The Black History of the White House

Most of us have grown up with a particular framework about American history and particularly the history of the presidencies. For the most part it has been a cleansed history, meaning that the foibles, errors and mistakes that were made by presidents were essentially not part of that history, particularly when it comes to race. Correcting that was part of the motivation for doing the book. We can see even today that this continues to be a battle. The decision in Arizona, for example, to ban ethnic studies, meaning that the histories of people of African descent, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians are more or less written out of the curriculum now in Arizona. Even more recently, this has been happening in Tennessee where a group of Tea Party activists also wants to rewrite history in a way in which only, as they see it, the positive parts of the lives of the Founding Fathers are taught, and any history related to what happened to African Americans as slaves, or what happened to Native Americans, who were frequently massacred, all of that should be written out. So we are always in a battle over how we understand and how we present history. (source: Political Affairs)

Clarence Lusane

Students, and I’ve been teaching close to 20 years now at the university level – each generation of students seems to forget what happened not only in the past, but almost immediately what has happened in front of them. The students who are coming in now, for example, are students who matured in the early 2000s, and we so have students now who think of Bill Clinton much as they think of George Washington – he’s an historic figure. So it becomes important that we revitalize and help them to either remember what they’ve forgotten or to learn what they have never learned. I think it has been a difficult transition, in many ways, for the universities, because the students who are coming in, this last generation, are coming in trained or in many ways educated through the Internet, and that means that a lot of the more rigorous kinds of book reading and learning that generations before went through, even with the imperfections, probably gave somewhat of a broader sense, or a more rigorous sense of history. Although students today have access to more information, they are coming with less knowledge. That’s what I’m finding and many of my colleagues are finding. (source: Political Affairs)

Official histories of the United States have ignored the fact that 25 percent of all U.S. presidents were slaveholders, and that black people were held in bondage in the White House itself. And while the nation was born under the banner of “freedom and justice for all,” many colonists risked rebelling against England in order to protect their lucrative slave business from the growing threat of British abolitionism. These historical facts, commonly excluded from schoolbooks and popular versions of American history, have profoundly shaped the course of race relations in the United States. (source: Teaching A People's History)

The Forum with Michael Fauntroy: Clarence Lusane from Michael K. Fauntroy on Vimeo.

Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C

Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast

Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat

Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight

Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night

Morning brings the tourists, peering eyes and rubber necks

To catch a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreck

It’s a mass of irony for all the world to see

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

(mmmm-hmmm)

May not have the glitter or the glamour of L.A.

May not have the history or the intrigue of Pompeii

But when it comes to making music, and sure enough making news

People who just don’t make sense and people making do

Seems a ball of contradictions, pulling different ways

Between the folks who come and go, and one’s who’ve got to stay

It’s a mass of irony for all the world to see

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

Seems to me, it’s still in light time people knifed up on 14th street

Makes me feel it’s always the right time for them people showing up and coming clean

Did make the one seem kind of numb

Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C

Interior of Slave Pen

Interior of Slave Pen

The interior of a slave pen in Alexandria, Virginia, shows the cells where people were held prior to being sold.

From its beginning -- ever since the nation's capital had been moved from Philadelphia in 1800 -- slavery was legal in Washington, D.C. With its proximity to both the upper and lower South, it would become a major center for the domestic slave trade, passing thousands of slaves through to the plantations of the deep South. Although Congress had the power to outlaw slavery in the District of Columbia, it did not do so until 1862 -- the power of the proslavery forces was too strong. Slavery proponents knew that if they kept the institution visible in the nation's capital, it would act as a vivid symbol of their grasp on the nation. They were right: the presence of slavery was impossible to ignore. Visitors expressed disgust at the sight of slave coffles and holding pens in the capital of the "freest" nation in the world.

(source: PBS)

A Description of a Washington, D.C., Slave Pen

E. S. Abdy description of a Washington, D.C., slave pen

E.S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour...One day I went to see the "slaves' pen"--a wretched hovel, "right against" the Capitol, from which it is distant about half a mile, with no house intervening. The outside alone is accessible to the eye of a visitor; what passes within being reserved for the exclusive observation of its owner, (a man of the name of Robey,) and his unfortunate victims. It is surrounded by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet in height, with the posts outside to prevent escape and separated from the building by a space too narrow to admit of a free circulation of air. At a small window above, which was unglazed and exposed alike to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so trying to the constitution, two or three sable faces appeared, looking out wistfully to while away the time and catch a refreshing breeze; the weather being extremely hot. In this wretched hovel, all colors, except white--the only guilty one--both sexes, and all ages, are confined, exposed indiscriminately to all the contamination which may be expected in such society and under such seclusion. The inmates of the gaol, of this class I mean, are even worse treated; some of them, if my informants are to be believed, having been actually frozen to death, during the inclement winters which often prevail in the country. While I was in the city, Robey had got possession of a woman, whose term of slavery was limited to six years. It was expected that she would be sold before the expiration of that period, and sent away to a distance, where the assertion of her claim would subject her to ill-usage. Cases of this kind are very common.

Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834, Volume 2, London, 1835

(source: PBS Africans in America)

Slave Code for the District of Columbia

Slavery in the United States was governed by an extensive body of law developed from the 1640s to the 1860s. Every slave state had its own slave code and body of court decisions. All slave codes made slavery a permanent condition, inherited through the mother, and defined slaves as property, usually in the same terms as those applied to real estate. Slaves, being property, could not own property or be a party to a contract. Since marriage is a form of contract, no slave marriage had any legal standing. All codes also had sections regulating free blacks, who were still subject to controls on their movements and employment and were often required to leave the state after emancipation.

When the District of Columbia was established in 1800, the laws of Maryland, including its slave laws, remained in force. Additional laws on slavery and free blacks were then made by the District. By Southern standards its slave codes were moderate. Slaves were permitted to hire out their services and to live apart from their masters. Free blacks were permitted to live in the city and to operate private schools. By 1860 the District of Columbia was home to 11,131 free blacks and 3,185 slaves.

The manuscript slave code for the District of Columbia is arranged by topic, listing relevant sections of Maryland and District of Columbia laws as well as the applicable court decisions. It is almost certainly a "practice book," produced within a law firm for the use of its attorneys and clerks, who could refer to it when drafting contracts and legal briefs. That such a book exists indicates something of the volume and routine character of legal work surrounding transactions in human property.

Slavery in the District of Columbia ended on April 16, 1862, when President Lincoln signed a law that provided for compensation to slave owners.

[The U.S.A PAID REPARATIONS for SLAVE OWNERS, NOT to the people that preformed the labor in perpetuity without compensation, without remuneration, without pay... their enslaved population...the SLAVES].

An Emancipation Claims Commission hired a Baltimore slave trader to assess the value of each freed slave and awarded compensation for 2,989 slaves.

[The owners got paid by the government, but the actual enslaved human beings got the middle finger from the government of the U.S.A.]

The printed slavery code was published on March 17, 1862, just one month before slavery in the District ended and the laws became of historical interest only.

Paul Jennings was President James Madison's enslaved manservant

Paul Jennings, who was born a slave on President James Madison’s estate at Montpelier in 1799, was a "body servant" who attended the president until his death in 1836. Jennings later purchased his freedom from Daniel Webster. Webster acquired Jennings from Pollard Webb who in turn bought the manservant from Dolley Madison in 1846. After meeting the terms of his agreement with Webster, Jennings became a free man and found work at the Department of the Interior. In 1865, Jennings published, Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, the first memoir about the White House by one who had lived there. The publication remained obscure for many years because it was printed in a limited edition, but today it is acknowledged by scholars as a classic. It provided details about one of the most critical periods in the history of the city of Washington–the War of 1812–and the formation of the city’s enterprising free Negro community in the antebellum period. It also recounted Jennings’s involvement in a plan in 1848 to undertake a large-scale escape of slaves from the capital aboard the schooner Pearl.

Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.

An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.

In "An Example for All the Land," Kate Masur offers the first major study of Washington during Reconstruction in over fifty years. Masur's panoramic account considers grassroots struggles, city politics, Congress, and the presidency, revealing the District of Columbia as a unique battleground in the American struggle over equality.

After slavery's demise, the question of racial equality produced a multifaceted debate about who should have which rights and privileges, and in which places. Masur shows that black Washingtonians demanded public respect for their organizations and equal access to streetcars, public schools, the vote, and municipal employment. Congressional Republicans, in turn, passed local legislation that made the capital the nation's vanguard of racial equality, drawing the attention of woman suffragists hoping for similar experiments in women's rights. But a conservative coalition soon mobilized and, in the name of reform and modernization, sought to undermine African Americans' newfound influence in local affairs. In a stunning reversal, Congress then abolished local self-government, making the capital an exemplar of disfranchisement amid a national debate about the dangers of democracy.

Combining political, social, and legal history, Masur reveals Washington as a laboratory for social policy at a pivotal moment in American history and brings the question of equality to the forefront of Reconstruction scholarship.

An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C.