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Dinner At The White House

Zam-Zam

Senator
And the fallout the ensued:


On 16 October 1901, shortly after moving into the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt invited his adviser, the African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, to dine with him and his family; it provoked an outpouring of condemnation from southern politicians and press.[1] This reaction affected subsequent White House practice and no other African American was invited to dinner for almost thirty years.

Roosevelt, while Governor of New York, frequently had black guests to dinner and sometimes invited them to sleep over.[3]

In 1798 John Adams had dined in the President's House in Philadelphia with Joseph Bunel (a white representative of the Government of Haiti) and his black wife.[4][5]

Black people, including leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, had been received at the White House by Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes and Cleveland. At the invitation of First Lady Lucy Hayes, Marie Selika Williams became the first African American professional musician to appear at the White House.

The following day, the White House released a statement headed, "Booker T Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama, dined with the President last evening." The response from the southern press and politicians was immediate, sustained and vicious. James K. Vardaman, a Democrat from Mississippi, complained that the White House was now, "so saturated with the odor of nigger that the rats had taken refuge in the stable;" the Memphis Scimitar declared it "the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States,"[7] and on 25 October the Missouri Sedalia Sentinel published on its front page a poem entitled "Niggers in the White House," which ended suggesting that either the president's daughter should marry Washington or his son one of Washington's relatives. Senator Benjamin Tillman (D) of South Carolina said "we shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back in their places." The Northern presses were more generous, acknowledging Washington's accomplishments and suggesting that the dinner was an attempt by Roosevelt to emphasize he was everybody's president.[8]

While some in the black community responded positively – such as Bishop Henry Turner who said to Washington, "You are about to be the great representative and hero of the Negro race, notwithstanding you have been very conservative" – other black leaders were less enthusiastic. William Monroe Trotter, a radical opponent of Washington, said the dinner showed him up as "a hypocrite who supports social segregation between blacks and whites while he himself dines at the White House."[9]

The White House first responded to the outcry from the south by claiming that the meal had not occurred and that the Roosevelt women had not been at dinner with a black man, while some White House personnel said it was a luncheon not an evening meal.[2] Washington made no comment at the time.



Booker T. Washington dinner at the White House - Wikipedia

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The way it was.
 

Zam-Zam

Senator
Some more background:

On why Roosevelt extended the invitation, and Washington accepted

"Theodore Roosevelt was known for being a very, very impulsive man. But this was a good impulse. He had an appointment with Booker T. Washington. At the last minute, he thought, 'Let's make it dinner.' He started to send out the invitation, and he hesitated for a second, thinking, 'Is this a bad idea because of this man's color?' And he was so ashamed that he hesitated, that he hastened to send the invitation out before he could change his mind.

"Now, Booker T. Washington faced the same thing when he had to decide whether or not to accept the invitation. He thought, 'This is going to be a real problem for me, but I have no right to refuse. It's a landmark moment, and I have to accept this on behalf of my whole race.' ...

"[But] he understood what the aftermath would be and the backlash."

On the furor following the dinner

"There was hell to pay, first weeks, then months, then years, then decades. This story did not go away. And, you know, an assassin was hired to go to Tuskegee to kill Booker T. Washington. He was pursued wherever he went. Theodore Roosevelt was criticized in ways that presidents were not criticized. There were vulgar cartoons of Mrs. Roosevelt that had never been done before. This was all new territory.

"There were some interesting spinning sessions that went on among Republicans. One was to turn the dinner into lunch, because it seems that lunch would be a less objectionable meal, and so the story went that, no, you know, Booker T. Washington didn't go to the dining room at the White House. He was sitting in the office, and they got hungry and they ordered a tray. And by the time they were finished, there was barely a sandwich on it. And that seemed to make the meal a little more palatable in the South. ...

"And this persisted for decades, actually, until finally in the '30s, a journalist asked Mrs. Roosevelt, was it lunch or was it dinner? And she checked her calendar, and she said it was most definitely dinner."




Teddy Roosevelt's 'Shocking' Dinner With Washington : NPR
 
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