Chapter Thirteen


J. Ernest Wilkins in Washington, 1953–1955

By the early 1950s my grandfather had a reputation in black Chicago as a consummate professional, a “lawyer's lawyer,” known for his incisive mind. In the one building in downtown Chicago that would rent to African Americans, a building sarcastically referred to by the city's black attorneys as “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” J. Ernest shared office space with some of the city's most influential African Americans, including the future Democratic congressman William L. Dawson.1 , My grandfather was now a member of the United Methodist Church's Judicial Council, the first African American to sit on this prestigious national tribunal. He had received an honorary doctorate from Lincoln University, had served two terms as president of the Cook County Bar Association, and was Grand Polemarch (president) of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.²

In 1950 Chicago's Republicans took note of my grandfather's high standing within the community and invited him to run as their candidate for circuit court judge, the first African American to be so honored.³ William J. Touhy, his opponent in the contest, was supported by Chicago's powerful Democratic machine. Though J. Ernest lost the election, he garnered enough votes to attract the attention of the Republican National Committee.

In an effort to boost their support among black voters, the Republican National Committee members had recently appointed Val Washington as their director of minority affairs. Washington was a member of J. Ernest's fraternity and a longtime Chicago resident. Although it's probable that the two men had already met socially, J. Ernest's rising political star would have given Washington reason to see my grandfather in a new light. When Republican officials began looking for “qualified Negroes” to serve in government after the 1952 election, it's likely that Washington put my grandfather's name at the top of the list. And when President Eisenhower announced that he would be forming a high-level committee to tackle the issue of job discrimination, J. Ernest was chosen to co-chair the group.⁴

To many observers in Washington, D.C., my grandfather's rise to national prominence seemed to come out of the blue. J. Ernest was not really a politician or a civil rights leader. He had not spent any time frequenting the halls of power on Capitol Hill. “Who is this guy? Do you know him?” they would have asked each other, shaking their heads.

Every now and then during my career as a music teacher, I've been lucky enough to watch a student or two rise from obscurity to stardom. One day they're playing for tips in some local dive. Then, before you know it, they're picking up a Grammy on TV. I know that the success that appears to come “overnight” is usually the result of a lot of hard work away from the limelight. When J. Ernest Wilkins was selected to co-chair Eisenhower's first major desegregation initiative, he was nearly sixty years old. He may not have been a household name in Washington, D.C., but my grandfather had been preparing for his moment on the national stage for years.

At the end of the group's first meeting in August 1953, Vice President Richard Nixon announced to reporters that the new committee would be more than a study group. The president, he said, was looking for “concrete action” on discrimination issues. Nixon and my grandfather were the co-chairmen, and the committee's other members included Franklin Delano Roosevelt's son James Roosevelt, the presidents of the American Retail Corporation and International Harvester, and the nation's top two labor leaders, Walter Reuther and George Meany.5

Although the White House billed the group as one that would “crack down on discrimination” in firms doing business with the federal government, the committee's mandate was in fact limited. The group would not be empowered legally either to investigate allegations of discrimination or to enforce compliance with its findings. In Eisenhower's words, the committee's main tools would be those of “cooperation, persuasion, education and negotiation.”⁶ Despite these limitations, the President's Committee on Government Contracts received front-page coverage in the black press and praise from civil rights organizations.⁷

As the only African American on the committee, my grandfather approached his work with a sense of mission. It is the “duty of the church to steer people of high moral standards to run for public office,” he told a large crowd at Harlem's St. Mark Methodist Church. Moreover, it is the “right of the people to alter their policy of government when it becomes destructive” to the maintenance of those standards.⁸

The committee's first priority was to address the issue of discrimination in the nation's capital. In meetings chaired alternately by Richard Nixon and by my grandfather, committee members persuaded District of Columbia officials to announce that companies seeking new contracts with the district would be required to show that their hiring practices were not discriminatory. As a result of the committee's efforts, both D.C.'s telephone and bus companies hired black workers for the first time. By November 1953 the committee was able to persuade D.C. commissioners to issue an order banning discrimination in twenty-three city agencies.9

However, the committee was not able to achieve all its goals. Bowing to pressure from segregationists in Congress, Washington's fire department was exempted from the new desegregation order. Though the District of Columbia did issue a desegregation order in 1954, it would be years before the fire department truly became an integrated agency.¹⁰

J. Ernest's work in co-chairing the committee won him Vice President Nixon's respect and also praise from his fellow committee members. In a 1954 editorial, the New York Times informed its readers that my grandfather's “qualities of tact, resourcefulness, strength of character and balanced judgment commended themselves to his colleagues.”¹¹ Knowing that the president was considering appointing some African Americans to sub-cabinet positions, Nixon encouraged President Eisenhower to find a place for my grandfather within his administration.¹² In March 1954, J. Ernest received word that he would be appointed to serve as America's first black assistant secretary of labor. Despite the segregated school system in Farmington, Missouri, and despite his impoverished beginnings and his bigamous father, J. Ernest Wilkins would now become the top-ranking African American in the federal government.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when he received the news. Just after hanging up the phone, what did my grandfather do? Did he grab Lucile and waltz around the living room? Did he fall down on his knees to shout a prayer of gratitude? Did he pick up the phone and share the news with his three sons? Perhaps my grandfather simply took a moment to savor his triumph in silence. No one still living in my family knows for sure. The one thing we are all positive about is that he did not toast his appointment with a glass of anything alcoholic. J. Ernest did not drink, smoke, swear, or play cards. No matter what else may have been going on in his life, my grandfather would always remain true to the strict Methodist values he had learned as a child in Farmington.

J. Ernest Wilkins's appointment was national news. James Hagerty, Eisenhower's press secretary, announced that it was the “first time, as far as we know, that a Negro has been appointed to a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet post.”¹³ The statement was not, in fact, strictly accurate. William F. Lewis, an African American, had served as assistant secretary general during the Taft administration.¹⁴ However, no black man had served in a sub-cabinet position in forty years, and never in the Department of Labor.

In a jubilant editorial, the Chicago Defender wrote, “Were he alive today, Robert S. Abbott, founder of the Defender, . . . might find reason to feel that his many years of arduous campaigning may not have been in vain.” The New York Times wrote an editorial calling Eisenhower's choice of my grandfather “an excellent appointment.” Back in Farmington, reporters chased down J. Ernest's elementary schoolteacher to inquire about her now famous pupil.15

At the press conference announcing his nomination, my grandfather told reporters that his appointment “honored his race” more than it honored him as an individual. He reminded his listeners that three-fourths of the world's people were not white. His status as a Negro would, he felt, allow him to work more effectively abroad as a representative of the U.S. government.¹⁶

Was my grandfather's new position a “token” appointment? There is no question that the White House was looking to increase its popularity with black voters before interim elections took place that November. Speaking to a large black audience in Detroit, Vice President Nixon made sure to let the crowd know that he had “had a hand” in J. Ernest's appointment. He told a reporter from the Chicago Defender that the president “had some even bigger jobs planned for Negroes.”¹⁷

By the end of 1954, Eisenhower had appointed ten more blacks to positions within his administration. Eisenhower's eleven African American appointments were the largest number made by any president up to that time. But given the likelihood that Congress would balk at confirming African Americans to high-ranking posts, the appointments were calculated with an eye more to job visibility than to efficacy.¹⁸

Today, the word “token” is considered pejorative, often used to describe an unqualified person who has been given a job purely on the basis of race. I wish I had a dime for every time I've heard someone tell me, over the last twenty years, that since I am both black and a woman, I must have had an easy time getting my teaching position. “Oh they had to put a black woman in that job,” people tell me, implying that without these so-called unfair advantages I would never have qualified. In fact, it's been my experience that “black firsts,” far from being less qualified than their white competitors, need to be even more qualified simply to survive on the job. In addition to dealing with the learning curve involved in any new position, African American “firsts” must often be prepared to cope with resentment, suspicion, and outright racist treatment from their white colleagues. As much as we would like to believe that we live in a colorblind society, it's been my experience that the color of your skin has a great deal of influence on the way people treat you.

Back when my grandfather was integrating the Labor Department, things were much worse. The Honorable Anna Diggs Taylor, now a senior U.S. district judge, was fresh out of Yale Law School when my grandfather took her under his wing in June 1957. Despite her Yale law degree, Judge Taylor, an African American, had “no prospects” of finding a job until J. Ernest hired her to work in the Labor Department. “The government was [the world was] VERY openly racist in those days,” she explained to me in a letter.19

A couple of years ago, over drinks, I asked one of my parents' friends to tell me what it was like for black folks back in the 1950s. With an ironic smile, this accomplished and highly successful black doctor told me the following joke: “What does a white man say to a black redcap? ‘Boy, go get my luggage.’ What does a white man say to a black bank president? ‘Boy, what are you doing in that three-piece suit? Here's a dime. Go get my luggage.'” Though we all laughed heartily, there was no mistaking the bitterness in his tone.

My grandfather's appointment may have been made with an eye to improving the administration's civil rights image. But it was also true that he had done an outstanding job as co-chair of the president's anti-discrimination committee. Standing toe-to-toe with leaders in government, labor, and business, my grandfather with his intelligence, tact, and integrity had won the respect of the second-highest official in the country.

J. Ernest's area of specialization within the Labor Department was to be in the field of international affairs. Barely three months after his appointment J. Ernest, now the head of the U.S. delegation, made his first trip to the International Labor Organization (ILO) convention in Geneva. The Chicago Defender has a wonderful photo of my grandfather standing on the tarmac awaiting his flight.²⁰ He is beaming. The pretty stewardess holding his umbrella for him, and also beaming, is a white girl. One can almost feel the excitement and optimism in the air. This was to be J. Ernest's first appearance on the world stage. If my grandfather was at all nervous, he did not show it.

On the first day of the convention, a veteran delegate from the Middle East approached J. Ernest and asked him how this conference compared with other international conferences he'd attended. In a rare moment of public humor, my grandfather dryly responded, “Well now, that's hard to say. The last international affair I attended on this side of the ocean was in 1918 in France. It was hardly a conference, and any way I was on what you might call the working level, so I really cannot answer your question.”²¹

As I read this exchange I laughed out loud, earning startled looks from my fellow scholars in the rarified confines of Harvard's Phillips Reading Room. It was delightful to see this side of my grandfather in print. Everything I had learned about him made him seem so austere. J. Ernest was certainly not a party guy. Nor, as far as I could tell, was he the kind of raconteur who laid folks out with a well-placed joke over dinner. My mother had described him as “cold, stuffy, and pompous,” and he was probably all of these things. Yet, at least for this one moment, the record of history had managed to capture a bit of self-deprecating wit. Lovely. I smiled reassuringly at the scholars hunched over their books at my table. After a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure that the head librarian had not phoned security to throw me out, I resumed my reading.

In 1954 the major thrust of American foreign policy involved pursuing a “Cold War” to contain the Soviet Union's growing influence in the world. Communism was considered to be the greatest threat to our nation's security, and many diplomats worried that the emerging nations of Asia and Africa would align with the Soviet Union. When State Department officials tried to contrast the American “Free World” with the dictatorship model put forward by the Communists, many Third World countries scoffed. How could the United States talk about “freedom” and “democracy” when several million of its black citizens were denied even the most basic civil rights? By sending his new, black, assistant secretary of labor to the ILO's Geneva conference, Eisenhower hoped to improve America's image around the world.22

As the ILO conference got under way, hostility between the American and the Russian delegations quickly surfaced. Avakimovich Arutyunyan, a Russian delegate with a reputation as a tough debater, declared that Russia was being deprived of its rightful place on the ILO selections committee. The United States, France, and Britain had already gone on record to oppose putting Russia on this important committee. J. Ernest took the podium in response. As he came forward, the reporter covering the event noticed a hush fall over the auditorium.

It seems to me that in the interest of harmony and peace and unity we all should come here not with the idea of saying that ours is the greatest nation in the world, but with the idea of building this organization into the organ for peace it should be. Certainly there are countries here whose boundaries are not so great as others, whose material wealth is not so great, who have not got the natural resources of some, but even they have as great an interest in this body as the greatest of us all. This equality of the ILO should never be forgotten.

After my grandfather finished his speech, the request to add the Russians to the selection committee was defeated by eighty-one votes.²³ The black press crowed at J. Ernest's success. Harold Keith wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier that “Most certainly, Mr. Wilkins' statesmanlike conduct before the International Labor Organization in Geneva, when he crossed swords with some of the old heads in the game from behind the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ and came out on top, has qualified him to be numbered among our more astute legal minds.”²⁴

On the last day of the conference, my grandfather gave the keynote address. The United States, he said, is “free and strong” and wants to help the other countries in the world “provide food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, and strength for the sick.” He denounced communist bloc countries for promoting an “empire of slavery to the eastward” whose leaders “use the boot, the gun, and the lie to captivate and oppress. . . . It is easy to be violent, it is easy to hate.” The ILO's job, he told the delegates, was “to make peace, to promote life, to seek freedom for all people.”25 My grandfather's first trip to the ILO Convention had been a rousing success—so much so that it inspired Congressman Fred Busbey to have his appropriations committee restore the cuts it had made in J. Ernest's budget.²⁶

But my grandfather was given little time to rest on his laurels. In November he was sent to Rome to lead the American delegation at a labor conference there. In this era before cell phones and computers, he wrote my grandmother every day to report on his progress. J. Ernest's letters from this period sparkle with references to state receptions, luncheons with foreign diplomats, and high-level committee meetings. His schedule for the week of November 11 was typical:

6:30PM Monday—Reception by Italian Society
12:30 pm Tuesday—Reception by the Mayor of Rome
9pm Wednesday—Reception by the Minister of Labor of Italy
8:30 PM Thursday—Dinner for the Governing Body
6:30 Friday—Reception by the Minister of Foreign affairs.

Later in the same letter, he tells my grandmother that “the date and hour of our visit to the Vatican has not been set.”²⁷

My grandfather's daily letters home, often little more than lists of times and dates, reveal a man who was proper, correct, and restrained even in his most private communications. Although he was not a man to show his emotions publicly, I suspect that the attention, recognition, and accolades J. Ernest received for his work abroad meant a lot to him. He was being feted on a regular basis by ambassadors and high-ranking government officials. It must have been heady stuff for the son of a laundress from Farmington, Missouri.

The environment back in Washington, however, was considerably less welcoming. Although administration officials were happy to display an African American to the world as an antidote to communist propaganda, many White House staffers were reluctant to accept a black man as their professional equal. E. Frederick Morrow, Eisenhower's administrative assistant, was the first black man ever hired to work in an executive capacity at the White House. He described the attitude of many White House staffers as “condescending to blacks generally.”²⁸ For example, Jack Anderson, later to become a noted Washington columnist, casually used the word “nigger” when telling a joke in Morrow's presence at a staff meeting. When Morrow asked him to repeat himself, Anderson looked him dead in the eye and repeated the slur without apology.²⁹

When Morrow first began working at the White House, many of the white women in the secretarial pool refused to work for him. Feeling himself “under scrutiny” at all times, Morrow found it necessary to meet with his female staff in groups “to avoid any damaging gossip.”30 From the beginning, Morrow felt himself “shut out” from serious policy discussions by other White House staffers, and he later wrote of the “paternalistic attitude” many Republican leaders had toward blacks.³¹

As the Labor Department's lone black official, my grandfather would no doubt have received similar treatment. But unlike Morrow, J. Ernest was an intensely private man. If he was refused service in a D.C. restaurant, he simply held his anger inside. And though he was an avid golfer, my grandfather never publicly protested the fact that blacks were not allowed to use the links at Burning Tree, the president's favorite country club. After leaving the White House, Morrow wrote a book about his encounters with racism there. J. Ernest never publicly complained. If someone made rude or racist comments in his presence, although he may have been inwardly livid, my grandfather kept his thoughts to himself.

The more I thought about the stoicism with which J. Ernest faced the adversities in his life, the more I thought about my father. Back in the 1970s, Dad was the first black man in Chicago to become a partner in a large white law firm. Although much ado was made about this at the time, truth was, Dad was miserably unhappy at his new job. For over a year, he held his frustrations inside and soldiered on, going regularly off to work and sharing his feelings with no one. Then one Saturday morning, he threw a bunch of boxes in the back of the family station wagon, packed up his law books, and moved out of his office. Presumably he had informed his fellow partners before he left the firm, but at home Dad had kept his intentions to himself. His silence through what must have been months of miserable agony on the job hurt my mother deeply and mystified the rest of us. But now, reading about J. Ernest, I began to see how my Dad had acquired his penchant for secrecy.

J. Ernest Wilkins had never been a quitter or a whiner. Not in Farmington when kids teased him about his absent father. Not at the University of Illinois when he had to work long hours after school in order to support himself. Not in the army where he faced death and vicious racial prejudice on a daily basis. Rather than make a fuss, my grandfather simply redoubled his efforts to show the world that a black man could excel at whatever task was put before him.

On August 16, 1954, J. Ernest Wilkins again made history when he became the first black man to participate in a cabinet meeting. The fact that his cabinet appearance may have been arranged as part of a calculated publicity stunt by the administration does not take away from the fact that he was indeed there, the first black man ever to sit around the big oval table with the president and his highest-ranking officers.³² During the meeting, all the cabinet officials welcomed J. Ernest cordially, while Vice President Nixon made it a point to elicit my grandfather's views on international affairs. As he was leaving the meeting, reporters asked how he had felt about being part of such a historic occasion. I am proud of J. Ernest's response. If the reporters had expected my grandfather to shuffle and grin with gratitude for this opportunity to sit down at the White Man's Table, they would have been sorely disappointed. “Of course, this was an unusual experience,” he responded, “but I have attended a great many meetings, and I tried to regard this as just another meeting.”33

In May of 1954 the Supreme Court issued its now famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, overthrowing the legal basis for segregated schools. If I had to choose one piece of legal history that has made the most difference for me personally, I would have to put the Brown decision at the top of the list. I was barely two when the nation's schools were desegregated, but the Brown decision opened doors of opportunity that previously would never have been available to me. Like many black folks, J. Ernest was optimistic about the state of American race relations in light of the Brown decision. “The members of the Supreme Court by their unanimous history-making decision in May decided this case as Americans, as men dedicated to the preservation of the nation that was founded on the principles of the Constitution,” he told an elite group of black professionals in Philadelphia.³⁴

Over the next three years, J. Ernest's duties as the Labor Department's international affairs representative kept him traveling constantly. In November 1954 he was sent to Rome, and in the spring and summer of 1955, to Geneva. In the summer of 1956, he once again led the American delegation at the ILO Convention, where two Hungarian delegates were refused participation in the convention to protest the Russian takeover of that nation's government.³⁵

As one of a tiny handful of high-profile African American Republicans, my grandfather's presence was in constant demand as the 1956 presidential election heated up. In the fall of 1956, J. Ernest represented the United States at a labor conference in Cuba and then rushed back to Tucson to give a speech in support of the Eisenhower ticket before Election Day. Meanwhile, he had been asked to be part of yet another committee investigating bias in procedures used to award government contracts. Convened in January 1955, the President's Committee on Government Employment Practices was charged with ascertaining the status of blacks employed by the government and increasing the number of African Americans in high-level positions.

But from the beginning the committee encountered severe obstacles. Few black employees were willing to risk their jobs by coming forward to make a complaint. The information-gathering process was hampered by the fact that employees who did wish to lodge a complaint were required to travel great distances, at their own expense, to attend the committee's hearings. And the procedural deck was stacked against those still wishing to make a formal complaint. The committee's hearing process mandated that the full burden of proof rested on the complainant, not on the government agency accused of discrimination. At the same time, the committee's procedures routinely denied complainants access to the government files they needed to prepare their cases, claiming that the files contained “sensitive information.” It is not at all surprising that few complaints were filed under this Kafkaesque system.36

Despite the failure of the new contract committee to make many changes in government hiring practices, J. Ernest continued to advocate equal employment whenever he could. At his insistence, two African American staffers were included in the American delegation at the 1957 ILO convention.³⁷

As 1956 came to a close, J. Ernest Wilkins appeared to have won the respect of colleagues both at home and abroad. At the Republican National Convention, J. Ernest gave a speech to second Richard Nixon's vice-presidential nomination. In that proud moment it must have seemed that all his struggle and hard work had paid off. As he often told reporters, times were changing for the better and discrimination was “fast fading from the American scene.”³⁸ When the distinguished South African writer and anti-apartheid activist Alan Paton came to Washington to investigate the state of American race relations in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, one of the first people he interviewed was J. Ernest Wilkins. When asked about the future of the Negro in America, my grandfather replied, “It is full of hope. It has never been so full of hope.”³⁹

But my grandfather was wrong. Behind the public façade of accolades and glamorous parties, the political culture in Washington would remain tainted by unremitting racism. Within the next year, J. Ernest Wilkins would begin to doubt his earlier optimism.