate, and moved around only within strictly racially determined divisions of the city.

After Eisenhower was reelected with 47 percent of the black vote, his administration seemed satisfied that its do-nothing strategy on civil rights had paid off, despite the fact that racial tensions were escalating by the hour. In June 1957, Morrow fired off yet another memo to Sherman Adams, stating truthfully that black leaders were being “ignored, snubbed, and belittled by the president and his staff.”
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Morrow strongly suggested that Eisenhower meet with Montgomery Bus Boycott leader Martin Luther King, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and NAACP head Roy Wilkins all together. Adams agreed, and a meeting was set up for later that fall. However, the school integration crisis in Little Rock postponed the gathering as Eisenhower gave preference to meeting with Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. Rather than sit down with those who could have provided a progressive insight and a peaceful solution to the conflagration, Eisenhower choose to meet with the person who was the chief obstacle to a resolution.

Finally, on June 23, 1958, after almost a year of delays, the Morrow-initiated meeting occurred, with Lester Granger of the National Urban League added to the group. It was the first presidential sit-down with black leaders since Eisenhower was elected president in 1952. The meeting lasted less than an hour and consisted mostly of Randolph reading a nine-point list of recommendations. The participants felt that the president had listened civilly and indicated some sympathy for their cause.

Following the meeting, there is no indication that Eisenhower made any change in his cautious, hesitant, publicity-concerned, Southern-favoring approach to civil rights. There were changes for Morrow, however. For a short time he was reluctantly moved to a position as an assistant to Arthur Lawson, the president's speechwriter, and later he was named White House Officer for Special Projects, which seemed little different from his original position except that this time he was explicitly tasked to work only on White House policy and politics regarding civil rights. The surreal nature of his tenure was further amplified when his nemesis, Wilton Persons, replaced the man who was nearly his only supporter, Adams, as White House chief of staff. Before either of them assumed their new positions, Persons at one point had told Morrow never to approach him with anything involving civil rights, because, being from Alabama, he had experienced personal conflicts within his family due to “the administration and its stand on civil rights.”
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In other words, even the mildest of efforts by Eisenhower regarding civil rights was so offensive to the Persons clan that any discussion on the issue was a non-starter for him. If Morrow had been marginalized before, now he was completely shut out.

As if he did not have enough troubles, a few months later he tried to convince baseball great Jackie Robinson that he should
not participate in a youth march being organized by Harry Belafonte, A. Philip Randolph, and others in Washington, D.C.'s radical black network. In the post–Little Rock atmosphere, the integrated march was set to forcefully criticize the woefully poor efforts of state and federal integration policies. The attempt to pressure Robinson backfired when Robinson went to the media with the threat, and Morrow came under severe criticism from the black community. Up to that point, despite Eisenhower's tepid policies and weak responses, Morrow had generally been given a pass by African Americans, a kind of credit card for being the first, but now it had cashed out. The walls were caving in on Morrow.

On occasion Morrow would publicly speak out against racism in brutally frank terms, such as when he admonished the Republican Women's Conference for its segregationist policy prohibiting black women from joining the organization. However, he rarely criticized the administration's nonfunctional civil rights policy in any public manner. In fact, one of his key responsibilities was to sell White House policy without qualification to an understandably and increasingly skeptical black public. The banality of his position was brought home full force when he gave a speech honoring Eisenhower at the 1960 Republican National Convention during which he thanked him for “bringing equality to all” and ludicrously added, “No man has done more to bring the truth about real democracy to the world than Dwight David Eisenhower.”
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Although it is unknown if Morrow would have continued working in the White House if Nixon had won, with John F. Kennedy's victory the question was moot. At that point, Morrow had little utility for the Republican Party, which would soon turn Eisenhower's conciliation to Southern white racism into its principal strategy. The sea change in which black voters
shifted to the Democratic Party, and the growing, increasingly militant black movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also marginalized Morrow. The first black person in U.S. history to work in the White House in a position of power soon faded into obscurity.

CHAPTER 7

Prologue: Abraham Bolden's White House Story

The black struggle for freedom and equality reached new heights and intensity in the 1960s and early 1970s. As activist Stokely Carmichael noted, the desire was for black power because “With power, the masses could make or participate in making the decisions which govern their destinies, and thus create basic change in their day-to-day lives.”
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Black activists and the black community targeted racism on all fronts; no area of society in which discrimination and bigotry existed was immune. The direct-action politics of the decade was launched on February 1, 1960, when four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that refused to serve blacks. Within five years, the call for “black power” was a national cry of the black community. By the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, radical and revolutionary black organizations such as the Black Panther Party, Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and League of Revolutionary Black Workers were calling for the establishment of a socialist United States where racism would no longer exist nor its resurgence be tolerated. Black
nationalist organizations and movements such as the Nation of Islam (NOI), Congress of African People, United Slaves (US), and many local groups were demanding black control of black communities. Civil rights leaders were shifting from protest strategies to electoral ones, taking advantage of the hard-won Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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.
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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.
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Recent detailed research by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann appears to verify at least part of Bolden's story.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!”
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This agent clearly had issues, and his relationship with Bolden 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.