Clark Atlanta University
The Rise of Segregation in the Federal Bureaucracy, 1900-1930
Author(s): August Meier and Elliott Rudwick
Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 28, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1967), pp. 178-184
Published by: Clark Atlanta University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/273560
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By AUGUST MEIER and ELLIOTT RUDWICK
The Rise of Segregation in the
Federal Bureaucracy, 1900-1930
INTRODUCTION OF SEGREGATIONinto the civil service," wrote Ralph
J J. Bunche in 1940, "was one of the blackest and most abominable
spots on the Wilson Administration." 1 Certainly, the growth of racial
segregation in the federal bureaucracy is a well-known aspect of Wilson's presidency.2 Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson and Secretary
of the Treasury William G. McAdoo have been held personally responsible for this innovation. One popular account even blames the President's wife, who on a visit to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving
was shocked to find white and Negro clerks lunching together.3
A few historians have indicated that the practice began under President Taft.4 Generally forgotten, however, has been the fact that this
was a Republican as well as a Democratic policy. It was introduced at
least as early as the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt, and was expanded during the period of Republican ascendancy in the 1920's.5
The developments during the Wilson Administration impressed both
contemporaries and historians for several reasons. Certainly a dramatic
increase in the extent of segregation in the government bureaus occurred at that time. Moreover, people anticipated that the Democratic
Wilson Administration, with its strong Southern tone, would exhibit
widespread discrimination. Thirdly, the opening months of the Wilson
presidency were a period of general deterioration in the status of Negroes, involving the exclusion of colored men from most patronage positions traditionally held by the race and serious attempts to enact jim
crow laws and anti-intermarriage statutes for the Northern states and
t fTTHE
1Ralph J. Bunche, "The Political Status of the Negro" (Unpublished Memorandum for Carnegie-Myrdal Study of Negroes in America, 1940), p. 1384.
Wolgemuth, "Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation," Journal of Negro History,
XLIV (April, 1959), 148-73; Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton, 1956), pp.
246-52; Laurence J. W. Hayes, The Negro Federal Government Worker (Washington, 1941),
pp. 30-35; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), p. 327; Richard B. Sherman, "Republicans and Negroes: The Lessons of Normalcy," Phylon, XXVII (First Quarter,
1966), 75; all either implicity suggest or explicitly state that the practice began under Wilson.
The NAACP national board of directors in protesting the Wilsonian policy, called it a "new
and radical departure." (Washington Bee, August 23, 1913); see also Link, op. cit., p. 250.
sCrisis, XXXV (November, 1928), 369; Cleveland Gazette, January 19, 1929.
165.
E.g., August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1963),
at the opBishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church, the leading Negro Democrat
ening of Wilson's presidency, recalled that the humiliating policy had actually started in the
Church
"latter part of Roosevelt's administration, and was continued during Taft's." AWME
Review, XXI (October, 1914), 209.
2 Kathleen
178
SEGREGATION IN THE FEDERAL BUREAURACY
179
the District of Columbia. Finally, and most important of all, there was
the dramatic confrontation between the President and the Negro radical
protest leader Monroe Trotter over the issue of federal segregation.
Trotter headed a delegation which had obtained an audience with the
President to discuss the matter. The conference closed unpleasantly
when Wilson ordered Trotter out of his office for what he deemed insulting language. This act of the President received enormous publicity
and outraged Negroes all over the country.6
Even contemporaries were not aware of the full extent of the trend
toward segregation in the federal departments under Republican presidents both before and after Wilson. Among the Negro newspapers consulted, only the Washington Bee gave much attention to the issue prior
to the Wilson Administration. During the 1920's,it was chiefly the Cleveland Gazette, whose editor was a close friend of Neval Thomas, president of the Washington, D. C. branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, which carried numerous and detailed
accounts. Generally speaking, the situation seems to have received publicity in 1913-1914and again in the middle twenties only when national
protest organizations made it the subject of a vigorous campaign.
Segregation of Negro clerks in the federal executive departments
was part of a larger movement toward the limitation, if not the exclusion, of Negro white collar workers from the civil service. The "rule of
three," first used in 1888, permitting the selection of any of the top
three applicants for a position, became a notorious instrument for weeding out qualified Negroes.7 Agencies also found excuses for not promoting Negroes and even justified the existence of segregated units as the
only way Negroes could be promoted to supervisory positions.8
Most government departments hired few colored clerks, and the majority of Negro white collar workers were concentrated in the Treasury,
Interior, and Post Office Departments.9 Where Negro clerks were few
or absent, the clamor for segregating them did not arise; accordingly it
was in these three departments that the problem of segregation (as distinct from hiring and promotion practices) was most critical. During
the period treated in this article, there were also reports of segregation
in the War, Commerce, and Justice Departments.
Segregation of government clerks took various forms. Negroes were
commonly required to work in separate rooms, or in a separate section
of a larger room in which whites also worked. Segregated lockers and
lavatories were also widespread. Most pervasive of all apparently was
the practice of segregated lunchrooms.
6 Washington Bee, November 21, 1914; AME Church Review, XXI (January, 1915), 309-18; Link,
op. cit., p 252.
7 Hayes, op. cit., pp. 49-51. Even under McKinley the rule was commonly used as a discriminatory device. (Washington Bee, September 16, 1899).
s E.g., Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1967.
Hayes, op. cit., p. 113.
180
PHYLON
The federal bureaucracy had never been free of discrimination. During Reconstruction, when Negro clerks were first employed in significant numbers,?1 some were segregated; but toward the end of the
century such practices were "at a minimum." 11
Although Theodore Roosevelt's Administration is known for the
expansion of the civil service merit system, during his years as president Negroes often complained about discrimination in hiring and promotions 12 and there was a tendency to segregate the colored clerks in
some departments. As early as March, 1904, the Washington Bee noted
that a "Negro colony" had been established in "one or two departments
of the government," specifically the Pension and Record Division of the
War Deepartment, where Negro clerks were "set off in one corner of the
building." Six months later the Bee asserted that the trend toward
segregation was growing. It especially singled out the Treasury, War,
and Interior Departments, "where scores of colored clerks are placed in
rooms without a white clerk in them." 13 In mid-1905 the Bee protested
about the Bureau of Engraving of the Treasury Department, where only
Negroes were assigned to one corner known as "the rag house," doing
very hot and disagreeable work. Nearly a year later a wooden partition
separating the two races was constructed in the women's locker room in
the new wing of this Bureau. Thereafter colored printers' assistants who
worked on all floors of the building were forced to use this one locker
room. It was reported that "in many instances the colored girls are not
given clean towels and neither are they given decent wash basins."
Not quite two years later the Bureau of Engraving provided separate
toilet rooms for the white and colored women; the one for Negroes was
unheated.14
Meanwhile racial segregation and exclusion had appeared in certain
restaurants located in federal buildings. At the United States Courthouse restaurant, both Negro employees and the general public experienced discrimination.15 During the summer of 1905, even such prominent figures as Municipal Judge Robert H. Terrell and Recorder of
Deeds J. C. Dancy had been refused service at the lunchroom of the
General Land Office in the Interior Department. And early in 1908 the
Treasury Department lunchroom refused to serve Lewis H. Douglass,
son of Frederick Douglass.16
By this time, the Washington Bee observed, things were "getting
worse," and over the next four years under Taft, segregation was exo Probably the first Negro clerk was appointed by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase
in 1863.
1 Crisis, XXXV (November, 1928), 369.
12E.g., Washington Bee, April 6, 1901; July 2, 1904; July 22, 1905; April 21, July 21, August 11,
1906; February 23, November 16, 1907.
18Ibid., March 19, 1904; September 3, 1904.
4 Ibid., July 15, 1905; May 19, June 2, June 30, 1906; March 7, 1908.
15 Ibid., August 8, 1905; March 16, April 13, 1907.
6 Indianapolis Freeman, August 12, 1905; Washington Bee, February 22, 1908.
SEGREGATION IN THE FEDERAL BUREAURACY
181
tended even further. In 1910 it was instituted in the Census Bureau and
in the diningroom for White House employees.17
During the first months of the Wilson Administration, the pattern
was expanded further, especially in the Post Office and Treasury Departments.18Intervention by prominent Negro Democrats such as Bishop Alexander Walters brought down the insulting signs designating separate lavatories in the Treasury Department, but the employees were
quietly told to use the old jim crow facilities.19 Protests in 1913 and
1914 by the NAACP and by militants such as Monroe Trotter are credited with halting the spread of the policy of separating clerks in the
government offices.20 Nevertheless, contrary to the general impression,
this was not the end of the story as far as the Wilson Administration
was concerned. The war preparedness efforts and World War I itself
were accompanied by further incidents. In August, 1916, the superintendent of the State, War, and Navy Departments building set up separate men's rooms. Protests led to a reversal of the policy a month
later.21 The War Trade Commission, however, decided to maintain separate toilets for Negroes. And after the war, segregation was instituted
in the lunchroom of the Library of Congress.22
Negro leaders made segregation in the federal departments an important campaign issue in the election of 1920. After the Republican
nominating convention, national committeeman Henry L. Johnson, who
conducted the Republican campaign among Negroes, stressed that the
race wanted a general executive order forbidding segregation in any federal department. James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the
NAACP, conferred with candidate Harding, who asserted that he opposed segregation in the government departments and promised that
if elected he would abolish the practice by executive order. However, he
refused to make a public statement, fearing it would hurt the party
politically.23
Yet after the election, Harding did not issue the order. In the early
months of the Administration, an Associated Negro Press representative
noted that Attorney General Daugherty ignored repeated requests to
remedy the jim crow conditions in the Division of Mails and Files of the
Justice Department which he had inherited from the Democrats. The
reporter added that colored laborers were just about the only Negro
employees who were not in segregated work groups. Two years later,
Washington Bee, May 30, 1908; Chicago Defender, July 30, 1910; Baltimore Afro-American,
January 22, 1910; Washington Bee, May 15, 1914.
is Link, op. cit., p. 247; Crisis, VII (November, 1913), 343.
19 Baltimore
October 25, 1913; January 17, 1914; New York Age, August 28,
Afro-American,
September 11, 1913.
2 Link, op. cit, p. 252; Wolgemuth, op. cit., p. 171.
2 Washington Bee, September 9, 1916; New York Age, September 14, 1916; James Weldon Johnson's column in ibid., September 18, 1920.
Bee, August 24, 1918; New York Age, August 23, 1919; Secretary's Report, NAACP
2Washington
National Board of Directors Minutes, December, 1919.
3 Richmond Planet, July 17, 1920; NAACP Board Minutes, September, 1920.
182
PHYLON
James Weldon Johnson descibed segregation in the various departments of the federal bureaucracy as "widespread."24
During the final days of the Harding Administration, and under
Coolidge, who succeeded him, conditions again became worse. Early in
July, 1923, a few weeks before Harding's death, an important symbolic
issue for Negroes arose when segregation was extended to the office of
the Register of the Treasury. The post, which Negroes had traditionally held under Republican administrations, had remained in white
hands when the Republicans returned to office in 1921. Register H. V.
Speelman, a white Ohioan, placed the Negro clerks in a special unit
under a Negro section chief. In 1923 Speelman decided that "efficiency"
required the erection of a beaverboard partition to prevent Negro clerks
from having any contact with the whites. To stop clerks of both races
from using the same elevator together, he required Negroes to arrive
and depart fifteen minutes earlier than the whites.25 Adding further
humiliation, he established jim crow lavatories for Negro women and
even demanded that the male clerks perform menial labor such as loading and unloading trucks. In response to a vociferous Negro protest,
Speelman made only one concession: he restored integrated lavatories.26Jim crowism in the Register's office received national attention
after the names of Negro and white employees who died in World War I
were memorialized on separate tablets on Armistice Day, 1924. Vigorous protests by Negro veterans led Secretary of the Treasury Andrew
Mellon to direct that a framed scroll listing all names alphabetically be
substituted for the tablets.27
If the office of Register of the Treasury provided the biggest symbolic issue, from the point of sheer numbers the problem was most critical elsewhere in the Treasury - at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where more Negro women were employed than in any other agency.
Under Republicans as under Democrats, Negroes were jim crowed in
working stations, toilets, and the cafeteria.28
In 1924 Neval Thomas surveyed conditions in the various government
agencies. He found Negroes allowed at only a few tables "in an out of
the way section" of the Government Printing Office cafeteria, and "rampant" segregation in the Post Office Department, with colored workers
excluded from the cafeteria and employees lounge and segregated in
the locker rooms and toilets. The national NAACP at its 1924 annual
conference condemned the Republican Party for allowing segregation
in government offices. A year later an NAACP investigator found that
24St. Louis Argus, June 17, 1921; Secretary's Report, NAACP Board Minutes, March, 1923.
25Cleveland Gazette, July 14, 1923; Atlanta Independent,
July 5, 1923, October 18, 1923; Kansas
City Call, November 16, 1923.
26 Atlanta Independent,
November 1, 1923; Kansas City Call, November 30, 1923, June 27, 1924;
St. Louis Argus, October 3, 1924; Cleveland Gazette, July 5, 1924.
27Atlanta Independent, November 20, 1924; Kansas City Call, December 5, 1924; St. Louis Argus,
December 5, 1924.
28Cleveland Gazette, August 9, April 15, 1924.
SEGREGATION IN THE FEDERAL BUREAURACY
183
segregation in the bureaus was "more or less obvious to any observer."
In 1926 Moorfield Storey, the NAACP president, concluded that the segregation was probably worse under Coolidge than during any previous
administration.29
Meanwhile the issue had become a focal point for the agitation of
Trotter's National Equal Rights League and the Washington branch of
the NAACP.30 Late in 1926, representatives of the two groups conferred
with the President. He maintained that much discrimination had been
eliminated, and agreed to work hard to stamp out what remained.31
Despite Coolidge's protestations, the segregation policy actually expanded. In July, 1927, when several Negro examiners in the Interior
Department were assigned together in a new work station, E. C. Finney,
acting Secretary of the Interior, told objectors that "the purpose of the
consolidation was not to segregate colored employees, but to place an
important unit of the Pension Office completely in their charge."32
Although the colored male clerks were no longer permitted to give
dictation to white female stenographers but had to submit the material
to them in longhand, Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, held that
this step was taken to promote "efficiency."33 He rescinded the segregation in the Pension Bureau only after a vigorous protest campaign
led by Neval Thomas.34 Subsequently the protest of Thomas and the
National Equal Rights League prompted Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to end segregation in the Bureau of the Census.35 Meanwhile Thomas with the help of the League and the national NAACP also
attacked segregation in the Interior Department's General Land Office
and in the Treasury Department. These struggles, however, were unsuccessful.36
The 1920's ended with the problem of the Treasury Department untouched, some segregated work units existing in the Interior Department, and the general prevalence of jim crow lavatories, locker rooms,
and cafeterias.37 Hoover had eliminated segregation in the Department of Commerce at the time he wanted to obtain the presidential
nomination. As chief executive, however, he ignored the problem while
blandly receiving delegations of Negroes who came to see him about the
persistent discrimination.38
29Ibid., August 9, 1924; Crisis, XXVIII (August, 1924), 152; Secretary's Report, NAACP Board
Minutes, February, 1925; NAACP Board Minutes, May 10, 1926.
30 E.g., Pittsburgh
Courier, November 3, 1923; St. Louis Argus, August 28, 1925; NAACP Board
Minutes, September 13, 1926; Cleveland Gazette, June 25, 1927.
51 Cleveland
Gazette, October 2, 1926; Pittsburgh Courier, February 26, 1927.
32Kansas City Call, August 5, 1927; Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1927.
s Crisis, XXXIV (December, 1927), 334. See Cleveland Gazette, November 12, 1927, and Crisis,
XXXV (November, 1928), 388, for a similar situation in the Land Office.
34Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1927; Cleveland Gazette, October 22, 1927; Secretary's Report,
NAACP Board Minutes, October, 1927; Crisis, XXXIV (December, 1927), 334.
85Cleveland Gazette, April 7, 1928; Richmond Planet, April 14, 1928.
30 Atlanta Independent,
December 22, 1927; Secretary's Report, NAACP Board Minutes, March,
1928; New York Age, April 7, 1928, May 12, 1928; Pittsburgh Courier, January 14, 1928.
a7Crisis, XXXV (November, 1928), 369, 388; NAACP Board Minutes, January, 1929.
38New York Age, December 12, 1930; Pittsburgh Courier, December 5, 1931.
PHYLON
184
Thus, in the first third of the century, two Republican presidents
before Wilson and three Republican presidents after him permitted the
growth and spread of a policy of segregating the relatively few Negroes able to obtain white collar positions in the executive departments. Ironically, the climax of this process came not under Woodrow
Wilson, who had been born in the South, but during the Administration
of Calvin Coolidge, that most Yankee of presidents.
By JAYE GIAMMARINO
Heart of Hearts
United Nations, symbol of the Age,
A giant heart enmeshed in East and West;
With drama aptly played on center-stageEach Solomon applies his wit at best.
United Nations, universal heart,
That channels hope for worldly ills like blood;
And Understanding, pulse and counterpart
Of love for man, an embryonic bud.
The heart that wakes to good evokes no beat
For legions that display the tiger's tooth,
As nations throw off chaff and take the wheat
To feed the fire within the brain of youth.
And as the force of life links heart and mind,
This mesh of hearts unites all men in kind.