Chapter Four
While the passage of the bill to create the National Memorial Commission was widely celebrated in the press and the African American community, the sentiment was not unanimous.
One Black commentator characterized the bill’s passage as “an empty honor” because the Commission would have to raise $500,000 before it could tap the $50,000 in public funds.1 Mordecai W. Johnson, president of Howard University, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, president of the National Training School for Women and Girls, both declined appointments to the Commission because of their concerns about the lack of funding and the formidable fundraising challenge ahead.
Johnson observed, “The legislation creating the Commission does not place the members thereof in a position to perform effectively their defined functions.”2 But Ferdinand Lee, the dedicated president of the NMA, would not let these obstacles deter them from their goal.
Lee immediately began promoting the memorial building, visiting churches and encouraging their congregations to support the project3; he also wrote letters to newspapers, thanking their readers for supporting the legislation.
One month after the bill passed, Lee organized a victory celebration at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, complete with a musical program and addresses by local African American leaders and congressional sponsors of the bill. The invitees even included Matthew Henson, the African American member of Commander Robert Peary’s expedition to the North Pole.4 Lee also arranged for Edward R. Williams, the architect who had designed a model of the memorial building, to meet with Charles Moore, head of the powerful Commission on Fine Arts,5 a newly created entity responsible for planning building projects in Washington, particularly those on the National Mall. Lee sought their input on plans for the building as well as the building’s location.
On September 20, 1929, President Hoover appointed members of the National Memorial Commission. Several of the new commissioners were active with the NMA. In addition to Ferdinand Lee and Mary Church Terrell, appointees included John R. Hawkins,6 who also served as the NMA’s treasurer, and two of the association’s vice presidents: Mary McLeod Bethune7 and Reverend L.K. Williams.8 The remaining seven commissioners, also prominent African Americans, were William Gaston Pearson,9 Webster L. Porter,10 Reverend J.R. Ransom,11 Reverend H. Clay Weeden,12 William C. Hueston,13 Paul R. Williams,14 and Matthew T. Whittico.15
The African American press reported extensively on the appointments, including coverage in the Chicago Defender, the Philadelphia Tribune, the Topeka Plain Dealer, and the New York Amsterdam News. Excitement surrounding the Commission grew even more when it was announced that President Hoover would meet with the commissioners at the White House. Taking advantage of the good press, the newly minted Commission mobilized the nationwide network established by the NMA by summoning to Washington the state commissioners appointed by their governors for a public meeting on the night after the White House visit.
Timing, however, could hardly have been worse for the National Memorial Commission.
Just a month after President Hoover’s appointments, the United States suffered one of the most devastating financial setbacks in its history: the stock market crash of 1929. Investors lost billions of dollars on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929, prompting a global economic meltdown of an unprecedented magnitude and the beginning of the Great Depression. The collapse of the American and worldwide economy was particularly distressing to the Commission, which was struggling to raise the funds necessary for its day-to-day operations.
Since Congress had stripped provisions in the legislation that would have granted the Commission an upfront appropriation to cover startup costs such as hiring staff and paying administrative expenditures, it was the Commission’s sole responsibility to find ways to cover its most basic expenses. Hoping funds would be available to reimburse them later, commissioners paid for their own travel to Washington to meet President Hoover.
Given the urgent need for funding, the National Memorial Commission devised a plan to obtain federal support for the memorial building. At the meeting with President Hoover in December of 1929, the commissioners made a bold request: they asked Hoover to make available two sources of federal funds long owed to African Americans. First, there were the unpaid salaries and bounties due to the African American soldiers and sailors who fought in the Civil War, but who could not be located or identified.16
The second claim concerned the Freedman’s Bank, which was chartered by Congress at the end of the Civil War and marketed to former slaves and African American Civil War veterans as a secure place to deposit their meager savings. While the bank was federally chartered, its deposits were not federally insured. Consequently, when the bank failed in 1874, many depositors received only partial reimbursement of the amounts they had placed in their savings accounts; more than $1.2 million in deposits remained unpaid.
The claims to these bank funds were well documented, and there had been numerous requests over the years for the federal government to either pay the individual claimants or their heirs, or to make this money available for an educational or charitable project that would benefit the African American community. In the decades following the bank’s failure, several congressional committees passed resolutions and introduced bills to fully reimburse Freedman’s Bank depositors. Presidents Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft also supported restitution; but ultimately, Congress failed to enact and fund such a measure.17
The moral claim to using these funds for the memorial building was especially compelling, given the project was inspired by the desire to honor African American veterans. One could hardly imagine a better use for funds earned by the sweat and blood of African Americans, especially in the service of defending and preserving the Union, than to construct a museum desired by those very same veterans.
When approached by Mary McLeod Bethune, President Hoover did not take kindly to the suggestion that he should take the lead on righting these historical wrongs by making these funds available. President Hoover reportedly snapped at Ms. Bethune, “That’s a matter for Congress,” and refused to discuss it further. 18
At the close of the meeting, President Hoover further insulted the commissioners by refusing to pose for a photograph with them. Addison Scurlock, an African American photographer who captured images of prominent individuals and events in Washington’s African American community, had accompanied the commissioners to the White House to document the occasion. The commissioners were so incensed by President Hoover’s treatment they refused even to pose for a group photo without the President after the meeting.19
During his administration, President Hoover made it a practice not to pose with African American visitors and delegations that called on him at the White House, no matter how notable. This, his aides would say, reflected the President’s concern that pictures might be misused for advertising purposes, a most curious explanation given the countless photos he took with White citizens. The African American press contrasted Hoover’s treatment of distinguished Black visitors with his photographs with the most mundane of White visitors, such as Western Union messengers and Boy Scout troops.20 Hoover did not pose with any African Americans until the end of his term, and the African American press savaged him for posing with all manner of White “ninnies and boobies,” while refusing to take photos with Black dignitaries until he became desperate to “offset the great swing of Negro voters to Roosevelt.”21
Nevertheless, the Commission remained stalwart despite the disrespect and financial insecurity it faced. It elected officers after the White House meeting, naming Ferdinand Lee its chairman, Paul R. Williams the chairman of the Sites and Plans Committee, Webster L. Porter the chairman of the Legislation Committee, and John R. Hawkins the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.22 In addition to the presidential appointees, Congress had specified there would be three ex-officio members of the National Memorial Commission: the Director of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, the Supervising Architect of the Treasury, and the Architect of the Capitol. These ex-officio members attended the White House meeting and accompanied the commissioners to a meeting with Charles Moore of the Commission on Fine Arts.
At that meeting, the Commission was urged to select a site for the national memorial building near Howard University. It was a fine location, but two miles north of the National Mall where the Smithsonian complex and the most prominent memorials could be found.23
Meanwhile, Howard University officials expressed an interest in having the memorial building on or near its campus,24 and the National Capital Park and Planning Commission also recommended this site. Commission members visited the spot25 and agreed it was “an ideal location for the memorial.”26 The Commission on Fine Arts approved, stating that the Georgia Avenue site was “a wise choice and that the opportunity afforded on that site is one of the best in the city of Washington.”27 The White federal and planning officials considered this building dedicated to African American achievement as better suited for a Black neighborhood than the monumental core of the nation’s capital, a sentiment expressed by David Lynn, the Architect of the Capitol, who said, “I feel that this evidences a wise selection, as the surroundings seem to be those which will make this site better adapted to do the work for which the building is to be erected.”28
Following the 1929 White House meeting with the Commission, President Hoover had Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon look into the matter of the federal funds due African American soldiers and Freedman’s Bank depositors. Even though there was no question about the legitimacy of the claim,29 neither Hoover nor Congress acted to make these funds available to the Commission. In fact, the Commission could not even receive a portion of their $50,000 authorization upfront.
Intense lobbying by the Commission in 1930 led the Senate to pass an amendment that would have allowed $12,500 of the federal funds to be made available immediately, but the measure did not pass the House.30 Another bill introduced in late 1931 sought $22,500 of the Commission’s appropriation, but it was likewise unsuccessful.31 Though federal funding was desperately needed, it was nowhere in sight.
In the interim, the Commission engaged in many private fundraising activities in Washington and around the nation,32 but the grave economic circumstances severely impeded those efforts. For instance, the Commission organized a benefit concert by Paul Robeson in 1931, the talented singer’s first ever recital in Washington. The event was wildly popular and thousands attended; but with most tickets selling for one dollar or less, the fundraiser netted only $1,000 after expenses.33
Racial segregation also hampered the fundraising efforts. Hundreds of Black people were turned away from a 1931 benefit concert of the Hampton Choir at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall because the White ticket agency restricted the seating of African Americans to two sections of the auditorium. As a result, most of the tickets went unsold, leading to large swaths of empty seats while legions of African Americans were unable to enjoy the performance of the famed choir and support the Commission’s work.34 These efforts, while valiant, managed to raise only a tiny fraction of the necessary funds to complete such a monumental venture.
In addition to fiscal insolvency, significant deaths35 severely hampered the Commission’s cause, and none more so than that of Ferdinand Lee,36 the heart and soul of the movement. Shamefully, his grave bears no headstone, so there is no memorial to honor his service or to recognize the many contributions he had made to his race and to the nation, an unfortunate commonality with the Black soldiers he had championed.
Yet, the most lethal blow to the Commission came from newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
After being sworn into the Oval Office in March 1933, President Roosevelt swiftly moved to reorganize the federal government. He abolished dozens of commissions created by Congress and President Hoover, transferring their authorities to federal agencies. One of the many bodies on the potential chopping block had been the National Memorial Commission, whose fate was sealed on June 10, 1933, when Roosevelt issued an Executive Order abolishing the Commission and transferring its duties to the Office of National Parks, Buildings, and Reservations in the Interior Department.37 Only Congress had the power to resurrect it, but Congress failed to act.38 The National Memorial Commission was no more.
Though the memorial building technically remained authorized, with the commission abolished the Interior Department failed to make any tangible efforts to bring the project to fruition. Other federal support for the project remained nonexistent. Roosevelt rebuffed requests from the NMA in 1934 for a $5,500 loan to cover fundraising expenses39 and again in 1935 to construct the memorial building as a federal public works project.40
However, while Congress refused to fund the Black memorial building and declined to revive the National Memorial Commission, it approved a new commission to plan and construct a memorial to President Thomas Jefferson in 1934.41 Roosevelt laid the cornerstone in 1939, and the Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1943. Congressman Rankin of Mississippi, who had opposed building a memorial to Blacks instead of one to Jefferson, was undoubtedly pleased with this turn of events.
Like Ferdinand Lee, the remaining members of the Commission passed away in the succeeding decades with the memorial dream still unfilfilled. The federal government abandoned the Commission’s work, and the African American community, like the rest of the nation, turned its attention to surviving the Great Depression, supporting the country upon its entry into World War II, and witnessing the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
With the nation having moved on, the National Memorial Building to Negro Achievement and Contributions to America was now a forgotten vision.