Cornell Capa
Clark Foreman, first head of the Office of the Special Adviser
on the Economic Status of Negroes, pictured in 1946 at
a Citizen’s Political Action Committee meeting.
In 1934, Black Cabinet founder Robert C. Weaver would succeed Clark
Foreman and take over leadership of the Office of the Special Adviser on
the Economic Status of Negroes. Weaver became the first Black American
to serve in a White House Cabinet after President Lyndon Johnson
appointed him the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1966.
Bettmann
telegrammed Ickes, protesting that there
were numerous African Americans, with
equal or superior educational credentials,
better suited for the job. The Chicago
Defender observed, “It was certainly bad
enough to select any white man for this
particular post, but to select one from
Georgia was certainly adding insult to
injury.”
After Foreman’s selection was
announced, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins
confided to the Associated Negro Press’s
wire-service editor Claude Barnett that
the Rosenwald Fund had intentionally
made an end run around the NAACP.
In his opinion, the special adviser would
accomplish nothing; the naïve Foreman
had been put in to block, rather than
to address, Black grievances. Wilkins
declared that the NAACP would call for
the appointment to be “bitterly fought
by all Negro organizations, especially the
Negro press, not on the grounds that
Foreman is personally objectionable, but
that no white man can speak for Negroes
in this time of stress.”
This was the message the NAACP’s lead
Washington attorney, Charles H. Houston,
carried directly to Ickes. Face-to-face
with Ickes, he argued that an African
American appointee was far more qualified
to be a special adviser on issues critical
to Black Americans. Ickes emphatically
disagreed. The “time” was “not ripe” for a
Black appointment, he sputtered. A white
man had access to people and places, both
on Capitol Hill and in the South, that were
off-limits to Blacks.
Houston next confronted Foreman,
who, after some waffling, admitted that
he too believed there were more capable
African Americans who could have filled
the special adviser’s job. In an attempt
to demonstrate his commitment to Black
inclusion, Foreman pledged to fill out his
staff with Black assistants and secretaries.
He would carry his fight against discrimination
beyond the Interior Department
and battle it in agencies throughout the
federal government.
The Black community had good reason
to be skeptical of Foreman. While he was
an eager champion of Black causes and
had worked on racial affairs for both the
Rosenwald Foundation and Alexander’s
Commission on Interracial Cooperation,
Foreman’s Georgian roots ran deep and
were tied to the slaveholding past. His
grandfather had fought for the Confederacy
and had been a leader among white
southern Democrats. Foreman was raised
in the traditions of the white South, where
racial divisions were a given and African
Americans were presumed naturally to
occupy an inferior position in society.
But by 1933, the 31-year-old Foreman
had rejected white Southern ideologies
and had amassed an impressive résumé.
He had studied at Harvard, where he
met W.E.B. Du Bois. After finishing a
doctoral dissertation on Black education
at Columbia University, he worked for
Will Alexander on race relations. Despite
these accomplishments, Foreman had not
been the top choice of either Alexander
or Embree for the special adviser post. He
possessed an abundance of reckless youthful
energy and zeal that some, both Black
and white, found insufferably brash and
overbearing.
When Foreman landed in the Department
of the Interior in August 1933, he
found plenty of problems. He confirmed
that the studies Weaver and Davis had
produced were true: The National Recovery
Administration’s jobs programs were
either turning African Americans away
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