Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era

Epilogue

241 EPILOGUE After he received the seminal civil rights report, To Secure These Rights (1947), President Harry Truman expressed outrage towards the prevalence of racial violence and discrimination in America. After discovering that African American veterans had been murdered in several southern states, he declared, “I can’t approve of such goings on and . . . I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause.”¹ This statement reveals a larger executive commitment to civil rights than Franklin Roosevelt was ever willing to advocate . In creating a Presidential Commission on Civil Rights and issuing his 1948 executive order to ensure “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services, without regard to race,” Truman demonstrated an unprecedented presidential interest in the rights of African Americans.² If the New Deal era provided the foundation for the civil rights movement, political divisions that had plagued the passage of racial legislation since Roosevelt’s first term still remained. Viewing Truman as the ultimate “scalawag,” southern legislators remained devoted to the cause of white supremacy, opposing the elimination of the poll tax and the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. After the 1948 election, an alliance of southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress blocked Truman’s proposed civil rights measures. While this coalition temporarily stalled federal action, Truman’s promotion of racial justice had a profound influence on politics in the postwar period. As historian William Leuchtenburg argues,Truman “had placed civil rights irrevocably on the national agenda, had reconfigured America’s election maps, and had set in motion a chain of events that made the greater achievements of the 1960s possible.”³ 242 EPILOGUE If the Truman presidency offered hope for federal intervention, Dwight Eisenhower advocated a more conservative commitment to civil rights. Milestones such as Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated the growing success of black activism; however, these seminal events did not prompt a wide-scale executive campaign to end racial injustice. Eisenhower’s sympathetic stance towards southerners , coupled with his belief in states’ rights, led him to enforce desegregation sporadically, feeling legally bound to defend the integrityof the courts. As Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, later recalled, “I knew that he [Eisenhower] was a strong supporter of states’ rights, and although certainly not opposed to the cause of civil rights, he did not intend to be a crusader on its behalf.”⁴ While many white liberals and African Americans criticized Eisenhower’s tardy response to the Little Rock crisis, claiming it demonstrated the president’s general disinterest in racial issues, the Eisenhower administration did bring about legislation that would anticipate the federal policies of the 1960s. Developed largely by civil rights advocate Brownell, the 1957 Civil Rights Act established a bipartisan commission on civil rights and provided federal protection for black voting rights and other civil liberties. The Eisenhower administration also initiated antidiscriminatory policies inWashington, D.C., as well as promoting greater racial diversity within government positions. Still, the president’s commitment to civil rights was always confined to federal sectors, as he had no interest in using the executive branch to promote desegregation in the South. Therefore, while the administration’s racial policies served to reflect “an official image of racial democracy,” the president’s “pattern of hesitancy and extreme political caution” largely protected white Southerners .⁵ Yet, with rising criticism from the international community, the Eisenhower administration would actively promote culturally based programs to buttress America’s Cold War democratic rhetoric. As historian Mary Dudziak argues, American segregation and discrimination provided fodder for the Soviets, who charged that America’s racial practices were inimical to the nation’s espousal of democratic values. For countries in Latin America and Africa, where the fight against American racial discrimination was seen as part of a larger global struggle against anticolonialism, progress in American civil rights initiatives became increasingly imperative to preserve important international alliances. During the Cold War, global politics forced American policy makers to consider the nation’s racial practices in a very different context than they had in previous decades.While both Roosevelt and Truman may have initiated 243 EPILOGUE some forms of antidiscriminatory legislation to maintain black loyalty and to sustain the African American presence within the Democratic Party, by the 1950s federal neglect of civil rights potentially threatened to disrupt vital diplomatic...