The Black Cabinet by Jill Watts

The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt
by Jill Watts
Grove Press

Every once in a long while, a book comes along that pulls back the curtain on an unheralded time in America’s civil rights past and leaves one inspired and eager to learn more. The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts is an invaluable historical contribution to an overlooked era of American history that had far-reaching impacts for African American civil rights movements still to be born.

Jill Watts is the author of several books, including Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, and professor of history at California State University San Marcos. Investing 12 years of research into The Black Cabinet, she documents a largely forgotten and clandestine unofficial council of African American economists, educators, journalists, and lawyers who advised the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration on racial affairs during the Depression Era and, eventually, beyond. This “Black Cabinet” of experts were the vanguard of a new movement that fought not only to improve the economic plight of African Americans under FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s, but to secure equality and justice for an oppressed and often persecuted and terrorized minority.

Under the indomitable leadership of the accomplished, confident, and determined African American educator, Mary McLeod Bethune, the Black Cabinet contained a bustling and often bristling coterie of the best and brightest. While bitter rivalries were often rife among the mostly male Cabinet, the shared belief and commitment to achieving black equality under the law was the glue cementing this diverse set of backgrounds and personalities.

Watts brings to life these fascinating and inspiring lives, such as Robert Weaver, economist and longest living member of the Black Cabinet, whose perseverance would result in the first appointment of an African American to the “white” cabinet of President Lyndon B. Johnson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Robert Vann, prominent newspaper editor essential in shifting black votes and political loyalties away from the Republican Party and to the Democrats; William “Bill” Hastie, lawyer and civil rights advocate who went on to become the first African American governor of the Virgin Islands, in addition to being named as a federal appellate judge later in life. To be sure, the Black Cabinet contained many other, slightly less prominent—but no less important—members throughout its existence, and Watts includes them and their contributions with exhaustive research (the bibliography and notes are must reads, as well). She also does yeoman’s work describing the often tedious work these sterling minds were given as early federal appointees in FDR’s new administration, the discrimination they fought and suffered, and ultimately, the groundwork they laid for future generations of civil rights warriors, both within and outside the government.

However, the biggest star of Watt’s book is the “star-led” woman who acted as the sun to the orbiting male minds who displayed little of the contemporary misogyny of the time. Mary McLeod Bethune was a force that kept the Black Cabinet on point and united even when its internecine quarrels threatened to end it, time and again. Bethune rightly deserves her own full-length biography. Born to former slaves in 1875, the fifteenth of seventeen children, she was an excellent student with huge ambitions that led to her founding her own school that eventually became Bethune-Cookman College (now University) in Daytona, Florida, in 1929. A lifelong Republican up until Roosevelt’s candidacy, Bethune grew disgusted with the continued lip service of the increasingly discriminatory Republicans and encouraged the black community give the Democrat Party and Roosevelt a chance. The enduring friendship of Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt mark some of the warmest passages in the book, at the same time highlighting the influence Bethune exercised within the Roosevelt administration and her own Black Cabinet circle.

The Black Cabinet also explores the inner workings of New Deal governmental agencies and the many obstructions the racial affairs advisers ran into over and over. Watts shows how the Black Cabinet seized the unique opportunity as Federal workers to not only advocate and build financial relief programs for Depression-era blacks, they believed the New Deal offered the chance to fight discrimination and injustice at all levels of society. Their work consisted of building coalitions and advocating for equal employment opportunities, fair wages, as well as the urgent appeals for passing anti-lynching legislation, to name only a few of their long list of civil rights demands. Many were not achieved during their lifetimes, but the seeds were planted.

Watts’s elegant and understated writing never leads the reader by the nose, but rather lets these vanguard civil rights leaders speak for themselves. The Black Cabinet is essential reading, now more than ever, to remind Americans of how long and hard the road to achieving civil rights was and still often is for African Americans. The courage, dignity, and fortitude of the men and women of the Black Cabinet serve as a continuing inspiration for all of us.

—Peggy Kurkowski holds a BA in History from American Public University and is a copywriter living in Denver, Colorado.