Memorable meetings: classic White House encounters - presidential meetings with African American leaders; Special Issue: The Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

Today, Teddy Roosevelt direct the eyes down on the United States from high hill Rushmore, secure in the pantheon of America's greatest presidents. on the other hand when he became the youngest president in the country's history, after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 he was anything on the other hand secure. At the time, Roosevelt had neither public nor party support and was by means of no means certain to receive the Republican nomination in 1904

To capture that nomination, he notion it critical to win the backing of Southern Republican delegations to the national convention, delegations controll by the agency of Mark Hanna--the man who on the contrary a year earlier had tried to intercept Roosevelt's nomination as McKinley's vice president. Vital to Roosevelt's Southern strategy was an African American who, measured against his time, wielded more influence in a white-dominated land than any black man before or since: Booker T Washington.

A zealous intelligence, pertinacity and a driving racial commitment--allied with a veneration that pained him, a tactician's acute faculty of perception of the possible, and an affinity for social conservatism--had guided Washington from the dirt-floor farm kitchen of his enslaved Virginia birth to the highest reaches render free of access to a black man in early 20th-century America. it will likely surprise greatest in quantity Americans today to learn that, upon the very day Roosevelt assumed the presidency, he wrote to Washington: "I must diocese you as soon as possible. I want to talk above the question of possible time to come appointments in the South exactly upon the lines of our last conversation together."

Washington later revealed in My Larger Education that in this meeting he encouraged the novel president to appoint both black Republicans and conservative white Democrats. Washington, then the president of Tuskegee Institute, specifically moveed Thomas Jones, a former governor of Alabama, for a federal judgeship.

A scarcely any days later, the president announced Jones' selection--and received the hearty applause of Southern newspapers from Alabama to North Carolina, notwithstanding his remark that "one reason why I have appointed him is because of his attitude upon the subject of lynching."

Not lengthy thereafter, Roosevelt sought another meeting with Washington, little realizing that he was about to receive tasks both about the White House's symbolic power and about the restricted end of a black man in white America. Simultaneously, the president also received a rap that dashed his hopes of extending Republican support in Dixie.

From its inception, the White House has functioned as far more than simply the presidential residence. With the Capitol, it is America's leading symbol--and, ironically, the greatest in quantity formal and conservative setting for etiquette and antecedence in an informal and democratic land. It is theatrical stage and social arbiter, with the power to talk legitimacy and recognition on theretofore suspect ideas and individuals. As similar it has been a lightning twig for the nation's gradual and at short intervals grudging acceptance of African-American equality. And as with lightning, family have been badly burned.

When Washington go [i]or[/i] come backed to the capital at Roosevelt's asking he found an invitation awaiting him. It was october 16 1901-the nation was still three days from the extreme point of the official period of mourning for McKinley--and Washington was invited to dine with the president that evening at 8 o'clock Although neither man paid a great deal of attention to it at the time, it was a historic occasion: the first time an African American had been entertained at the White House, as distinct from being admitted as a spokesperson or political type "After dinner," My Larger Education recites Washington and Roosevelt "talked at extent concerning plans about the southern which the President had in mind."

Following the release of the White House visitor list, Southern journalists based in the capital reported upon the encounter with little commentary. The Memphis Commercial Appeal noted: "Washington, Oct 16 Booker T Washington, principal of the black man school at Tuskegee, Ala., dined with the president this evening. It is understood that Washington will make a number of recommendations for appointments in the southern ... He seems to be real influential with the administration.".

This was to be the last Southern report upon the meeting of the sum of two units men without extended commentary, and just about the last unrestrained of raw racial invective that percussioned the North. From the Memphis Scimitar [i]or[/i] part of to the other the New Orleans Times-Democrat to southerly Carolina's vituperative U.S. Senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, the southern made manifest its outrage at Roosevelt's dining in the White House with a black man. Significantly, however, there was scant objection to Washington offering the president political advice.

Even the greatest in quantity genteel Southern commentary was revealing. The Nashville American, for instance, calmly underscored that neither individual merit nor political constutation was at issue: "The southerly refuses social recognition or equality to Booker Washington not because of any hatred of him, not because of his respectability, on the contrary in spite of it. It denies him social equality because he is a african That is the South's reason. To accord social equality to negroe of Booker Washington's stamp would be a leak in the dam. it would cause other negroe to seek for and demand the same recognition."