Chapter Fourteen


In Washington, 1955-1957

After months of painstaking research I was on the verge of finding out what had caused my grandfather to leave the Labor Department. I had pestered my older relatives and friends of the family for information. I had spent hours in libraries and hundreds of dollars on books. I had worn out my researcher, Mariah Cooper, with scores of questions. I had flown more than a thousand miles to see the place where J. Ernest's story began. I had checked and double-checked information drawn from old newspapers, census data, and tax rolls.

I was almost at the end of my search. There was only one small problem. I was driving my husband crazy.

When a two-foot-high stack of books on the Eisenhower era crashed to the floor during one of my late-night research sessions, John, startled awake by the noise, confronted me.

“Carolyn, what on earth are you doing? It's nearly two a.m.” He rubbed his eyes and peered at me accusingly.

“I'm sorry, honey. I didn't mean to wake you. I was looking for this great quote I found about J. Ernest. I know the book is here somewhere—I was just looking at it a minute ago. It's by Robert Burk. It's got a gray cover. You've got fresh eyes. Could you just take a look around? Maybe you can find it. I just had it not five minutes ago.” Focused on my task, I continued to dig through the pile of books at my feet.

My husband took me by the shoulders and turned me toward him, the chill in his voice commanding my full attention.

“Carolyn. You know I have to get up early in the morning. You wake me out of a sound sleep and don't even apologize? Then you have the nerve to ask me to look for a book?

Well, it was not just any old book. It was the book that might contain vital clues about J. Ernest's time in D.C. But, of course, John was right. I might have been acting just a tiny bit obsessive.

“I'm sorry, honey. It's just that I'm so close to figuring out why J. Ernest quit his Labor gig. That's the whole reason I started this search. The answer's right here. I can feel it.”

“Carolyn, this thing has gotten completely out of hand.” John's bleary eyes, now fully focused, glanced angrily around my cramped study. “Look at this place. You spend hours in here each day. You don't go out, you barely play your music anymore. I can't remember when we've spent a quiet evening at home just hanging out. I love you and I know your grandfather is important to you, but I cannot go on like this indefinitely.”

“Of course, of course, baby, I know. I can't go on forever like this either.” When I looked at my behavior from John's perspective, the sight was not pretty.

“You are totally right about everything, John. I know I've been distracted and difficult. This thing about my grandfather has been tearing me up inside. Every day I wake up with this ridiculous hunger to find out what really happened to him. I know it's crazy. I know. And you are beyond a saint to put up with me like this. And I'm really, really, really sorry I woke you up. It won't happen again, I promise.”

My husband stood stiffly among the books and papers scattered on the floor and allowed me to give him a hug.

“OK Carolyn. Here's what we'll do. While you are on vacation from school, do your thing. Spend twenty-four hours a day in your study if you want. But come September, I want my wife back. I know your research is important to you, but it's been three years. Enough is enough.”

John was right. It was time to rein myself in. I had taxed the limits of my marriage, the patience of my family, and the boundaries of my sanity. But I was so close to finding out why my grandfather had resigned from the Labor Department.

“Alright, love. You got a deal. I will work like crazy for the next few weeks, and come September, no later than the end of September, I will be done. How does that sound?”

John smiled. “Carolyn, you really are a lawyer's daughter. I say September, and somehow you've managed to extend it until the end of the month. Pretty tricky negotiating. But OK. September 30. And that's it. I get my wife back, no ifs, ands, or buts. Do we have a deal?”

My knees sagged with relief. I love my husband to death and really cannot function if he's angry with me. John's deadline would be tough to meet, but come hell or high water I would do it.

“Deal.” I shook his hand formally and gave him a peck on the cheek to seal the bargain.

“Alright, Carolyn. I'm going to hold you to it. And clean up this room. Each day it's a worse mess than the day before. You'll never get any quality work done in this sty.”

The next day when I came home from grocery shopping, I found a brand- new bookcase leaning against the door to my study. Stuck to the case was a giant yellow PostIt. “Getting organized is half the battle,” it read. “Happy early (or late) Valentine's Day. I love you—John.”

Believe me, I know just exactly how lucky I am.

The next day I drove out to Fitchburg State College. Fitchburg is a Massachusetts state school with only a fraction of Harvard's endowment. But it was Fitchburg's library, not Harvard's, that contained the information I now needed to continue my research. My grandfather's resignation had been covered extensively in the black press, and I was hoping to find an in-depth piece that Ebony magazine had written about him. The library at Fitchburg State College was the one place within a five-hundred-mile radius where I could read old copies of Ebony on microfilm.

Fitchburg's enrollment, like that of most colleges, is smaller for the summer term. As I took my place by the microfilm reader, the librarian and I were the only people in the room. I threaded the microfilm through its spool and adjusted the focus. Outside, it was a hot July day but inside the library's large, modern reading room, the air felt crisp and inviting. As I settled into my task, the sounds, sights, and smells of the outside world fell away. I was no longer Carolyn Wilkins, a twenty-first-century academic trying to discover her grandfather's past. For the next few hours the pages of Ebony magazine would place me at the center of one of most turbulent times in the history of American race relations.

On August 27, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi. The night after Carolyn Bryant, a clerk at the local general store, accused Till of whistling at her, the boy was taken from his uncle's home at gunpoint, tortured for several hours, and finally killed by Bryant's husband and a brutal gang of whites. When Till's mutilated body was recovered from the Tallahassee River several days later, his mother, in a terrifying act of courage, refused to have the body restored in any way by the undertaker. At the funeral in Chicago, thousands of people kept vigil outside a South Side church where shocked and grieving mourners filed respectfully past the boy's open casket. The pictures of Emmett Till's battered and broken body appeared in newspapers around the world and seared the minds of a generation of black Americans.1

In a cramped and steamy Mississippi courtroom several weeks later, an all-white jury found Bryant's husband and brother-in-law not guilty of murder, despite eyewitness testimony linking them to the crime. In that terrible moment, the modern civil rights movement took a new leap forward. From speakers' platforms across the country, black and white politicians denounced the verdict. Meanwhile, white violence against blacks across the South intensified. As white school districts across the country prepared to open their doors to black students, in compliance with the Brown decision, blacks and whites alike feared even greater racial violence.2

On December 19, 1955, Max Rabb, Eisenhower's unofficial expert on “minority affairs,” called a meeting with my grandfather, Morrow, and five other high-ranking black Republicans to discuss civil rights issues. “We were unanimous,” Morrow later recalled, “in feeling that the White House should have spoken out on the Till case.” Rabb responded that he was “under pressure from various factions” within the administration because of his civil rights advocacy. As Morrow put it, “some members of the staff, as well as the Cabinet, are utterly conservative on the matter of race.”3

Despite the administration's refusal to make any kind of moral statement to the nation about the murder of Emmett Till, Rabb expected that Eisenhower's black appointees would campaign vigorously for the president in the upcoming election. In the presidential election of 1952, Eisenhower had received less than 30 percent of the black vote.4 Republican officials were especially concerned with the results of a recent Gallup poll indicating that the majority of African Americans still favored the Democratic Party. Administration official Howard Pyle, who, though not invited to the meeting, had attended anyway, was critical of black voters. Eisenhower had “bent over backwards” on the issue of civil rights, he said. In continuing to support the Democrats, black voters had not shown any “gratitude” for his efforts. He told my grandfather and the other black men gathered in the room that they needed to “get out into the field and preach loyalty” to the black community.5

My guess is that the black Republicans gathered in the room that day resented the inference that they had not been hard at work supporting the party's programs. As the 1956 election campaign got under way, my grandfather was part of an elite corps of black public speakers charged with bringing Eisenhower's message to the black community. “With the President planning to confine his campaign to a few major speeches and television programs,” columnist Levi Jolley noted in the Pittsburgh Courier, “you can expect a complete new approach with many present appointees going from town to town drumming up the votes.”6

In February 1956, J. Ernest addressed the Urban League banquet in New York City. In April, he flew from Washington to participate in a star-studded fund-raiser featuring hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, Vice President Richard Nixon, and Illinois senator Everett Dirksen. In May my grandfather was on the stump again, this time addressing the party faithful in Minnesota.

While my grandfather traveled the country speaking on behalf of the administration's civil rights policies, the country's racial climate continued to worsen, however. Scholar Robert Burk notes that the fall semester of 1955 witnessed only minimal progress toward desegregating southern schools. No desegregation whatever was reported in Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Virginia. In Hoxie, Arkansas, massive protests and a lawsuit by the local White Citizens' Council forced the local school board to close their schools down rather than desegregate.7

In December 1955, Morrow sent a memo to the president's chief of staff asking that the president take a more visible stand on civil rights. The flamboyant African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell had proposed an amendment to a school construction bill that would deny federal funding for segregated schools. But the administration, stressing the pressing need for new classrooms, was not interested in supporting an amendment that was likely to antagonize influential southern legislators. When Powell offered to withdraw his proposal if the White House would pledge to enforce the Supreme Court's decision to integrate the nation's schools, the president disowned any executive responsibility for implementing the desegregation order.8

Meanwhile, southern resistance to desegregation continued to intensify. When a black woman named Autherine Lucy attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama, she was stoned by an angry mob of whites. When Lucy sued the university for failing to protect her from mob violence, she was expelled from the school. On orders from administration officials, the Justice Department took no action in Lucy's case, refusing to intervene in what was considered a matter of “state's rights.”9

Undeterred, civil rights activists continued to push for desegregation. In December 1955, blacks led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King began a yearlong boycott of the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. Once again, the Eisenhower administration was given an opportunity to demonstrate moral leadership in support of integration initiatives when Dr. King was thrown in jail by city authorities. On February 24, 1956, Adam Clayton Powell sent an urgent telegram asking the president to intervene on King's behalf. But Eisenhower showed little inclination to get involved in what he saw as a local matter. “As I understand it, there is a state law about boycotts, and it is under that kind of thing that these people are being brought to trial,” he stated.10

As my grandfather shuttled about the country making campaign appearances on behalf of the president, and as he attempted to defend U. S. policies to foreign critics at labor conferences abroad, J. Ernest must have felt some frustration with the administration's hands-off stance toward federal enforcement of the Brown decision. His colleague E. Frederick Morrow noted passionately in his diary the deep conflict he often felt in having to defend the administration's policies to critical black audiences. “I am more and more conscious of the great personal problem . . . of being two personalities at once—a Negro and an American,” Morrow wrote.11

Unlike Morrow, my grandfather never commented publicly on the Montgomery bus boycott or the activities of Dr. Martin Luther King. My guess is that as a “lawyer's lawyer,” J. Ernest would have preferred to lobby for civil rights in the courtroom rather than demonstrate in ways that provoked the local authorities. But as one southern school district after another openly defied the Brown decision, it must have pained my grandfather that his president refused to take a more active role in enforcing the law of the land. But Eisenhower remained determined to stay out of the desegregation controversy. “Another system was upheld by the Supreme Court for sixty years” before the Brown decision, the president told Attorney General Brownell in a confidential memo. “Ever since the ‘separate but equal’ decision, they [the South] have been obeying the Constitution of the United States.”12 J. Ernest had lived through the injustices of the so-called separate but equal system. If he had seen this memo, I wonder if he would have worked so hard on the president's reelection campaign.

My grandfather was not a political man. He had attained his position because of intellectual brilliance, not because of any ability to be a team player. A staunch Methodist who didn't drink, smoke, or swear, J. Ernest had a deeply ingrained sense of right and wrong, and once he had decided on a position he could be inflexible.13 As the racial climate in the country worsened, my grandfather did begin to show public dissatisfaction with the jobs being made available for African Americans.

In a speech before the National Urban League in February 1956, J. Ernest summed up his thoughts on the current state of employment opportunities for blacks: “It is like the remark that was made at a recent dinner party in Washington. A lady is reported to have said, ‘I tried to get a white maid, but they wanted so much money. I finally had to hire a colored girl. You know, it makes us feel so broad-minded.’ As I said, though the economic position of Negroes is improving, their competitive position has not improved to the same degree.”14

Later that spring, J. Ernest told an audience of black postal workers that much more work needed to be done in the area of creating equal employment opportunities for African Americans. “What we are after is not a few jobs in the foundry, a little token employment in the accounting department. We want effective protection from the top of industry for the qualified Negro competitor for any job which industry has to offer.”15 I can imagine that the strain of being a public spokesman for an administration that had failed to deliver on the promises of the Brown decision was beginning to tell on my grandfather. Back in Washington, his relationship with his boss was also beginning to sour.

James P. Mitchell had been the head of the Labor Department for only a few months before my grandfather began his duties there. Although both men were roughly the same age, they came from vastly different worlds. The son of working-class Catholics in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Mitchell had worked his way up through the ranks of government service, serving as a county supervisor, in the WPA, and in the labor relations division of the army construction program. During the war he had been the director of industrial personnel for the War Department before taking a civilian job as the head of personnel for Bloomingdale's department store empire. Eisenhower had known Mitchell from his work in the army, and when his first secretary of labor resigned after serving only ten months in the job, Eisenhower appointed Mitchell to head the department.16

Widely respected as an administrator, Mitchell was a stickler for detail and was well-known for being tough on his staff. According to Rocco Siciliano, who also served as an assistant secretary of labor during this period, Mitchell was proud of the fact that he had worked his way up through the ranks without benefit of a college education. In fact, Siciliano states that during staff meetings Mitchell would delight in reminding his more educated subordinates of this fact.17

My grandfather had not exactly been born with a silver spoon in his mouth either, of course. But there was no way J. Ernest would even have been hired by the Labor Department without a college degree. A black man needed all the credentials he could muster simply to be placed in the running for a high-level position. During the 1950s many college-educated blacks had to take jobs in factories and post offices because white employers refused to hire African Americans in leadership roles, no matter how well-educated they were.

Like Secretary Mitchell, J. Ernest Wilkins was a hard worker with a passion for detail. But as a “Negro first,” my grandfather was forced to step into a demanding high-profile job without the benefit of a mentor or any previous experience of working in Washington's bureaucratic jungle. Hired on the basis of his work with the President's Committee on Government Contracts rather than because of any connections within the world of labor, my grandfather was a fish out of water among the former union men with whom he worked. Since many labor unions at this time were strictly segregated by race, several of the men with whom J. Ernest interacted on a daily basis were not comfortable working with a black man as their professional equal.18

As a man who came from a very traditional culture where elders were respected and never publicly contradicted, my grandfather would have found his new work environment disconcerting, to say the least. In 1956 my grandfather was already sixty-two years old. James Mitchell was ten years his junior, while the thirty-five-year-old Siciliano was at the same level as J. Ernest in the Labor Department hierarchy.

Mitchell could be charming to outsiders. But he was “a very tough, driving taskmaster” who could be abrupt, even inconsiderate, with members of his own staff.19 J. Ernest had a great deal of pride in his educated status and in that of his family. For a man of my grandfather's background, to be addressed bluntly, perhaps inconsiderately, in front of others by someone who was not even a college graduate would have been deeply humiliating. It would have really rankled, I expect, though I doubt J. Ernest would have let his annoyance show.

Within three months of starting to work at the Labor Department, my grandfather had been chosen to head the American delegation to a major international conference. He had given major speeches on government policy. He had seen his opinions solicited by the vice president in a cabinet meeting. I am sure, by 1956, my grandfather would have felt he was handling his job pretty well. But, lacking the mentoring support that is available to most people when they step into a new leadership position, J. Ernest was unable to interpret the hints and early warning signs of the labor secretary's dissatisfaction.

In April 1955, my grandfather was asked to prepare a monthly report on labor developments around the world. Then, through his assistant John Gilhooley, Mitchell expressed dissatisfaction with the report J. Ernest had written. Gilhooley sent the report back down the chain of command and asked his assistant Millard Cass to speak to my grandfather about changing it. “Material referred to is a sheaf of twenty-five pages reciting picayune details of labor developments in various countries,” Gilhooley explained to Cass in a memo. “What the boss wants is a monthly report on major and significant developments through the world in the broadest strokes and confined to a couple of pages—readable prose.” Then, using a tactic familiar to administrators the world over, Gilhooley told Cass, “I would appreciate your doing what you can to give Wilkins an idea of how he ought to go about this without indicating that this request was made to you.”20

Perhaps Gilhooley was trying to spare J. Ernest's feelings or avoid a direct confrontation. Whatever he was trying to do, however, Cass's “hints” to my grandfather failed to yield the desired result. Cass sent back his own memo: “Wilkins says not feasible to make brief of this—he believes the Secretary merely wants to see how this information is compiled.” A week later Gilhooley returned J. Ernest's report again, stating, “I am returning this to you in accordance with my memorandum to you of Abril 6th. The secretary would like these monthly reports to commence May 1st.” But J. Ernest apparently held firm. On yet another Gilhooley memo, Mitchell scrawls an exasperated note at the bottom of the page: “Jack—The same type matter again!”21

My grandfather was nothing if not stubborn. It was stubbornness that had gotten him through all the difficult times in his life, and it seems he wasn't going to change now. J. Ernest was a novice in the complex world of government bureaucracy. Before he joined the Labor Department, he had always been his own boss. If there was a problem with something he did, J. Ernest would take his case straight to the man at the top. And if my grandfather felt he was really right about something, no matter what the boss said, he would stick to his position.

J. Ernest's early memos and reports on his activities in the ILO indicate he was not afraid to take on other departments or agencies that he felt were impinging on his turf. Unskilled at the art of political infighting, my grandfather probably stepped on the toes of several officials when he wrote Mitchell that “Practically everything we do requires the concurrence of the Department of State—which is not always forthcoming. Conversely, State often acts unilaterally on matters of direct interest to the Department of Labor.” In this 1956 annual report, my grandfather states that “lack of policy and overall program formulation in the labor field in Washington” has hampered his department's efforts abroad. In point after point, he criticizes the “negative attitude” of U. S. employers toward the ILO and the unwillingness of the U. S. government to support popular ILO agenda items such as sanctions against the use of forced labor. Time and again, J. Ernest presses his bosses for additional funding and more staff.22

At the close of the 1956 ILO conference, Mitchell shoots J. Ernest an ironic note: “Wouldn't it be a good idea to request each member of this year's Government Delegation to ILO to give you 1. An honest critique on the conference. 2. Suggestions for improving our position in ILO.”23 It's only a short memo, but it seems to indicate some dissatisfaction with the way things went at the conference.

In an article written three years later, Simeon Booker quotes an anonymous labor official as saying that J. Ernest was “too honest, too sincere to realize his role as a diplomat.” During the 1957 ILO conference, for example, a Russian delegate took the floor and gave a rousing speech attacking racial injustices in the United States. Other members of the U. S. delegation wanted J. Ernest to silence the delegate, but my grandfather refused to do so, saying, “He's telling the truth, isn't he.”24

By 1957 Secretary Mitchell had become increasingly displeased with J. Ernest's work and was looking for a way to remove him from his position as assistant secretary.25 Perhaps my grandfather was aware of his boss's dissatisfaction with his performance. If so, he kept it to himself. In Ebony magazine, Booker described J. Ernest as a man who “took little advice, had few friends in labor areas and worked almost independently.” Booker quotes one black labor leader as saying that my grandfather “never picked up the phone or dropped by.”26 My grandfather's tendency toward self-reliance and stoicism had gotten him far in life, but as the year 1957 came to a close, these same personality traits were beginning to work against him.

On the national stage, relationships between blacks and whites in the South had reached a crisis point. Southern cities resisted attempts to integrate their school districts in accordance with the Brown v. Board decision. In the fall of 1957, the Little Rock school board ordered Central High School to begin admitting black students. Arkansas governor Orville Faubus, an astute politician who avidly courted segregationist voters, was determined to defy the U. S. Supreme Court's desegregation decision. As the first day of the 1957 school term approached, Governor Faubus called out the Alabama National Guard, not to protect the nine black students who would be attending Central High but to keep them off school property. On the first day of school the situation in Little Rock spiraled rapidly out of control. Jeering mobs of white segregationists chased and beat the black students who were attempting to enter the school, as soldiers from the Alabama National Guard stood idly by. In the months leading up to the Little Rock confrontation, advocates within the administration had attempted to get the president to take a greater leadership role in the school desegregation controversy. But Eisenhower continued to reject all suggestions for a White House conference on desegregation.27

“If you go too far too fast,” on the issue of school desegregation, the president told his attorney general, “you are making a mistake.”28

“It is difficult,” a frustrated E. Frederick Morrow confided to his diary, “for me to explain to my friends why the President will not . . . admonish the South on its outright flouting of Brown.29

My grandfather was a vigorous supporter of school desegregation. He told an audience in 1954 that those who opposed the Brown decision were “opposing the whole concept of law and order, the whole concept of human rights on which their security is founded.” In that same speech, my grandfather praised the NAACP for their hard work during the long series of court battles that led to the Supreme Court's groundbreaking decision in the Brown case.30 But as the Little Rock crisis unfolded, I could find no evidence that J. Ernest Wilkins commented publicly on the situation. It is likely that my grandfather, like his black colleague E. Frederick Morrow, was “powerless to do anything” and was “too well-schooled in protocol” to offer unsolicited advice to the president.”31

President Eisenhower was indeed caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, his whole philosophy of government revolved around respect for states' rights and local traditions. On the other hand, Brown v. Board was now the official law of the land. As the country's commander in chief, it was Eisenhower's sworn duty to enforce desegregation whether he personally agreed with it or not.

As the situation in Little Rock worsened, the president vacillated, hoping to negotiate a compromise with Governor Faubus. But after three weeks of mob violence in Little Rock, the president had had enough. On September 24, 1957, Eisenhower ordered troops from the 101st Airborne Division into the city to enforce the law and restore public order. The story was custom made for the brand-new medium of television, which carried into living rooms around the world the image of armed U. S. troops escorting the nine black children up the steps of Central High.

Civil rights leaders were quick to express support for the president's actions. Dr. Martin Luther King cabled President Eisenhower: “The overwhelming majority of southerners, Negro and white, stand firmly behind your resolute action.” The parents of the nine black students involved in the crisis wrote a grateful letter to the president to let him know that his actions had strengthened their faith in democracy.32

In the wake of the Little Rock crisis, Eisenhower officials decided to revive a civil rights bill that the attorney general had tried to push through Congress the year before. Despite the active opposition of many conservatives and despite a twenty-four-hour filibuster by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, a compromise bill was passed and signed into law in November. Among other provisions, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 required that a bipartisan commission be established to investigate allegations of discrimination across the country. Eisenhower's hope was that the commission would have an “ameliorating effect” on the passions aroused by the school desegregation crisis.33 To serve on the new commission, the president hoped to find “thoughtful men” who would represent the “full spectrum” of opinion on civil rights.34 To this end, the commissioners would represent the North and the South in equal numbers. One spot on the Civil Rights Commission would be reserved for an African American.35

In October 1957, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff Sherman Adams met with E. Frederick Morrow. Adams wanted Morrow's confidential opinion on my grandfather's suitability for the job. Morrow wrote about the conversation, “I told him that I felt that Secretary of Labor Wilkins was well qualified, that the Senate would confirm him without difficulty, and that he was esteemed by both Negro and white citizens. He is an able man and could bring objective thinking to this difficult problem.” When Adams asked if he had any other recommendations for the commission in the event J. Ernest should turn down the job, Morrow was hard-pressed to think of anyone else who would be suitable. “While there are scores of highly educated widely respected Negroes in this country, the character of this commission demands an exceptional Negro member,” he wrote in his diary after the meeting. “I am hoping that Ernest Wilkins will not turn down the request.”36

For entirely different reasons, Labor Secretary Mitchell had similar hopes. Perhaps, if my grandfather had a position on the Civil Rights Commission, he would be willing to resign from the Labor Department. In a not-too-subtle letter, Mitchell forwards to J. Ernest a copy of a speech on civil rights by New York congressman Kenneth Keating. “I heard Congressman Keating make this very fine speech and I would like to call your attention particularly to his comments on the functions and opportunities of the Civil Rights Commission,” Mitchell wrote.37

In the end my grandfather accepted the president's invitation to join America's first Civil Rights Commission. It was a historic moment for a poor boy from Farmington, Missouri. Standing in front of the president with the rest of the commission members in November 1957, my grandfather looks solemn but proud as he takes the oath of office.38

Much to Secretary Mitchell's disappointment, however, my grandfather refused to resign his position at the Labor Department. Throughout the fall of 1957 and the spring of 1958, J. Ernest continued to churn out reports, letters, and memos in preparation for the annual ILO spring meeting in Geneva.39 My grandfather was particularly excited about a position paper on job discrimination that he wanted the U. S. delegation to present at the Geneva conference. On April 25, 1958, he forwarded a copy of it to Secretary Mitchell. In this paper J. Ernest refers both to the Brown decision and to the President's Committee on Governmental Contracts.

It is not possible to separate discrimination in employment and occupation from discrimination in other fields. For example, on May 17, 1954, the U. S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision declared that segregation in public education imposed by State law is a denial of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed in the 14th Amendment. Admission to public vocational training and vocational schools in the United States is currently guided by this decision.40

Although J. Ernest's language seems bland enough today, the southern congressmen who held the department's purse strings viewed any official statement supporting school desegregation as anathema. The State Department had already expressed concerns over the position paper. In April and early May, my grandfather held a series of meetings with State Department officials to discuss his position paper.41

On May 9, 1958, J. Ernest forwarded the list of people he wanted added to his delegation at the ILO up the chain of command.42 As the convention's date approached, my grandfather cleared his calendar and made final preparations for the trip to Geneva. But shortly before his planned departure, J. Ernest was told he would not be making the trip with the rest of his delegation.43

Although the warning signs had been clear for some time, I honestly believe my grandfather did not see the blow coming. As Booker reported in Ebony, J. Ernest Wilkins was “a man dedicated to what he believed was right.” Once he had made up his mind, he would not stray from his course of action.44 But now it was too late. It seems that Secretary Mitchell, a veteran bureaucrat, was determined to force J. Ernest's resignation from the Labor Department.

My grandfather must have been devastated. Preparing for and attending the ILO convention had been the major focus of his professional life in government. Three days after the U. S. delegation left for Geneva without him, my grandfather suffered a heart attack while at work and was rushed to Walter Reed Hospital, and this is where he spent the next three months. The illness was nearly fatal, and for several weeks doctors worried that he would be permanently blinded. Even in the midst of this severe personal and professional crisis, however, J. Ernest refused to reach out for help. Booker reports one Negro Republican as saying, “If we'd just known what was going on, we could have helped. But Wilkins was a self-reliant man.”45

He was also a proud and deeply self-critical man. I believe my grandfather's failure to win the esteem of his superiors at the Labor Department wounded him profoundly. All his life J. Ernest had driven himself to be the top achiever in any and all endeavors. The sarcastic criticism he meted out to his sons for even the smallest of mistakes would have been nothing compared to the way he punished himself for in any way not excelling on the job. Failure at any level would have been deeply shameful and totally unacceptable to him.

I believe he was incapable of sharing his pain with anyone. J. Ernest had survived the many traumatic events in his life by not allowing himself to be overwhelmed by emotions. He had made a success of himself despite the odds. He had not given up as a boy in Farmington, Missouri. He had not given up as a young man in the army. And, although his situation appeared hopeless, J. Ernest Wilkins would not give up now.

When my grandfather returned to work in July 1958, he found he had been stripped of almost all his former job responsibilities and was without even a full-time secretary. Booker describes J. Ernest as “the loneliest man in the building,” forgotten by his former Labor associates. According to an office worker Booker interviewed, my grandfather simply sat at his desk and “shuffled papers” all day.46

Devastated by ill health and haunted by a sense of failure, J. Ernest finally drafted a letter resigning his position. On July 7, 1958, he sent a short memo to Mitchell: “Attached hereto is a copy of letter which I am sending to the President. I am sure you are aware of its subject matter.” In his letter, J. Ernest gives “personal considerations” as the reason for his resignation. Secretary Mitchell immediately sent Eisenhower suggestions for a presidential letter accepting the resignation and began making plans for J. Ernest's replacement.47

Not long beforehand, Secretary Mitchell had had a run-in with NAACP representative Clarence Mitchell at a news conference. E. Frederick Morrow and other insiders speculated that the labor secretary's dismissal of J. Ernest was a way of indicating that he had “had enough” of the civil rights issue.48 It is probably more accurate to say that tension between Secretary Mitchell and my grandfather had been building for some time. Perhaps Mitchell's run in with the NAACP was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.

What is clear, however, is that Mitchell had already decided, J. Ernest's replacement would be a white man. While my grandfather had been selected for his position after years of distinguished professional service, his successor was little more than half his age with an extremely short resume. Perhaps the man's most important qualification was that he was the son of Eisenhower's close friend Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. For the past few months, the young George Lodge had been working as my grandfather's assistant. Now, he would take over my grandfather's job. Rumors of J. Ernest's impending departure flew all over Washington. On July 17, Morrow wrote in his diary:

The real story behind this is not available, although I understand that there have been personal differences between him and Secretary of Labor James Mitchell. Because of my official position here, I have been aware of the impending resignation and have even seen the proposed letters to be exchanged between the White House and Mr. Wilkins. . . . Present plans call for a friendly exchange of letters between Mr. Wilkins and the President, and Mr. Wilkins will come to the White House for a farewell with him. Then the exchange of correspondence between them will be given to the press.49

It was a polite dance, where face would be saved and an outcry from the black press would be avoided. But although J. Ernest's departure from the Labor Department was by now a certainty, he refused to leave gracefully. When White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams attempted to meet with J. Ernest to discuss the matter, my grandfather refused. When Vice President Nixon offered to intervene, J. Ernest again refused, saying that he wanted to take his case directly to the president.50 Just as he had refused to take orders from Mitchell's assistant in 1955, he now refused to discuss his resignation with anyone except the man at the top. Booker in Ebony quotes J. Ernest as saying, “The President appointed me and I want him to hear my case.”51

In preparation for the president's meeting with my grandfather, Mitchell prepared some notes to brief Eisenhower on the situation. After summarizing J. Ernest's professional history with his department and giving the president some information about J. Ernest's family, Mitchell wrote: “Mr. Wilkins has suffered several illnesses during the past year and is presently undergoing treatment at Walter Reed Hospital. You might want to suggest that he could continue to receive treatment there.”52 My guess is that Mitchell was hoping the president could persuade my grandfather to use his recent stint in the hospital as an excuse to make a graceful exit.

On August 5, 1958, J. Ernest met with Eisenhower. The president's calendar for that day shows that J. Ernest was given exactly thirteen minutes to make his case. Ann Whitman, the president's secretary, took notes:

Honorable J. Ernest Wilkins, who has been Asst. Sec. of Labor. Apparently he was very emotional (he has been ill) and had wanted to stay on for another six months which would enable him to get a pension. Also, apparently, he is being forced to resign. Governor Adams sat in on the appointment and promised President he would try to find a spot for Mr. Wilkins so he could serve out the six months necessary.53

Syndicated columnist and Washington insider Drew Pearson wrote up the meeting in his weekly column, saying that my grandfather “wept” as he put his case before the president. According to Pearson, Eisenhower remained adamant. Cabinet members had the right to choose their own staff, and Mitchell was determined that J. Ernest must leave the Labor Department. My grandfather was not going to back down for anyone, however, not even the president. According to Pearson, “Wilkins told the President that he would think about the request for his resignation. Wilkins has been considered a rather mild-mannered man, and nobody expected him to hesitate over acceding to the President's request.”54

Thirteen minutes later, the meeting was over. Shattered, his last options exhausted, my grandfather returned to his office to deliberate. Always a reserved, self-contained, and “proper” man, he had broken down in tears before the president of the United States. After pleading to hold on to his job, he had been told that he would have to go.

J. Ernest, now nearly sixty-five years of age, must have worried about how he would provide for his family. His position on the Civil Rights Commission, although prestigious, was an unpaid one. In order to collect a retirement pension, my grandfather needed to work as a civil servant for another five months. Although Sherman Adams promised to arrange this, I could find no indication that J. Ernest was given another civil service job after he left the Labor Department.

Surely this period must have been the nadir of my grandfather's life. His financial future was threatened. His professional life was in ruins, and he continued to be dogged with ill health. Still, typically tight-lipped, J. Ernest did not share his problems with his children. His wife, Lucile, must have known about his failing health but continued to pursue her own busy career as an in-demand public speaker and member of the United Methodist Women's Board.

Habits formed early in life are difficult to shake later on. Stoicism had gotten him through the hard times of his youth. Stoicism was what he fell back on in this time of crisis.

On August 20, 1958, Alice Dunnigan, the lone black reporter in the White House press corps, confronted Eisenhower at his weekly news conference: “Mr. President, would you care to comment on newspaper stories that the White House has asked J. Ernest Wilkins to resign his post as Assistant Secretary of Labor to make his position available to Mr. Lodge?”55 Eisenhower acted as if he had not heard about the Lodge appointment, although it seems he must have known. After all, Frederick Morrow had known of it a full month before. Instead, the president told Dunnigan: “I will say this: I have had some talks with Secretary Wilkins, who was talking about the possibility that he might resign from that particular position in the Labor Department. I have never urged him to nor asked him to, or anything else.”56

Perhaps not an outright lie, this surely was not the whole truth either. In the weeks that followed, the black press covered the story extensively. The Pittsburgh Courier's headline for August 25 read, “Wilkins Told: ‘Quit Little Cabinet Post,’” and included quotes from Pearson's column.57 On August 30, Dunnigan repeated Eisenhower's response to her at the press conference and quoted Lodge as saying that the whole thing was just an “unfortunate rumor.”58

Through it all, my grandfather maintained his tight-lipped demeanor. He could have whipped up the black press by commenting on his predicament. It wouldn't have taken much of a statement to create an incident. Instead, he declined to talk to reporters both before and after his meeting with the president. The Baltimore Afro-American continued the story on October 4, 1958, stating that, whereas Mitchell had announced Wilkins would be resigning for reasons of ill health, “Wilkins crossed up this formality by publicly denying that there was anything wrong with his health.” The article mentions that Mitchell and my grandfather had had “differences of opinion” and went on to refer pointedly to Mitchell's run-in with the NAACP's Clarence Mitchell.59 Finally, on November 6, 1958, using the same letter he had written four months earlier, a defeated J. Ernest formally submitted his resignation to the president. In a reply that had also been drafted months earlier, Eisenhower accepted his resignation, thanking him for his work with the ILO and hoping that he would continue on with the Civil Rights Commission.60

My grandfather's long ordeal was over, but many questions remained. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that “no mention of another appointment for Wilkins” was made. J. Ernest declined to comment on his future prospects, saying simply that he planned on “resting,” after four and a half “strenuous years.” Although he had fought desperately to hold on to his position, in the end my grandfather opted to leave without making a fuss. When asked if he had been forced to resign, he told reporters from the Sun-Times that his resignation was “entirely voluntary.”61

The Pittsburgh Courier was not so sure, however. What particularly rankled was that J. Ernest had been asked to step aside for an inexperienced white man half his age: “Considering Mr. Wilkins' training and experience, it is unlikely that his former assistant would have succeeded him had he not been the UN Ambassador's son; having no other evident claim to fame.” The Courier also pointed out that J. Ernest's expulsion from the Little Cabinet did not bode well for the future of the Civil Rights Commission. “It is suggestive of the role the President's Civil Rights Commission is expected to play when an able public servant dropped as Assistant Secretary of Labor is nevertheless retained as a member of this important commission.” The paper's editor spoke for many African Americans when he wondered, “Are other top Negro appointees to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency?”62

My eyes filled with tears as I read the story of J. Ernest's departure from the Labor Department. I had barely known my grandfather, but in the past three years I'd come to feel very close to him. For most of the afternoon I'd been sitting in front of a microfilm reader helplessly watching the inexorable destruction of his hopes and dreams. It felt as though someone had punched me in the stomach. Collecting the many photocopies I had made from Ebony, I carefully rewound the microfilm, turned off the machine, and left the air-conditioned comfort of Fitchburg State's library. As I inched through the late afternoon traffic back toward Boston, I mulled over what I had read.

Was race a factor in my grandfather's forced resignation? In August 1958 an irate black voter who had read Drew Pearson's column wrote Secretary Mitchell to suggest exactly that. Inching along past a truck rollover in the breakdown lane, I smiled to myself as I remembered the woman's letter. “Don't you know I could hardly believe this when I read it,” she wrote, referring to the Pearson article. “Of all the dirty underhand deals that the present administration has pulled, this is the worst I ever heard of. . . . I will say one thing you never would have put a white man out to put in a Negro, and this man Lodge. What has he got besides wealth and a prominent father[?]” Booker wrote in Ebony that, while race may not have played an overt role in J. Ernest's resignation, it “lurked in the shadows.” Later, Jessie Carney Smith wrote an article about my grandfather as a man who, like so many others, had become “another black man at risk.”63

The kind of prejudice that lurks in the shadows, however, can be very hard to see, particularly by people who are not too interested in looking for it in the first place. Secretary Mitchell's reply to Mrs. Herndon's letter was indignant. After stressing that J. Ernest had resigned for “personal considerations,” he wrote, “What I cannot quite comprehend is your reasoning in attaching racial considerations to this matter. This has no bearing on the question, whatsoever; just as it had no bearing when Mr. Wilkins was originally selected.” Mitchell continued:

For my own part, I must add that some of your assertions are a bit disappointing to one who has put a great deal of effort into urging employers around the nation to abandon any and all discriminatory hiring practices, and who has consistently and openly spoken out in opposition to racial segregation in the South. I, for one, cannot believe that the intelligence of the American Negro voter would permit him to have his judgment influenced by a false set of facts.64

As I turned off the crowded highway and circled down the steep curve of the exit ramp, I kept turning over in my mind all the things I had read that day. Although Mitchell's letter to Herndon had been sent more than fifty years ago, the whole exchange felt eerily contemporary. My guess is that for Mitchell, a man who did indeed support black civil rights efforts, the fact that my grandfather was not openly called a “nigger” on the job meant that race had not been a factor in his resignation. But Mitchell did not realize that race had everything to do with the kind of man my grandfather was—his lack of experience with labor unions, his inability to negotiate government bureaucracies effectively, his unwillingness to ask for help from his white colleagues, and his inability to function well in the clubby all-white environment at the Labor Department.

A white man of J. Ernest's abilities would not have been starting his first government job at the age of sixty. Had he been white, my grandfather would have had the benefit of mentors to teach him the ropes before he ever got into serious trouble with his boss. Had he been white, my grandfather would have been put in a position tailored to his unique abilities as a lawyer. Instead, because J. Ernest was not white, he was placed in the job where his race could be used to the greatest public relations advantage.65 Describing his own bitter experiences as the lone black man on Eisenhower's White House staff, E. Frederick Morrow wrote, “I do not believe it is possible for a black to ever be fully accepted, without any reservation, into the power structure of this country. A black man may penetrate and be within the structure, but not of it.”66

As I turned off Massachusetts Avenue into the relative quiet of the street where I lived, I wondered what Mr. Morrow would have thought about Barack Obama's presidential campaign. I am sure a man of Morrow's political experience would have had a lot to say about the way the issue of race has been handled by both sides during the campaign. Still in a pensive mood, I pulled the car into my driveway, turned the motor off, leaned my head against the steering wheel, and sat. As the effects of my car's air conditioning wore off, the air became thick, heavy, and still. Yet I continued to sit quietly, with the windows closed, as little beads of sweat crept down my neck and into my shirt.

I had finally gotten an answer to the question that had been driving me for over three years. As much as I ever would, I now knew what had caused my grandfather's departure from the Labor Department. And as well as anyone now living could, I think I now understood why the whole event had been so traumatic for him. To be honest, discovering the truth about my grandfather's resignation had also been painful for me. As I sat in my car that hot July afternoon, tears mingled with the drops of sweat coursing down my cheek.

Unlike his fellow “black first” E. Frederick Morrow, J. Ernest Wilkins left no memoir about his tenure as a government official. A tight-lipped and reserved man, J. Ernest refused to discuss his resignation with the press. But in his quiet way, my grandfather had been a fighter. Although he was no longer part of the Labor Department, he continued his career in public service.

Rousing from my sweaty reverie, I unbuckled my seat belt, dug out a tissue from the glove compartment, wiped my eyes, and got out of the car. As I imagined what J. Ernest might have said about the tears I was now shedding, I had to smile. If I had in the last three years learned anything at all about my grandfather, it was that he did not indulge in self-pity. If J. Ernest had been sitting in the car with me at that moment, he would have reminded me that, although he had left the Labor Department, his most significant career accomplishment was still ahead.

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