In 1935, there were at least 45 Blacks working in the federal executive departments in the administration of Democrat Party member and the Thirty - Second United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These Black members were in the cabinet known as the Federal Council of Negro Affairs (renamed the Black Cabinet) which was an informal group consisting of Black public policy advisors to U.S. President Roosevelt.
This was a creation of one of the New Deal agencies under the U.S President Roosevelt after what had happen in the Great Depression and the disenfranchisement of the Black American, especially after Reconstruction in the American South. Delano Roosevelt. These Black
Some of the important and influential members include the first Black cabinet member of the Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Robert C. Weaver. He was also the director of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, formed in the 1975 in order to deal with the financial crisis happening in New York City, New York.
Even though the Black Cabinet is rarely heard of these days, it is evident that it may have had some sort of influence on Black minority political activities in the future. Case in point, the political group known as the Black Caucus, which is an organization which represents the Black members of the United States Congress exists today. And even though the Black Caucus has honorary members who are not Black, the Black Cabinet was exclusively Black only.
Published by Marquis Canaday
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Howard University law school dean William Henry Hastie; author Walter White, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; social worker Lawrence A. Oxley; educator and economist Robert C. Weaver, who would later become secretary of housing and urban development in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, and as such the first African American to serve in a presidential cabinet; and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College and the National Counsel of Negro Women and personal friend of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
From 1936 to 1944, Bethune was President Roosevelt's special adviser on minority affairs, while simultaneously serving as director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration. When she assumed this office, she became the first black woman ever to head a federal agency. By the mid-1930s, President Roosevelt had appointment forty-five African Americans to serve in his New Deal agencies.
Fleming, Thomas C. "The Black Cabinet." The Free Press. 8 September 1999
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