By Jill Watts
During the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Black Americans were appointed
to federal posts at historically large numbers.
Together they eventually formed
an advisory body known as the Black
Cabinet, which was led by the crusading
educator Mary McLeod Bethune and the
brilliant economist Robert Weaver. But
early on Black inclusion was met with stiff
resistance, and appointees had to fight for
both a voice in the administration as well
as relief for the Black community.
In August 1933, Robert Weaver returned
to his academic post at Greensboro’s
North Carolina Agriculture and Technical
College. He dreaded going back. While he
was a popular professor, he found teaching
there a chore. He felt smothered by
Greensboro’s omnipresent segregationist
traditions and laws; he isolated himself,
refusing to patronize segregated stores
and entertainment venues.
In Greensboro and its surroundings,
Weaver became exposed to the rawest
versions of white southern racism. As he
traveled in and out of town, he passed
sharecroppers’ shacks and the cotton and
tobacco fields where Black farmers barely
scratched out a living. The Depression had
hit North Carolina hard. By fall 1933, 25%
of all families there depended on some
kind of public or private assistance; the
NAACP estimated that the rate was far
higher for the Black rural population.
And poverty haunted not only rural
areas but also the cities. The textile industry
was one of North Carolina’s largest
employers, and it had collapsed with
the Depression’s onset. Large textile mills
stood on the hills surrounding Greensboro—they
had dominated the city’s economic
life. As the economy deteriorated,
Impoverished Black children in the Mississippi
Delta, July 1936. Dorothea Lange, photographer.
Black mill workers were laid off or cut
back to starvation wages at a far greater
rate than white workers.
At night, Weaver meticulously pored
over the numbers, mining them for irrefutable
proof that Black communities
were in a downward spiral. That summer
he tracked the data of 12,000 Black
cotton-mill workers nationwide who had
managed to hang on to their jobs. He
determined that 75% of them were grossly
underpaid and overworked, despite the
National Recovery Administration’s mandates
regarding minimum wages and
maximum hours. Times were hard and
people took any job they could get—even
if they earned almost nothing. This was, as
Kansas City’s Plaindealer pointed out, a
“new kind of slavery.”
As Weaver walked Greensboro’s Black
neighborhoods, he witnessed firsthand the
impact of the Great Depression and the
suffering it caused. Families were homeless;
children went hungry. For Weaver,
the experience marked the beginning of
a transformation. His determination to
resist American racism grew. “The lash
of prejudice is not the overt lash; it’s the
subtle lash of feeling yourself up against
an iron block of prejudice that is the most
cutting. Because I had been protected, I
felt the cut more deeply,” he reflected.
The Robert Weaver who came to
Greensboro was a man of limited but rare
privileges. In 1933, he was only 26, but
he was impressive in nearly every way.
Handsome, with a chiseled jaw and a sly
smile, Weaver radiated confidence, pride
and dignity. His grandfather, DC dentist
Robert Tanner Freeman, remained a celebrated
figure in Washington’s Black community.
His grandmother, Rachel Turner,
born out of wedlock to white parents, had
been raised by an African American family
and lived her life as a Black woman.
Weaver’s mother, Florence was born
shortly before her father’s early death.
Rachel Turner remarried in 1890—and
well at that. Her second husband, Albert J.
Farley, was a clerk for the Supreme Court,
and his salary enabled the family to move
to the middle class, interracial Washington,
DC suburb of Brookland.
Weaver’s father, Mortimer Grover
Weaver, came from far humbler origins.
He was born on a farm in Fauquier
County, VA. His mother was a domestic
and his father was a former white slaveholder
who had sided with the Confederacy.
As a child, Mortimer worked in the
fields. But when he reached his teens, he
was sent off to attend high school in the
District of Columbia. A few years after
graduation, he secured a prized position
in the city’s post office. A careful guardian
of his earnings, Mortimer Weaver saved
his money and, in 1901, married Florence
Freeman. He purchased a home in Brookland
and, eventually, a seaside cottage for
weekend getaways. The Weavers quickly
added two sons to their family, Mortimer
Grover Jr. and Robert Clifton.
The Weavers were intensely proud
of their sons and were determined that
they should have the finest that could be
offered to African American children. The
closest Black secondary school was the top
in the country—Paul Laurence Dunbar
High School. Dunbar was rigorous and
challenging, requiring students to master
all academic disciplines. In Weaver’s era,
80% of the school’s graduates attended
northern colleges; many were admitted to
the most prestigious in the nation.
Robert Weaver graduated near the top
of his class at Dunbar. In 1925, he enrolled
at Harvard and declared an economics
major. After finishing his bachelor’s
degree with honors, he then attempted
to do what no African American had
ever done before—earn a PhD from Harvard’s
extremely conservative economics
department. It was not a welcoming
environment. Weaver remembered that
the department’s most influential scholar,
Frank Taussig, “didn’t think that Black
men had aptitude for economics.” Nonetheless,
Weaver excelled. After passing his
comprehensive examinations with high
marks, he focused on crafting his thesis,
entitled “The High Wage Theory of Prosperity.”
In 1931, he headed to Greensboro
to teach.
On weekends, he often returned to
Brookland to work with his long-time
friend John P. Davis. They founded an
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