Grant

by Ron Chernow

Previously blacks had been forced to ride on separate streetcars with stars stamped on their sides. When they crowded onto white streetcars in protest, transport companies appealed to Sheridan to banish these black passengers. Instead Sheridan warned that if companies permitted discrimination, he would bar them from the streets. Sheridan

A former member of the Free-Soil Party, an upright gentleman of starchy integrity, he had served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court where he used sarcasm to savage lesser mortals. “When on the bench,” wrote an observer, “he was said to be unhappy because he could not decide against both litigants.”

Despite such pressures, Grant made extraordinary strides in naming blacks, Jews, and Native Americans to federal positions—a forgotten chapter of American history. The minor story of nepotism has overshadowed this far more important narrative. Forty years before Theodore Roosevelt incurred southern wrath by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, Grant welcomed blacks there.