HOME
*



picture info

Booker T. Washington Dinner At The White House
On October 16, 1901, shortly after moving into the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt invited his adviser, the African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, to dine with him and his family. The event provoked an outpouring of condemnation from white politicians and press in the American South. This reaction affected subsequent White House practice and no other African American was invited to dinner for almost thirty years. Background Roosevelt, while Governor of New York, frequently had black guests to dinner and sometimes invited them to sleep over. This instance was not the first time African Americans were invited to dinner at the White House. In 1798 John Adams had dined in the President's House in Philadelphia with Joseph Bunel (a mulatto representative of the Government of Haiti) and his black wife. Black people, including leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, had been received at the White House by Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes and Clevel ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. The term "White House" is often used as a metonym for the president and his advisers. The residence was designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban in the neoclassical style. Hoban modelled the building on Leinster House in Dublin, a building which today houses the Oireachtas, the Irish legislature. Construction took place between 1792 and 1800, using Aquia Creek sandstone painted white. When Thomas Jefferson moved into the house in 1801, he (with architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe) added low colonnades on each wing that concealed stables and storage. In 1814, during the War of 1812, the mansion was set ablaze by British forces in the Burning of Washington, destroying the interior and charring much of the exterior. Reconstruction began ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Marie Selika Williams
Marie Selika Williams (c. 1849 – May 19, 1937) was an American coloratura soprano. She was the first black artist to perform in the White House. Biography She was born Marie Smith in Natchez, Mississippi, around 1849. After she was born her family moved to Cincinnati, where a wealthy family funded voice lessons for her. She moved to San Francisco in the 1870s and studied with Signora G. Bianchi. She then studied in Chicago with Antonio Farini, who taught the Italian method. There she met a fellow student, operatic baritone Sampson Williams, whom she would later marry. Williams became the first Black artist to perform in the White House in 1878. On November 13, she sang for President Rutherford B. Hayes and First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes in the Green Room and was introduced by Marshall Fred Douglass. She performed at Philadelphia's Academy of Music in 1878 and at New York's Steinway Hall in 1879. From 1882 to 1885 she performed across Europe with her husband, giving a concert in St ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin ( 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Because of the fame achieved for his ragtime compositions, he was dubbed the "King of Ragtime." During his career, he wrote over 40 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the '' Maple Leaf Rag'', became the genre's first and most influential hit, later being recognized as the archetypal rag. Joplin considered ragtime to be a form of classical music and largely disdained the practice of ragtime such as that in honky tonk. Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Arkansas, developing his own musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. While in Texarkana, he formed a vocal quartet and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s, he left his job as a railroad laborer and traveled the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part i ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




A Guest Of Honor (opera)
''A Guest of Honor'' is the first opera created by celebrated ragtime composer Scott Joplin. The focus of the production was the 1901 White House dinner hosted by President Theodore Roosevelt for the civil rights leader and educator Booker T. Washington. The event was politically polarizing, with Roosevelt receiving criticism from Democrats for dining with the African-American leader.Biography from ScottJoplin.org
Joplin is believed to have begun writing ''A Guest of Honor'' shortly after Washington’s visit to Roosevelt’s White House. A copyright application was filed in 1903 with the , but Joplin did not include a copy of the score with the application. I ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

A GUEST OF HONOR Advertising Poster
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it fro ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter (April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934), was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts. An activist for African-American civil rights, he was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the ''Boston Guardian,'' an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Trotter was born into a well-to-do family and raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. J. M. Trotter a Recorder of Deeds and Virginia Trotter were his parents. He earned his graduate and post-graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there. Seeing ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Henry McNeal Turner
Henry McNeal Turner (February 1, 1834 – May 8, 1915) was an American minister, politician, and the 12th elected and consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). After the American Civil War, he worked to establish new A.M.E. congregations among African Americans in Georgia. Born free in South Carolina, Turner had learned to read and write and became a Methodist preacher. He joined the AME Church in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1858, where he became a minister. Founded by free blacks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the early 19th century, the A.M.E. Church was the first independent black denomination in the United States. Later Turner had pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC. In 1863 during the American Civil War, Turner was appointed by the US Army as the first African-American chaplain in the United States Colored Troops. After the war, he was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. He settled in Macon and was elected to the state leg ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860 – July 26, 1925) was an American lawyer, orator and politician. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, running three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States in the 1896 United States presidential election, 1896, 1900 United States presidential election, 1900, and the 1908 United States presidential election, 1908 elections. He served in the United States House of Representatives, House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895 and as the United States Secretary of State, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, Bryan was often called "The Great Commoner", and because of his rhetorical power and early notoriety, "The Boy Orator". Born and raised in Illinois, Bryan moved to Nebraska in the 1880s. He won election to the House of Representatives in the 1890 United States House ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Miles McSweeney
Miles Benjamin McSweeney (April 18, 1855September 29, 1909) was the 87th governor of South Carolina from June 2, 1899, to January 20, 1903. McSweeney was born in Charleston and was forced to become a paperboy at the age of 10 in order to help support his family when his father died. He went to Lexington, Virginia to attend Washington and Lee University upon being awarded the Typographical Union of Charleston Scholarship, but later had to withdraw due to lack of funds. He published the ''Ninety-Six Guardian'' at the age of 22 and he moved to Hampton two years later to start the ''Hampton County Guardian''. In 1894, McSweeney was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives and additionally served as the chairman of the Hampton County Democratic Party. He successfully ran for Lieutenant Governor in 1896 and was elevated to the governorship following the death of Governor William Haselden Ellerbe on June 2, 1899. A proponent of the state Dispensary and backed by Se ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Allen Candler
Allen Daniel Candler (November 4, 1834 – October 26, 1910), was a Georgia state legislator, U.S. Representative and the 56th Governor of Georgia. Early life Candler was born the eldest of twelve children to Daniel Gill Candler and Nancy Caroline Matthews in Auraria, Georgia, in Lumpkin County, a mountainous mining community. Candler attended country schools and then Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, graduating in 1859. Candler studied law briefly, and then taught school. Civil War In May 1862, Candler enlisted as a private in the Confederate 34th Georgia Volunteer Infantry, and was immediately elected a first lieutenant by the members of his company. Candler fought in some of the Civil War's most brutal battles: Vicksburg, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Jonesboro. By war's end, he was serving as a colonel under General Joseph E. Johnston in the Army of Tennessee in North Carolina. He was wounded at Kennesaw and lost an eye in Jonesboro. At ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Benjamin Tillman
Benjamin Ryan Tillman (August 11, 1847 – July 3, 1918) was an American politician of the Democratic Party who served as governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, and as a United States Senator from 1895 until his death in 1918. A white supremacist who opposed civil rights for black Americans, Tillman led a paramilitary group of Red Shirts during South Carolina's violent 1876 election. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, he defended lynching, and frequently ridiculed black Americans in his speeches, boasting of having helped kill them during that campaign. In the 1880s, Tillman, a wealthy landowner, became dissatisfied with the Democratic leadership and led a movement of white farmers calling for reform. He was initially unsuccessful, though he was instrumental in the founding of Clemson University as an agricultural land-grant college. In 1890, Tillman took control of the state Democratic Party, and was elected governor. During his four years in office, 18 black Ameri ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Niggers In The White House
Niggers in the White House is a poem that was published in newspapers around the United States between 1901 and 1903. The poem was written in reaction to an October 1901 White House dinner hosted by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who had invited Booker T. Washington—an African-American presidential adviser—as a guest. The poem reappeared in 1929 after First Lady Lou Hoover, wife of President Herbert Hoover, invited Jessie De Priest, the wife of African-American congressman Oscar De Priest, to a tea for congressmen's wives at the White House. The identity of the author—who used the byline "unchained poet"—remains unknown. Both visits triggered widespread condemnation by many throughout the United States, particularly throughout the South. Elected representatives in Congress and state legislatures from southern states voiced objections to the presence of a black person as a guest of the First Family. The poem is composed of fourteen four-line stanzas, in e ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]