Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America

Six: Resistance and Friction: Challenging and Justifying Wilsonian Praxis

Chapter Six Resistance and Friction Challenging and Justifying Wilsonian Praxis The changes in federal buildings that white Treasury officials viewed as fairly subtle were not at all minor to blackworkers and civil rights activists. African Americans and their allies went beyond such humiliation to more fundamental questions of citizenship. “There [can] be no freedom, no respect from others, and no equality of citizenship under segregation of the races,” William Monroe Trotter told Woodrow Wilson in November 1913, “especially when applied to but one of the many racial elements in the government employ.”1 A fully integrated civil service, with black men and women working at all levels, was an unambiguous, concrete representation of equal participation in the laws and government of the United States. The symbolic and civic nature of federal employment made segregation in Washington a representative threat to black citizenship, and it sparked resistance and a national movement. News of federal segregation spread quickly through a well-developed network of black newspapers in the spring and summer of 1913. The Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender sounded alarms all over the counSuppose that I were building a great piece of powerful machinery, and suppose that I would so awkwardly and unskillfully assemble the parts of it that every time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by the others, and the whole thing would buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the several parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them all, would it not? —Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, 1912 133 RESISTANCE AND FRICTION try.They joined Calvin Chase’s Washington Bee, which had been publishing news of segregation in federal offices since Wilson’s inauguration. In the fall, some liberal white editors, especially Rolfe Cobleigh of the Congregationalist and Christian World, picked up the story.2 The obfuscation that became a hallmark of Wilsonian praxis accomplished its goal of making protests more complicated, but the reports began leaking out almost immediately . Ralph Tyler, a black Republican still serving as auditor for the Navy Department, was one of the first to take the reports seriously and voice his objection to racial segregation in May letters to the Bee and to the president directly.3 By the summer, black leaders were moved to action. They joined the workers’ efforts already underway to establish a broad resistance movement to Wilsonian praxis. By resistance, I mean the ways in which black civil servants and their allies acted to protect their dignity, their rights, their jobs, and all aspects of autonomy, personhood, and citizenship that came under attack by white supremacists.4 Importantly, this was a resistancewhose goal was to staveoff change—to “protect” against the crippling of black mobility—more than to create it. Clerks, in particular, were a relatively conservative lot. What they wanted was the right to work, live, and aspire to a more comfortable and prosperous future. In fact, they were littledifferent from whiteworkers, plenty of whom chafed under managerial “rationalization” that threatened their autonomy in the federal bureaucracy.5 Many black clerks lived under middle-class proscriptions and surveillance that precluded overt protest. The toll that “holding in” frustration took can be seen in the weariness of clerks under Wilson. In 1920, for example,Treasury clerk Edward Scott was forced to ask for a leave of absence after working “seven years and a half in the Division of Bookkeeping and Warrants faithfullyand conscientiouslyat the lowest salary for clerks in the division without advancement and with little or no hope for advancement now.”6 Yet part of the story of resisting federal discrimination was the subtle radicalization of a group of middleclass strivers. As their aspirations were made illegitimate or unrealizable by the national state, they became increasingly engaged with civil rights activism. The historical record reveals myriad attempts by activists and federal employees to resist white supremacy. Two main groupings emerge, however . First, there was the “routine” or “hidden” resistance of black federal workers themselves, many of whom felt too vulnerable to participate in public activism.7 The subordinates’actions, left generally unseen or unintelligible by superiors, included self-preserving assertions like quitting, com- 134 A NEW RACIAL REGIME plaining to civil rights leaders, secretly passing information to the press, racial passing, being “difficult,” and perhaps even stealing and slowdowns. No doubt, there were also other methods of voicing personhood and frustration less legible in the historical...