The Black History of the White House (34 page)

After years of delay, Roberts suddenly acquired a work ethic and reacted quickly to the Writ. On October 24, 2004, within two days of its filing, he ruled that “despite the [agents'] compelling allegations of discrimination within the Secret Service,” the class action part of the suit should be dismissed on technical grounds because all the agents had not, as required, completely exhausted all necessary federal administrative channels before bringing the case into federal court.
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Roberts contended that the agents had bypassed the internal processes for settling their disputes. Unsurprisingly, Roberts did not address the conflict-of-interest allegation raised by the Black Agents group.

While Roberts's ruling was a setback, it did not prevent Black Agents of the Secret Service from refiling the class action suit after going through all the administration steps and still finding no relief. In addition, individual claims would continue. Despite the filing of the case in 2000 and the unfavorable attention it brought to the Secret Service, overt racism continued to be a problem within the agency. In 2008, once some records were finally released, it was revealed that from 2003 through 2005, during the Bush administration, at least ten email messages contained racist jokes and messages. Remarkably, these messages were sent or forwarded from Secret Service supervisors. One email, referring to an assassination attempt on black leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, stated that if a missile hit a plane on which he was flying, it “certainly wouldn't be a great loss and it probably wouldn't be an accident either.”
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Another email made a joke about lynching.

The high rank of the Secret Service officials sending these emails demonstrated that the hostility was not a matter of isolated improprieties of entry-level employees, but rather institutional racism being perpetuated by agency leadership. One email dated October 9, 2003, that referred to a “Harlem Spelling Bee” and ridiculed black speaking styles was sent by Thomas Grupski, then assistant director for protective operations and later promoted to head the Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs. Another racially inappropriate email about interracial sex, dated February 2003, was sent by Donald White—then head of the Presidential Protective Detail—to Kurt Douglass, the agent in charge of the Secret Service office in Cincinnati.
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In April 2008, a noose was left in a room used by a black instructor at the James J. Rowley Training Center in Beltsville, Maryland, where the Secret Service trains. A white agent admitted to leaving the rope and was put on administrative leave. The first response by the Secret Service was to state, “There has been no indication of racial intent on the part of the employee who has claimed responsibility.”
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Although the rope was found and reported on April 16, it took the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility eight more days to begin a formal investigation.
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As
Newsweek
reported, the agency first debated whether the noose was even a noose or just a hanging rope.
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The emails came to light because a different judge in the case brought by the Black Agents group, Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson, proved much more aggressive than her predecessor in pushing the Secret Service to give up files relevant to the case. She strongly criticized the agency for destroying records, deleting emails, failing to produce documents, and needlessly dragging out the case. On three occasions she admonished the agency and the Bush administration. The agency had been able
to get away with stonewalling the case for so long because the Bush Justice Department had allowed it to.

The carefully cultivated and protected image of the Secret Service as a model of impeccable service and selfless professionalism was further shattered by a notorious security breakdown during the first year of the Obama administration. On November 24, 2009, at the first official state dinner hosted by the Obamas for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the supposedly super-tight, multilayered, impenetrable circle of security around the White House and the president was brazenly breached by a publicity-seeking couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, and Carlos Allen, who entered with the official Indian delegation. Without an official invitation, all three were able to get into the event and even shake hands with President Obama and other top administration officials. Before the dinner was officially over, the Salahis had left and began posting pictures of themselves at the White House on the Internet.

While it is doubtful that a similar black couple would have been able to talk their way through White House security—the fact that both as a candidate and as a U.S. president Obama had reportedly received more death threats than any president in history, in part because of his race, underscores the seriousness of the security failure.
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Bolden has surely been watching these developments with some sense of vindication. His persecution by the agency and then the judicial system was a toxic mix of race and politics at the White House. From Kennedy to George W. Bush, and perhaps beyond, the White House has allowed racist behavior and discrimination to run rampant within the agency charged with protecting the president.

After the pioneering appointments of E. Frederic Morrow by Eisenhower and Bolden by Kennedy, black faces in high
places became more frequent at the White House. Soon there would be other presidential aides, with significantly more visibility and authority than Morrow or Bolden. The 1960s would also bring black cabinet appointments, beginning with a trickle and then becoming normal. In fact, as a consequence of black activism, even conservative presidents felt an obligation to bring some racial diversity to their cabinets. The White House would also start to swing as it had never done before, as the sweet sound of black jazz musicians began to flow at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The 1960s and 1970s: The White House, the Modern Black Freedom Movement, and Averting Crisis

The 1960s would be a challenging time for the White House on many levels, particularly in racial politics. Racial and ethnic barriers (as well as gender, age, religion, disability, and sexual orientation) were being pushed and broken at a dizzying pace. Millions were mobilizing in the streets, suites, and other sites to become involved in their communities and in the political structures that made decisions affecting their lives. Trade unions found new life after decades of retreat following the organizing advances of the 1930s. Young people fought the White House over the Vietnam War and its other foreign and domestic policies. The 1960s were a time of turmoil not only
in the United States but around the world as workers' movements in Europe and liberation movements in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin American directly confronted centuries-old power structures.

Under John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, the White House would be relentlessly confronted by the black community. On multiple fronts, black organizations, churches, and social movements mobilized to fight back against racial inequality at every level of daily life. With powerful leadership, black people of all ages used protest marches, civil disobedience, and relentless lobbying to open up space for landmark reforms in the area of racial justice and civil rights. The black freedom struggle was creating a culture of resistance that spread through church networks, the media, and the popular music of the time.

What historian C. Vann Woodward has called the “Second Reconstruction” came about because substantial change was the only way to prevent widespread civil unrest and revolt.
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Power brokers in the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court passed reforms that had been rejected or ignored for decades. In nearly every area of U.S. society, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other groups historically oppressed and marginalized by whites were making breakthroughs by organizing. These accomplishments, however, were overwhelmingly driven from the bottom up rather than top-down organizing strategies. Wide-ranging social movements were applying relentless pressure on a historically white-dominated system to transform or risk continued disruption, rebellion, or even destruction. Those in power in the areas of public policy, business, academics, sports, and entertainment were forced to get involved, and their concessions were for the most part due to the mobilization of millions of activists and the radicalizing atmosphere of the
period. It is also important to note that these changes were profoundly uneven. While the two coasts and large urban areas in the Midwest made changes relatively rapidly, in the South and many small communities around the country change was difficult and slow, and white backlash was stern and often violent.

And, once in place, newly gained reforms were often immediately endangered, either from passivity and timidity in their enforcement or from determined attack. Democratic administrations gave strong rhetorical support to defending the gains of the period while offering little support when they came under assault, and sometimes distancing themselves from black legislators, civil rights leadership, and other progressives. Republicans, using supposedly race-neutral frames, sought to roll back or stall any advances in racial equity and social justice.

The White House was not immune to the transformations and turbulence occurring across the country. From the liberal and progressive candidates who ran for office to the newly diverse staff at the White House to the opening for a more inclusive cultural life, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was forced to change with the times. And militant black advocates who went to the White House to meet with the president during this period, such as Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and John Lewis, came with support from millions of African Americans who were working at the local level to bring more justice, fairness, democracy, and equality into U.S. social, cultural, economic, and political life.

For the twenty years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, liberal, centrist, and even conservative presidents made accommodations with a vibrant black movement whose demands pushed the white-dominated political system to places it never could have imagined. And whether it was protests outside the White House or negotiations inside the White House, it was
clear, in the words of 1960s soul singer Sam Cooke, that
change gonna come
.

Following the generally unresponsive Dwight Eisenhower administration, the 1960 victory of John F. Kennedy over the anti–civil rights agenda of Richard Nixon energized the black community. Although Kennedy's politics were mostly moderate on domestic policy (and hawkish on foreign policy), they were also pragmatic, and he recognized early on that black rights were an issue that could no longer be ignored. The increasing urbanization of African Americans put significant stress on the Democratic Party not only to address the civil rights issues that were being raised by the black community in cities like Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, but also to support the voting and political rights of blacks in the South. Blacks outside the South identified with Southern blacks, not least because many were only a generation or two removed from the region, and the overwhelming majority still had family and friends there. Even for those who did not, the sense of shared pain and destiny was acute, and support for ending legal segregation was nearly universal.

Kennedy's words tended to carry more impact than his policies. During his campaign he gave personal support to the Civil Rights Movement by calling Coretta Scott King after Martin Luther King Jr. and others were arrested attempting to desegregate Rich's department store in Atlanta in October 1960, only a few weeks before the election. While the Nixon campaign declined E. Frederic Morrow's suggestion that the candidate send a telegram, the Kennedys were deftly manipulating the situation. Robert negotiated behind the scenes to have King released, always wary of losing white Southern votes, as John placed the now famous call to Coretta (which Robert initially vigorously opposed). Most analysts believe that the black vote
was decisive in Kennedy's winning the White House, one of the narrowest election victories in U.S. history. As researcher Christopher Booker notes, Kennedy won Illinois by only 9,000 votes in a state with 250,000 black voters, and South Carolina by only 10,000 votes in a state with 40,000 black voters.
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Overall, Kennedy won 49.7 percent of the vote compared to Nixon's 49.6 percent.

However, except for a number of low-level appointments and two Executive Orders that reinforced the need for antidiscrimination policies throughout the federal system and, in a limited way, desegregated public housing, it is difficult to identify any substantive effort on the part of Kennedy regarding civil rights. On March 6, 1961, he issued Executive Order 10925, which required that federal contractors take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Besides being the first federal document to use the words “affirmative action,” the Order also established the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a tepid step that later evolved into the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Executive Order 11063, issued on November 20, 1962, addressed discrimination in housing but only applied to new housing or construction directly financed by the federal government. And this was issued after the 1962 midterm Congressional elections, protecting the president and the Democrats against any backlash from white voters.

Meanwhile the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, spent a great deal of time looking for communist infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement. During this period J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, under Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, extensively monitored King and other civil rights leaders.
Alerted by FBI wiretaps, on June 22, 1963, the president took King for a walk in the Rose Garden to ask him to dismiss two suspected communists on his staff—fundraiser and voter mobilizer Jack O'Dell and strategist Stanley Levinson.
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When King told O'Dell about the encounter later (and his speculation that maybe Kennedy was being wiretapped himself, accounting for why the talk took place in the Rose Garden), O'Dell's understandable response was “Hoover can kiss my ass!”
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O'Dell and King were convinced that the real aim was to limit the power and success of the movement, and that authorities hoped to accomplish that by getting rid of two of King's most trusted and effective advisers.