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Trotter Group meets with Clinton.
For 90 minutes in the Cabinet Room of the White House, President Clinton answered hardball questions about race relations and social policies from 12 African-American columnists.
As the meeting ended, Betty Baye of the Louisville Courier-Journal asked the President if he had ever checked out who George Clinton was.
At the 1992 NABJ convention in Detroit, President Sidmel Estes-Sumpter slyly noted that most African-American journalists would probably be more familiar with Funkadelic groove-master George Clinton that the Arkansas governor and presidential hopeful Bill.
Either stunned or playing along with the laughing audience, Bill Clinton pulled out a small pad and took notes as he waited for Estes-Sumpter to finish introducing him. Three years later, Clinton told Baye that, of course, he knew who George Clinton was a U.S. vice president of the early 1800s.
Decades after George Clinton helped govern our country, William Monroe Trotter was a black columnist and editor of the Guardian newspaper in Boston.
Opposed to Booker T. Washington's accommodationist strategy, Trotter had a fierce argument with President Woodrow Wilson about the growing number of lynching and Jim Crow's growing influence.
Wilson met with Trotter for nearly and hour at the White House, an occasion reported on the front page of The New York Times. The exchange was less collegial than last fall's meeting between William Jefferson Clinton and 12 members of the Trotter Group, a four-year-old organization of African-American columnists named in honor of the crusading journalist.
Trotter members later wrote about their meeting with Clinton. Here are excerpts:
I had been to Washington dozens of times before, but never had visited the White House. Some journalists tend to be blase about such things....I didn't like the decor in the Cabinet Room....Those yellow walls have to go. Jacqueline Kennedy, where are you when we need you? Maybe the White House could be persuaded to redo the Cabinet meeting room in an Afrocentric motif: Red walls, bordered with kente cloth....Just kidding? ...Yes, I heard that some members of the media grumbled about a group of black columnists getting to have a private meeting with the President. Sorry about that....