Harry Truman hoped to finally put racism to rest, Tommy Tuberville would like the South to rise again.
If Alabama’s Senator Tommy Tuberville had his way, today’s army would have you trading in your combat helmet for a white hood.
Yet it was another former Southerner with an abiding belief in white supremacy, who was responsible for integrating the military 75 years ago this summer.
Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in 1948. Desegregation of the military represented a massive change in military culture. Black soldiers WWI
On July 26, 1948, when President Harry S. Truman, the former senator from Missouri signed Executive Order 9981 calling for the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces, he repudiated 170 years of officially sanctioned discrimination. Since the American Revolution, African Americans had served in the military, but almost always separately from white soldiers—and usually in menial roles.
White Supremacy Roots
Truman came by his beliefs from his upbringing in Missouri a border state that was sympathetic to southern sensibilities. Harry Truman and his mother, Martha E. Truman who died in 1947.
That Harry S. Truman a man known to pepper his speech with the “n” word, signed the bill itself is remarkable. It is a story of overcoming his own deeply embedded racial prejudices.
Describing his parents, Truman once famously referred to them as “a violently unreconstructed southern family” and “Lincoln haters.”
Raised in a home that openly held dear the hallowed symbols of the Confederacy, and with grandparents who owned slaves, Harry had been nurtured on the valor of Robert E. Lee, the iniquity of the Union raiders, and the melancholia of the Lost Cause.
Harry Truman was proud of his service as a doughboy in WWI
In 1911, when Truman was a 27-year-old corporal in the Missouri National Guard, he wrote to his future wife, Bess Wallace:
“I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman… I am strongly of the opinion that negros ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”
A Southern Senator
Harry Truman and his Senate cronies
Entering the United States Senate in 1935, Truman immediately gravitated toward the Southerners where his language and attitudes appeared to align with theirs. They, in turn, accepted him as one of their own.
Truman came by these beliefs from his upbringing in Missouri, a border state as southern in its sympathies race relations as any Mississippi Delta town, a state where 60 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, the second-highest number of any state over that period outside the Deep South.
As a border-state Democrat Truman carried within him the conflicts that divided not only Missouri but the country. Only someone who understood himself to be a Southerner could have felt such empathy for the traditions of the South.
Vice President- A Win For the South
Vice President Harry Truman and FDR. He was sworn in as the 33rd President on April 12, 1945, following the death of President Franklin Roosevelt.
At the 1944 Democratic Presidential National Convention, Southerners saw Truman as a feasible vice-presidential nominee for FDR and were instrumental in getting the nomination for him, convinced it was a grand victory for the South and the Southern way of life.
When Franklin Roosevelt’s death, on April 12, 1945, catapulted Truman into the White House, the white South were confident that Harry was on their side.
He was one of them.
On the funeral train carrying FDR’s body, the Democratic senator from South Carolina Burnet Maybank assured a Southern friend, “Everything’s going to be all right—the new President knows how to handle the niggers.”
WWII -A Hope For A Double Victory
WII African Americans in the Navy Photo Wayne Miller
Though blacks fought bravely in the Pacific and Europe during WWII in a segregated military they were defending a democracy that for them still represented a dream deferred.
The War Department defended its segregation policy claiming that it could not ignore “the social relationships between Negroes and whites” that had been “established by the American people through customs and habits.”
WWII would become the transition to the civil rights revolution. The defense of democracy abroad stirred demands for racial justice at home with peace came new challenged against discrimination and inequality
African Americans hoped that WWII would lead to an improvement in their status. The war was challenging Americans of all races to come together in the fight for a “double victory” against fascism abroad and racism at home.
Surely there would be a more enlightened egalitarian America after the war.
Though ultimately WWII would prove to be an impetus for change for African Americans, when peace came in 1945, black soldiers returned home to the same Jim Crow America.
Returning From War, Returning To Racism
World War II veteran Isaac Woodard with eyes swollen shut from aggravated assault and blinding. (Library of Congress)
It would take acts of violence at home to help spawn the change to the military.
In July 1946, four Black people, including George W. Dorsey, a distinguished veteran who had served in World War II in the Pacific and North Africa, were beaten, tortured, fatally shot, and hanged from the Moore’s Ford bridge in Walton County, Ga., in what is called the last mass lynching in America.
When the beatings and murders of recently returned African American WWII vets in the South caught the national attention in 1946, our new president Harry Truman was moved to act.
Truman was especially appalled by an incident in Aiken, South Carolina, where, only three hours after a black sergeant had received his separation papers from the United States Army, policemen gouged out his eyes.
In February 1946 Isaac Woodard, a Black veteran who served in the Pacific theater got into an argument with a bus driver while traveling from Georgia to South Carolina. Woodard, in his uniform, was ordered off the bus in a town now known as Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina and beaten so badly with a billy club by the local police chief that he was permanently blinded.
On being told of the blinding of the black sergeant, the President, his face “pale with horror,” rose and said, “My God. I had no idea it was as terrible as that. We’ve got to do something!”
Whatever his inclinations as a native Missouri might have been, as president he knew this was bad.
In response to the rash of lynchings and beatings and under pressure from Black civil rights groups Truman formed the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1946. Their report condemned all forms of segregation and asked for an immediate end to segregation in all branches of the armed services.
Trumans Conversion
Truman had changed, in part, for political reasons. In World War II Southern blacks had migrated in large numbers to states, such as Michigan and California, with big blocs of electoral votes, and in the 1946 elections, dismayed by Southern racists they had begun to move away from the Democrats.
Truman was motivated too by foreign policy concerns. Discrimination against people of color was proving an embarrassment to the government as it vied with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of Third World nations.
Most important though was Truman’s reading of history and in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights that had led him to question the assumptions on which he was raised. He acted as he did not because he was “anti-South,” but because he took solemnly the oath he had sworn to sustain the Constitution. He viewed the Constitution as sacred text.
Once Truman set out on this new course, he would not relent.
When Democratic leaders asked him to back down from his strong stand on civil rights, he replied:
“My forebears were Confederates.… Every factor and influence in my background—and in my wife’s for that matter—would foster the personal belief that you are right.
“But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.
“Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.”
In October 1947 the committee issued its historic report, “To Secure These Rights.” It found that a gaping disparity between the country’s ideal of equality and its behavior had resulted in “a kind of moral dry rot which eats away at the emotional and rational bases of democratic beliefs.”
The committee presented nearly three dozen recommendations, including ending “immediately” discrimination in the armed services and in federal agencies’ practices.
Southern Backlash
Dixiecrats -The States’ Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived segregationist political party in the United States, active primarily in the South. It arose due to a Southern regional split in opposition to the regular Democratic Party and their stance on civil rights. South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond was their presidential candidate in 1948
The publication of the report aroused a storm of criticism, and the South reacted with rage.
In Florida, the State Association of County Commissioners declared that “all true Democrats” found the President’s program “obnoxious, repugnant, odious, detestable, loathsome, repulsive, revolting and humiliating.”
As postwar American society evolved, the armed forces became an important model for desegregation and equal opportunities for African Americans.
Truman permanently altered the character of Southern politics.
For the first time since Reconstruction, he made civil rights a proper concern for the national government, and for the first time ever the Democratic party became the main defender of the rights of blacks.
The South, and the nation, would never be the same again.
On February 2, 1948, Truman, undaunted by Southern criticism, sent a special message to Congress asking it to enact a number of the recommendations of his committee.
Executive Order 9981
Executive Order 9981 remains one of the crowning achievements of Truman’s eight years in office, a bold decision that pitted him against the southern wing of his party on this and other civil rights issues
Truman did something that would change the course of American society and the military forever. He integrated armed forces with his executive order.
A major achievement of the post-war civil rights movement —and of Truman’s presidency—Executive Order 9981 remains one of the crowning achievements of Truman’s eight years in office, a bold decision that marked the first time a U.S. commander-in-chief had used an executive order to implement a civil rights policy.
It became a crucial step toward inspiring other parts of American society to accept desegregation.
Harry Truman hoped to finally put racism to rest, Tommy Tuberville would like the South to rise again.