On Thursday, October 13, from 12:45 to 2:00, Kenneth W. Mack, the Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University, will deliver the Annual Distinguished Lecture at the Boston University School of Law, entitled E. Frederic Morrow and the Historical Time of the Civil Rights Movement:
In this Lecture, Professor Mack will tell the story of lawyer E. Frederick Morrow, who was the first African American to work in the White House in a professional capacity. His official title—Assistant Administrator for Special Projects—does not reveal that he “became the person who both Black Americans and white federal officials expected to explain race and civil rights to a President who was reticent about enforcing civil rights law in the South, and to explain the Eisenhower’s views to an increasingly skeptical Black public. Morrow’s tenure would encompass many of legal and political milestones of the postwar era: not only the debate over Brown v. Board of Education and Emmet Till’s murder, but also the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a national leader, the birth of the sit-in movement, and the Presidential election of 1960. Nevertheless, he would leave the White House in January 1961 with his reputation, and his self-respect, in tatters. He penned a bitter memoir/diary of his time in the government, titled A Black Man in the White House. More memoirs would follow, each tinged with anger, and each an attempt at self-justification, but to no avail. Morrow quickly slipped into obscurity, largely forgotten by historians and the public alike, just as the civil rights movement was etching itself into law, American public consciousness and transnational collective memory.
--Dan Ernst
