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

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Jill Watts

The Black Cabinet

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

Jill Watts

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English

Black Cat
04 March 2021

History; History of the Americas; Social & cultural history; Ethnic studies; Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies; Central government

"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."

By: Jill Watts
Imprint: Black Cat
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 140mm, Width: 210mm,
ISBN: 9780802148667
ISBN 10: 0802148662
Pages: 560
Publication Date: 04 March 2021
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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 University San Marcos.

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

"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"