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Booker T. Washington Visits the White House
Theodore Roosevelt became president after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. The early months of his administration were a tense period of trial and error as Roosevelt had not been elected president. Fond of dinners as a means of entertaining, the Roosevelts held them nearly every night over the last few months of 1901 and constructed the guest lists with
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Frederick Douglass
The son of an enslaved woman and an unknown white man, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in 1818 on Maryland's eastern shore. He was enslaved for twenty years in city households in Baltimore and on Maryland farms. In 1838, he fled north and changed his name to Frederick Douglass.Douglass was highly active in the abolitionist movement and became
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Living Quarters on the Ground Floor
White House staff who lived at the President’s House during the nineteenth century, including enslaved and free African Americans, usually had rooms in the basement. Open at the ground level on the south, the basement (referred to as the Ground Floor today) had windows on the north side facing a dry moat that was entirely hidden from view. Visitors on
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Racial Tension in the 1970s
During his tenure in office President Nixon steered a middle course in domestic affairs and did not attempt to dismantle Johnson’s programs but strived to make them more efficient. Robert J. Brown was an African American member of Nixon’s White House staff who was looked to as liaison to the black community. He dealt with issues related to civi
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African Americans in Lafayette Square, 1795-1965
The phrase "The Half Had Not Been Told Me" is taken from a Biblical reference Frederick Douglass used to describe the beauty of the new Freedman's Savings Bank and Trust building, once located on Lafayette Square. Douglass compared the experience of seeing the building for the first time to the way the Queen of Sheba, an African queen, felt upon
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Daniel Webster's House
Before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building was built during 1922-25, a simple three-and-a-half story brick home stood in its place at the corner of H Street and Connecticut Avenue. The home's original owner was Daniel Webster, a Congressman from both New Hampshire and Massachusetts and a Senator from Massachusetts who also served as Secretary of State for three
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Self-emancipation in Lafayette Park
In 1810 an enslaved woman named Alethia “Lethe” Tanner purchased her freedom with $275 dollars she had earned selling vegetables in the area we know today as Lafayette Square. Enslaved people used the open air markets to their advantage, by growing fruits and vegetables on small plots of land and selling them to raise money. Before being landscaped and named for the Marq
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St. John's Church
Every president since James Madison has attended services at St. John's Church. This distinctive yellow church was the second building to be constructed on Lafayette Square and has always been a symbolic and important house of worship in Washington, D.C. Visitors to Lafayette Square can enter St. John's Church from the 16th Street entrance to see the sanctuary and
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The White House, Lafayette Square and African Americans
To imagine what it was like here when the White House was being constructed in the 1790s, erase everything else you see now on and around Lafayette Square. The park was a field—muddy or dusty, depending on the weather. Enslaved workers who were building the White House were housed in temporary shelters—each about 10 feet wide and 10 feet long—lined
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The Butler's Role at a State Dinner with Royal Visitors
Prior to the 1939 visit of the queen and king of England, Eleanor Roosevelt received a State Department memorandum, listing various rules of protocol. Mrs. Roosevelt became concerned about the order in which the Roosevelts, and the queen and king, should be served at the state dinner honoring the royal couple.1"I told Franklin," Mrs. Roosevelt recalled, "that British protocol required
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The President and His Steward Meet with a Calamity
John Quincy Adams hired Antoine Michel Giusta as his valet after they met in Belgium in 1814. Giusta was a deserter from Napoleon's army. During the time John Quincy Adams and Louisa Catherine Adams were living in London, Giusta married Mrs. Adams's maid. Antoine and his wife had managed the Adams' households from the time the Adamses returned to the United
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The White House Usher on the Role of Television
"Largely through television," notes historian William Seale, the White House "is the best known house in the world, the instantly familiar symbol of the Presidency, flashed daily on millions and millions of TV screens everywhere."1J. B. West was Assistant Chief Usher at the White House from 1941 to 1957, and Chief Usher from 1957 to 1969. During the Eisenhower administration, West had an