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The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt Audiobook
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In the early 20th century, most African Americans still lived in the South, disenfranchised, impoverished, terrorized by white violence, and denied the basic rights of citizenship. As the Democrats swept into the White House on a wave of black defectors from the Party of Lincoln, a group of African American intellectuals―legal minds, social scientists, media folk―sought to get the community’s needs on the table. This would become the Black Cabinet, a group of African American racial affairs experts working throughout the New Deal, forming an unofficial advisory council to lobby the President. But with the white Southern vote so important to the fortunes of the Party, the path would be far from smooth. Most prominent in the Black Cabinet were Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator close to Eleanor Roosevelt, and her “boys”: Robert Weaver, a Harvard-educated economist who pioneered enforcement standards for federal anti-discrimination guidelines (and, years later, the first African American Cabinet secretary); Bill Hastie, a lawyer who would become a federal appellate judge; Al Smith, head of the largest black jobs program in the New Deal at the WPA; and Robert Vann, a newspaper publisher whose unstinting reporting on the administration’s shortcomings would keep his erstwhile colleagues honest. Ralph Bunche, Walter White of the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph, and others are part of the story as well. But the Black Cabinet was never officially recognized by FDR, and with the demise of the New Deal, it disappeared from history. Jill Watts’s The Black Cabinet is a dramatic full-scale examination of a forgotten moment that speaks directly to our own.
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“A revealing history of African-Americans, many of them little known, who worked in government during the New Deal, and their struggles to bring about social justice. Watts shows that the fight for civil rights has deeper roots than history remembers.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“Excavates the too often ignored history of black female genius behind racial progress.”
— Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author -
“Revealing the hidden figures of a ‘brain trust’ that lobbied, hectored, and strong-armed President Franklin Roosevelt to cut African Americans in on the New Deal…Meticulously researched and elegantly written.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune -
“A groundbreaking reappraisal of an unheralded chapter in the battle for civil rights.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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About Jill Watts
Jill Watts is the author of several books of nonfiction and is a professor of history at California State University San Marcos.
About Bahni Turpin
Bahni Turpin, winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and several prestigious Audie Awards for her narrations, was named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine in 2019. Publishers Weekly magazine named her Narrator of the Year for 2016. She is an ensemble member of the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles. She has guest starred in many television series, including NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Six Feet Under, Cold Case, What about Brian, and The Comeback. Film credits include Brokedown Palace, Crossroads, and Daughters of the Dust. She is also a member of the recording cast of The Help, which won numerous awards.