To Secure These Rights

Context

To Secure These Rights emerged out of the immediate political context of World War II. During the war, almost one million African Americans left the South for work in military-related industries in the North and West. Once there, African Americans formed powerful political blocs in urban areas important for both state and national elections, New York, Chicago, and Detroit among them. Yet African American voters did not completely abandon the Republican Party, many still remaining loyal to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Eager to continue his predecessor’s success at winning over black voters, Harry S. Truman made civil rights an important component of his domestic platform.

Although the Supreme Court had indicated as early as 1937 that the federal government might be constitutionally authorized to protect civil rights abuses against the states, Truman was arguably the first federal official to truly embrace such a vision. His first statement to this effect occurred during his State of the Union address before Congress on January 6, 1947, when he invoked “the will to fight” crimes against blacks and lobbied to extend “the limit of federal power to protect the civil rights of the American people.” Truman reiterated this interest during an organizational meeting of the Civil Rights Committee at the White House, requesting that the committee inform him of “exactly how far” his attorney general could go in enforcing civil rights at the state and local levels.

On December 5, 1946, Truman issued Executive Order 9808, establishing a committee to investigate civil rights abuses and recommend possible solutions. Issued on the heels of World War II, Truman’s order drew a direct line between civil rights and World War II. “Freedom from Fear”––one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as articulated in January 1941 at the outset of the war––had come “under attack,” Truman declared in this order, by individuals willing to “take the law into their own hands” and target African American “ex-servicemen.” Of particular concern to Truman were stories of white violence against black soldiers in the American South, including the murder of a black soldier and his wife in Georgia in July 1946 and the blinding of a black sergeant in South Carolina in February of that year. Truman confronted the fallout of such events personally when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People picketed the White House in late July and sent a delegation to confront him directly in September 1946, prompting him to write Attorney General Tom Clark immediately to request that “some sort of policy” be implemented to prevent future violence.

That Truman ultimately decided to issue an executive order was not unprecedented. Truman’s predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had also responded to pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by issuing an executive order favoring civil rights in 1941, ultimately leading to the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Yet Roosevelt’s decision shared the support of organized labor, muting its potentially radical, racial effect.

Truman faced more complex problems. Suffering low approval ratings in the polls, he risked losing even more support by coming out in favor of black rights, particularly among powerful southern contingents in the Senate and House of Representatives. However, he also confronted an embarrassing string of democratic losses in the congressional elections of 1946, alerting him to the possible abandonment of the Democratic Party by black voters in the North. Eager to assuage blacks without forcing an open confrontation with southern whites, Truman followed Roosevelt’s use of the executive order, a move that could be funded out of his own discretionary accounts independent of congressional approval. To build public support for such an initiative, Truman warned of an impending wave of racial hysteria akin to that which followed World War I “when organized groups fanned hatred and intolerance,” as he put it in his instructions to the civil rights committee. Incidentally, one such organized group, the Ku Klux Klan, had become particularly repugnant to Truman, smearing him as a Jew (which he was not) during his race for county judge in 1922.

Global concerns also haunted Truman’s thoughts in late 1946, possibly pushing him to align America’s domestic treatment of minorities with its foreign policy. For example, he expressed open support for his predecessor’s emphasis on the Four Freedoms (freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear) and embraced America’s new role as leader of the free world. Indeed, Truman hosted former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, applauding as Churchill delivered a rousing alarm that the Soviet Union had erected an “iron curtain” across Europe threatening “freedom and democracy” the world over. Exactly one year later, Truman articulated his bold, interventionist policy of containment, the now famous Truman Doctrine. Although the Truman Doctrine did not have an overt tie to civil rights, Truman did realize that at least part of America’s struggle against the Soviet Union and China was ideological and that glaring examples of persistent, state-sanctioned racism undermined America’s cold war image. Truman also rankled at the irony of black soldiers being ordered to fight racism in Nazi Germany, only to then suffer domestic abuses once they returned home, an eventuality that pressed him to establish a federal committee dedicated to investigating civil rights.