A Butler Well Served by This Election

By Wil HaygoodWashington Post Staff Writer Friday, November 7, 2008 For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land. He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week. He was there while America's racial history was being remade: Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, the cities burning, the civil rights bills, the assassinations. When he started at the White House in 1952, he couldn't even use the public restrooms when he ventured back to his native Virginia. "We had never had anything," Allen, 89, recalls of black America at the time. "I was always hoping things would get better." In its long history, the White House -- just note the name -- has had a complex and vexing relationship with black Americans.