The Black Cabinet : the untold story of African Americans and politics during the age of Roosevelt

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Title:

The Black Cabinet : the untold story of African Americans and politics during the age of Roosevelt

Author:

Watts, Jill, 1958- author.

ISBN:

9780802129109

Edition:

1st ed.

Physical Description:

viii, 540 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Personal Subject:

Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882-1945-Relations with African Americans.

Subject Term:

African Americans -- Politics and government -- 20th century.

African Americans -- Economic conditions -- 20th century.

African Americans -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- History -- 20th century.

Geographic Term:

United States -- Race relations -- Political aspects -- 20th century.

United States -- Politics and government -- 1933-1945.

Summary:

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. --

Holds:

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake)	323.1196 WAT	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	323.1196 WAT	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	323.1196 WAT	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

A magnificently researched, dramatically told work of narrative nonfiction about the history, evolution, impact, and ultimate demise of what was known in the 1930s and 1940s as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Black Cabinet.

"Will the New Deal be a square deal for the Negro?" The black press wondered. The Black Cabinet set out to devise solutions to the widespread exclusion of black people from its programs, whether by inventing tools to measure discrimination or by calling attention to the administration's failures. Led by Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, they were instrumental to Roosevelt's continued success with black voters. Operating mostly behind the scenes, they helped push Roosevelt to sign an executive order that outlawed discrimination in the defense industry. They saw victories--jobs and collective agriculture programs that lifted many from poverty--and defeats--the bulldozing of black neighborhoods to build public housing reserved only for whites; Roosevelt's refusal to get behind federal anti-lynching legislation. The Black Cabinet never won official recognition from the president, and with his death, it disappeared from view. But it had changed history. Eventually, one of its members would go on to be the first African American Cabinet secretary; another, the first African American federal judge and mentor to Thurgood Marshall.

Masterfully researched and dramatically told, The Black Cabinet brings to life a forgotten generation of leaders who fought post-Reconstruction racial apartheid and whose work served as a bridge that Civil Rights activists traveled to achieve the victories of the 1950s and '60s.

Author Notes

Jill Watts is the author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood , Mae West: An Icon in Black and White , and God, Harlem USA: The Father Divine Story . She is a Professor of History at California State University San Marcos.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Watts (Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood), a professor of history at California State University, San Marcos, delivers a unique and enlightening portrait of "the informal group of black federal employees" who sought to advance African-American interests during the New Deal. Led by Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College and a friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the "Black Cabinet" included housing expert Robert C. Weaver, attorney William H. Hastie, and Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier and a leading advocate for shifting black votes from Republicans to Democrats. Watts details the group's internecine political quarrels as well as their efforts to integrate the federal workplace, end "race-based wage differentials," and rally support for antilynching legislation, among other objectives. Lesser-known civil servants such as Lucia Mae Pitts, "the first African American woman to serve as a secretary to a white federal administrator in Washington, D.C.," receive overdue attention, as does the influence of the black press on Roosevelt's staffing decisions. Watts finds drama in committee meetings and unemployment surveys, and expertly tracks her subjects across the maze of federal bureaucracy. The result is a groundbreaking reappraisal of an unheralded chapter in the battle for civil rights. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Associates. (May)

Choice Review

In what may be among the most honored nonfiction books published in 2020, Watts (history, California State Univ., San Marcos) transports the reader back to an age (1930s--40s) when discrimination and segregation were a grim reality. Watts tells the story of the Federal Council of Negro Affairs--informally the "Black cabinet"--a group of African Americans, led by the indefatigable Mary McLeod Bethune, who pressed President Franklin Roosevelt to build into the New Deal, and later WW II policies, reforms designed to give full citizenship to the neglected and oppressed Black minority. Elegant in its prose and vivid in its depiction of key characters, The Black Cabinet captures the challenges faced by these would-be reformers, and tells a story of high idealism mixed with raw pragmatism. With the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, these reformers paved the way for the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. This is a magisterial work, deftly executed and compellingly presented. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --michael A. genovese, Loyola Marymount University

Kirkus Review

A history of how Franklin Roosevelt's policies were decisively influenced by a group of African American advisers. Drawing on government documents, newspapers, and an extensive number of archives, historian Watts vividly recounts an important chapter in black American history: the place of black advisers in Roosevelt's administration. Among the many ambitious, well-educated men and women who took up government roles during the New Deal were Robert Clifton Weaver, a Harvard-educated economist; William H. Hastie, the first African American to hold a federal judgeship; Alfred Edgar Smith, the leader of the Works Progress Administration; Eugene Kinckle Jones, who had a position at the Department of Commerce; newspaper publisher Robert Vann; and, prominent among them, the outspoken, tireless mover and shaker Mary McLeod Bethune, celebrated by African Americans as the "First Lady of Our Negro Nation." The Black Cabinet--never officially acknowledged as such by Roosevelt--came to be knowns as "her boys." Roosevelt could be ambivalent about advancing the cause of African Americans, fearing to alienate Southern voters, and his administration, Watts reveals, "was often explicitly hostile." Eleanor Roosevelt, however, "awakened to the brutalities of American racism" through her close friendship with Bethune, became a stalwart supporter of equality and justice for blacks. The Democratic Party saw the advantage of courting black voters once it seemed likely that they would defect from Republicans, which looked to many blacks less like the party of Lincoln than heirs of the old Confederacy. Watts chronicles rivalries, frustrations, and disillusionments among the Black Cabinet but also considerable achievements: a growing voice within the federal government; better New Deal relief for many African Americans; nondiscrimination clauses in Interior Department contracts; and documentation of the impact of racism on the black community. As much as possible, they raised Roosevelt's awareness of the reality of life for blacks in 1930s and '40s America. After Roosevelt's death, his group of black advisers "came to be celebrated as yet another one of FDR's accomplishments." A thoroughly researched history of important black activists. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

In this thoroughly researched history, Watts (Hattie McDaniel) traces the birth of the relationship between the Democratic Party and Black America through the influence of African Americans on Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. Thanks to the tireless work of Mary McLeod Bethune, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, along with an informal group of Black federal employees in Washington, DC, the concerns of Black citizens were added to Roosevelt's agenda. Consisting of lawyers, educators, teachers, and politicians, the team informally advised the president on social issues in the midst of the Great Depression. In the author's telling, this led to the start of a political change that would help define the civil rights movement and American politics for the 20th century. This sweeping history looks at how a core group took on the racist machinations of post-Reconstruction government to give Black communities a chance to influence one of the most powerful men in the world. Though they never achieved official recognition, they still helped change the course of history. VERDICT A dramatic piece of nonfiction that recovers the history of a generation of leaders that helped create the environment for the civil rights battles in decades that followed Roosevelt's death.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

Prologue	p. xi
Part 1 Of People and Politics, 1908-1932
Chapter 1 Remembrance	p. 3
Chapter 2 Turning the Picture of Lincoln to the Wall	p. 36
Part 2 Called to Washington, 1933-1935
Chapter 3 Will the New Deal Be a Fair Deal?	p. 69
Chapter 4 A Black Cabinet	p. 100
Chapter 5 Factions	p. 132
Part 3 Thinking and Planning Together, 1935-1939
Chapter 6 Star-Led	p. 169
Chapter 7 We Belong Here	p. 199
Chapter 8 Things Are Happening	p. 229
Chapter 9 Thwarted	p. 259
Part 4 Fighting on Two Fronts, 1940-1944
Chapter 10 Keep 'Em Squirming	p. 293
Chapter 11 Mobilization	p. 324
Chapter 12 Mighty Struggle	p. 356
Chapter 13 Last of the Brain Trusters	p. 389
Part 5 Vanishing Figures
Chapter 14 No Resting	p. 421
Notes	p. 451
Bibliography	p. 497
Acknowledgments	p. 523
Index	p. 527

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Choice Review

Kirkus Review

Library Journal Review

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