This White Woman’s Racism Made Her an American Hero

“I won’t make up any nigger’s bed,” she said. Then America turned her into a hero.

In this video, I will tell a 120-year-old story that has never been fully recounted. It features a Black man who rose up from slavery and became one of his era’s most influential Americans. And it connects directly to a viral racist scandal in 2025.

This story will perfectly convey a truth that people who want to destroy America’s racial caste system must grapple with. In my book, Their Accomplices Wore Robes, I call those who want to maintain that system caste preservationists. And they are the same people now, as they were a century ago. Two centuries ago. Three centuries ago.

Caste preservationists remain as committed to racial hierarchy as ever—and the vile White supremacist in the White House has emboldened them.

***

On the morning of May 6, 1903, Booker T. Washington fielded press questions in his room inside the English Hotel and Opera House in Indianapolis.

A 36-year-old White maid, Louise Hadley, hovered in the background, cleaning. Newspaper reporters, meanwhile, gathered around one of the most celebrated men in America, and the country’s preeminent Black leader.

As she made his bed, a reporter asked about Theodore Roosevelt. 

“What have you to say about the president?”

Booker T. replied, “Not a word; not a word.”

Hadley interjected: “What, aren’t you going to say anything about the president after he has faced all he has on your account?”

Let me tell you the incredibly racist backstory.

On September 14, 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency after the assassination of his predecessor, William McKinley. Intent on winning his own term in 1904, Roosevelt immediately began conceiving his election strategy. He wanted Booker T., a man deeply knowledgeable on the South’s political climate, to advise him.

On October 16, 1901, after the two steadily communicated for a month, Roosevelt and his family ate dinner with Booker T. Word of this White House meal ripped through the nation. White southerners condemned Roosevelt for defiling the people’s home, and his own wife and children, by receiving a Black man at his dining table. 

“The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger,” South Carolina senator Ben Tillman vented, “will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”

The matter disheveled Booker T.’s manicured apolitical image. White folk, particularly in the South, deemed politics the White man’s space. Booker T. told Black folk, for the time being, to acquiesce to that. And he endeared himself to White America by both imploring Black folk against seeking social equality and by comforting White folk with the message that his race did not even crave it. 

The dinner, however, loudly contradicted this worldview. The White South denounced him for violating societal restrictions placed on the Black caste.

Booker T. responded to Hadley’s question with silence. He never did publicly address the White House dinner controversy. Hadley later claimed that Booker T. shot her a glare. She abruptly left the room, leaving the bed unmade.

Later that day, Booker T. delivered a speech that evoked the same themes of racial conciliation that lifted him to prominence.

“There is just one way to solve the race problem,” he said. “It is for colored people to realize their needs and to work earnestly and conscientiously to secure emancipation from ignorance. It is for white people to assist in every way possible the bringing from darkness of another race. The two races will continue to live side by side in America, and in time, I earnestly believe the problem will be solved for the good of both races.”

By all appearances, Booker T. had a successful Indianapolis trip. However, another racist controversy that distracted from his work would soon entangle him.

***

The next evening, May 7, the hotel’s head chambermaid informed the manager that the bed Booker T. had slept in remained unkempt. Hadley refused to make it despite Booker T. having checked out that morning.

An indignant Hadley told the manager, “I won’t make up any nigger’s bed.”

He told her to quit if she didn’t want to do her job. She didn’t respond. Just collected her pay and left.

But somehow, a maid quitting ignited a firestorm. The flames started in Indiana.

“We do not care to give the affair any publicity,” the manager told a local newspaper, “but the facts are that the woman refused to do her work because the room had been occupied by a negro, and she was given the alternative of quitting, which she accepted.”

The manager expressed that “his hostelry was run for the benefit of the public, and Washington as a self-respecting citizen was entitled to board and lodging there.”

Then, the Associated Press reported on the ordeal. Its copy landed in papers across America. Soon, the fire engulfed the nation. The Atlanta Constitution, perhaps the South’s most influential daily, carried the piece on May 9th. “Booker’s Bed Made Her Balk,” the headline blared. “Miss Louise Hadley,” the story read, “a chambermaid at the Hotel English, was discharged yesterday evening for refusing to make up a bed occupied by Booker T. Washington the night before.”

Next, America went full America, as it usually does. (I think you know what that means.)

***

Just days after the story hit the press, residents of Senoia, Georgia sent Hadley $25 and an encouraging note: “In token of our appreciation of your conduct in refusing to condescend to such service.” 

From there, the sun seemingly rose each morning to witness money from southern admirers streaming into Hadley’s pockets. Ten days after her grand moral stance, she opened a bank account with a $456 balance, all from her new fans.

(How shocking is this? Tell me in the comments.)

The Macon News reported that “citizens of other towns in Georgia are raising purses for her, and still others are drawing up letters of commendation.” The newspaper listed the citizens who sent her heartfelt written praise for honoring the racial caste system.

One hundred from Sheffield, Alabama joined to each send her a dollar, and they penned her a note expressing that they “approve of her discrimination.”

The Macon, Georgia police pooled together funds from their membership, sending her $40. A committee of folk in Louisiana calling themselves “Southerners at New Orleans” sent her $1,000 with an accompanying note that stated, “You are 1,000 times better than any negro.”

Perhaps no city showered Hadley with more support than did Houston. A hotel there, for example, offered her a new job: “Have heard that you refused to make Booker’s bed. Would you like a situation in a good hotel?”

A Houston detective started a fund for her: “I admire the pluck which Miss Hadley manifested in this matter,” he wrote, “and I believe she is entitled to some consideration at the hands of the public. It must have required considerable courage to thus place in jeopardy the means by which she obtained a livelihood rather than submit to what she regarded as an indignity.”

The Houston Chronicle actually sponsored a widely attended meeting to fundraise for caste preservationists’ new hero. One attendee said, “I have more respect for the girl who refused to make up the bed occupied by Booker Washington than I have for the President who dined with him.”

“The hotel proprietor,” the attendee continued, “who will admit a negro to his place and permit white girls or men either, for that matter, to serve him should be shot like a dog.” 

Her Houston benefactors sent her $500 and a memo. It read: “For a girl with self-respect.”

A month after the incident, Hadley reportedly had amassed between 4 and $5,000. Folk from Indianapolis gave her a gold watch. From Louisville came a locket. Nashville sent a gold necklace. And from all over, mainly from the South, but also from the North, warm telegrams found Hadley.

One newspaper wrote, “A few weeks ago Louise Hadley was an unknown chambermaid in an Indianapolis hotel. Today she is known all over the United States, her picture has appeared in hundreds of papers and gentlemen of the Sunny South are drinking her health.” 

Black Americans reacted much differently, sending thank-yous to the hotel’s leadership for requiring that their employees treat them equally.

What followed gave them a measure of karmic relief.

 (If this video has taught you something, give it a like, subscribe and get notified when I drop new stuff.)

***

In June, a judge threw out her $5,000 lawsuit against the hotel. Around this time, the national attention unearthed personal skeletons. 

The local Board of Children’s Guardians asked that Hadley’s 11-year-old adopted daughter be put in an orphan’s home. The little girl, Georgia Hadley, begged that her adopted father instead receive custody. She revealed that her mother Louise “treated her mean.”

A newspaper article reported the story and included a damning line: “Mrs. Hadley, it is said, received in the neighborhood of $2,000 ‘admiration’ money from people all over the country, but it was evident from the appearance of her child in the courtroom that the mother was the only one in the family to receive any benefit from the prosperity.”

Hadley’s husband, Levi, at this time, had filed for divorce, seeking to become her third ex-husband. He also complained that she had physically abused him.

Newspapers never truly determined how much money Hadley received. One said as much as $5,000. Another reported her home was broken into, and burglars stole nearly all of it. A third printed that “out of the thousands of dollars in checks that were sent to her for the stand she took regarding the negro, only about $400 was ever collected, the balance of the checks being worthless.”

Perhaps the most insidious part of the story was that Hadley apparently hatched this race controversy on purpose. The hotel manager thought that she anticipated being fired and concocted this entire White supremacist ruse. Hadley, the manager said, had been disciplined before for violations. He surmised that she hatched a scheme to quit and blame it on her supposed refusal to clean up after a Black person. Her coworkers figured the same thing. And one told the Indianapolis Journal that Hadley had cleaned Booker T.’s room the first day without issue, and she knew the room’s occupant. Moreover, Hadley’s husband said that she often associated with Black people and had very friendly relationships with Black folk in their neighborhood.

 Speaking with certainty is difficult here.

 But evidence suggests that she set out to turn herself into a martyr.

 What happened next supports this theory.

***

The June 7, 1903, edition of the Buffalo Sunday Morning News published Hadley’s breathtakingly racist defense of her actions. In explaining herself, she championed the racial caste system.

 “I refused to make up the bed of Professor Washington on general principles,” she wrote. “For a white girl to clean up the rooms occupied by a Negro, I don’t care who he is or how great he is, is a disgrace. I realized that if I cleaned up Booker Washington’s rooms I would be looked down upon, and the slurs and insults of others would be thrown into my face at every turn….

 “The President has lowered himself and his country by welcoming the negro to the chief home of the nation. That is carrying matters entirely too far, and I think, as President, Roosevelt should be impeached for it.”

 “I simply stood by my principles, and did what I thought was right.”

 Leaving her adopted daughter behind, she moved to Houston, accepting jobs as a telephone operator and a clerk in a dry goods store.

 By January 1904, however, an unemployed Hadley was penniless, living in a boarding house, and relying upon others to take care of her. That same year, the lawsuit that Booker T. secretly funded to defend Black people’s right to a jury composed free from the taint of race discrimination, won at the Supreme Court.

 A century later, a Louise Hadley disciple improved upon her formula for racist grifting.

***

In May 2025, in Rochester, Minnesota, a bystander recorded a White woman, Shiloh Hendrix, calling an 8-year-old Black boy a nigger. Hendrix claimed that the boy had taken something from her child’s diaper bag.

 She kept repeating the slur in the video and defended hurling it at the boy, “if,” she said, “that’s what he is going to act like.”

 Hendrix started an online fundraiser, and supporters sent her more than $700,000, far outpacing what Hadley collected a century ago even factoring inflation. Hendrix’s sins, though, were arguably far more villainous. Maybe that’s why she took in more compensation.

 Some tried to justify gifting Hendrix money. The funds, they claimed, signaled a rebuke of wokeness and cancel culture, not personal support for calling a young Black boy the n-word.

 But in 1903, Louise Hadley also received bounty for comparable behavior. Is their argument that Hadley also monetarily benefitted from what was actually a strike against cancel culture? Was America too woke in 1903?

 Here’s the truth: The United States has always included millions of citizens eager to reward those who remind Black folk that they are meant to be chained to the bottom of a racial caste system. And the ilk currently in the White House has reassured caste preservationists of the propriety of treating Black people as social, political, and legal inferiors.

 In our interconnected world, where those who enjoy lathering themselves in the venom of race hatred can easily communicate with each other, racism pays more in 2025 than it did in 1903.

 As I explain in my book, White supremacists, during Booker T.’s era, argued that the biological frailties of the Black race would culminate in its ultimate extinction. The dying out of Black skin, therefore, would solve America’s race problem. Decades ago, I was told that the dying out of old White supremacists would free my children from having to confront America’s race problem.

 Yet, Louise Hadleys still roam our land. They have not died out. They have multiplied and now receive an even bigger check for instilling into Black people the knowledge that many of their fellow country folk consider their subjugation necessary and proper.

 Down in the comments, let me know what you think of Shiloh Hendrix’s story.

 And if you want to know how the Supreme Court helped make this kind of racism profitable, check out my book—link in the pinned comment.

 The story of America’s race problem won’t end with Black people dying out. Or White supremacists dying out. In the video above, I explain why the story might end with White supremacy causing American democracy to die out. A republic can no longer have a race problem if it does not exist.

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