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

by Jill Watts

Overview

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.

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, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. As the New Deal began, a “black Brain Trust” joined the administration and began documenting and addressing the economic hardship and systemic inequalities African Americans faced. They became known as the Black Cabinet, but the environment they faced was reluctant, often hostile, to change.

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802129109
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	1,156,311
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

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 UniversitySan Marcos.

Table of Contents

Prologue xi

Part 1 Of People and Politics, 1908-1932

Chapter 1 Remembrance 3

Chapter 2 Turning the Picture of Lincoln to the Wall 36

Part 2 Called to Washington, 1933-1935

Chapter 3 Will the New Deal Be a Fair Deal? 69

Chapter 4 A Black Cabinet 100

Chapter 5 Factions 132

Part 3 Thinking and Planning Together, 1935-1939

Chapter 6 Star-Led 169

Chapter 7 We Belong Here 199

Chapter 8 Things Are Happening 229

Chapter 9 Thwarted 259

Part 4 Fighting on Two Fronts, 1940-1944

Chapter 10 Keep 'Em Squirming 293

Chapter 11 Mobilization 324

Chapter 12 Mighty Struggle 356

Chapter 13 Last of the Brain Trusters 389

Part 5 Vanishing Figures

Chapter 14 No Resting 421

Notes 451

Bibliography 497

Acknowledgments 523

Index 527

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/24/2020

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)

Publishers Weekly

06/01/2020

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

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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

From the Publisher