The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt
By Jill Watts
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
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 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.
Related to The Black Cabinet
Related ebooks
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: The Companion to the PBS Television Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTo Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Children of Fire: A History of African Americans Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsW.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Radio Free Dixie, Second Edition: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gender and Jim Crow, Second Edition: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEbony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5101 African Americans Who Shaped South Carolina Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking Black History: The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLest We Forget: The Passage from Africa into the Twenty-First Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Worse Than Slavery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Ethnic Studies For You
Black Rednecks & White Liberals Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heavy: An American Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wretched of the Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Conspiracy to Destroy Black Women Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Self-Care for Black Women: 150 Ways to Radically Accept & Prioritize Your Mind, Body, & Soul Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Blood of Emmett Till Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Encyclopedia of the Yoruba Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for The Black Cabinet
2 ratings0 reviews