People Who Were Way Ahead of Their Time On Racial Issues.

Eleanor Roosevelt was way ahead of her time. She believed in full equality for African Americans when that view wasn't popular. She broke with tradition by inviting hundreds of African-American guests to the White House. Which doesn't seem like much today ironically, but was radical then. The last person in the White House to do that was President Theodore Roosevelt, who had dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House October 16, 1901. And when the African American singer Marian Anderson was denied the use of Washington's Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939, Eleanor resigned from the group in protest and helped arrange another concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.