Using white privilege to fight racism
As protests, marches and fury over the police killing of George Floyd continue, questions emerge about where the line stands between white Americans undertaking performative exercises that will do little to address structural racism and actions that actually will begin the work of tearing down the structures that have upheld white supremacy for centuries.
In the coming weeks, there will be more debates about what white Americans must do if this nation is to finally overcome structural inequality.
The role of Belle Case La Follette in fighting against racially segregated government offices in 1913 and 1914 offers a template, illuminating how white Americans can genuinely assist in the crusade for racial justice. La Follette was keenly aware that while she could not know what it was like to be African American confronting deeply entrenched racist structures, she could dig into the trenches and focus on action, advocacy and activism, not mere expressions of solidarity.
La Follette and her husband Robert La Follette (R-Wis.), congressman and later senator, were part of the small but determined biracial coalition striving to bring about the economic equality and full citizenship to African Americans that Reconstruction had intended but failed to achieve.
From the floor of the House of Representatives in 1890, as violence and intimidation destroyed postwar progress and entrenched white rule in the South, Bob La Follette warned, “You cannot maintain a domestic election system rooted in perjury and fraud and watered with blood and not see it finally blossom and fruit in bitterness and hate and awful retribution.”
In 1913, without public notice, the new administration of Woodrow Wilson reversed 50 years of tradition by racially segregating government offices in the nation’s capital. It also began purging and mistreating African American employees. African American leader Mary Church Terrell called it “the most serious blow to Negro rights since the days of slavery,” and Booker T. Washington observed that he had never seen African Americans in Washington
“so discouraged and so bitter.”
The change received little attention in the mainstream press, but an African American colleague alerted Belle La Follette, who sprang into action. Although she had no political power (as a woman, she could not vote), her goal was to generate sufficient white awareness of this assault on black rights to spur a congressional investigation.
She first confronted William McAdoo, secretary of Labor and Wilson’s son-in-law, to confirm that the Bureau of Printing and Engraving was segregating its work and eating spaces.
McAdoo passed the buck to Joseph Ralph, director of that bureau, who denied any general order to segregate. But he grudgingly acknowledged that when “three colored girls” persisted in disregarding the “kindly suggestion” that “it would be best for them to occupy [lunch] tables with girls of their own race,” he found it “necessary” to give them “positive directions” to restrict themselves to those tables assigned to “colored assistants.” La Follette interviewed the three women in question, who had worked for the bureau for an average of 10 years, for La Follette’s Magazine (published today as The Progressive). Her reporting crystallized the human suffering caused by the new segregation. Since eating at integrated tables hadn’t been specifically forbidden, she asked the women if they were still attempting to do so. “No,” came the reply, “it was no use trying. Our food choked us.”
The repercussions were swift. Two days after the interview, the most outspoken of the women, Rosebud Murraye, received her dismissal notice. When the NAACP declined to take up her case, La Follette protested Murraye’s firing directly to President Wilson (reprinting her letter in the press), and when the government refused to reinstate Murraye, helped to find her another (albeit lower paying) job in the private sector.
La Follette grew more committed to the cause of racial justice with news of each fresh indignity as black government workers were demeaned or fired. She used speeches as well as a lengthy series of articles to make clear that “merit, not sympathy, demands that Negroes should not be discriminated against and should be accorded the justice due them as citizens of a democracy.”
She skewered the hypocrisy of Southern whites who supported segregation. “It seems strange,” she observed caustically, “that the very ones who consider it a hardship to sit next [to] a colored person in a streetcar entrust their children to colored nurses, and eat food prepared by colored hands.”
Her activism inspired others to join in the effort. As the ranks of the Washington, D.C., branch of the NAACP swelled, Wilson received hundreds of letters of complaint calling the discrimination “harsh and humiliating” and a violation of “the spirit of the Constitution and opposed to the teaching of Jesus Christ.”
Yet, La Follette’s campaign can be viewed as a failure. While the outcry she helped to generate prompted the new Secretary of the Treasury to mandate no segregation notices posted in restrooms, no discrimination in promotions and no partitions in dressing rooms, few of the measures already in place were rolled back in other departments.
La Follette’s campaign, however, can also be termed a success. Her expose and refusal to accept defeat left African Americans feeling less alone in their struggle. Navy Department auditor Ralph W. Tyler, organizer of The National Negro Business League, thanked her for her “immeasurable” help.
In the days ahead, white Americans can use their privilege to be perpetuators of an old problem. This won’t be a quick or easy fight, but whiteness enables allies in this struggle to push in ways that African Americans sometimes cannot without risk. That was Belle La Follette’s secret: She used white privilege to fight against it.