16 oct 1901 año - Booker T. Washington Dinner

Descripción:

Shortly after moving into the White House, Theodore Roosevelt invited his adviser, the African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, to dine with him and his family, and provoked an outpouring of condemnation from southern politicians and press. This reaction affected subsequent White House practice, and no other African American was invited to dinner for almost thirty years.

Senator James K. Vardaman (D) of 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," 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.

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."

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