Black Cabinet

Although many have ascribed the term to Mary McLeod Bethune, African American newspapers had earlier used it to describe key black advisors of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

[2] Although the council was concerned with civil rights, Franklin D. Roosevelt believed there were larger problems to be addressed than racial inequality during the wartime years; he was also struggling to maintain the support of the Southern white Congressional Democrats.

[6] Rayford Wittingham Logan drafted Roosevelt's executive order prohibiting the exclusion of African Americans from the military in World War II.

The leaders associated with the Black Cabinet are often credited with laying part of the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement that developed in strength in the postwar years.

The Federal Writers' Project paid its workers $20 a week, and they wrote histories of every state in the Union, covering major cities in addition.

In 1966 he became the first African American cabinet member, appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson as Secretary of the newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Another prominent member of Roosevelt's Black Cabinet was Eugene K. Jones, the Executive Secretary of the National Urban League, a major civil rights organization.

Franklin Roosevelt was so impressed by one of Bethune's speeches that he appointed her to the Division of Negro Affairs in the newly created National Youth Administration.