When President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, calling for the desegregation of the US 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 junior roles.
A major achievement of the post-war civil rights movement – and of Truman’s presidency – the event marked the first time that a U.S. Commander-in-Chief had used an executive order to implement a civil rights policy . It became a crucial step in getting other parts of American society to accept desegregation.
Truman’s journey to signing 9981 is a story, in part, of listening to pressure from black civil rights leaders and recognizing, in a pragmatic way, the importance of the black vote to his fortune. Politics. But it is also the story of his overcoming his own deeply rooted racial prejudices.
READ MORE: Black Americans who served in World War II faced segregation abroad and at home
White supremacist roots of Truman
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 a man is as good as any other as long as he is honest and decent and not a nigger or chinese… i am a firm believer that niggas (sic) should be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.
Truman came by these beliefs from his upbringing in Missouri, where his grandparents had owned slaves and where 60 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, the second highest of any state during this period. outside the Deep South.
He grew up in a house that openly insulted abolitionism, reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln. “Truman literally learned on his mother’s knees to share the Southern perspective on inter-state warfare,” wrote William E. Leuchtenburg, professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 1991. “He also acquired a lifelong belief in white supremacy. ”
The arrest, beating and blindness of African-American veteran Isaac Woodard by police in Batesburg, South Carolina, February 12, 1946—hours after being honorably discharged from the United States Army, and while still in uniform – caused national fury and helped inspire Harry Truman’s decision to desegregate the military. Here, NAACP staff help Woodard prepare his disability claim with the Veterans Administration.
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After the lynchings of black veterans, Truman took action
Yet when the beatings and murders of African-American veterans of World War II recently returned to the south gained national attention, Truman, who assumed the presidency after Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 12 1945, was pushed to act.
“My stomach turned when I heard that black soldiers, just back from overseas, were being thrown out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten,” Truman said. “Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri, as president, I know it’s bad. I will fight to end such evils.
In response to the lynchings and under pressure from black civil rights groups, Truman formed the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights in late 1946. He produced a report, To guarantee these rights, which condemns all forms of segregation and calls for an immediate end to discrimination and segregation in all branches of the armed forces.
In 1947, Truman became the first president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In his address at the Lincoln Memorial, Truman said: “I am deeply convinced that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to ensure freedom and equality for all of our citizens.
READ MORE: Red Summer: How black World War I veterans fought against racist mobs
January 12, 1949: Six months after President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, he is seen here speaking with his Committee on Equal Treatment and Opportunity.
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Truman realized he needed the black vote
Throughout his life, Truman made racist statements to his relatives and in private correspondence, and probably never completely abandoned the attitudes of his youth. But he was a wise politician who understood the importance of the black vote to his political fortunes. In 1940, as a United States Senator, he told the National Colored Democratic Association: “The Negro Flag is our flag, and he stands ready, just like us, to defend it against all enemies within and from the outside.
Truman’s sharp views on civil rights during his first term as President divided the Democratic Party. Conservative Democrats in southern South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama protested the party’s civil rights plan, quitting the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Without the South’s white vote, Truman’s chances in the election general votes against Republican candidate Thomas Dewey have eased considerably.
Despite Dixiecrat’s defections, Truman collaborators convinced him that a winning coalition included black voters, whose leaders saw the integration of the armed forces as a major electoral issue. Months before the election, 20 African-American organizations, including the NAACP and the National Urban League, issued a “Declaration of Black Voters,” which included the desegregation of the armed forces among its demands.
In the closing days of the election, Truman made an election appearance in Harlem, marking the first time that an American president had visited the symbolic capital of black America. Truman was drawn to it by Anna Arnold Hedgeman, an African-American political agent who led the black outreach of his campaign. According to Hedgeman’s biographer, Jennifer Scanlon, “Truman won the race, by a narrow margin at the national level, thanks in part to the black electorate and Hedgeman.
READ MORE: ‘Dewey defeats Truman’: election upset behind photo
African-American leaders have eased the pressure
On March 22, 1948, Truman met with black leaders to discuss segregation. “I can tell you that the mood of black people in this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of prejudice and discrimination are abolished,” said A. Phillip Randolph, pioneer from the union organization and leader of civil rights, to the president.
In a hearing nine days later before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Randolph said: “I will personally advise black people to refuse to fight as slaves for a democracy they cannot own and from which they cannot enjoy.
In a famous case taken over by the American Civil Liberties Union, Winfrid Lynn, a black landscaper from New York City, went to jail after telling his local editorial board that he “ would not have to serve in a unit. chosen undemocratically as a Negro. . “
In June, Randolph informed President Truman that if he did not issue an executive order ending segregation in the military, African Americans would resist the project.
A month later, with an election looming and under intense pressure from civil rights leaders, Truman signed Executive Order 9981 and established the Presidential Committee on Equal Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces, popularly known as Committee name Fahy, to oversee the process. .
Executive Order 9981, signed by President Harry Truman on July 26, 1948, mandated the racial integration of the long segregated American armed forces.
AB Forces News Collection / Alamy
Gradual integration and lasting legacy
To achieve full integration, Truman needed the cooperation of all four branches of the military. “I want the job done,” Truman told the committee in early 1949, “and I want it done in a way that everyone is happy to cooperate in making it happen.
For its part, the army retreated. “The military is not an instrument of social change,” said Kenneth Royall, Secretary of the Army, who expressed concern about the negative effect of order on enlistments, re-enlistments and morale among soldiers across the country – but especially in the south.
Truman, who would settle for nothing less than complete desegregation, forced Royall to retire after refusing to comply with the order.
It took six years to desegregate the American armed forces. At the end of 1954, the deactivation of the 94e The Engineer Battalion, the army’s last all-black unit, completed the process. Executive Order 9981 remains one of the major accomplishments of Truman’s eight-year tenure, a bold move that pitted him against the southern wing of his party on this and other civil rights issues. But with the evolution of postwar American society, the military has become an important model of desegregation and equal opportunity for African Americans.
In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of Executive Order 9981, General Colin Powell, who later became the first US Secretary of State, spoke of the impact of Truman’s decision on his life: “The military was the only institution in all of America – because of Harry Truman – where a young black boy, now 21, could dream the dream he didn’t dare think of at 11. It was the one place where all that mattered was courage, where the color of your guts and the color of your blood was more important than the color of your skin. “
