The Black History of the White House

Clarence Lusane (2011)

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. (George Santayana)

Arizona: not only is SB 1070 controversial (immigration law), but HB 2281 bans schools from teaching ethnic studies courses.

p. 22 Presidents, and political leaders in general, are captives of the period and circumstances they inherit. Elected leaders have the potential to advance a politcal and policy agenda, but only within the limits of the social and broader historical constraints of their times.

(regarding Blacks in Revolutionary America) It is important to note that "free" is not the same as "equal." While a small percentage of African Americans were not held as slaves, and are commonly referred to as "free", they did not enjoy the same rights and privileges enjoyed by whites. Restrictions were placed on voting rights, business and property ownership, marriage, legal rights, education, and other areas of life and livelihood, such that the distinction between slave and freedman was not as broad as it seemed. And there was always the omnipresent threat of being kidnapped and being sold into slavery, an atrocity no white American has ever suffered [impressment though]. [Although we should not diminish the difference between slave and free, we should reconsider the difference between free white and free black in America at taht time]

p. 27 [much like Washington, Lincoln eventually permited blacks to join the army]

p. 27 "The Lincoln White House resolved the issue of slavery, but not that of racism."

p. 35 Ona "Oney" Maira Judge, the slave who, while never once reporting ever being beaten or treated poorly, escaped from slavery, her master / owners were George and Martha Washington.

remember, Washngton signs into law the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act

MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show - July, 2009: Rachel corrects, clarifies and counters the bigoted untruths about who built this country, Sotomayor's law article publication record, her Harvard law review record, and affirmative action. - snip - MADDOW: But here's the statement from my discussion with Pat that does require the most emphatic correction: BUCHANAN (VIDEO): White men were 100 percent of the people who wrote the Constitution, 100 percent of the signed the Declaration of Independence, 100 percent of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably 100 percent of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks... MADDOW: Pat joined us for this discussion from a studio in Washington D.C. that is not far from the White House, which was, of course, built by slaves, who are not white folks. The U.S. Capitol, the physical building, was built by slaves. The city of Washington D.C., where Pat has spent his entire life, was physically built in part by slave labor. It's not even possible to imagine how America could have competed for a place in the global economy in the 1800s, say, without plantation cotton and tobacco and sugar and rice and the other industries that were so thoroughly dependant on slave labor. BUCHANAN (VIDEO): This has been a country built basically by white folks... MADDOW: That statement is only true if you don't consider anyone other than white folks to be folks. Even if you only consider slave labor, even if, for example, you reimagine the railroads somehow magically building themselves without Chinese laborers. The idea that only white people built America is a fantasy and it should not have been maintained on this show as fact. As for who has died for this country in combat? More than 200,000 Black Americans fought for the Union in the Civil War. Thousands even fought for the Confederacy. 1.2 million African Americans served in World War II, and, yes, they were among those who stormed the beaches at Normandy. The Defense Department says almost 10,000 Mexican Americans fought for the Union during the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics served in the armed forces during World War II. 12 Hispanics were awarded the Medal of Honor. 24 Asian Americans received the Medal of Honor for heroism in World War II. BUCHANAN (VIDEO): This has been a country built basically by white folks. MADDOW: That's... just not true. I love white folks. I'm white folks. Yay, white folks. It's just not factually true to generalize from white experience to explain how America came to be.

p. 52 (remember the Somerset case of 1772) An alternative view regarding the driving force behind Am Rev is that contiued ties to England could lead emancipation. Preempting the Crown's abolition of slavery in the colonies became an urgent matter for the southern Colonies, and slave owners who perhaps had been hesitant at first to join the independence movement were now fully for independence, but their participation to the cause would come at a price: the perpetuation of slavery.

p. 56 (when discussing literalist interpeters of the Constitution) Conservative defenders or original intent obscure the unambiguous willingness of many of the young nation's leaders to politcally and socially continue the disenfranchisement of millions. {the Declaration, the Articles and the Constitution -- euphemisms and cautious language were often used, the words slavery and slave never appeared in these final documents but all parties involved were fully aware that slavery was being legally perpetuated. national unity, or the exigent need for such, trumped morality.)

Jefferson's slave, Richard, was in the background, tending to his master, the entire time Jefferson was holed up in the Philly house he was drafting the Declaration of Independence.

p. 85 (regarding Washington and his slave cook Hercules) "In the personal battle between refusing to particpate in human trafficking or eating well, the latter won out."

p. 96 (the president's temporary residence in Philly and the efforts to sanitize history by hiding the slave quarters section of this residence when a new Constitutional Center was being built in 2002)

The State House bell was not called the Liberty Bell until much later, and the name change came from the Abolitionists.

p. 108 James Hoban gets much praise by many historians for his building of the White House (it would seem that he built it himself), but there is no praise, in fact no mention, of the many slaves and other poor laborers who actually did the building.

"nightwalking", white many male slaves did at night, walking great distances to spend just moments with wife and other family before having to steal back in the night to their own plantation and master. The lengths many would go to to be with family.

November 6, 1860, Lincoln is elected president; December 20, 1860 South Carolina secedes; followed by, and before Lincoln took office March 4, 1861, Mississipi (January 9), Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia (January 19), Louisiana (January 26), Texas (February 1). Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina (May 20) would all follow after the war begins April 12.

slavery is abolished, finally!, in Washington, D.C. April 11, 1862.

p. 181 Lincoln postpones signing Emancipation Proclamation, his hand was shaking too much? The reason? historians say he had been greeting and shaking hands all day; others think he was nervous beyond control. (also keep in mind, abolitionist sentiments often did not include a call for racial equality)

(regarding colonization efforts) Many free blacks saw their future as citizens of the United States and nowhere else.

(all before the E.P) Lincoln enraged and rescinds a military order enacted in the field by Union General John C. Fremony that freed black persons enslaved by whites who were in revolt against the Union. (August 31, 1861) Lincoln also opposed, but signed, the Confiscation Act of 1861.

keep in mind the E.P. was a presidential order; it was not an act of Congress or an Amendment, and with that limitation it had questionable long-term standing.

Andrew Johnson - openly racist, failed to intervene when black voters and activists came under attack from white terrorist groups; he advocated and gave pardonst to Confederates; ousted black employees from the Freedmen's Bureau; rescinded Sherman's order to give land to blacks; vetoed funding for the Freedmen's Bureau; vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866

Teddy Roosevelt: prior to becoming president, blacks were "the most utter under-developed" of the races; they were "suffering from laziness and shiftlessness"; "a perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the Negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else."

Oscar De Priest, first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century (1928, Illinois)

October 17, 1901, Roosevelt issued an order officially naming the president's residence "the White House."

p. 233 Cold War proves problematic for segregationists and those who accomodated them, as the Soviets and newly independent African and Caribbean nations would point to the U.S. (defender of Democracy) for its audacious racial hypocrisy.

from 1870 to 1901, 22 blacks, all Republicans, served in the Senate and House; the first black Senator in U.S. history, Hiram Rhodas, Mississippi (1870), who was elected to finish out the term of former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

Ida B. Wells: an outspoken leader against lynchings, journalist and activist, 71 years before Rosa Parks, she launched and initially won a lawsuit against a Tennessee train company that forcefully removed her from a whites-only area on one of the compnay's trains. for more on lynching, withoutsanctuary.org

Du Bois: the one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency; and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

p. 249 1911, Livemore, Kentucky, black man was snatched from a local jail, taken to the opera house, and hanged from the ceiling. Town residents paid admission to be allowed to shoot his body; NAACP sends an emergency message to President William Howard Taft to urge Congress to respond; Taft never answered.

Wagner-Van Nuys Bill finally passes the House in 1938, but after 30-day filibuster in the Senate, it was tabled and never revived. In essence, white lawmakers were granting immunity to white people to commit hate crimes, murder, terrorism. [is this similar to 2011 and Obama Admin and direction to Justice Dept. to not seek judgments regarding DOMA]

FDR, telling the NAACP why he did not push for progress on anti-lynching legislation: "I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The Southeners by reason of seniority rule in Congress are chairmen of occupy strategic places on omst of the committees. If Ic ome out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I JUST CAN'T TAKE THAT RISK."

p. 254 During the FDR era, Billie Holiday writes and sings "Strange Fruit"; Southern trees bear a strange fruit

it was not until 1968 that the first federal anti-lynching law was passed as part of the Civil Rights Act. and on June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate officially apologizes for its failure to enact anti-lynching bills. "Lynching is not a footnote to American historym but integral to the text."

the DAR refuse Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall (owned by the DAR) in 1939, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt immediatley arranges to have Anderson perform at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson would give an magnificent performance and the First Lady resigned from the DAR.

p. 281 in 2000, a lawsuit filed by black Secret Service agents, claiming racism on the part of the agency

Supreme Court: Boynton v. Virginia (1960) outlawed segregation in interstate travel, there was little enforcement of the policy by officials in the South.

September 15, 1963: 4 little girls (less than a month after the March on Washington; progress?); this bombing was followed by arson and shooting in other parts of Birmingham during which white racists killed two more black children.

p. 297 "The carefully cultivated and protected image of the Secret Service as a model of impeccable service and sefless professionalism was further shattered by a notorious security breakdown during the first year of the Obama administration. (November 4, 2009, first official state dinner hosted by the Obamas for Indian prime minister, and the now notorious Salahi party crashers.) While it is doubtful that a similar black (or muslim?) couple would have been able to talk their way through White House security--the fact that both as 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 serious of the security failure."

"In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate." (Toni Morrison) p. 304 (on the black power movement in the 60s) "These pioneering black women and men were not asking something from power; they were emenating power itself." p. 308 "due to widespread animosity toward the war, widespread urban rebellions in 67 and 68, loss of his base in the South, and the looming possibility of tens of thousands of low-income people pouring into D.C. and setting up camp, on March 31, 1968, LBJ announced that he would not seek reelection. The assassination of King four days later, and RFK on June 5 not only spelled the end of LBJ's Great Society effort, but opened the door for a law-and-order Republican to succeed him. (Shirley Chisholm, March 26, 1969, speech before House of Reps) "We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote 'no' on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war.