To Secure These Rights

Impact

With a right to health care providing the best example, the committee’s enumeration of what civil rights, precisely, needed to be secured amounted to nothing less than a dramatic act of rights prioritization, if not outright creation. Ignoring traditional rights like freedom of contract and property, the committee did much to set the agenda for the modern civil rights movement, establishing equality of access to the political process, equality of opportunity in employment, and procedural due process protections against police as central to America’s post–World War II constitutional project. Further, the committee expanded the reach of the Constitution to protect citizens against discriminatory private actions, particularly in the housing context, prefiguring the Supreme Court’s turn against restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the committee’s report was its treatment of racial segregation. Initially reluctant to claim that segregated schools harmed black children, the committee revisited the topic in a separate section, flagging Jim Crow as a “complex” system that attempted to recognize African Americans as “citizens” but ultimately branded them as inferior beings not fit to associate with white people. Although the report had little substantive impact on schools, it did the important work of publicly stating that segregation had, in fact, evolved into a complex structure of discrimination. Moreover, evidence that the abolition of such a system would not lead to interracial violence emerged in army units during World War II, where white soldiers who found themselves fighting side by side with blacks indicated that their feelings toward their black colleagues had changed after serving with them in combat. Such findings led Truman to desegregate the armed forces with confidence in 1948.

Based on its observations of the evils of Jim Crow, coupled with its discovery of rampant racial discrimination in the realms of health care, employment, voting, and criminal justice, the committee concluded that the “Government of the United States” needed to lead the effort of safeguarding the civil rights of all Americans, even those who were harmed by “private persons or groups.” Traditional conceptions of states’ rights factored negligibly, if at all, in the committee’s solution, which counseled in favor of encouraging “the local community” to “set its own house in order.” Animating such a move was a sense that isolated lynchings did not affect simply local norms but also the entire nation, potentially even echoing “from one end of the globe to the other.” Indeed, America’s foreign policy objectives could be jeopardized unless it brought racial transgressors to heel, since “an American diplomat cannot forcefully argue for free elections in foreign lands without meeting the challenge that in many sections of America qualified voters do not have free access to the polls.” Here was a direct link between American foreign policy and domestic civil rights, almost a decade before Brown. Here, too, was an indication that despite its awareness that “the American people are loyal to the institutions of local government,” foreign affairs warranted a larger role for the federal government in protecting citizens from both public and private abuses.

In the final section of its report, the committee set forth recommendations for how each of its enumerated rights might be secured, beginning with the overarching need to professionalize state and local law enforcement, expand the scope and reach of the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice, and establish a special unit within the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate civil rights abuses. Once such institutional needs were met, the committee went on to propose that the right to security be bolstered by the enactment of a congressional antilynching act, the right to citizenship be reinforced by legislation ending poll taxes, and the right to equality of opportunity be encouraged by the “elimination of segregation.” Although other recommendations were issued as well, this last suggestion was perhaps the committee’s boldest—one that included no precise directives on how Jim Crow was, in fact, to be abolished. Perhaps the only indication that the committee made of a possible solution was its mention of money, noting that “federal aid to the states for education, health, research, and other public benefits should be granted provided that the states do not discriminate.” Rather than wait for courts to get involved, the committee recommended that “independent administrative commissions” be created to “consider complaints and hold hearings to review them.”

Although federal commissions like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would not be created until 1965, the committee essentially identified all of the major fronts upon which the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s would be fought. Indeed, it might even be said that even though few of the committee’s recommendations were enacted into law immediately, the report nevertheless succeeded in framing the core issues of the civil rights movement. For black civil rights activists like Walter White, To Secure These Rights represented “the most courageous and specific document of its kind in American history.”

Not surprisingly, the report triggered a backlash in the South. Newspapers protested, state officials balked, and angry letters poured into the White House, yet Truman remained undeterred. Inspired by his committee’s findings, the president made it a point to emphasize the need for federal leadership on civil rights during his State of the Union Address on January 7, 1948. “Our first goal,” announced Truman, “is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens.” Less than a month later, Truman reiterated this point, remarking that “all men are created equal” and that “basic civil rights” were the “source and the support of our democracy.” To support this point, he introduced into Congress a ten-point proposal that included the creation of a permanent Commission on Civil Rights, increased support for “existing civil rights statutes,” “federal protection against lynching,” and heightened protections of “the right to vote.”

Enraged, southern delegates to the Democratic National Convention in July 1948 bolted from the party only two days after Truman won the Democratic nomination, forming their own “Dixiecrat” bloc. This schism would fundamentally alter the course of Democratic politics in America, robbing the Democrats of their most conservative element and ultimately leading many of their once loyal southerners into the hands of the Republican Party in protest in the 1970s and 1980s. In the meantime, Truman forged ahead, desegregating both the federal government and the armed forces and setting in motion forces of racial progress that would build through the end of the twentieth century. Although the report was often eclipsed by more sensational flashpoints like Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, To Secure These Rights not only set the tone for racial reform in the post–World War II era but also framed the terms upon which that reform would take place.