Everett Frederic Morrow (April 20, 1909 – July 19, 1994) was the first

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

to hold an executive position at the

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 ...

. He served President Dwight Eisenhower as Administrative Officer for Special Projects from 1955 to 1961.

Early life

Morrow was born in Hackensack, New Jersey. Morrow's father was John Eugene Morrow, a library custodian, who became an ordained Methodist minister in 1912, and his mother was Mary Ann Hayes, a former farm worker and maid. His grandparents had been enslaved. He graduated from Hackensack High School in 1925, where he participated for three years on the school's debate team, serving as its president during his senior year."Morrow, Everett Frederic (1909–1994)"

BlackPast.org BlackPast.org is a web-based reference center that is dedicated primarily to the understanding of African-American history and Afro-Caribbean history and the history of people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. In 2011 the American Library Associati ...

. Accessed November 25, 2017. "Everett Frederic Morrow, the son of John Eugene Morrow, a library custodian who became an ordained Methodist minister in 1912 and Mary Ann Hayes, a former farm worker and maid, was born on April 9, 1909 in Hackensack, New Jersey. He graduated from Hackensack High School in 1925, where he not only served on the debate team for three years, but was their president his senior year." He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. His brother,

John H. Morrow John Howard Morrow Sr. (February 5, 1910 – January 11, 2000) was an American diplomat. In 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him the first ambassador to independent Guinea. He became the first representative of the United States in t ...

, was Ambassador to Guinea and American representative to

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Education

A graduate of the law school of

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...

, he attended Bowdoin College from 1926–1930, where he was one of two African American students in attendance.Willcox, Isobel
"Hackensack Is Recalled As Hostile, Racist Town"
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', July 15, 1973. Accessed November 25, 2017. "After his four years at Hackensack High School, Mr. Morrow attended and was graduated from Bowdoin College, served as a major in the Army during World War II and earned a law degree at Rutgers University School of Law." Morrow had to return home before graduating to assist his family. (Bowdoin awarded him an honorary LL.D. degree in 1970.)

Early career

In 1935, Morrow held a position as a business manager for Opportunity Magazine, a part of the

National Urban League The National Urban League, formerly known as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, is a nonpartisan historic civil rights organization based in New York City that advocates on behalf of economic and social justice for African Am ...

. Two years later, he became a field secretary for the NAACP, before joining the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. In 1942, after only a month of serving in the US army as a private, he was promoted to sergeant. He soon after graduated from Officers Candidate School, and was discharged in 1946 as a Major of Artillery. Later, he was a writer for

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...

Political activity and White House period

After serving on Eisenhower's 1952 campaign staff, Morrow served as an adviser at the U.S. Commerce Department. He then moved to the White House as Administrative Officer for Special Projects, becoming the first African American to hold an executive position in the White House. The White House Historical Association wrote of his tenure:

As the sole African American on a staff dealing with racial tensions related to integration, Morrow faced difficult personal and professional struggles at the White House. The Supreme Court's landmark ''
Brown v. Board of Education ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segrega ...
'' ruling, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Little Rock crisis were the backdrop for Morrow's White House years. On a staff with a civil-rights policy that was at best cautious, Morrow was often frustrated and angered. He lived at a time when qualified African Americans were excluded from high-level political positions. Morrow as a black 'first' found relations within the president's 'official family' to be 'correct in conduct, but cold.'

Morrow campaigned for

Richard Nixon Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...

in Nixon's unsuccessful 1960 presidential campaign, including a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention and a role in the Vice-Presidential selection caucus.

Post-White House life

In 1964, Morrow became the first African American vice-president of

Bank of America The Bank of America Corporation (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The bank ...

, retiring from the company in 1975. He died in 1994.

Books and papers

After the 1960 campaign, Morrow wrote a book on his experiences, ''Black Man in the White House''. In it, Morrow said:

I have discovered certain peculiarities in the White House top staff. There is little sentiment at anyone's downfall. There may be outward expressions of sympathy, but each man is primarily concerned with his own survival, and there's always the possibility that another's misfortune will ease the pressure on him.

In Morrow's book, he speaks of many accounts where he suffered from racism on personal and professional levels. He also refers to multiple occasions when he was mistaken for a coat boy or taxi driver while working. In 1973, Morrow published his first autobiography, ''Way Down South Up North'', focusing on racism "up north", in his hometown of Hackensack, New Jersey. In 1980, after retiring from Bank of America, Morrow published his last autobiography, ''Forty Years a Guinea Pig: A Black Man's View from the Top.'' Some of his papers are at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and at the Chicago Public Library's Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature.