WASHINGTON--When Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, he was subdued and held by an African American dishwasher named James Benjamin Parker, who acted faster and more decisively than the Secret Service. McKinley died eight days later, but Parker became a hero, lauded by Booker T. Washington as exemplary of African Americans as patriots.
Just a few weeks after McKinley's assassination, Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington for dinner at the White House, and the ensuing controversy resulted in a decades-long ban on African Americans in the POTUS residence — except in a work capacity.
Parker's heroic actions, meanwhile, were quickly scrubbed from the official record. His story is one of many unearthed by American University professor Clarence Lusane in "The Black History of the White House" ($20, City Lights), a look at African Americans as slaves, cooks, designers, builders, performers, officials and — ultimately — President.
Where did the idea for this book originate?
It came from a number of sources. One, of course, was the election of Obama himself. In 2007 and 2008, as I traveled in Brazil and England and other places, many questions were raised as to what it would mean to have an African American in the White House. But there were also questions about the history of black people in the White House. As I started to do a bit of research, I realized that there was no comprehensive work that looked at that particular history.
Were any of your own ideas or preconceptions changed or dispelled?
Like some, I had a sense that there were African Americans who worked in the White House as slaves, and it's pretty well known that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had slaves. But the issue of race was even more embedded in the presidency and in the White How itself as an iconic symbol of the U.S. democracy, and the degree to which black labor and black resistance have been part of that has been completely exorcised. It went through the entire evolution of this institution. So that really was eye opening.
You describe it as the "tragic anonymity of slavery." Does that pose challenges to you as a researcher and writer?
It does, because in many ways it's disrupting our notions and our comfort zones. But I think as a writer, you have to do that. I was trying not to create a work that was all negative and that was all about black oppression, but to really say that there were heroic actors even in the face of this unimaginable obstacles that people had to contend with
You write that American history often excludes these stories. How would you like to see this material taught?
I try to make the point that history is always a debate about the present. Each generation has to revisit these questions because they're never settled. Some of the issues and the stories that I wrote about in this book have basically been forgotten, and unless we try to make them part of the historic record, then the record will be dominated by those who get their word out best and most effectively.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Monday, January 24th 2011 at 2:35PM
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