Elizabeth Warren is doubling down on her affection for Frances Perkins, despite the Post reporting about the former Secretary of Labor’s segregationist sympathies.
Warren released a roughly 3-minute video this week filmed in the Perkins family home in Maine with her grandson touting the similarities between the 2020 Democrat and the first female cabinet secretary.
“I think my grandmother and Elizabeth Warren would both agree government should be for the people,” Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall says in the slickly produced video.
Perkins helped usher in Social Security and New Deal reforms under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“Frances Perkins was bold and courageous and effective. She knew how to get things done. I think Elizabeth Warren shares a lot of those qualities. She has fire in her belly and I like that,” Coggeshall says.
But Perkins also was very critical of the Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in schools.
She called the Brown v. Board of Education decision “terrible” and said that integration is “not overdue,” according to research dug up by Steven White, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, and published in the Post.
In an interview, Perkins showed a deference to the “way of life in the South” of separate schools, drinking fountains and African Americans relegated to the back of the bus.
Frances Perkins pictured in 1936.Getty“Yes, but they got on the bus after all. The bus hauled them where they wanted to go,” Perkins said, according to the interview.
White says Perkins’ thoughts on segregation were not well known and the interview occurred near the end of her life.
Calls to Coggeshall and to the Frances Perkins Center were not immediately returned. Warren’s campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment on why she continues to associate with Perkins despite her race-relations revelations.
Coggeshall did not immediately return a call for comment. But the Frances Perkins Center provided a scholarly article published in 1980 called “Frances Perkins’ interest in a new deal for blacks” to provide a more fuller picture of her record.
The article says that Perkins made welfare of African Americans a priority at the Department of Labor, including integrating cafeterias, hiring more black workers at the department, appointing her own adviser for Negro affairs and studying the problems of black workers.
Warren has said previously she considers Perkins a role model and she extolled her labor rights record in a rousing Washington Square Park rally in September.
In the new campaign video, Perkins’ photo is flashed on the screen along with images of American icons Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass.
“They built a grassroots movement,” Warren says. “They persisted and they changed the course of American history.”
