In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty in the South, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. But Roosevelt's victory created the opportunity for a group of African American intellectuals and activists to join his administration as racial affairs experts. Known as the Black Cabinet, they organized themselves into an unofficial council. They innovated antidiscrimination policy, documented the New Deal's inequalities, led programs that lifted people out of poverty and paved the way for greater federal accountability to African Americans and a greater black presence in government. But the Black Cabinet never won official recognition from Roosevelt, and with his death, it disappeared from history. This is its story. --