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In November 1914, William Monroe Trotter, a Harvard-educated African-American newspaper editor from Boston, was granted an audience with President Woodrow Wilson. Historians agree that Wilson possessed racist views unmatched by any U.S. president of the twentieth century. The meeting turned into a one-hour shouting match. Trotter asked the president to end his policy of racially segregating the federal workforce. The president defended his policy and then told Trotter he would never again be welcome in the Oval Office.
In mid-December Kweisi Mfume, outgoing president of the NAACP, asked for and was granted a meeting with President Bush in the Oval Office. But in the not too distant past, the only black people to set foot in the Oval Office were White House servants and porters. The first break in a rock-solid tradition occurred in the fall of 1901. In that year President Teddy Roosevelt summoned Booker T. Washington to the White House to advise the new administration on the issues of race. In the course of their discussions, the pair broke for dinner. The fact that a black man had sat down to a meal at the White House became front-page news the next day. The nation was shocked. The southern press was appalled at the news. Headlines in southern newspapers included: "Our Coon-Flavored President" and "Roosevelt Dines a Darkie." Senator "Rtohfork" Ben Tillman of South Carolina was outraged that a black man had been invited to the White House. Tillman declared, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."
Thirteen years later, on November 12, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson agreed to permit a group of five black men from the National Independent Equal Rights League to come to the White House to discuss the president's recent decision to segregate the federal work force in Washington, D.C. Leading the delegation of Negroes was William Monroe Trotter, a black newspaper editor from Boston. Trotter had supported Wilson's election in 1912. In his editorials Trotter expressed the belief, commonly held today, that black...