Johnson’s response, on its face no more than a concerned statement of the results that could well be expected from placing a Negro on a predominantly white board in a southern state, was evidently convincing. Corson, forwarding it to NYA Director Aubrey Williams on September 22, attached a memo saying “Under the circumstances, I have advised him that we will not press the matter at this time.” Corson was shortly to leave the NYA, and the matter was not raised again. No Negro was ever appointed to the Texas NYA Advisory Board. In retrospect, however, the letter becomes somewhat less convincing—because of something that has gone unmentioned in any Johnson biography: at the very time he wrote the letter saying that an attempt to appoint a Negro to his state’s Advisory Board would “inevitably” result in the calamitous consequences he enumerated, seven of the ten other southern states had already appointed Negroes to their advisory boards—with no such consequences. The other three states would all follow suit—also with no consequences. Even Alabama and Mississippi had Negroes on their NYA Advisory Boards, as did Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In not one of those ten states did the appointment cause the rest of the board—or the state director—to resign. In not one was the director run out of the state. In none of these states did the appointment result in the loss of cooperation of Negro leaders; in none of them did the appointment cause “turmoil.” Eloquent though Johnson’s reply was, the results which he said were “inevitable” hardly seem to have been inevitable at all.
IT WAS NOT JUST to his Advisory Board that the Texas NYA Director declined to appoint an African-American. The appointment of African-Americans to high-level administrative and supervisory positions in the state NYA’s was important to the Negro Affairs Director, Mrs. Bethune, who was to explain to the state directors that “It does not matter how equipped your white supervision might be, or your white leadership, it is impossible for you to enter as sympathetically and understandingly into the program of the Negro, as the Negro can do.” In February, 1936, seven months after Johnson had been appointed Texas director, a report issued by the NYA’s Washington headquarters stated that “In those states where the Negro population is large, a Negro staff member has been appointed to the state staff”—a salaried administrator, generally called “Assistant to the State Director,” who worked directly under the director at state headquarters and oversaw all Negro programs. Those states included ten of the eleven southern states—even Mississippi and Alabama. They did not include Texas. Johnson did not appoint a Negro administrator, instead using the five members of his Negro Advisory Committee as liaison with black organizations.
All five already had full-time jobs—two, Joseph J. Rhoads of Bishop College, and Mary Branch of Tillotson College in Austin, were presidents of black colleges and highly respected educators in Texas’ black community; two were principals of black high schools, and the fifth was a home demonstration agent—and their work for the NYA was not made easier by the fact that, unlike members of Johnson’s white Advisory Board, they were given little staff assistance. In March, 1936, the NYA’s newly appointed Administrative Assistant in Charge of Negro Activities, Juanita J. Saddler, took an inspection trip of Texas. She found that the members of the Negro Advisory Committee were personally very fond of Johnson, but upon her return to Washington, she reported that the committee “feels…that they have been asked to assume heavy responsibilities…responsibilities that for the white group are carried by employed persons.” She felt particularly the lack of a salaried black administrator, and wrote Johnson:
I was very much impressed with the splendid cooperation you were receiving from the Negro Advisory Committee. I feel however, as I said when I was there, that they are being asked to assume major responsibilities for the NYA program which, in view of the heavy pressures of duties involved in their own jobs, must put them under an extra burden. Whereas they are doing a very splendid job, an employed person carrying full responsibility for the program for this group would assure greater development of the work.
NYA Regional Director Garth Akridge renewed the request for a salaried Negro administrator without results, and on August 3, 1936, after receiving a report on the situation in Texas, Akridge’s supervisor, Richard Brown, the NYA’s Assistant Director, put the request in writing, telling Johnson, “We feel very much the importance of having a well trained Negro Assistant to the State Director to look particularly into the program of the Negro youths of your state. In the fourteen states where these appointments have been made, the work among the Negroes has been most productive and satisfactory.” Johnson’s response was to ask for a face-to-face meeting on the subject, and, as the most detailed study of the Texas NYA puts it: “What was said at that meeting is unknown, but Johnson did not appoint a black assistant.” He never appointed a high-level black assistant. No black administrator would be hired by the Texas NYA until Johnson had left the agency. “Apparently Johnson was not willing to take the politically damaging step of integrating his [headquarters] staff with one black member,” this study says.
Johnson’s reluctance to hire blacks may have extended further down the Texas NYA’s organization chart than the “Assistant to the State Director.” The racial background of the Texas NYA’s more than two hundred administrators and supervisors is not given in the organization’s records, and the author has found it impossible to determine—sixty years after the fact—how many were African-American, but contemporary statements hint that that reluctance may have included almost every one, if not every one, of the top administrative and supervisory jobs at his disposal. Enthusiastic though they were about the Freshman College Centers Johnson had created, at least two members of the Negro Advisory Board, Rhoads and Branch, were disturbed by the fact that although the students at the centers were overwhelmingly black, the two top supervisors of the College Centers program were white. Johnson established a Junior Employment Center in Fort Worth, at which hundreds of black youths would be interviewed by “counselors.” When Ms. Saddler arrived at the Employment Center, she appears to have found that every counselor was white. In her report, she was to say that while the Negro Advisory Committee was planning a vocational guidance program, “it will not substitute for an efficient counselor attached to the employment office…. I hope that in time it will be possible to place a Negro counselor there.” Upon her return from Texas, Saddler wrote Johnson that during her tour
I was asked on several occasions why there were so few supervisory positions available for Negroes. It was pointed out to me that even though the greater number of College Centers were for the colored group, the supervisors were white….
Being a hopeful person, not always with justification, however, I look forward to the time when Negro Counselors can be assigned to interview Negro youth in connection with the new Junior Employment Service that has been established in Fort Worth. The fact that the Government is aiding and supporting various projects in the State, seems to me to allow leeway for liberal and tolerant groups and individuals in the community to try to make the social patterns more just and equitable for all the people in the community.
THE PICTURE of a crusading young Lyndon Johnson battling to get blacks more than their fair share of NYA assistance grows even more blurred when one looks—not through the prism of the great accomplishments of his presidency—at the share of NYA assistance that blacks actually received in Texas during Johnson’s nineteen-month tenure as the agency’s Director there. Examining the extent to which the moneys allocated to the Texas NYA went to blacks—looking not at rhetoric but at the actual figures—raises, in fact, not only the question of whether, during Johnson’s tenure, blacks received, as he claimed, more than their fair share of such assistance but also the question of whether they received even their fair share.
The NYA, as the inspiration of Eleanor Roosevelt, was committed to a just and equitable distribution of its funds. Mrs. Roosevelt was insistent that it give a fair share to black youths. In the ear
ly days of the NYA, Director Aubrey Williams sought to ensure this by establishing a policy that state directors include blacks in NYA programs in percentages proportionate to the state’s total population, but it was soon felt that since the program was intended to assist not all blacks but black youths, a fairer criterion would be to include them in percentages comparable to their percentage in a state’s youth population; a 1936 bulletin from NYA headquarters declared that “Certainly the proportion of Negro youth aided should never fall below the percentage of the youth population.” In Texas, Negroes comprised 27.8 percent of the youth population and 14.7 percent of the total population. In November, 1936, the sixteenth month of Johnson’s tenure, the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs issued a report on “school aid”—the assistance given to students in high school and college—which was the NYA’s major program. The report stated that “While in most states, Negroes have shared at least to the extent of their proportion of the total population, there are a number of notable exceptions.” Six such exceptions were listed: Arkansas, Delaware, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee—and Texas. And of those six states, the differential between a fair share for Negroes and the share they had actually been given was largest in Texas, where, the report stated, “Negroes comprise 14.7% of the total and 27.8% of the youth population, but receive only 9.8% of the school aid.” By the criterion established by the NYA then, in the agency’s major program Texas was the worst state in the country. (The report also stated that “Although accurate figures are not available, even larger discrepancies exist in the proportions of the amount of money actually expended.”)
As for the Texas NYA’s other programs—assistance to youths working on non-campus projects—determining the proportion of such assistance that went to black youths has proven difficult because racial breakdowns cannot be found in the National Archives or at the Lyndon Johnson Library, possibly because they have been lost, possibly because Johnson did not submit such breakdowns, despite repeated NYA directives to all state directors to do so each month. In January, 1936, after Johnson had been in office for seven months, National Assistant Director Brown wrote him: “In going over the report of the activities of the Texas Youth Administration, we observe that you failed to report on the plans which are in progress regarding Negro activities. I shall appreciate a statement regarding this phase of the program in Texas, inasmuch as this is a real problem in your state” (italics added). From the scattered and incomplete figures that can be found for some months, it appears that the proportion of non-school aid that went to blacks was somewhat higher than campus aid, but never high enough to raise the Texas NYA’s overall aid to blacks up even to the 14.7 figure, much less the 27.8. During the nineteen months that Lyndon Johnson was Director of the Texas NYA, the proportion of its funds that went to black youths may never—not even once—have reached even the lower of the two figures below which “the proportion of Negro youth aid should never fall.”* Lyndon Johnson may indeed, as he later claimed, have been quietly transferring funds from white schools to black schools and from white public works projects to black public works projects. But if he was doing so, he was nonetheless only shifting the funds out of allocations (allocations he himself had made) that were so inequitable—so far from the NYA purpose and guidelines as defined by its director—as to make the final allocations not fair, not nearly fair, but only somewhat less unfair.
THERE WAS IN TEXAS another racial minority almost as numerous as African-Americans and also desperately in need of the aid the NYA could offer.
Mexican-Americans did not have a separate division at NYA headquarters in Washington or a strong voice such as Mrs. Bethune’s to prod state administrators toward equal treatment, and for approximately seven hundred thousand Mexican-American citizens in Texas there was not only no seat on the Texas NYA’s Advisory Board, but no separate Advisory Committee, either. At other levels, however, their treatment within Lyndon Johnson’s organization was comparable to that afforded Negroes. There was no high-level staff member at NYA headquarters in Austin to oversee Mexican-American programs and represent their interests within the agency. There was not a single individual with a Spanish surname on a list of the top thirty-seven Texas NYA staff. As for on-site supervisors for individual projects, even projects on which every one of the youths employed was Mexican-American, the skin color of those supervisors is a reminder of Johnson’s feeling expressed three decades later on tape that “I don’t think Mexicans do much work unless there’s a white man with them.” Separate statistics on Mexican-Americans were not kept within the NYA because the agency was determinedly classifying them as “white”; President Roosevelt had ordered all federal agencies to change their designation after Congressman Maury Maverick of San Antonio told him that the “colored” classification they had previously been given was reducing the participation of this loyally Democratic group in the southern states’ white primaries. But if there were any Mexican-American supervisors, their number was very small—deliberately so. A Texas NYA directive looked for Spanish-speaking Anglo supervisors who “know how to handle men, with particular reference to Mexican boys, ages 18–25.” In her book LBJ & Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power, the most thoroughly documented analysis of the subject, Julie Leininger Pycior concludes that Mexican-American youths were “categorized officially as white but [were] treated as racially inferior” by the Texas NYA. Although they comprised almost 12 percent of the state’s population, “they had no voice in administering the Texas NYA.”
Determining whether Mexican-Americans received an equitable share of the Texas NYA’s funds is impossible because of the failure to keep separate statistics of Mexican-heritage recruits. But Lyndon Johnson, using the NYA to set up what would be a statewide political organization—his statewide political organization—didn’t want to antagonize local officials, so in Texas, in contrast to the practice in many other states, the NYA did not itself select those high school students who would receive its grants but allowed local school officials to do so. “It was up to the [school] superintendent to determine who needed it most,” a Texas staffer was to say. And, as Dr. Pycior writes, “Thus the same people who enforced the segregation selected the trainees.” Although no precise figures are available, Dr. Pycior says, “most of the Mexican-heritage trainees in the NYA worked as common laborers” on projects like the roadside parks that required only unskilled labor. “A few learned skilled jobs…. A small number received college aid….” At the Residential Training Centers, she says, Mexican-American women were hired “in numbers far below their actual unemployment rate.” (“These residential facilities barred black women,” she adds.)
As Texas Director of the National Youth Administration, then, Lyndon Johnson set up a statewide organization in a state more than a quarter of whose population—more than a million and a half people—had skins that were not white. But no member of the organization’s Advisory Board, and, so far as can be determined, no member of its headquarters staff, had a skin that was not white. As for the deputy directors and other administrators out in the field across the huge state, “Johnson did not hire Mexican or African-American staff members,” Dr. Pycior writes. If there were any blacks or Mexican-Americans among them, their number was certainly small. And that fact calls to mind the paternalistic condescension of Johnson’s remarks about black Americans and Mexican-Americans in his diary and on the photographer’s tape, for regardless of the amount of money he was allocating to young people of these races, very few members of those races were allowed to decide how the money was spent or to supervise its expenditure.
Lyndon Johnson certainly wanted to help black and Mexican-American youths in Texas—wanted very much to help them. His spontaneous outburst of anger at the San Antonio businessman—“I saw a couple of your kids hustling, all right”—and the fact that he threw himself into the creation of public works projects that would employ black youths as eagerly as he did into the creation of “white” projects, and that he showed as much energy and
ingenuity in helping black colleges and black high school students as white, demonstrates that his heart was in helping them. But again, it had not been the heart that ruled but the head. The compassion, though genuine, had taken a back seat to calculation; the Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, who covered Johnson for many years, was to write, in an incisive phrase, of his “real, though expendable, compassion.” In Johnson’s unending, silent calculations about the best way to further his career, it was the Alvin Wirtzes and the Herman Browns who were the key figures, not some powerless black leaders, and in his direction of the NYA program, it was not the philosophy that perhaps had captured his emotions which he followed, but the diametrically opposed philosophy of the Wirtzes and Browns. And, of course, the correctness of his course—if ambition was the guiding star—was proven when, on February 23, 1937, the congressman from the Tenth District suddenly died. Lyndon Johnson was in Houston, touring NYA projects there, when he saw a newspaper headline announcing the death. He was far from a logical candidate in a district containing many experienced, well-known politicians. Not only was his age a drawback but so was the fact that many of the district’s political leaders—and most of its voters—had never even heard of him; on the day Johnson saw the headline, the Austin American-Statesman ran a list of possible candidates, a list that included not only the favorites but long shots as well, and Lyndon Johnson was not even mentioned. Speeding back to Austin, however, Johnson pulled up in front of the Littlefield Building and went not to the sixth floor but to the seventh, and asked Wirtz to give him the support he needed to enter the race. And Wirtz agreed on the spot.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 116
