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®8F"SF-JWJOHJOB%JGGFSFOU%BZ¯ E. H. Crump was cold and wet. On January 1, 1948, he attended the Delta Bowl football game between Texas Christian and the University of Mississippi . As he sat in the stands he was buffeted by high winds and stinging rain that had blanketed Memphis. The night before, on New Year’s Eve, a tornado had touched down in rural Shelby County, killing three people and injuring eighteen.1 Meanwhile, nine hundred miles away in the nation’s capital, President Harry Truman was dealing with another type of storm that threatened to rip the nation asunder. As the new year dawned, neither leader had any way of knowing that in 1948 Republicans would establish a toehold in the Democratic South while the first cracks would begin to appear in the fortresses of white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation. In September 1946 a delegation of African American leaders, including NAACP executive director Walter White, met with Truman in the White House to discuss the rise of racial violence then occurring across the American South. The president was particularly shocked by the brutal attack upon an African American soldier in South Carolina. Honorably discharged from the army in February 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was traveling by bus through South Carolina when, during an unscheduled stop, he asked the white driver if he could use the restroom. The driver refused permission and cursed Woodard, who responded in kind. When the bus arrived in Batesburg , the driver informed police chief Lynwood Lanier Shull that Woodard had been unruly during the trip. Boarding the bus, the police chief arrested Woodard for disturbing the peace. When he protested that he had done nothing wrong, Shull savagely beat the discharged sergeant, blinding him in both eyes.2 “My God!” the president exclaimed. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something.”3 Under the president’s direction, the Justice Department prosecuted Schull for violating Woodard’s civil rights, but an all-white jury found him not guilty.4 In December 1946, one month after Schull’s acquittal, Truman issued an executive order creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights to investigate civil rights abuses and propose federal statutes that would prevent them in the future. As the committee  ˜SA=NAHEREJCEJ=@EBBANAJP@=U™ began its work, Truman continued to call for an end to racial discrimination . On June 29, 1947, the president spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the first chief executive to ever do so. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Truman committed the federal government to insuring equal rights for African Americans. Four months later the president was given the tools to make his commitment real when his civil rights committee presented him with its 178-page report on October 29 1947. Entitled To Secure These Rights, the report not only catalogued egregious abuses of civil rights, but also recommended measures “to extend full and equal rights of citizenship to all Americans .” The list included recommendations to end segregation in education, employment, and housing.5 If Truman had wanted merely to appease northern black voters and thus keep Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition intact, he would have acknowledged the panel’s recommendations and then done nothing. To be sure the president was a professional politician who wanted a united Democratic Party to assist in the 1948 campaign, but the available evidence suggests that civil rights was more than a political expedient to Harry Truman. During a White House luncheon a Democratic national committee member from Alabama asked the president for a statement on his civil rights views for the upcoming campaign. “Can I tell them you’re not ramming miscegenation down our throats? That you’re for all the people, not just the North?” Truman dramatically reached into his coat and pulled out a copy of the Bill of Rights, which he proceeded to read to the astonished audience. When finished, Truman declared, “I’m everybody’s president.”6 The president seemed to have concluded that some southern Democrats would remain loyal to the party, if not to him, and that a civil rights program would solidify northern liberal and black votes for his reelection bid. Consequently , the president sent a special message to Congress on February 2, 1948, proposing a set of laws designed to secure some measure of equality for African Americans. The president’s...

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