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[[image]]
[[caption]] At United Nations session, Mrs. Roosevelt chats with UN Alternate Delegate Edith Sampson and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Two women have been close friends. [[/caption]]

[[image - CARMEL MARR]]

[[image - ROBERT KITCHEN]]

[[image - RALPH BUNCHE]]

[[image - WILLIAM DEAN]]

Government Agencies.

By the time Roosevelt's first term was drawing to a close and he was stepping up activity looking forward to his second campaign, Mrs. Bethune had welded together a political force second to none. There was no "Big Four" any longer. Only Dr. Thompkins remained. There was no Hatch Act prohibiting Government employees from participating in political activity. Mrs. Bethune, throughout the previous years, had sent her Black Cabinet members to every nook and cranny in the land expounding the virtues of the New Deal and what it meant to Negroes. It didn't take much selling. The Negro knew. Having voted the Republican Ticket all their lives, they were now ready to shelve the Republicans for the Democrats who had fed them. 

One old lady described her benefits under the New Deal, in referring to Roosevelt, said: "He tuck my feets out of the mirey clay, and put them on the solid rock of the WPA."

And so for the first time since the Revolution, Negroes had deserted the Party which they believed had freed them, and voted almost solidly for the Party "that feeds them." Freedom without Freedom was no good.

Roosevelt, after his landslide election for the second time, was inaugurated with greater splendor. The depression was over, the country was back on its feet, the economy was solvent, and Negroes were coming into their own. But the town of Washington, District of Columbia, situated between Virginia and Maryland, still was not ready for Negro participation on what they called a "social equality basis." And Roosevelt was not about to rock the boat.

Roosevelt was good at playing Dick Tracy and digging up old Negroes with whom he become associated in early days. During his first term he remembered that while Assistant Secretary of the Navy, under President Wilson, he had a Negro messenger named Frederick Pryor. He wondered out loud what "ole Freddie is doing now." Sending for him, he learned that "old Freddie" had graduated from law school and was practicing law. He gave him a staff position at the White House as a confidential assistant, called in the Negro Press to meet, photograph and interview him, and when that was over admonished the Press not to come back any more to see him because of the confidential nature of the work he would be doing. And so, out of sight, out of mind. Which probably accounts for the fact that many Blacks thought that Frederick Morrow, appointed as an assistant to President Eisenhower, was the first Negro to serve on the White House staff.

When the question of Negro participation in his second inaugural came up, he felt that he owed them something because of the massive manner in which they had supported and voted for him. And so he dug up another Negro, this time one who had been a classmate of his at Harvard. He wondered out loud what G. David Houston was doing. he learned that Mr. Houston was the principal of the Negro Dunbar High School. He

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