The Most Important City: How the U.S. Government Segregated its Workforce (Video)
On June 25, the Historical Society presented an online conversation, “The Most Important City: How the U.S. Government Segregated its Workforce,” with historian Eric S. Yellin, author of Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America, and Samir Meghelli, senior curator of the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum.
Watch the video here.
Recommended Reading
“‘It Was Still No South to Us’: African American Civil Servants at the Fin de Siecle,” by Eric S. Yellin, Washington History 21 (2009).
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After the Civil War, Washington attracted African Americans who had been denied opportunity elsewhere, with the Republican Party as their patrons. Federal employment offered professional opportunities, responsibilities, salaries, and job security unknown elsewhere. The salaries brought capital to Black neighborhoods and enterprises. This moment of unusual opportunity evaporated, however, when the Woodrow Wilson administration (1913-1921) instituted segregated federal employment, and African Americans were demoted, denied advancement, or dismissed. Published four years before his comprehensive study, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America, Yellin’s essay sets the scene for what Black workers had gained–and would soon lose.
“The Mirror Image: Black Washington in World War II-Era Federal Photography,” by Barbara Orbach and Nicholas Natanson, Washington History, 4-1 (1992).
Historical photography specialists Orbach and Natanson examine how the federal government used photography as propaganda to present positive pictures of African Americans in federal service. They look at the Office of War Information’s documentation of Black Washingtonians in the 1940s, and the contrasting styles of white photographer John Collier and African American photographer (and later celebrated filmmaker) Gordon Parks.
“‘Shelling the Citadel of Race Prejudice’: William Calvin Chase and the Washington ‘Bee,’ 1882-1921,” by Hal S. Chase (Records of the Columbia Historical Society) 49 1973-74.
A look at the publisher of Washington’s pre-eminent, crusading African American newspaper. Chase was a relentless and often bitter critic of white supremacy in the city and the federal government.
The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the Story of a Forgotten Era (2017), by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor.
The Original Black Elite offers, according to reviewer Lawrence Otis Graham, an account of the Black civic leader and assistant librarian of Congress in the context of “the rise of African Americans during the time of Reconstruction and their fall during the subsequent decades, when legislation was advanced in order to again segregate, impoverish and humiliate a population that many whites believed had gained too much.”
Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (2017), by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove.
Purchase online
The history of Washington receives the attention it deserves, from the story of its native peoples to just shy of today, with race and democracy front and center. Federal service plays a major role. University of Maryland historian Alfred A. Moss, Jr., called Chocolate City “the definitive history of Washington, D.C.”
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