Breaking Down Racial & Gender Barriers

The Reconstruction Era changed the face of Congress as African Americans—some of them former slaves—were elected to the U.S. House. Other freedmen were appointed or hired to serve as staff.⁶⁰ Fourteen-year-old Alfred Q. Powell of Manchester, Virginia, is the earliest known Black American appointed as a House Page. His chief sponsor was Representative Charles Howell Porter of Virginia, who had moved to Virginia from New York after the Civil War and represented a Richmond-centered district. He secured Powell’s appointment on April 1, 1871, and Powell served during most of the 42nd Congress (1871–1873). It appears Powell wasn’t simply plucked out of obscurity for this ground-breaking appointment. He hailed from a prominent family in Virginia’s free African-American community. Powell’s great uncle was one of the most influential Black American politicians of the nineteenth century, John Mercer Langston, who represented Virginia in the U.S. House in the 51st Congress (1889–1891).⁶¹

Powell’s first day as a Page in the Republican-controlled House coincided with a contentious debate on the eve of the first Ku Klux Klan Act, as notable African-American Members such as South Carolinians Robert Elliott and Joseph Rainey delivered speeches on the floor attesting to violations against the 14th Amendment rights of their constituents.⁶² A New-York Tribune correspondent wrote, “Except [for] some practical jokes which have been put upon [Powell] by some of the older pages, he got started very creditably.”⁶³ Records indicate that Powell served until late 1872, just months before the close of the 42nd Congress.⁶⁴ An African-American Page (appointed by the Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts) had served as a Senate riding Page nearly a year and a half before Powell started in the House.⁶⁵ It is unclear if there were any other black Pages who served in the years immediately after Powell left the chamber. The “Jim Crow” laws and customs that followed had, by the 1890s, made that improbable. By the turn of the twentieth century, Powell’s milestone was forgotten.

It was not until 1965, at the zenith of the civil rights movement and on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s death, that the House welcomed another African-American Page: Frank Mitchell of Springfield, Illinois. Congressman Paul Findley, who represented the district that encompassed Lincoln’s hometown, and Republican Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan pushed for the appointment, which symbolized a marriage of the past and present. Like Alfred Q. Powell nearly a century earlier, Mitchell paged during a civil rights revolution as he witnessed debate about the 1965 Voting Rights Act during his service in Washington. The March on Selma, Alabama, had occurred just weeks before his appointment. “I don’t think I broke any barriers for anybody,” recalled Mitchell, whose principal job during his several months of service was to answer phones in the Republican Cloakroom. “But what I did do was carry myself with dignity and respect, and I hope I made it easier for the next guy or woman coming along, so that there wouldn’t be any hesitation.”⁶⁶

The first female Page was 13-year-old Gene Cox—appointed on January 3, 1939, by her father, Representative Edward Eugene Cox of Georgia, to serve symbolically on the opening day of the 76th Congress (1939–1941). Sworn in by Doorkeeper Joseph Sinnott, Cox logged just three hours on the job, collected autographs from Members, posed for the national press on the Speaker’s rostrum wielding a gavel, and earned $4 for her work.⁶⁷

Sinnott fretted that the Cox story might “get into the papers” (it did) and produce an immediate avalanche of applications from girls (it did not).⁶⁸ Over the next several decades, whenever the issue of girls serving as Pages was raised by the occasional advocate on or off Capitol Hill, the response from House leaders mirrored American society’s prevailing assumptions. Girls could do the work, but because Pages lived independently in an urban setting, the overriding consideration in denying gender equality in the Page ranks was that living conditions were unsafe for unsupervised teenage girls.

Such attitudes prevailed into the 1960s but began to change as more women Members of Congress advocated for introducing girls into the Page ranks and as pressure for equality grew with the women’s rights movement during that decade. In 1973, more than 30 years after Gene Cox served for a day, Speaker of the House Carl Albert of Oklahoma made the historic first appointment of a female Page—Felda Looper of Heavener, Oklahoma. Speaker Albert’s decision was based in part on Looper’s persistent letter-writing campaign to gain girls admittance to the Page program. “It was the first time in my life I ever felt discriminated against as a woman, and it made me furious,” Looper recalled about her reaction upon learning about the “unspoken rule” barring girls from serving as Pages.

Looper began her tenure on May 21, 1973, amid widespread media coverage.⁶⁹ But as a bench Page, she quickly settled into a summer of performing the same tasks as her male counterparts—primarily running errands for Members of Congress. “This was a life-changing experience for me,” Looper recalled, noting that the mounting Watergate Crisis was a topic that occupied much of the summer. “This was the first time I ever saw kids fighting over a newspaper and really knowing what was going on in the world, or certainly in our little world.”⁷⁰ Within several years girls were being appointed House Pages in numbers commensurate with their male counterparts. And, in the 97th Congress (1981–1983), because of her superior academic performance, Polly Padden was selected from among the Pages to become the first female to be the Speaker’s Page.⁷¹