Preface
by Donald A. Ritchie
In her 45 years of service on Capitol Hill, Christine S. McCreary saw great
changes in both the Senate and in Washington, D.C. Born in New York City in
1926, Christine Stewart was a student at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona
Beach, Florida, when the United States entered World War II and the federal
government put out a call for civilian employees to staff the many new wartime
agencies. She passed the typing test and immediately left for Washington.
Although still a segregated city, the capital offered exciting challenges and
opportunities for a young African American woman.
Beginning at the Office of Price Administration, she moved to the Federal
Security Administration. One day while working in the FSA typing pool, Stewart
was called to take dictation for an official whose secretary was out sick. The
official, Stuart Symington, was so impressed with her work that took her along
when he became chairman of the National Security Board and director of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation. She served as administrative assistant to
Symington's assistant, George L. P. Weaver. In 1952 Symington won election to
the United States Senate from Missouri as a Democrat, and offered her a position
on his Senate staff. She accepted, but waited until after the birth of her son. She
had married Rivers D. McCreary, then a railroad postal clerk in Washington and
a musician. They had two sons, Rivers and James.
Very few African Americans held professional positions in the Senate in 1953.
Jesse Nichols had become the government documents librarian for the Senate
Finance Committee in 1937, and Marguerite Ingram became the first black
secretary when she joined the staff of Senator Paul Douglas, an Illinois Democrat,
in 1949. By 1953 the Senate restaurant in the Capitol and the staff cafeteria in the
Senate Office Building remained unofficially segregated. Although most of the
kitchen staff, waiters and cafeteria workers were black, the patrons were
exclusively white. Christine McCreary was among the first to challenge this de
facto segregation by dining regularly in the staff cafeteria.
McCreary remained on Senator Symington's staff until his retirement in 1977.
She then joined the office of Senator John Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, who was
serving in his first term. McCreary retired from the Senate in 1998 at the end of
Senator Glenn's fourth term, when he chose not to run for reelection. During her
nearly half century on Capitol Hill she saw size of each senator's personal staff
multiply. When she began the entire Senate staff worked out of one Senate Office
Building. By the time she retired, three office buildings accommodating a staff
that had increased seven fold. During those years she moved from the Old Senate
Office Building (later named the Richard Russell Building) with its mahogany
United States Senate Historical Office -- Oral History Project
www.senate.gov
Birth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.