 | 202402 28Integrating Senate Spaces: Louis Lautier, Alice Dunnigan, Thomas Thornton and Christine McCreary
February 28, 2024
African American men and women have worked on Capitol Hill since Congress moved to the new capital in the District of Columbia in 1800. Black laborers, enslaved and free, helped to build the Capitol. They worked as messengers, groundskeepers, carpenters, and cafeteria workers. In the 20th century, as African Americans moved into professional positions, they began to challenge inequality in their workplaces. Years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended segregation, four courageous individuals demanded the integration of Senate spaces.
African American men and women have worked on Capitol Hill since Congress moved to the new capital in the District of Columbia in 1800. Black laborers, enslaved and free, helped to build the Capitol. In the 19th century, African Americans worked as messengers, groundskeepers, pages, carpenters, and cafeteria workers. In the 20th century, as they began to move into professional positions, they challenged the discriminatory practices that prevailed in their workplaces. Years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended segregation, four courageous individuals demanded the integration of Senate spaces.
In January 1946, Louis Lautier, a correspondent for the Atlanta Daily World and the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association, applied to the Senate Standing Committee of Correspondents for admission to the daily press gallery. In 1884 the Senate had made the Standing Committee, a group of elected members of the press gallery, responsible for credentialing congressional correspondents. Under Senate rules, the daily press gallery was open to correspondents “who represent daily newspapers or newspaper associations requiring telegraphic service.” Most African American papers were published weekly. A separate periodicals gallery served reporters of weekly magazines, not newspapers. Rules that seemingly were intended to prevent lobbyists from moonlighting as correspondents effectively made the Senate’s daily press gallery and the periodicals gallery off-limits to Black reporters. As Senate Historian Emeritus Donald Ritchie explains, “There [was] never a rule of the press gallery that says, ‘You have to be a white man,’ but the rules are written in such a way that that’s the only people who could get in.1
African American reporters had applied for admission on occasion despite these regulations, but their applications had all met the same fate—rejection. When rejecting Lautier’s application for admission in January 1946, the Standing Committee explained, “Inasmuch as your chief attention and your principal earned income is not obtained from daily telegraphic correspondence for a daily newspaper, as required under [Senate rules], you [are] not eligible.” Lautier then revised his application, noting that he was “jointly employed” by the Atlanta Daily World and the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association, “with each organization paying half of my salary.” The Standing Committee stood by its initial decision, so Lautier appealed directly to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which had jurisdiction over the press galleries. The Rules Committee chairman, Democrat Harry Byrd of Virginia, did not intervene. Undeterred, Lautier resubmitted his application to the Standing Committee in November 1946.2
When the 80th Congress convened for its first session in January 1947, Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since 1933. One of the first orders of business facing the Senate was the seating of Senator Theodore Bilbo, a vocal white supremacist. In 1946 a Senate committee had investigated allegations by Black Mississippians that Bilbo had “conducted an aggressive and ruthless campaign” to deny Blacks the right to vote in the 1946 Democratic primary. A second, separate Senate inquiry had concluded that Bilbo had accepted “gifts, services, and political contributions” from war contractors whom he had assisted in securing government defense contracts. Lautier intended to cover the Senate debate, but without admittance to the press galleries, he was forced to wait in long lines for a seat in the public galleries, where Senate rules prohibited him from taking notes.3
Weeks later, on March 4, “after exhaustive deliberations and a personal hearing,” the Standing Committee again rejected Lautier’s application. Editorials in the national press urged the Standing Committee to reconsider its decision, and Lautier appealed to the new Rules Committee chairman, Senator C. Wayland “Curley” Brooks of Illinois. “Since the Standing Committee of Correspondents has acted arbitrarily in refusing me admission to the press galleries, and since under the interpretation of the rules Negro correspondents are barred solely because of their race or color, it appears that the Senate Rules Committee has the responsibility and duty to see that this gross discrimination against the Negro press is removed,” Lautier wrote.4
Senator Brooks, who had recently encountered separate allegations of racial discrimination in Senate facilities, readily agreed to investigate Lautier’s case. On March 18, 1947, Chairman Brooks convened a hearing to consider both Lautier’s application and the issue of discrimination in Senate dining facilities. “In the Capitol of the greatest free country in the world, we certainly should have no discrimination,” Brooks declared.5
The hearings first addressed Lautier’s application. Lautier testified that he met the qualifications for admittance to the daily press gallery under the existing rules. “I believe that I comply with the rules, if reasonably interpreted … because daily I gather news for the Atlanta Daily World.” While the rules had not been designed to “exclude Negro correspondents” from the press galleries “solely because of their race or color … that is the practical effect of the interpretation given the rules by the Standing Committee of Correspondents,” Lautier explained to committee members. Lautier described how the Atlanta Daily World and the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association rendered a vital service to African Americans by focusing on issues of particular significance to them. At a recent hearing to consider amending the cloture rule, for example, Louisiana senator John Overton had stated that “the Democratic South stands for white supremacy.” Overton’s statement, as well as debates about proposed changes to Senate rules and procedures, had been “inadequately reported by the white daily press,” Lautier explained. His readers relied upon Black correspondents to be “intelligently informed of what is going on in the Congress.”6
Testifying in defense of the decision to deny Lautier’s admission, the chairman of the Standing Committee, Griffing Bancroft of the Chicago Sun, maintained that race had not played a role in its decision making and recommended a rules revision “so that facilities could be provided for the weekly papers.” Brooks pressed Bancroft; couldn’t the situation be immediately resolved by admitting Lautier? That is not a long-term solution, Bancroft replied, because without revising the rules for admission, African American correspondents writing for weekly papers would continue to be denied admission to the daily press gallery and the periodicals gallery. Lautier belived that a rules change would not be required in his case, because “under a reasonable interpretation of [the current] rules I am entitled to admission.” Members of the Rules Committee agreed with Lautier and voted unanimously to approve his application for admission to the Senate daily press gallery. It was only a partial victory for Black correspondents, however, as it was not clear if Lautier’s admission had paved the way for other Black reporters.7
At the same time that Lautier was appealing the decision of the Standing Committee for credentials to the daily press gallery, Alice Dunnigan, the new Washington correspondent for the Associated Negro Press, had just arrived in the city to cover the Bilbo floor debate. Unaware of the Lautier case, Dunnigan submitted applications to the Standing Committee for admission to the daily press gallery and to the periodicals gallery, but she waited weeks with no answer. She called repeatedly to inquire about her application and made personal visits to the Capitol, “probably making a nuisance of [herself].” Even after Chairman Brooks’s hearing on Lautier’s application, Dunnigan still did not get an answer. After some investigation, Dunnigan learned that she faced another kind of discrimination. The founder and director of her news organization, Claude Barnett, had failed to provide a letter of recommendation in support of Dunnigan’s application, as required by the Standing Committee. When Dunnigan confronted Barnett about the issue, he explained, “For years, we have been trying to get a [Black] man accredited to the Capitol Galleries and have not succeeded. What makes you think that you—a woman—can accomplish this feat?” Dunnigan persisted, however, and Barnett eventually sent his letter to the Standing Committee, who promptly approved her application for admission to the daily gallery in June 1947. “My acceptance received widespread publicity,” Dunnigan later recalled, “and the Republican-controlled Congress received credit for opening the Capitol Press Galleries” to African American reporters.8
Chairman Brooks’s hearing on the Senate press galleries had a positive impact on integrating those Senate spaces, but the fight to integrate the Senate’s dining facilities took a bit longer. Brooks had appointed World War II army veteran Thomas N. Thornton, Jr., an African American, to a position as a mail carrier in the Senate post office on February 20, 1947. One day in early March, Thornton stopped at the luncheonette in the Senate Office Building (now the Russell Senate Office Building) and ordered a sandwich and coffee. A waitress asked Thornton to take his order to go, but he refused, sat down at a table, and ate his meal. Though Senate rules prohibited discrimination in Senate facilities, Thornton had violated a long-standing Senate practice of “whites only” dining facilities. Word of Thornton’s actions spread, and Washington Post syndicated columnist Drew Pearson reported that Sergeant at Arms Edward McGinnis had reprimanded Thornton and advised him not to eat again inside Senate dining facilities. During the March 1947 Rules Committee hearings about discrimination in Senate facilities, the Architect of the Capitol, David Lynn, whose responsibilities included the operation of Senate restaurants, assured Chairman Brooks that discrimination in Senate dining facilities would not be tolerated. “When this incident happened, it was purely a misunderstanding on the part of a new [restaurant] employee or it would never have happened,” reported the director of Senate dining facilities, D. W. Darling.9
Despite these assurances, de facto segregation in the Capitol’s dining rooms persisted for years. Not long after joining Senator Stuart Symington’s personal staff in 1953, Christine McCreary attempted to eat in the Senate cafeteria. When an anxious hostess reminded her that the cafeteria served “only … people who work in the Senate,” McCreary explained, patiently, that she worked for Senator Symington. The hostess demurred, then reluctantly invited McCreary to “take a seat anyplace you can find.” Diners gawked as McCreary passed through the serving line with tray in hand. “You could hear a pin drop,” she later recalled. Silently enduring the “snide remarks” of those who disapproved of her effort, McCreary remembered her first years of Senate service as “a lonesome time.” But she refused to give up. “I went back [to the cafeteria] the next day, and the next day, until finally they got used to seeing me coming.”10
As we commemorate Black History Month, let us acknowledge the perseverance and determination of members of the Senate community, including Lautier, Dunnigan, Thornton, and McCreary, and their remarkable courage in challenging the Senate’s long-standing discriminatory practices.
Notes
1. Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 109–110; “Donald Ritchie, Senate Historian 1976–2015,” Oral History Interviews, Senate Historical Office, Washington, D.C.
2. “Credentials,” January 1946, Louis Lautier Case, included in the subject files of the Senate Historical Office: Senate Press Gallery, Standing Committee on Correspondents.
3. Special Committee to Investigate Senatorial Campaign Expenditures, Investigation of Senatorial Campaign Expenditures, 1946, S. Rep. 80-1, 80th Cong., 1st sess., January 3, 1947; Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, Investigation of the National Defense Program, Additional Report, Transactions Between Senator Theodore G. Bilbo and Various War Contractors, S. Rep. 79-110, Part 8, January 2, 1947, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., 2; Donald A. Ritchie, Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35.
4. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, Hearing on the Application of Louis R. Lautier for Admission to Senate Press Gallery and Hearing on Reports of Discrimination in Admission to Senate Restaurants and Cafeterias, 80th Cong., 1st sess., March 18, 1947, 5–6, 47–52.
5. Ibid., 70.
6. Hearing on the Application of Louis R. Lautier for Admission to Senate Press Gallery, 4, 10; Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, Amending Senate Rule Relating to Cloture: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Rules and Administration on S. Res. 25, 30, 32, and 39, 80th Cong., 1st sess., January 28, February 4, 11, 18, 1947.
7. Hearing on the Application of Louis R. Lautier for Admission to Senate Press Gallery, 9, 38.
8. Alice Dunnigan, Alone Atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press (Athens: The University Press of Georgia, 2015) 107–9, 110–12; Ritchie, Reporting From Washington, 39–40; “Credentials,” January 1947, Alice Dunnigan Case, included in the subject files of the Senate Historical Office: Senate Press Gallery, Standing Committee on Correspondents.
9. Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 17 (Autumn, 1997), 117–21; Rodney Dutcher, “Behind the Scenes in Washington,” Times-News, Hendersonville, N.C., March 3, 1934; Drew Pearson, “Color Bar in Senate Restaurant,” Washington Post, 8 Mar 1947, 9; Hearing on the Application of Louis R. Lautier for Admission to Senate Press Gallery, 61–64, 66; Report of the Secretary of the Senate, July 1, 1946, to January 3, 1947 and January 4, 1947, to June 30, 1947, S. Doc. 80-117, 80th Cong., 2nd sess., January 7, 1948, 260.
10. "Christine S. McCreary, Staff of Senator Stuart Symington, 1953–1977 and Senator John Glenn, 1977–1998," Oral History Interviews, Senate Historical Office, Washington, D.C.
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 | 202005 4Charles Sumner: After the Caning
May 4, 2020
Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts is best remembered for his role in a dramatic incident in Senate history. On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked the senator at his desk in the Senate Chamber. The “Caning of Sumner” is a famous event, but of course the story did not end there. To understand the importance of Sumner’s enduring legacy as statesman and legislator, particularly in the realm of civil rights, we must explore what happened after the caning.
Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts is best remembered for his role in a dramatic and infamous event in Senate history—what has become known as the “Caning of Sumner.” Just days earlier, Sumner had delivered a fiery speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,” in which he railed against the institution of slavery and unleashed a stream of vitriol against the senators who defended it. In retaliation, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Sumner at his desk in the Senate Chamber, beating him with a heavy walking stick until the senator was left bleeding and unconscious on the Chamber floor.
Sumner convalesced, returning only intermittently over the next three years. He resumed full-time duties in 1859 and over the next 15 years became a trailblazing legislator who left an indelible mark on the Senate and the country. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1861 to 1871, Sumner wielded great influence over the nation’s diplomacy, but his tireless efforts in the realm of abolition and civil rights were what truly defined his career.
Sumner was among the first members of Congress to argue that the Civil War had to be fought to end slavery as much as to save the Union. In fact, he said the two goals were inextricably linked. He called slavery “the main-spring of Rebellion” and insisted, “Let the National Government . . . simply throw the thing upon the flames madly kindled by itself, and the Rebellion will die at once.”1 He worked tirelessly behind the scenes to prevent moderate Republicans in Congress and in Abraham Lincoln’s administration from compromising on the question of abolishing slavery. When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which freed slaves in the rebelling states, Sumner praised Lincoln’s action but quickly added that the presidential proclamation did not go far enough. Only national abolition, immune from action by the Supreme Court, could guarantee an end to the heinous institution—and that meant a constitutional amendment.
To gain Senate approval of what would become the Thirteenth Amendment, Sumner collaborated with a number of antislavery activists and forged a unique alliance with members of the Women’s National Loyal League. Created by stalwart reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the Women’s National Loyal League held its first convention in May of 1863 and began a campaign to collect one million signatures on a petition demanding a constitutional amendment for the total abolition of slavery. To receive this and other petitions, Sumner asked the Senate to create a special committee “to take into consideration all propositions . . . concerning slavery.” The Senate complied and named Sumner as chairman.2
“By early 1864, the National Loyal League had collected 100,000 signatures on six thousand petition forms and mailed them to Sumner in a large trunk. On February 9, Sumner presented the petitions to the Senate. In a dramatic speech, he called the signers “a mighty army, one hundred thousand strong . . . . They ask for nothing less than universal emancipation.”3 Sumner’s speech became known as “The Prayer of One Hundred Thousand.”
Sumner hoped to use his position as chairman of the new committee to promote total abolition. In February of 1864, just before delivering his “Prayer” speech, he introduced a constitutional amendment to end slavery, asking that it be referred to his Select Committee on Slavery and Freedmen, although Senate practice dictated otherwise. Judiciary Committee chairman Lyman Trumbull objected, insisting that his committee was the proper one to consider such proposals. The Senate sided with Trumbull.
When the Judiciary Committee reported its version of an abolition amendment to the full Senate, Sumner thought it was not strong enough. He had insisted that any amendment must include a provision that all persons were “equal before the law,” but few senators were ready to take such a bold step. Making all persons “equal before the law,” argued one senator, might lead to dangerous consequences, such as providing voting rights to women. Instead, the committee approved more modest language that echoed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” Although the statement was less than Sumner had hoped for, he joined his colleagues in voting for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in April of 1864.
In the years following the Civil War, Sumner recognized that abolition was only the beginning of the battle for civil rights. He used what power he could muster to protect the gains that African Americans had made in the South and urged his colleagues to approve mobilization of federal resources to do so. He emerged as a leading opponent of President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, which Sumner and other Radical Republicans believed were designed to reinstate white supremacy in the former Confederate states. He supported impeachment and removal of the president in 1868, though the Senate came up one vote short of conviction.
Sumner’s steadfast defense of his principles often led him to oppose compromise measures. He believed that the government owed former slaves a guarantee of their suffrage rights, along with support for education and land ownership. Sumner initially opposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declared that African Americans were citizens entitled to equal protection of the laws, because it did not contain a clear guarantee of voting rights. Ultimately, he cast his vote in favor of the amendment. Never shy about chastising his fellow Republicans for not going far enough, Sumner took every opportunity to place the question of equal rights before the Senate. Such radical views stirred action, but they also made enemies. “If I could cut the throats of about half a dozen senators,” confessed William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, “Sumner would be the first victim.”4
In 1870 Sumner introduced what he considered to be his most important piece of legislation, a civil rights bill to guarantee to all citizens, regardless of color, “equal and impartial enjoyment of any accommodation, advantage, facility, or privilege.” Sumner had characterized segregation and other anti-black laws in the South as “nothing but the tail of slavery,” and he predicted his civil rights bill would be the greatest achievement of Reconstruction. “Very few measures of equal importance have ever been presented,” he proclaimed.5
Unfortunately, Sumner’s idealistic and uncompromising stance had alienated him from many of his Senate colleagues, and the bill failed. In 1871 he even lost his influential position atop the Foreign Relations Committee when he entered into a fierce public battle with President Ulysses S. Grant over plans to annex Santo Domingo. The party caucus sided with Grant and removed Sumner as chairman. Despite becoming increasingly isolated within his party, Sumner persisted and continued to introduce the civil rights bill. After suffering a heart attack in 1874, Sumner’s final thoughts remained with his bill. The dying Sumner pleaded with Frederick Douglass and others at his bedside: “Don’t let the bill fail. You must take care of [my] civil rights bill.”6 Sumner did not live to see the fate of his bill.
When Sumner died on March 11, 1874, his supporters mourned him as a national leader. Thousands passed by his casket in the Capitol Rotunda, where it was placed on the same catafalque that had held President Lincoln’s casket a decade before. Thousands more lined the train route by which the senator’s body was transported north and were present upon its arrival in Massachusetts. As he lay in state in the Massachusetts State House, soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, composed of African American soldiers who had fought in the Civil War, stood guard. The Springfield Republican lamented: “The noblest head in America has fallen, and the most accomplished and illustrious of our statesmen is no more.”7
As a final tribute to their often-difficult colleague, senators passed an amended version of Sumner’s bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, but again Sumner proved to be ahead of his time. The Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional in 1883. It would take another 80 years for Sumner’s ideas to gain full legislative endorsement—with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
If you seek the source of Sumner’s fame, look to the caning. To truly understand the importance of Sumner’s enduring legacy as statesman and legislator, however, you need to explore the career that came after the caning.
Notes
1. Quoted in David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Knopf, 1970), 29.
2. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 148.
3. Congressional Globe (38th Cong., 1st Sess.), February 9, 1864, p. 536.
4. William Pitt Fessenden to Elizabeth Fessenden Warriner, June 1, 1862, quoted in Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 272.
5. Congressional Globe (38th Congress, 1st Session), May 13, 1864, p. 2246; Sumner to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, February 25, 1872, in Edward Lillie Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 1860-1874 (Boston, 1894), 502.
6. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 1860-1874, 598.
7. Quoted in Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 8.
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