The Butler: A Witness to History Read Online Free PDF

Avenue had always been pulled into the nation’s racial agonies.
    Throughout history blacks have looked to the White House for help and leadership in the march toward equality.
    In 1863 President Lincoln, utilizing his ferocious political acumen, had ingeniously forced Congress into adopting the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. Chains fell from both ankles and wrists. But he paid with his life. (The momentous legislative victory to abolish slavery was the subject of Lincoln, a 2012 Steven Spielberg film. Spielberg, incidentally, had been one of the directors initially interested in telling the Eugene Allen story.) Reconstruction, in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, sought to expand black aspirations. In 1866 Frederick Douglass—onetime slave and among the most famous abolitionists of his time—made it to the White House to plead with President Andrew Johnson about black voting rights. Johnson allowed that he had no political capital to gain from fighting for blacks to have the right to vote. Douglass secured another White House invitation in 1877. On this occasion there wasn’t even the pretense of politics: President Rutherford B. Hayes had engaged Douglass to serve as master of ceremonies for a festive evening of entertainment.
    On October 16, 1901, a Negro butler at the White House was told that President Theodore Roosevelt would be having an evening guest. Just before the appointed time, the butler dutifully set the table. The guest, alone, arrived under the cover of darkness—and in secret. It was Booker T. Washington, the famed educator, also born into slavery. ANegro had never before dined at the White House. His mere presence made the butler both curious and nervous. Lynchings were still common in the Maryland countryside, a scant distance from the White House itself. According to later accounts, Washington and Roosevelt primarily talked about southern politics and strife in that region. The next morning a smallish item about the dinner appeared on newswires. In short order, all hell, indeed, broke loose. Southerners excoriated Roosevelt for having invited Washington to dine at the White House. The Memphis Scimitar was among the first to unleash its invective: “The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House.” It went on: “It is only recently that President Roosevelt boasted that his mother was a Southern woman, and that he is half Southern by reason of that fact. By inviting a nigger to his table he pays his mother small duty . . .”
    There were, to be sure, shards of light amid the darkness that sometimes flowed from the White House when it came to black Americans. In 1939—the year a natty-dressing Eugene Allen was plotting to get out of rural Virginia for better job opportunities—the Daughters of the American Revolution, who controlled bookings to Constitution Hall, refused to allow opera singer Marian Anderson to sing on that stage because of their segregation policy. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a member of the DAR,abruptly quit. Her stance gained wide and appreciative coverage in the Negro press. More significant, she arranged for Anderson to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939.
    By contrast, First Lady Bess Truman, who hailed from the border state of Missouri, was a devoted member of the DAR. When the DAR refused to allow Hazel Scott—a noted pianist and wife of Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—an engagement in 1945 at Constitution Hall, another war of words erupted. Powell pleaded with President Truman to do something. Truman said he could not, offering that the DAR was a private organization and he intended to stay out of its business. Bess Truman steadfastly refused to quit the DAR. Powell—who could be dangerously quick with a quip—referred to First Lady Bess Truman as “the