Weaver, Robert C. 1907–1997

Robert C. Weaver 1907–1997

Government official, scholar

At a Glance…

Selected writings

Sources

Robert C. Weaver remains one of the least known of the civil rights pioneers who struggled throughout the middle half of the twentieth century to obtain rights for black Americans. Ebony magazine called him “one of the direct action pioneers” for picketing Washington, DC, stores as early as the 1930s. Primarily, however, his activities were within the context of his governmental jobs; he held various federal positions under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in the 1930s and 1940s, and then again under the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presidential administrations in the early 1960s. In 1961 he received the highest federal appointment then assigned to any African American when he became Administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Four years later, he became the first African American on the presidential cabinet, when President Johnson appointed him to the top position at the newly formed U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

While many have considered Weaver’s achievements to be exceptional, he never considered his actions extraordinary. He was raised in a middle-class family in Washington, DC, by parents who stressed education and achievement. “They worked [and] they struggled,” he told Ebony magazine, “and their one ambition was to send us to New England schools.” The family’s vision of success was rooted in its lineage. Weaver’s grandfather, Robert Tanner Freeman, was the first Black person to graduate from Harvard with a degree in dentistry. His parents realized their goal, for Weaver attended Harvard from 1925 until 1934, earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in economics.

Weaver dedicated most of his life to fighting discrimination and improving race relations. He held a succession of assignments for a variety of departments under the New Deal administration of the 1930s and 1940s, frequently serving as advisor for minority affairs and race relations. He advised the Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes from 1934 to 1938; acted as special assistant to Nathan Straus of the Housing Authority from 1938 to 1940; assisted Sidney Hillman of the National Defense Advisory Commission in 1940; and was chief of the Negro employment and training branch of the labor division in the Office of Production Management from 1942 to 1943. After the United States joined World War II, he served on the War Manpower Commission as director of Negro Manpower Services.

Simeon Booker wrote in Ebony magazine, “[Weaver’s] race relations service was an innovation for government [at that time].” Not satisfied with fighting discrimination on the job, Weaver spent his free time fighting the battle, too; during his first year in government, he and some friends desegregated the employee cafeteria.

Throughout his life, Weaver felt the sting of discrimination personally. Shortly after he finished his work at Harvard, he was recommended for a position with the Federal Reserve Board in New York City. He did not get the job because of his race. Years later, when he

At a Glance…

Born Robert Clifton Weaver on December 29, 1907, in Washington, DC; died on July 17,1997, in New York City; son of Mortimer Grover and Florence Freeman Weaver; married Ella V. Haith, 1935; children: Robert (deceased), Education: Harvard University, BA, 1929; Harvard University, MA, 1931; Harvard University, PhD, 1934.

Career: Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Interior, 1934-38; U.S. Housing Authority, special assistant, 1938-40; National Defense Advisory Commission, administrative assistant, 1940-42; Office of Production Management, Labor Division, chief of Negro employment and training, 1942-43; War Manpower Commission, director of the Negro Manpower Service, 1943-44; Chicago Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations, director, 1944-45; American Council on Race Relations, director of community services, 1945-48; John Hay Whitney Foundation, director of Opportunity Fellowships, 1949-54; New York State Rent Administration, 1955-59; U.S. Housing and Home Finance Agency, administrator, 1961-66; Chief of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1966-68; Baruch College, president, 1969-70; Hunter College, distinguished professor, 1971-78.

Selected memberships: Metro Life Insurance Company board of directors, 1969-78; Bowery Savings Bank, board of trustees, 1969-80; U.S. Controller General, consulting panel, 1973-97; New York City Conciliation and Appeals Board, 1973-84; Harvard University School of Design, visiting commission, 1978-83; NAACP Legal Defense Fund, executive committee of the board, 1978-97.

Selected awards: Spingarn Medal, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1962; Russworm Award, 1963; Albert Einstein Commemorative Award, 1968; Merrick Moore Spaulding Achievement Award, 1968; U.S. General Accounting Office, Public Service Award, 1975; New York City Urban League, Frederick Douglass Award, 1977; Schomburg Collection Award, 1978; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, inductee, 1985; National Urban League, Equal Opportunity Day Award, 1987; received more than 30 honorary degrees.

became Housing and Home Finance Administrator, he had a problem with his own housing. After he and his wife moved into an apartment building on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC, both suffered cold shoulders from the tenants. “There was the coolness,” he told Ebony, “and [the] management wasn’t too happy with the integration idea.”

Weaver left Washington in the 1940s because he felt that the anti-discriminatory programs he had helped to put in place were moving too slowly. He served on the first Mayor’s race relation board in Chicago from 1944 to 1945, and then moved to New York, where he taught at Columbia University and New York University. From 1949 to 1954 he worked with the John Hay Whitney Foundation as director of Opportunity Fellowships, distributing money to fund projects that would not otherwise have received support; he distributed at least $600,000 to promising young African-American scholars. During the 1950s he served on various housing boards for the city and state of New York.

Weaver’s scholarly work during the 1940s and 1950s reflected his interest in the economics and housing problems of the African-American population. In 1946 he published Negro Labor: A National Problem, and two years later finished The Negro Ghetto, a book about housing segregation in the North.

Weaver’s scholarly and administrative work quietly attracted attention, and on December 31, 1960, President John F. Kennedy appointed him as the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, making him the first black to achieve such a high position in the federal government. His agency had an estimated annual budget of more than $300 million, and oversaw such subsidiary agencies as the Federal Housing Administration, Public Housing Administration, Community Facilities Administration, and the Urban Renewal Administration. In 1966, Ebony magazine reported, “How the…poker-faced scholar [Weaver] took over the…[Housing and Home Finance Agency] in 1961 and brought direction and morale to the sprawling agency is a sterling example of his ability. For the first time, administrators of five agencies in the network met, worked out common problems and developed programs. New projects were conceived, including moderate-income housing, rent supplement assistance for low income families, open space preservation, urban beautification, mass transit assistance, rehabilitation assistance, relocation aids, grants for basic public facilities, [and] advanced acquisition of sites and land development assistance.”

In 1961 President Kennedy attempted to raise Weaver’s agency to cabinet level but was blocked by Congress because of his plans to put Weaver, a black man, at the head. Four years later President Johnson succeeded, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development was established. On January 13, 1966, Weaver became the first African American appointed to a cabinet position. As President Johnson made the appointment, he told the country, according to an Ebony account, that “Bob Weaver’s performance as administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency has been marked by the highest level of integrity and [an] ability to stimulate a genuine team spirit. I have found him to be a deep thinker but a quiet and articulate man of action. He is as well versed in the urban needs of America as any man I know.”

When the President Richard Nixon’s administration took over in 1968, Weaver left government for good, and returned to academe. He served as the President of Baruch College for two years and then became a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College until he retired in 1978. Even after his retirement, Weaver was famous for never wasting time and always working. Shortly after he joined the cabinet, in fact, an aide of his told Ebony that “Weaver never wastes time. He reads, writes, and constantly researches. When he makes a trip, he carries books and reports to read.”

In addition to both his academic and government work, Weaver kept busy on many boards and committees. He was on the board of directors of Metro Life Insurance Company, the Bowery Savings Bank, and Mount Sinai Hospital and Medical School; he served as president of the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, as a member of the commission on law and social action of the American Jewish Congress, the Citizens Committee for Children, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and for many years was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He kept busy until he no longer could. At age 89, Weaver died in New York City on July 17, 1997.

Despite his success and the praise of others, Weaver always refused to spread his own fame. “Bob believes in getting the work done, not publicity on what he plans to do,” Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP told Ebony magazine. Even when he was waiting to be nominated to the cabinet, he refused to ask black groups to recommend him or campaign in his behalf, knowing that his qualifications would secure him the position.

While he may never have blown his own horn, many others recognized Weaver’s worth and awarded him honors accordingly. In addition to the nearly 30 honorary degrees from such institutions as the University of Michigan, Howard, Harvard, Morehouse, Rutgers, Amherst, and Columbia, he received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1962, the Russworm Award in 1963, delivered the annual Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1965, and received the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award in 1968. In 1992 the Congressional Black Caucus honored him at a special party during their annual Weekend Production.

The nation commemorated Weaver’s greatest legacy in 2000, when the HUD headquarters building in Washington, DC, was dedicated in his honor. Fittingly, Weaver’s name became the first of any African American to grace a cabinet building in the capitol. Harlem Representative Charles Rangel, who had introduced the bill honoring Weaver to Congress told Jet that “This is a long overdue expression of the nation’s gratitude for Robert Weaver’s contributions.” The HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo praised Weaver in Jet, saying that he “put the bricks and mortar on President Johnson’s blueprint for a Great Society. Robert Weaver got real urban legislation on the books and nurtured our country’s first commitment to improve the quality of life in our nation’s cities. All of us who work at HUD and all who believe we can build an even greater society, are forever in his debt.” Indeed many of the “bricks and mortar” Weaver put in place continue to benefit the nation.

Selected writings

The Negro Ghetto, Russell & Russell, 1948, reprinted, 1967.

Negro Labor: A National Problem, Kennikat Press, 1946, reprinted, 1969.

Dilemmas of Urban America, Harvard University Press, 1965.

The Urban Complex; Human Values in Urban Life, Doubleday, 1966.

(With William E. Zisch and Paul H. Douglas) The Urban Environment: How It Can Be Improved, New York University Press, 1969.

Sources

Black Enterprise, April 1971, p. 44.

Ebony, April 1966, p. 83; April 1972, p. 182; August 1975, p. 7; March 1982, p. 129.

Jet, October 12, 1992, p. 8.; August 4, 1997, p. 57; December 13, 1999, p. 31; June 5, 2000, p. 16; January 19, 2004, p. 36.

Look, April 11, 1961, p. 33.

Newsweek, January 9, 1961, p. 23; February 20, 1961, p. 25; March 5, 1962, p. 27; January 24, 1966, p. 26.

Time, January 6, 1961, p. 15; May 14, 1961, p. 16; January 21, 1966, p. 19; March 4, 1966, p. 87.

—Robin Armstrong and Sara Pendergast