1940s
Civil Rights
The most significant developments in civil rights in the immediate postwar era came in 1947, when Jackie Robinson eliminated the color restrictions in major league baseball by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and in 1948, when Truman, by executive action, desegregated the armed forces.
Robinson, who served in the army during the World War II and was discharged as a lieutenant, first integrated professional baseball in 1945, when owner Branch Rickey, signed him to a contract with the Montreal Royals, the International League farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1946, despite vicious harassment on and off the field, Robinson led the league in hitting and was called up to the Brooklyn major league team the following spring. Again, he excelled, despite cruel harassment from fans and other players, and in 1949, he was won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award after setting records for fielding and batting and establishing himself as a premier base stealer. Robinson’s major league career lasted through 1956, and like other black and in some cases Hispanic players who followed him during the era of segregation, when playing in the South he typically was denied entrance to the restaurants, hotels, and other facilities enjoyed by the rest of his team. Nonetheless, his success on the field made it possible for other talented black players to join the major leagues, and baseball stadiums, too, were soon integrated, as black fans no longer had to sit apart, in inferior seats, from whites. Moreover, as the centerpiece of a Brooklyn team that dominated its league in the late 1940s and throughout much of the 1950s, Robinson helped bring respect to Brooklyn, which was otherwise overshadowed by Manhattan in the public mind. Thus, in addition to becoming the focal point for racial divisions, he also helped forge a new sense of unity and pride for his community.
Truman delivered his 1948 state of the union address before a largely unresponsive Congress filled with conservative Republicans and Dixiecrats. The president asserted that “our first goal is to secure the essential human rights of our citizens.” A month later, appalled by what he read in To Secure These Rights, the report of his Civil Rights Commission that documented unwarranted beatings and lynching in the South, Truman called on Congress to pass legislation to ensure voting rights, terminate the poll tax that discouraged black voters, end racial discrimination by employers and labor unions, and eliminate discrimination in interstate travel. In addition, Truman asked for a federal law against “the crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly,” and he ordered the Secretary of Defense to end racial discrimination in the military services. He also asked Congress to act on claims by Japanese-Americans who had been forced from their homes and into confinement during World War II “solely because of their racial origin.”
Most of Truman’s legislative agenda fell on deaf ears in the Congress, but he had the authority to desegregate the military by executive action, and on July 26, 1948, he did so. Black Americans who had been serving in separate units, often under the command of white officers, were now fully integrated into previously all-white units. As a result, white and black men worked together as equals, in many instances for the first time in their lives. As a result, they came to know one another as more as individuals than as racial abstractions. This change within the military facilitated later changes within the society at-large, because so many men of both races served in the armed services as a result of the draft. The Korean War was the first significant military action in which the integrated units fought. At the same time that he desegregated the armed forces, Truman issued a separate executive order calling for a fair employment policy in federal government civil service, declaring that merit and fitness should be the only criteria for employment with the U.S. government.
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