The house that slaves built: as Barack Obama and his family move into the presidential, mansion, a took back at a 200-year-old house that has not always been so welcoming to blacks.

• Author: Harris, Gardiner

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In 1801, a year after the White House opened, Thomas Jefferson moved in with nearly a dozen staves from Monticello, his Virginia home. And staves made up much of the house's staff until. the death in 1850 of Zachary Taylor, the fast slaveholder to be President.

The White House was built by crews of Mack laborers--both stave and free. Today, more than 200 years tater, Barack Obama's family making the White House their home is a powerful symbol, of change for Americans of all races.

"The racial, history of the White House is a wonderful, symbol of the racial history of the nation as a whore," notes author John Stauffer.

In the 19th century, the most prominent black guest at the White House was abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He came three times white Abraham Lincoln was President, but his last visit was perhaps his most important.

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The White House had been thrown open to the public to celebrate the President's second inaugural, but the guards turned Douglass away--apparently on standing orders that blacks were not to be allowed in. Douglass sent in his card, and Lincoln ordered him admitted.

Well into the 20th century, it was considered taboo to invite blacks to a meat at the White House. When President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to a private dinner in 1901, a Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper called it "the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States."

Lou Hoover, the wife of President Herbert Hoover, found the taboo against inviting blacks to be a problem in 1929, after Oscar De Priest of Illinois became the first African-American...