Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts”

About the Author

Robert Clifton Weaver was born December 29, 1907, and raised in Washington, D.C., where his father worked for the U.S. Postal Service. He attended the prestigious Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, an elite black school in the nation’s segregated capital. Weaver went on to Harvard University, completing his PhD in economics in 1934. In 1933 he joined the incoming Roosevelt administration as part of the Department of the Interior, where he worked on Secretary Harold Ickes’s staff. In that capacity, Weaver was instrumental in ensuring that blacks were placed in supervisory roles in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that provided job training and relief for unemployed workers. Weaver also developed an antidiscrimination policy for the Public Works Administration (PWA), which required a minimum number of skilled black workers on federal projects overseen by this agency. In 1938 Weaver became special assistant in charge of race relations to Nathan Straus, the director of the U.S. Housing Authority. He continued to fight discrimination against African Americans, securing language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race in PWA housing contracts.

As an increasingly prominent member of the Roosevelt administration, Weaver functioned as a leader in the president’s “Black Cabinet.” This group of African American advisers gained much publicity (both negative and positive) during the New Deal years, and by the beginning of World War II, Weaver and the other black intellectuals working in Washington had become well known. In 1940, as the United States began to inch its way toward involvement in the war, Weaver was named special administrative assistant on race relations to the Labor Division of the National Defense Advisory Commission, where he worked on the integration of black workers into the war effort. One of the by-products of segregation was the inferior education and job training afforded African Americans, a problem that made it difficult to integrate blacks into the military. On April 11, 1941, Weaver was named chief of the Negro Employment and Training Branch of the Labor Division in order to begin redressing this issue. From 1942 to 1944, he served as chief of the Minority Groups Service in the War Manpower Commission. Weaver retired from federal service on May 1, 1944.

After World War II, Weaver taught at several institutions and was New York’s rent commissioner from 1955 to 1959. By 1960 he was a nationally recognized expert in public housing. The following year President John F. Kennedy appointed him administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Weaver became the first black member of a presidential cabinet when President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, named him secretary of the newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1966. Weaver retired from government service in 1968 and later served as president of Bernard Baruch College and professor of urban affairs at Hunter College, both in New York City. He died on July 17, 1997.