Everett Frederic Morrow (1909-19 July 1994) was President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Administrative Officer for Special Projects from 1955 to 1961 and the first African-American to hold an executive position at the White House.
Biography[]
Everett Frederic Morrow was born in Hackensack, Bergen County, New Jersey in 1909, the son of a Methodist minister and a maid; he was the brother of John H. Morrow. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1930, one of the first two African-American students to attend the school. In 1937, he became a field secretary for the NAACP, and he served in the US Army artillery during World War II. In 1952, he served on the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower's campaign staff, and he served as an advisor at the Department of Commerce before being made Administrative Officer for Special Projects from 1955 to 1961, making him the first African-American to hold an executive position at the White House. His job was to reach out to black voters who were leaving the Republican Party for the Democrats, and he grew concerned about the Republican Party's moderate stance on civil rights and Eisenhower's own gradualist approach to racial equality. He campaigned for Richard Nixon in his unsuccessful 1960 presidential campaign, and he served as the first black vice-president of Bank of America from 1964 to 1975. He died in 1994.