{"id":113472,"date":"2018-03-23T10:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T14:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=113472"},"modified":"2024-09-06T00:56:36","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T04:56:36","slug":"look-what-we-found-sue-houchins-historic-photograph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2018\/03\/23\/look-what-we-found-sue-houchins-historic-photograph\/","title":{"rendered":"Look What We Found: A photograph of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘Black Cabinet’"},"content":{"rendered":"

A framed black-and-white photograph hangs in the Pettengill Hall office of Associate Professor of African American Studies Sue Houchins, a reminder of family and the power of education.<\/p>\n

Taken 80 years ago this month, on March 15, 1938, it depicts 20 African American leaders who comprised President Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s so-called Black Cabinet<\/a>: some of the country\u2019s finest minds and specialists in a variety of fields, including Houchins\u2019 father, economist Joseph Roosevelt Houchins.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s in the second row at far right in the photo, taken by photographer Addison Scurlock, famous for documenting black Washingtonians. All 20 people in the photo are men, except the legendary educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune, known as \u201cthe First Lady of the Struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

Associate Professor of African American Studies Sue Houchins. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Growing up, Sue Houchins knew of the photo because her father kept it rolled tightly in his top dresser drawer. \u201cEvery now and then we would unroll it, although it stayed rolled up for too long.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Cornell University\u2013trained attorney and labor economist, Joseph Houchins led Roosevelt\u2019s Division of Negro Affairs in the U.S. Department of Commerce until 1953. He later joined the president’s Committee on Government Contracts, where he used his skills as a lawyer and economist to address discrimination by federal contractors, including the denial of jobs to blacks at shipyards in Mississippi and Alabama.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a troublemaker, and he knew what people needed,\u201d says his proud daughter.\u00a0It\u2019s what she learned from him, she says.<\/p>\n

In 1950, Houchins prepared an influential analysis of the African American population based on the U.S. Census, work that was featured in Ebony<\/em> magazine,<\/em> providing census data to a popular audience.<\/p>\n

In 1961, he joined the economics department at Howard University, where he served as chair and mentored younger scholars. Sue Houchins occasionally meets one of those now-elderly scholars, and they sing his praises as \u201cthe father of black economics\u201d or as the source of important economic data that strengthened the NAACP\u2019s landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.<\/p>\n

To raise awareness of her father\u2019s contributions to American society and to academe, Sue Houchins and Howard economist Rodney Green recently co-authored a scholarly essay that chronicles his career<\/a>, including publication of two Commerce reports he authored in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

One analyzed the high failure rate of black-owned insurance companies, and the second reported on a national survey Houchins conducted to create a complete listing of black chambers of commerce that could be used for intra-racial communication and support.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Joseph Roosevelt Houchins at Cornell University, circa 1930.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sue Houchins also remembers the kind of father he was \u2014 one who instilled a love of learning. \u201cOn Saturdays, he would take me to a second-hand book store, put some money in my hands, and send me to where I wanted to go. He would go where he wanted to go, and then we\u2019d have an ice cream sundae afterward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in the South in 1900, Joseph Houchins grew up in the Ithaca, N.Y., home of an uncle who was a janitor. He earned four Cornell degrees: two bachelor\u2019s, plus a master\u2019s and a doctorate of the science of law.<\/p>\n

Sue Houchins says that her firebrand mother, Frankie V. Lea Houchins, a physicist and photographer, engineered her father\u2019s Commerce job by applying for it in his name without his knowledge. They hadn\u2019t yet wed, and he was teaching at a small historically black college in Texas at the time.<\/p>\n

According to family lore, Frankie seemed much more interested in marrying him if she could arrange a move up North. And she succeeded.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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