Truman's administration - The Tide Turns: African Americans Enter the Executive Ranks; Special Issue: the Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

Few today appreciate the depths of the nation's unease on the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945. Loved or loathed, FDR dominated America's politics from the Depression till the closing days of World War Il. Suddenly, with the war still on and an uncertain postwar future looming, Americans had to ponder what sort of president they would have in the largely unknown Missourian, Harry S. Truman.

No group felt FDR's loss as intensely, nor worried about the future more, than African Americans. Harry McAlpin, the sole black newspaper reporter then accredited to the White House, captured this mood in his question at Truman's first presidential press conference. "Mr. President, probably as much as any group, the passing of President Roosevelt is very keenly felt by the Negroes in America, as they looked upon him as sort of a symbol of justice and equal opportunity. I wonder," McAlpin asked, "if you would comment on the things that they were so specifically interested in and felt they knew where the President stood: on the fair employment practice, the right to vote without being hampered by the poll taxes, and all that?"

"I will give you some advice," the new president replied. "All you need to do is read the Senate record of one Harry S. Truman."

Truman's answer typified the man: While blunt, it concealed as much as it revealed. Truman's senatorial record of support for several major objectives of African Americans--a federal anti-lynching law, the wartime Fair Employment Practice Commission and bringing an anti-poll tax bill to a vote on the Senate floor--had alarmed Southern Democrats less than a year earlier, during the 1944 Democratic National Convention. Concerned that the party's vice-presidential candidate would likely complete Roosevelt's fourth term, Alabama Governor Chauncey Sparks confronted Truman on his views on race relations. The Missourian replied that he was "the son of an unreconstructed Rebel mother."

Indeed, Truman's border-state heritage included direct family ownership of slaves and embittered memories of antebellum and Civil War violence between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces. Truman's parents and their respective families lost both property and their own freedom under General Order Number 11 of 1863. That measure relocated slave owners and suspected Confederate sympathizers of the border area to a Federal post to ensure Union control in Missouri's western border counties. Little wonder that when 91-year-old Martha Truman visited her son in the White House in 1945, she did not take kindly to teasing from the family that she would be required to sleep in Abraham Lincoln's bed.

Truman never transcended the custom of his place and time that drew the color line on social equality, but as an ardent nationalist, he believed that the Constitution entitled all Americans to political and economic opportunity. He affirmed this belief in June 1945 by urging Congress to create a permanent Fair Employment Practice Commission, his first important action in a course that ultimately came to endorse a comprehensive civil rights program.

The liberal direction of the new president seemed to turn South, however, during the fall social season over an incident involving the First Lady, Bess Truman. Mrs. Truman had accepted an invitation to a tea hosted by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR): Shortly afterward, the pianist Hazel Scott revealed that she had been denied use of the DAR's Constitution Hall for a concert. Scott's husband, Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., telegraphed Mrs. Truman to ask her to withdraw her acceptance. Mrs. Truman informed Powell that while she deplored discrimination that denied artistic talent an opportunity to express itself, her acceptance of the DAR's hospitality was "not related to the merits of the issue which has since arisen." The president in turn informed Powell that he found no constitutional or legal basis for interfering with the DAR's discriminatory policy.

Congressman Powell greeted these responses with a public rebuke, calling Mrs. Truman the "last lady" of the land. Mrs. Truman's excuse, he stated, would not bear comparison with Eleanor Roosevelt's resignation from the DAR when the patriotic organization had denied Marian Anderson use of Constitution Hall in 1939.

In private, the angry president, who never tolerated attacks on his wife or daughter, referred to Powell with the racial pejoratives that reflected his upbringing by an unreconstructed Rebel. Publicly, the president struck Powell's name from the annual White House reception for members of Congress and their spouses, and channeled patronage for Harlem through a black Chicago congressman, William L. Dawson. He continued the ban and patronage arrangement throughout his presidency.

However, other African-American leaders, notably Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, had frequent access to the president. In a historic meeting in the Oval Office on September 19, 1946, White and a small group of labor, liberal and race leaders met with the president to brief him on numerous acts of senseless violence against African Americans that year. White's vivid recounting of the blinding of a black Army veteran by a white policeman in South Carolina visibly shocked Truman. "My God!" he exclaimed. "I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We've got to do something!"

That December, Truman issued an executive order creating the President's Committee on Civil Rights. The blue-ribbon panel of whites and African Americans spent the next 10 months studying the civil rights needs of the nation. Truman reinforced their work with an address in June 1947 at the annual convention of the NAACP. His speech was the first ever delivered by a president to the civil rights organization. In direct challenge to the old doctrine of states' rights, Truman declared, "We must make the federal government a friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equalities of all Americans."

In October 1947, the president's civil rights committee issued its far-reaching report. "To Secure These Rights"--a title borrowed from the Declaration of Independence--set forth nearly three dozen recommendations: expand the Department of Justice's civil rights section to a full division; congressionally establish a permanent commission on civil rights and a common on fair employment; pass an anti-lynching law and home rule and presidential voting rights for the District of Columbia; and abolish segregation in the armed forces. The report also recognized the need for equalizing educational opportunities in all states and favored the withholding of federal funds from educational institutions still wedded to segregation.

Truman wholeheartedly made the report the basis for his special message to the Congress on February 2, 1948, and then moved from rhetoric to action with his mid-1948 executive orders for the desegregation of the armed forces and a ban on discrimination the employment practices of the federal government.

Behind these actions lay both domestic political considerations--particularly the critical nature of the black vote if Truman were to survive the national swing toward the Republicans in a presidential election year--and organized pressure from the black community. In particular, Truman's order desegregating the military (which was not fully implemented until Eisenhower's administration) came a month after A. Philip Randolph told congressional leaders that he and his Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation organization would encourage black resistance to induction in the absence of an end to this odious practice.

African Americans were as thrilled with the president's actions as Southern whites were outraged. Many Southern congressmen told the president either to abandon his civil rights agenda or face certain defeat in his election bid that year. When the president affirmed his support for the strong plank on civil rights adopted by the Democratic National Convention in july, Southern whites walked out, many of them forming a States' Rights Democrat party, whose "Dixiecrat" presidential candidate was South Carolina's Strom Thurmond.

African Americans, especially the voters in Northern cities of several important electoral states, remained loyal to the Democratic coalition, thanks to Truman's bold endorsement of civil rights, enabling the president to score an upset victory over the Republicans' Thomas Dewey. But Truman's full term left both him and African Americans disappointed with the lack of congressional action on his civil rights program. Southern Democrats successfully mounted a filibuster in the Senate to block action on a Fair Employment Practice Bill in 1949 and, with support of Northern and Western senators, continued to prevent other civil rights measures from coming to a vote.

Moreover, within the executive branch--and particularly within the White House itself, where his writ ran unchallenged--Truman continued his own holdout against appointing African Americans to senior positions. He spumed a request to appoint an African American to the White House's executive staff when he met with a small group of black editors early in his presidency. Later, he brushed aside a suggestion to appoint an African American to replace an ailing David Niles when the presidential aide for minority and labor affairs resigned in May 1951, offering the excuse that he expected Niles to return to work. Throughout his seven years in the White House, Truman kept his inner circle lily white.

Social and official Washington remained, to a significant extent, a segregated city during the Truman presidency. When some civil rights advocates argued that the president could desegregate the federal district by executive order, he responded that neither he nor the courts had found the constitutional basis for such action. Privately, however, he backed his assistant secretary of the Interior, C. Girard Davidson, in ordering the desegregation of Washington, D.C., swimming pools under the control of the Interior Department.

Like Lincoln, who struck the first presidential blows for a new burst of freedom during the Civil War, Truman's actions on the issue of race in America moved the nation during the Cold War closer toward its bright--but still distant--democratic ideals.

Franklin D. Mitchell, an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California, is currently writing a history of post-World War II race relations.

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