FOUR 

PRESIDENT TRUMAN AND THE ROAD TO BROWN

THE AMERICAN VICTORY in World War II created a changed international landscape; the war’s aftermath changed it even further. By 1946, the Soviet Union, recent ally to the US, was now seen by the US as a threat to world peace. Although the war had been won together, each seized upon the peace as an opportunity to consolidate power—to control their own populations—through purges, internal exile, and prison in Russia and with greater sophistication in the United States. Competition between the Soviet Union and the United States became a secular religion—opposition to Communism became the national faith.

The choice, President Harry Truman told Congress in March 1947, was stark and real. One way of life, the president said, is “distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.” But Truman was describing a way of life most Black Southerners had never known. Then he described the Communist choice, a way of life that “relies on terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.”

“It will be the policy of the United States,” the president said, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”¹ Except that Black people in the US were not free. Truman had easily described the day-by-day existence of most Blacks living south of the Mason-Dixon Line—resisting subjugation.

Truman’s listeners had heard what would be called the Truman Doctrine, a commitment to stop the expansion of Communism everywhere. It would not be limited to foreign affairs; both domestic and foreign policy initiatives would now be evaluated to see whether or not they contributed to Communism’s spread or undercut attempts at Communist infiltration at home.

One effect of concentrated anti-Communism and the escalation of the Cold War at home was the weakening and red-baiting of interracial organizations. Following the November 1948 election, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Negro Youth Congress disbanded; Highlander Folk School and the Southern Conference Education Fund remained the lonely Southern interracial battlers for integration.

TRUMAN HAD COME TO OFFICE when President Roosevelt died suddenly in April 1945. It is fair to say that while most Americans mourned his death, Black Americans were especially bereft. Truman had flirted with the Ku Klux Klan in his political youth, but 20,000 Black voters in Kansas City, Missouri, and another 110,000 across the state served as an antidote to moderate his views and were an important factor in his first election to the Senate in 1934. He accepted segregation as the norm but was a racial moderate, a supporter of antidiscrimination legislation, including a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, and an opponent of the poll tax.

Following the limited success of his threatened March on Washington in 1941, A. Philip Randolph had created the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. It attracted solid support, including from the Socialist and Communist Parties and even in the 1944 Republican platform. Truman, as vice president, had strongly supported a permanent FEPC. In the months after Roosevelt’s death, he kept the FEPC alive through executive orders but was unable—some thought unwilling—to win congressional authorization.

Blacks remained skeptical, even more so after Truman appointed South Carolina senator James Byrnes to be secretary of state. An unapologetic racist, Byrnes was leading the resistance to implementation of the 1944 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the exclusion of Black voters from Democratic Party primaries.

Having won that 1944 victory, the NAACP continued to press Truman and continued its legal fight as well. In 1947, in Patton v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court found the exclusion of Blacks from juries unconstitutional. In 1948, the NAACP won Sipuel v. University of Oklahoma, a decision that required a state to provide legal education for Blacks at the same time it was offered to whites. In 1950, Sweatt v. Painter held that an equal education meant more than equal facilities; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents held that Black students could not be segregated within a university.

These court victories were tempered by a wave of violence that swept the South following the war. My earliest memory of racial violence is the nightstick beating and blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard in Aiken, South Carolina, in 1946. Woodard was returning home after three years in the army and arrested after an argument with the bus driver because he wanted to use the restroom. He was brutally beaten by police officers, including being jabbed in the eyes with nightsticks. The Aiken police chief was indicted for the beating but was acquitted as a courtroom full of whites cheered. I will remember the newspaper photographs of Sergeant Woodard, his bandaged eyes beaten into darkness, as long as I live.² I was six years old.

Later that summer, Macio Snipes, the only Black voter in his Georgia district, was killed in his home by whites. In July 1946, in Monroe, Georgia, Roger Malcolm was arrested for fighting with a white man. When he was released, his white employer drove Malcolm, his wife, and two friends down a back road to a waiting mob—all four were shot and killed.

Liberal groups—representatives of forty-six civil rights, religious, and labor organizations—spurred by Southern violence, established the National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence and quickly moved to mobilize mass opinion. They met with Truman in September 1946 to call for federal action against lynchers. Walter White described the Woodard beating, and Truman rose from his chair and said, “My God! I had no idea that it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something!”

Truman took advantage of the committee’s meeting to announce the establishment of a presidential commission, already under consideration, to study racial violence and to recommend federal action. Foremost in the president’s mind were the upcoming midterm elections. Black Democrats were expressing dissatisfaction with the administration’s civil rights efforts. Truman announced the commission in December to mixed notices.

The year 1946 had not been a good one for civil rights. Racist Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge and Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo had been reelected; legislation ending the poll tax, outlawing lynching, and establishing the FEPC had been defeated; attacks on Black voting rights and widespread racist violence continued. Japanese Americans seeking compensation for their wartime losses made little progress.

Despite these setbacks—or perhaps because of them—more and more groups and organizations took up the cause of civil rights, and several reached across racial barriers to form coalitions. Blacks and Mexican Americans joined together in San Antonio to elect a Black to a college trustee board and a Mexican American to the school board. The Japanese American Citizens League supported a permanent FEPC, Japanese Americans condemned racism, and Black newspapers spoke out against anti-Japanese prejudice. Blacks, Jews, labor and church groups supported FEPC laws in twenty-seven states; ten enacted them.³

The leadership of the NAACP pushed for integrated schools, despite evidence that some Blacks were pleased to have facilities that, if separate, were truly equal. In the early 1940s, the NAACP had opposed the construction of all-Black hospitals and supported the integration of existing, segregated facilities. When the government proposed building an all-Black hospital in Mississippi, a Negro Digest poll showed that 34 percent of those asked supported it, 28 percent opposed it, and the rest were undecided.

Increasingly, the pro–civil rights rhetoric of white elites—as well as Blacks—was colored by international politics. Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in April 1946 of the “adverse effect [the existence of discrimination] has on our relations with other countries. . . . Frequently we find it next to impossible to formulate a satisfactory answer to our critics in other countries.”⁴

Formed in 1946, the United Nations Human Rights Commission soon became an international forum for grievances. In October 1947, the NAACP filed a petition, “An Appeal to the World,” before the commission over the opposition of the State Department and the US delegate to the commission, Eleanor Roosevelt. The appeal created a worldwide stir, demonstrating the availability of international embarrassment as a lever in the fight for equal justice.

Truman would have to face the voters as president for the first time in 1948 and secure Black votes. In October 1947, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights released To Secure These Rights.⁵ It codified the demands of the then civil rights movement and gave them presidential approval.

Henry Wallace of the anti-segregation Progressive Party formally announced as a third-party candidate on December 29, 1947. “Voting for a Democrat or Republican is like voting for different ends of the same egg,” Charles Houston said. “Wallace offers the American people something different.”⁶ Truman countered with a special message to Congress on civil rights on February 2, 1948, the first time an American president had sent such a message to Capitol Hill. He recommended many of the same suggestions put forth in To Secure These Rights: abolishing the poll tax, a permanent FEPC, federal protection against lynching, and creation of a civil rights division in the Department of Justice.

There was no direct attack on segregation, except in interstate travel, where the Supreme Court had already spoken. What Truman did do, however, was to outline the nature of the struggle for civil rights over the next two decades. As enthusiasm for the Wallace campaign waned, Truman’s popularity fell too. Some elements in the Democratic Party even tried to dump Truman in favor of war hero General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, who had not committed to either major party.

The Eightieth Congress, dominated by the Republican Party, passed almost none of Truman’s civil rights program; indeed, the president hardly seemed to promote the program he had announced earlier in the year. As the election approached, Truman’s record showed promises made and promises delayed.

The Democratic Convention in Chicago in July 1948 produced a civil rights plank only slightly stronger than the one in the Democrats’ 1944 platform. But it featured a bruising floor fight and made a civil rights hero of young Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey, who brought the hall alive.

To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are one hundred seventy-two years too late. To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on States’ Rights, I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of States’ Rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.⁷

SOME SOUTHERNERS WALKED OUT. The civil rights plank adopted by the Democratic Convention in 1948 so angered the racist white South that many bolted the convention, formed the States’ Rights Party, and nominated segregationist governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as their presidential candidate.

On July 26, 1948, Truman delivered a long-awaited civil rights bombshell. He issued two executive orders. The first declared the policy of “fair employment throughout the federal establishment without discrimination because of race, color, religion, or national origin” and established a Fair Employment Board in the Civil Service Commission. The second called for “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”⁸

Earlier that year, in March, A. Philip Randolph had told a congressional committee he would counsel Black youth to refuse induction into a segregated army. He had begun to threaten that young Black men would refuse to register for the draft, set to begin August 16, unless the president outlawed military segregation. Truman’s actions were as much a ploy for Black votes and a response to Randolph as they were an attempt to paint the Republican Congress as a “do-nothing” body. Its failures and an appeal to the “little man” were his central election themes. He told a Southern Illinois audience, for example, that “big business Republicans have begun to nail the American consumer to the wall with spikes of greed!”⁹

The Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, who had a decent if largely unknown race relations record as New York governor, made little effort to attract Black voters, and Wallace continued to fade. Attacks from Southern congressmen on Truman’s civil rights program helped him with Black voters. Thurmond’s attacks on Truman’s FEPC as similar to the “Communistic Russian all-races law promulgated by Stalin” helped convince Black voters that the Truman campaign was where they should be.¹⁰

In the last week of the campaign, Truman made a bold appeal for the votes of American minorities. He began in multiethnic Chicago, assailing the “crackpot forces of the extreme right wing” who were “stirring up racial and religious prejudice against some of our fellow Americans.” It is these “dangerous men,” he said, “who are trying to win followers for their war on democracy, are attacking Catholics, and Jews, and Negroes, and other minority races and religions.”¹¹ In Boston, he denounced religious bigotry against Catholics, and in New York, he identified himself with Israel, reaffirming his sometimes tenuous support for a Jewish homeland.

And then, on October 29, the first anniversary of his Committee on Civil Rights report, he became the first president to speak in Harlem. He told an audience of 65,000 that he would work for equal rights “with every ounce of strength and determination that I have.”¹²

Black votes made a difference in Truman’s victory. He won California by over 17,000 votes, Black voters in Los Angeles giving him a 25,000-vote margin over Dewey. He carried Illinois thanks to Black Chicago voters and Ohio because of Black Cleveland. Although Truman’s civil rights program was an important part of his victory, his ability to make himself the heir to the New Deal helped him to succeed with Blacks as well. Class interests joined race interests to create a Truman landslide among Blacks. From 1936 forward, the class interests of the majority of Black voters led them closer and closer to a solid identification with the Democratic Party and away from loyalty to the Republicans that had begun with Abraham Lincoln. The Democrats were the “bread and butter” party for Blacks even though the Republicans were thought by many to have a modest edge overall in civil rights.

By solidifying the shaky relationship between Black voters and the Democratic Party, Truman prompted some racist white Democrats to look elsewhere. Civil rights was still a sectional issue in 1948 and, outside the South, largely a contest between Southern and Northern wings of the Democratic Party. The States’ Rights Party candidacy of white supremacist Strom Thurmond showed white Southerners there were alternatives to the Democratic Party—his Dixiecrats carried South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

In 1952, war hero Dwight David Eisenhower, opting to run as a Republican, was elected president, defeating Adlai Stevenson and shattering the solid Democratic South that had been so important to the Democrats in the past. The Republicans won control of the House of Representatives and tied for control of the Senate. Stevenson had courted the South too; his unwillingness to make a strong statement on civil rights created hesitancy among many Blacks to support the Democratic ticket, but he still received three out of every four Black votes, similar to Truman’s totals four years earlier.

The Roosevelt and Truman years had seen an expansion of Black protest and politics, with each attempt at legislation or regulation, effective or not, stirring other attempts, energizing more people. A generation of Black and white civil rights activists battled with the federal government, others fought lonely battles in the South, but all stood poised and ready for the next leap forward. There was much hope that the momentum built up under Roosevelt and Truman would continue under Eisenhower.

If there is one distinguishing feature of the struggle of Black Americans, it has been a willingness to try many methods; that was true when the twentieth century began, and it was even more true at the century’s halfway point.