http://www.northjersey.com/news/opinions/220977491_Opinion__Besides__The_Butler__there_was_Fred_Morrow.html?page=allBesides "The Butler", there was Fred MorrowSunday, August 25, 2013
BY MICHAEL J. BIRKNER
The Record
White House butlers have a tough job, but also a privileged view of goings-on among the nation's leading movers and shakers. "The Butler," a newly released Hollywood drama, is told from the perspective of a black man who served a series of presidents at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It appeals precisely because the angle of vision is fresh and intriguing.
North Jersey residents may be interested to learn that a Hackensack native was one of the African-Americans in the White House during much of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. That man, Frederic Morrow, was not a butler or chauffeur. He was a member of the president's executive staff, the first such appointment in presidential history.
Fred Morrow (1909-1994) grew up in Hackensack at a time when African-Americans were supposed to be deferential and largely invisible in public life. His father, an itinerant minister, made ends meet by working as a janitor at the Johnson Free Library in Hackensack. Yet when Fred applied for a library card at a young age, the librarian told him to forget it because he did not need books.
Fortunately, his family was dedicated to the idea that education was the key to upward mobility. They didn't let the librarian's evident racism get them down. All of Fred's siblings, including his sister Nellie, sought college educations. Most, including Nellie, completed degree programs. Fred's brother John earned a Ph.D., taught French for many years at Rutgers University and served as the first U.S. ambassador to the West African nation of Guinea.
Fred himself garnered a bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in Maine and a law degree from Rutgers before joining the NAACP as field representative. He served in the military during World War II and returned to the organization's main office after the war.
By 1951, Morrow was working in the news division of CBS in New York. Long active in Republican politics in New Jersey, he was known by the state's dynamic governor, Alfred E. Driscoll. When the Republicans needed a "black" aide to ride with presidential nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower on his campaign train in 1952, Driscoll saw to it that Morrow was appointed.
In his campaign role, Morrow reminded everyone he met of the Democratic Party's dismal record on civil rights and the Republicans' commitment to a fair shake for blacks under Gen. Eisenhower. Promised a role in the new administration if the Republicans took power, Morrow was disappointed when director of congressional liaison-designate Wilton Persons, an Alabamian, promised to resign if a black man were named to the White House staff. It took two more years for Eisenhower's chief assistant, Sherman Adams, to deliver on his promise to Morrow.
Deliver he did in 1955. From his White House perch over the next six years, Morrow pushed for civil rights and helped shape the administration's message to the African-American community. But Morrow also made it clear he did not want a job dedicated to "Negro affairs." Consequently, his portfolio focused more on special projects, including finding space for presidential commissions to meet and negotiating with staffers who had special material needs.
Inevitably, however, Morrow was drawn into civil rights advocacy. He was proud of what Eisenhower did to integrate the armed forces — contrary to conventional wisdom, this was not accomplished by Eisenhower's predecessor, President Harry Truman — and eliminate segregation in military facilities and in the District of Columbia.
Lobbyist for actionWhen Morrow was appointed to the White House staff, he still could not count on finding a place to eat in the neighborhood. Adams made him a member of the White House mess, and that took care of that problem. However, finding appropriate housing for him and, after he married in 1958, his wife, was not a simple matter.
Records show Morrow consistently, though discreetly, lobbied the administration to take more aggressive actions, both symbolic and substantive, to advance civil rights. Even so, he was never able to persuade the president to publicly endorse the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Nor did Eisenhower condemn the maiming and killing of Emmet Till, a Chicago teen visiting his cousins in Mississippi. White men slew Till after the boy, on a dare from friends, allegedly said "bye, baby" to a white woman in a local store.
On the plus side, Morrow lobbied successfully for more black appointments to important positions in the White House, proselytized for the administration's tough civil rights measure in 1957 — ultimately watered down by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson —and helped broker the first meeting of African-American leaders with Eisenhower, an event which received massive news coverage in June 1958.
A straight-shooter and a hard worker, Morrow found himself caught between civil rights activists who believed he was not pressing hard enough on measures important to them and conservatives in the Eisenhower White House who felt he was pressing too hard. Even Secretary to the Cabinet Maxwell Rabb, who served as liaison with the African-American community and was widely viewed as sympathetic to civil rights, periodically dressed Morrow down for being "too aggressive" in pitching for his cause.
A loyal RepublicanDespite frustrations that included being snubbed socially by several Eisenhower officials and by his growing isolation from civil rights leaders, Morrow soldiered on, doing his best to see the GOP live up to its billing as the party of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president.
Morrow's White House tenure was the highlight of his career. He never held another high position in government and was largely a pariah in Bergen County Republican circles because of his civil rights advocacy. Although his legal residence was Teaneck for many years, in a home co-owned with his sister, Morrow spent most of his retirement in New York City.
He published three books, including an edited diary of his White House years and two memoirs. One of them — "Way Down South Up North" — sheds a fascinating and at times harrowing light on what it was like to grow up black in Hackensack in the years just before and after World War I.
Morrow did not have a butler's eye view of doings in the White House. He had something better: An opportunity to influence policy and programs, and to serve as a symbol of African-American aspiration and opportunity. He was always proud of being a race pioneer and would have been prouder to know that African-Americans now aim for — and achieve — higher peaks than was possible for Morrow.