Freedom to Serve

Truman, Civil Rights, and Executive Order 9981

Jon Taylor, Jon E. Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415894494
• eBook ISBN: 9781136174247
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

On the eve of America's entry into World War II, African American leaders pushed for inclusion in the war effort and, after the war, they mounted a concerted effort to integrate the armed services. Harry S. Truman's decision to issue Executive Order 9981 in 1948, which resulted in the integration of the armed forces, was an important event in twentieth century American history.

In Freedom to Serve, Jon E. Taylor gives an account of the presidential order as an event which forever changed the U.S. armed forces, and set a political precedent for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Including press releases, newspaper articles, presidential speeches, and biographical sidebars, Freedom to Serve introduces students to an under-examined event while illuminating the period in a new way.

For additional documents, images, and resources please visit the Freedom to Serve companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/criticalmoments

CHAPTER 1

Franklin Roosevelt, African
Americans, and the Coming
of World War II

It is an irony of our day that three-quarters of a century after the adoption of the Amendment forever outlawing slavery under the American Flag, liberty should be under violent attack. And yet over large areas of the earth the liberties which to us mean happiness and the right to live peaceful and contented lives are challenged by brute force—a force which would return the human family to that state of slavery from which emancipation came through the Thirteenth Amendment.

President Franklin Roosevelt's comments on the seventy-fifth
anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment,
October 6, 1940

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president on March 4, 1933, the country was in the throes of the Great Depression. African Americans, the nation's largest minority population, made up about 10 percent of the population. Over half of all African Americans who lived in the United States in 1930 lived in the South, while more than two million lived outside of the South.¹ By the end of the 1930s over 400,000 African Americans had left the South for northern cities where they hoped to find better jobs and less discrimination.

Surprisingly, African Americans in 1932 supported Herbert Hoover, despite the fact that Hoover had disbanded the black Tenth Cavalry and his refusal to be photographed with African American leaders. Franklin Roosevelt did little to appeal to African Americans in the campaign. He even refused to answer a questionnaire that the NAACP had sent to him to collect his views on issues important to them. Historian Harvard Sitkoff noted: “Although black unemployment hovered around 50 percent, over two-thirds of those Afro-Americans voting went Republican, an even higher proportion than had voted for Hoover in 1928.”²

Politically, Roosevelt was in a tough situation to move on civil rights. He wanted Congress to pass relief and reform measures to help the country get through the Great Depression and that legislation had to have the backing of the Southern Democrats. Roosevelt knew if he pushed hard on civil rights he could alienate the Southern votes he needed to get his relief and reform measures through Congress. However, this did not stop Roosevelt from changing the Democratic tone on racial and civil rights issues.

During his presidency Roosevelt allowed himself to be photographed with African American leaders and he did openly accept African American delegations to the White House. He spoke out against lynching even though he did not support an anti-lynching law. Early in his first term, Roosevelt consented to the creation of a Black Cabinet. By 1936 this group, which was comprised of African Americans who had taken positions in Roosevelt's cabinet and New Deal agencies as well as representatives from the Urban League and NAACP, referred to themselves as the Federal Council on Negro Affairs. They usually met at the home of Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune founded the Colored Women's Clubs and in 1934 she was appointed to the advisory Committee of the National Youth Administration by New Dealer Harry Hopkins. Sitkoff concluded: “Never before had civil rights organizations had so inside a view of a national administration. Never before had black government employees had such outside leverage at their disposal.”³

Even though Franklin Roosevelt was slow to act on civil rights issues, his wife, Eleanor, was not. Harvard Sitkoff argued that Eleanor Roosevelt showed interest in civil rights issues for African Americans in three ways. First, she served as the “unofficial ombudsman” for African Americans. Second, she could influence her husband and the advisors that surrounded him to draft New Deal programs and policies that would be inclusive of African Americans. Finally, she did not hesitate to associate with predominately African American organizations and attend their public meetings.⁴

After the 1936 election she moved beyond just being an advocate for civil rights issues and called for laws that would abolish the poll tax and lynching. More importantly, as the New Deal created a number of new federal agencies, she encouraged the heads of those agencies to be inclusive of African Americans and many heeded her request. She encouraged Harold Ickes, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, who had been the former President of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, to include blacks in the projects his federal agency oversaw. Under the Public Works Administration (PWA) African American residents occupied one-third of the housing units constructed by the PWA.⁵

The 1936 presidential election was a turning point in the Democratic push to capture the growing black vote in the northern cities, which was a product of at least two to three decades of African American migration from the South to the North. Most African Americans in the South were prohibited from voting by a combination of literacy tests, poll taxes, and voter intimidation. However, when they came north, their votes became politically important because the southern devices used against them were not utilized in the north to restrict their votes and the Democrats and the Democratic machine leaders in the northern cities wanted to capture their votes.

At the Democratic convention of 1936 the Democrats seated thirty black delegates, which had never happened before, and this action demonstrated the party's commitment to African Americans. Roosevelt selected an African American minister to deliver the invocation which prompted Senator Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith from South Carolina to walk out of the convention proclaiming: “By God, he's as black as melted midnight! Get outa my way. This mongrel meeting ain't no place for a white man!” The New Deal commitment to African Americans in 1936 paid off because a Gallup poll determined that 76 percent of African Americans in the North supported Roosevelt.⁶

Sitkoff noted that it was difficult to determine just exactly what prompted many African Americans to switch their party allegiance from predominately Republican in 1932 to predominately Democrat in 1936. However, he did argue that African Americans were given jobs in New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and in the National Youth Administration, but he also noted that the Democratic Party had actively incorporated African Americans into its political apparatus by creating a Negro Division that was very active in the campaign. He also argued that throughout 1936 African American leaders focused on civil rights issues and argued that the creation of the Black Cabinet and the fact that many of Roosevelt's advisors, like Harold Ickes, supported civil rights were also reasons why African Americans supported the Democrats and Roosevelt in significant numbers in the election.⁷

While African Americans were emerging as a new constituency of the Democratic Party for the first time, the organizations that supported African Americans pushed the Roosevelt administration and Eleanor Roosevelt on civil rights issues. Some of the most prominent civil rights organizations active in the 1930s included the NAACP, the National Urban League (NUL), the National Negro Congress (NNC), the Southern

Figure 1.1 W. E. B. Du Bois: founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Cornelius M. Battey, photographer, LC-USZ62-16767, Library of Congress.

Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), the Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (SWPL), and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC).

The NAACP was formed in 1909 by both blacks and whites that wanted to address America's challenging race relations. One of its founding members was W. E. B. Du Bois, who continued to serve the organization until his resignation in June 1934. Early on, the organization worked with the black press to expose the problem of lynching. By the 1930s W. E. B. Du Bois was still with the organization and worked with Walter White, who became the executive secretary in March of 1931; however, in 1932 the organization shifted its focus from exposing lynching to attacking segregation, especially segregation in education. One of the key individuals who assisted the NAACP in this effort was Charles Hamilton Houston.⁸

Walter White hoped that the NAACP's successful legal challenges to segregation would serve as a recruiting tool for increased membership. One of the first attempts to challenge segregated educational facilities occurred at the University of North Carolina. The University barred African Americans from attending their professional schools—training that was open to whites only. However, there were no equivalent professional schools for African Americans. The NAACP lawyers found an African American student, Thomas Hocutt, who applied to the School of Pharmacy; however, his application was denied. The NAACP sued arguing

Charles Hamilton Houston

---

Houston was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. He attended the Dunbar High School in D.C., which was the most important high school for African Americans in the country, and in 1915 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College. On the eve of America's entry into World War I, he advocated the establishment of a training camp for black officers when he served as an instructor in English at Howard University. He became an officer in the army and his experiences greatly influenced his pursuit of legal equality.⁹

Houston served as a judge advocate in the army and he observed firsthand the inequality African Americans faced before the military's legal system. Houston described the situation: “I made up my mind … that if luck was with me and I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”¹⁰ After the war Houston enrolled in the Harvard Law School and he graduated among the top of his class and in 1924 he began teaching at Howard University Law School. He became vice-dean of the law school in 1929 and he began supplying lawyers to the NAACP in the 1930s that would oversee the implementation of the legal challenge to segregation.¹¹ In 1934 he became a part-time special counsel for the NAACP. He left the NAACP in 1938 and returned to his private practice in Washington D.C. where he continued to work on civil rights cases. He died in 1950.¹²

that the state had to provide the training. The judge ruled against Hocutt, but the North Carolina state legislature did introduce a bill that would provide funding for qualified African American students admitted to professional schools. However, the students had to receive the training out of state.¹³

While the NAACP focused on challenging legal segregation during the 1930s, they also focused on making sure African Americans would not be left out of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs and also revived their efforts to push for a federal anti-lynching bill. White reprised his role as the chief investigator of lynchings during this period. Prior to becoming executive secretary, one of his most significant contributions to the NAACP was the investigative work he had completed on lynchings throughout the United States.

The NAACP's Legal Committee drafted an anti-lynching bill and White convinced Senator Edward Costigan from Colorado and Senator Robert Wagner from New York to introduce the bill at the beginning of the 1933 legislative session. The bill essentially stated that the federal government “would prosecute local and state officials who participated in a lynching or proved negligent in preventing one.”¹⁴

While the NAACP focused its efforts on addressing segregation in education and on lobbying for the passage of an anti-lynching bill, they did not focus their efforts on trying to address the problems of economic discrimination. Early in its history, the NAACP allowed the NUL to focus on economic matters. The League, founded in 1910 with support from Booker T. Washington, had as its original mission the task of helping southern blacks who migrated out of the South find work in the industrial cities of the North. During the 1930s the organization lobbied the Roosevelt administration for inclusion of African Americans in New Deal programs and cooperated with the NAACP on several initiatives in the 1940s.¹⁵ In the mid-1930s it associated itself with a new organization, the National Negro Congress (NNC).¹⁶

By February of 1936 a group of African American leaders, which included members of the NAACP like Charles Houston, Ralph Bunche, and A. Philip Randolph, decided that a new organization might better advocate for African American labor and economic issues. These men met and formed the NNC. Up until this point both the NAACP and the NUL had relied upon the support of white and black middle and upper class patrons and the NNC hoped that it would be an organization that would appeal to working class African Americans and include their concerns in a broader coalition of African Americans fighting for economic justice.¹⁷

The founding of the NNC concerned Walter White because he thought it might draw members away from the NAACP and he rejected a plan by Roy Wilkins, from the NAACP, to allow the NNC to affiliate with the NAACP. For the most part, in the early 1930s the NNC remained an organization that was strongest in the North while the NAACP had chapters spread all over the United States. However, by the mid-1930s, communists, who had also been prominent in the founding of the organization, decided to try to expand the organization in the South. In 1937 the communists in the NNC established the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). The SNYC supporte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical Moments in American History
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Franklin Roosevelt, African Americans, and the Coming of World War II
• 2 Politics and the Quest for an Integrated Military, 1937–1945
• 3 Harry Truman and Civil Rights, 1884–1945
• 4 Post-War Utilization of the Military and the Creation of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, 1945–1947
• 5 Integration of the Military, 1948–1953
• 6 Historians Debate Truman's Civil Rights Record
• Documents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index