Women’s Work: From Protest to Power —The Evolution of Black Political Influence

In the spring of 1943, two women in Washington, D.C. fought for Black Americans’ civil rights — one through grassroots student activism, the other from within the federal government. One was an unknown teenager named Patricia Roberts. The other was Mary McLeod Bethune, the leader of President Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet.”

Born nearly 50 years apart, their life experiences placed them in different roles that season. Mary McLeod Bethune had grown up in the South in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and became an educator and activist. In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt made Bethune the National Youth Administration’s Director of Negro Affairs, and by 1940, she was the vice president of the NAACP. Patricia Roberts, on the other hand, was an 18-year-old college student at Howard University. Born in a small town in central Illinois, Roberts had spent much of her childhood in the Chicago area before coming to D.C. When she arrived at Howard, Roberts joined the school’s chapter of the NAACP.

Howard University students staged some of the first recorded sit-ins to protest segregation in Washington, D.C. restaurants. In 1943, they successfully desegregated the Little Palace Cafeteria, and the following year, they continued their activism with a sit-in at Thompson’s Restaurant. Patricia Roberts participated in at least one of these protests, a precursor to the civil rights protests that would sweep the nation in the coming decades. It would be more than a decade and a half before sit-ins became a common form of civil rights activism, but it had all started in wartime Washington with the students of Howard University.

Roberts’ activism, alongside her Howard University peers, was made possible in part by the groundwork leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune laid, shaping the future of Black political and social activism. Bethune’s early experiences with racial inequality informed her own lifelong commitment to education and advocacy. She founded a school for Black girls, which later became a college.

In addition to being an early member of the NAACP, she also belonged to the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC). As NACWC president in the 1920s, Bethune began to be noticed by white Americans in powerful roles. President Calvin Coolidge asked her to join a 1928 Conference on Child Welfare and Housing at the White House. President Herbert Hoover invited Bethune to his own White House Conference on Child Health and Protection the following year. Meanwhile, Bethune was developing a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband Franklin was elected president in 1932.

That friendship, along with Bethune’s persistent advocacy for Black Americans’ inclusion in New Deal programs, led Roosevelt to appoint her Director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration in 1936. In that role, Bethune began to bring together all the Black advisors in the federal government — the so-called Black Cabinet. In this position, Bethune was a key force in securing Black Americans’ access to opportunities in the New Deal and World War II. In the years that followed, she brought unity and collaboration to the group, as historian Jill Watts explains in her book The Black Cabinet. Bethune’s leadership amplified Black voices in federal decision-making, but the Black Cabinet was unofficial, with no formal authority over policy. None of the Black Cabinet members had the status or power of being in Roosevelt’s cabinet. It would take decades until a Black American became a cabinet secretary.

Bethune remained a vocal advocate for Black Americans throughout World War II, and in 1945 was the only Black American woman to attend the 1945 conference that created the United Nations. In the final years of her life, she was hailed as the “First Lady of Negro America” by many.

Bethune was an inspiration for future generations. Her work opened doors for Black Americans in the federal government, the military, education, and in many other areas of American life, making later civil rights work possible in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.

Patricia Roberts didn’t know it yet, but that was where she was heading, too. Bethune passed away in 1955, the same year Patricia Roberts became Patricia Roberts Harris. Harris spent several years prior as the Assistant Director of the American Council of Human Rights and enrolled in The George Washington University Law School soon after. While working with the National Capital Area Civil Liberties Union in the early 1960s, Harris, too, began to catch presidential attention. In 1963, President Kennedy appointed Harris the co-chair of the National Women’s Committee for Civil Rights. When President Johnson came to office, he made Harris the first Black woman ambassador in the nation’s history. As that term came to an end, Harris was named an alternate delegate to the United Nations General Assembly between 1966 and 1968.

By the early 1970s, Harris’s career shifted focus again as she expanded her influence beyond politics, becoming the first Black woman on the board of a Fortune 500 company (IBM) while remaining engaged in civil rights and policy. But she had not left behind her political interests, and in 1973 Harris was named a member at large for the Democratic National Convention.

In 1977, Patricia Roberts Harris was appointed to a position never available to Bethune four decades earlier: a cabinet member. President Jimmy Carter made Harris the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the first Black woman to be part of a presidential cabinet. Bethune had wielded influence without formal power, but now Harris held a cabinet position with direct authority.

Like Bethune and others before her, Harris’s work focused on improving Americans’ lives, including Black Americans’. Harris had come far from her early years, just as Bethune herself had. At her confirmation hearings, Harris affirmed that her work was informed by all she had experienced. Speaking in front of a Senate Committee, Harris explained:

I am a black woman, the daughter of a dining car waiter. …a black woman who could not buy a house eight years ago in parts of the District of Columbia. I didn’t start out as a member of a prestigious law firm, but as a woman who needed a scholarship to go to school. If you think I have forgotten that, you are wrong… if my life has any meaning at all, it is that those who start out as outcasts may end up being part of the system.

At HUD, the office’s housing rehab programs focused on improving neighborhoods and renovating them. She created grants for the Urban Development Action Program and expanded the then-new Urban Homesteading Program, which tried to create avenues to homeownership for lower income families in urban areas. In 1979, President Carter named Harris the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, only the second woman to hold that office.

Harris’s rise from student activist to cabinet secretary fulfilled the visions leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune had imagined decades earlier. The fight Bethune waged in Roosevelt’s Washington found new ground in Harris’s, ensuring that Black women’s voices were no longer just advising the president, but shaping the policies of the nation.