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The White House

To imagine what it was like here when the White House was being constructed in the 1790s, erase everything else you see now on and around Lafayette Square. The park was a field—muddy or dusty, depending on the weather. Enslaved workers who were building the White House were housed in temporary shelters—each about 10 feet wide and 10 feet long—lined up in rows on the east and west sides of the field. Like so many buildings in early Washington, the President's House would have been very difficult to construct without enslaved labor, as the city was very sparsely populated and workers were in great demand.

Some early Presidents including Jefferson, Jackson, and Polk brought slaves to the White House, where they almost always lived in basement rooms. In the summer of 1862, Abraham Lincoln received the first group of African American leaders to visit the executive mansion. Lincoln also met with Frederick Douglass and Sojurner Truth during his time in office.

Elizabeth Hobbes Keckly, a former slave who had become a successful businesswoman in Washington and the dressmaker and confidante of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, also spent time in the White House during the Lincoln Presidency. Keckly described her experiences in an 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House.

African Americans also came to the White House as artists and musicians. Ten-year old piano prodigy and composer Thomas Greene Bethune is believed to have been the first African American artist to perform at the White House when he played for President James Buchanan in 1860. The Fisk University Jubilee Singers were the first African American choir to sing at the White House, performing for President Chester A. Arthur in February 1882. Their program included "Safe in the Arms of Jesus," which newspaper accounts said brought the President to tears.

In 1901, Booker T. Washington was the first African-American invited to dine with a President at the White House, but racial segregation was also a part of life in the White House well into the 20th century. Alonzo Fields, who worked in the White House from 1931 to 1952, experienced it first hand. In an oral history project produced by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage called Workers at the White House, Fields commented on what this was like.

He noted, "They had separate dining rooms – Black and White. We all worked together, but we couldn't eat together… Here in the White House, I'm working for the President. This is the home of the democracy of the world and I'm good enough to handle the President's food – to handle the President's food and do everything – but I cannot eat with the help."

As the nation struggled with issues of segregation and discrimination, African Americans leaders including Mary McLeod Bethune, James Farmer, Dorothy Height, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr., and A. Phillip Randolph, visited the White House to advise American Presidents. In 1964, almost exactly a century after Lincoln received the first group of African Americans visitors to the White House, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other African American leaders came to the White House to see President Lyndon Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act guaranteeing equal access to public places and outlawing discrimination.

The 1960s also saw important civil rights protests in and around Lafayette Square. After the brutal attacks on demonstrators in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, protestors stopped traffic in front of the White House by lying down across Pennsylvania Avenue and at least two small sit-ins by protestors took place inside the White House.

The White House Historical Association  |  Decatur House on LaFayette Square  |  National Trust for Historic Preservation