Some members of the nation’s organization of African American columnists have accused the Obama White House of playing favorites.

On Friday, Oct. 16, President Obama met in the Roosevelt Room with 10 members of the Trotter Group, part of a White House effort to shore up the president’s African American base ahead of next month’s midterm elections.

But who got invited, or disinvited, has caused a stir, according to Richard Prince’s Journal-ism, a blog that reports on blacks in media.

It seems the White House initially said the president would accommodate 16 members of the group, and group leaders submitted the names of the first 16 people who signed up. But after seeing the list, the White House decided that only Trotter Group “founders” could attend. It also dropped the head count from 16 to 10.

That meant some initially invited suddenly learned they couldn’t go, and some not among the initial 16 were packing their bags for Washington.

Some who got the boot said they lost money after canceling travel plans.

"I am also deeply dismayed over how an announced selection process was abandoned in mid-stream, evidently because the names of certain people were not included on the list,” veteran journalist George E. Curry, who writes for the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, which serves black newspapers, and for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was quoted as saying.

"My newspaper thought the trip was important enough to send me and I didn't find out I wouldn't be going until after I made my travel arrangements,” said columnist Cary Clack of the San Antonio Express-News. “Frankly, it was embarrassing to have to tell them the trip was off.”

The irony of the dust-up was not lost on Journal-ism editor Richard Prince, one of the people snubbed. He noted that the Trotter Group gets its name from an activist Boston editor named William Monroe Trotter who traveled to the White House in the early 20th century to confront President Woodrow Wilson about the president’s silence in the face of lynchings and other racists acts.
 

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