The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt

by Jill Watts Narrated by Bahni Turpin

Overview

In the early 20th century, most African Americans still lived in the South, disenfranchised, impoverished, terrorized by white violence, and denied the basic rights of citizenship. As the Democrats swept into the White House on a wave of black defectors from the Party of Lincoln, a group of African American intellectuals-legal minds, social scientists, media folk-sought to get the community's needs on the table. This would become the Black Cabinet, a group of African American racial affairs experts working throughout the New Deal, forming an unofficial advisory council to lobby the President. But with the white Southern vote so important to the fortunes of the Party, the path would be far from smooth.

Most prominent in the Black Cabinet were Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator close to Eleanor Roosevelt, and her “boys”: Robert Weaver, a Harvard-educated economist who pioneered enforcement standards for federal anti-discrimination guidelines (and, years later, the first African American Cabinet secretary); Bill Hastie, a lawyer who would become a federal appellate judge; Al Smith, head of the largest black jobs program in the New Deal at the WPA; and Robert Vann, a newspaper publisher whose unstinting reporting on the administration's shortcomings would keep his erstwhile colleagues honest. Ralph Bunche, Walter White of the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph, and others are part of the story as well. But the Black Cabinet was never officially recognized by FDR, and with the demise of the New Deal, it disappeared from history.

Jill Watts's*The Black Cabinet*is a dramatic full-scale examination of a forgotten moment that speaks directly to our own.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for The Black Cabinet

“A well-researched, urgent, and necessary history of black folks during the New Deal that excavates the too often ignored history of Black female genius behind racial progress.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author

“Jill Watts’ timely, deeply absorbing narrative unravels the little known but highly significant behind-the scenes account of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unofficial Black Cabinet, and their relentless determination that New Deal socio-economic justice include Black Americans. The voices of the historical actors come right through the pages and give a flavor to the narrative as though you were actually on the scene...A powerful piece of scholarship and a great story.” —Margaret Washington, author of Sojourner Truth’s America

“Drawing on government documents, newspapers, and an extensive number of archives, historian Watts vividly recounts an important chapter in black American history.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A unique and enlightening portrait . . . [The Black Cabinet] is a groundbreaking reappraisal of an unheralded chapter in the battle for civil rights.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Watts’ compelling account of a diverse set of early twentieth-century public figures—with the remarkable Mary McLeod Bethune at the center—who labored to make the Federal Government work for and be accountable to African Americans is important and timely. One comes away from this deeply researched and engaging narrative with a rich and textured sense of the work the members of the Black Cabinet accomplished in the decades before the modern Civil Rights Movement and the stakes and significance of their efforts.”—Judith Weisenfeld, author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

“Jill Watts here tells stories of the fascinating characters who formed what has been nicknamed the ‘Black Cabinet’ of FDR. Making her subjects come alive for the reader, she portrays them as courageous individuals motivated by a combination of personal ambition and principled devotion to the cause of black rights, which the New Deal by no means embraced with enthusiasm. These crusaders paved the way for the political transformation of the African-American community from Republican to Democrat, and prefigured the Black Civil Rights Movement.”—Daniel Walker Howe, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning What Hath God Wrought:  The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“My great-uncle Frank Horne, a poet, a doctor and an educator, was a member of FDR’s so-called ‘Black Cabinet.’ For the first time, this fascinating new book tells the whole story of the victories and defeats of these brilliant black New Dealers and the dynamic, charismatic black woman, Mary McLeod Bethune, who was their leader.”—Gail Lumet Buckley, author of The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family

Kirkus Reviews

2020-01-26
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178986035
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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