Black Cabinet

By: Robert Fay

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Black Cabinet

Informal network of African American public policy advisers in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt launched the New Deal, a major economic recovery program that dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in American life. Several groups and individuals recognized the vital importance of ensuring that black interests be represented within the Roosevelt administration. Prior to 1933 no African Americans had formally served as policy advisers within a presidential administration.

During the early days of the Roosevelt administration, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Julius Rosenwald Fund were among the groups that lobbied administration officials to appoint black advisers to federal agencies and New Deal programs. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1933, shortly after hearings began on the New Deal's National Recovery Administration (NRA), Robert C. Weaver, a young black economist, and John P. Davis, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, established themselves as the Negro Industrial League. Its main purpose was to represent the interests of black workers at NRA hearings on Capitol Hill.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and some progressive New Dealers were sympathetic to black demands, but they feared that the appointment of African Americans to policy positions would alienate powerful Southern Democrats in Congress. Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, a former president of the Chicago branch of the NAACP, volunteered to appoint an adviser on Negro affairs, a position to be paid for by the Rosenwald Fund. But Ickes appointed Clark Foreman, a white Southerner. While black civil rights activists acknowledged Foreman's commitment to racial equality, there was nearly unanimous opposition on the part of the NAACP, black newspapers, and others to the appointment of a white man to serve as an advocate for black America. Foreman supported this protest. When Ickes still refused to appoint a black adviser, Foreman proposed a compromise: that Robert C. Weaver be appointed as an assistant adviser, and that he take over Foreman's position when Ickes judged political circumstances to be more favorable. Ickes agreed, as did Weaver, who became Foreman's assistant and succeeded him as adviser on Negro affairs in the Interior Department in 1935.

Robert C. Weaver,  a member of President Franklin Roosevelt's Black Cabinet, was appointed assistant to the head of the president's Defense Commission in 1940.

(Library of Congress.)

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Once established at the Department of the Interior, Ickes, Foreman, and Weaver determined to work throughout the government to gain equal treatment for blacks. However, their initial progress was minimal because most of the black advisers did little to monitor the administration; they had been hired in part for their pro-Roosevelt politics. Early in 1934 Roosevelt approved Ickes's plan to create the Interdepartmental Group Concerned with the Special Problems of Negroes. For six months the group met regularly with white representatives of the National Recovery Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agriculture Department, and the military, but disbanded after encountering resistance and accomplishing nothing.

Still, more black advisers received appointments in the Roosevelt administration, and by mid-1935 forty-five African Americans were working in many of the cabinet offices and New Deal agencies. They included James C. Evans, Frank S. Horne, Rayford Logan, William J. Tent Jr., and Ralph Bunche. In 1936 the group began to call itself the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, although the press referred to it as the Black Cabinet or the Black Brain Trust. The members, who usually assembled on Friday evenings at the home of Mary McLeod Bethune, quickly became a bridge between the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. For example, during the 1936 presidential campaign, Civil Rights leaders and the Black Cabinet often shared information and coordinated strategies. During Roosevelt's second term, black leaders like Walter White, Channing Tobias, John P. Davis, and A. Philip Randolph frequently corresponded with Black Cabinet members to arrange protests against heel-dragging New Deal officials and to remain abreast of government developments.

The Black Cabinet brought issues of racial equity into the corridors of the federal government, had some success in ending job discrimination in certain government agencies, and helped expand the number of government jobs available to blacks in Washington. Through their presence and their individual efforts, they helped to increase black interest in politics and worked to encourage black participation in New Deal programs. Mary McLeod Bethune and Robert Weaver, who served for more than a decade in Washington, were especially effective in working with white progressives in creating biracial political coalitions that linked the interests of blacks and whites around issues of economic justice and social welfare. Indeed, the members of the Black Cabinet worked in tandem with the massive crossover of black voters into the Democratic Party in the presidential election of 1936, giving form to a “New Deal coalition” built upon black voters, labor, and liberals.

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