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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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First Lady Hoover's Tea Party with Mrs. De Priest Creates a Stir
Oscar De Priest’s election to Congress as a Republican representative from Chicago in 1928 created an interesting political and social dilemma for the White House. De Priest was the only black to serve in Congress during his three terms (1928-1935). Even before De Priest took his seat in 1929, Washington buzzed about the arrival of a black congressman and what this me
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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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Rodgers House and Belasco Theater
The Rodgers HouseThe Rodgers House, formerly at 717 Madison Place, was constructed in 1831 by Commodore John Rodgers, a high-ranking naval officer. Rodgers is known to have owned slaves because one of them, a man named Henry Butler, was identified as Rodgers' slave in an 1827 entry in the Marriage Register of St. John's Church, also located on Lafayette Square. In the image
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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