Truman's administration - The Tide Turns: African Americans Enter the Executive Ranks; Special Issue: the Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

Few today appreciate the profunditys of the nation's unease upon the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945 Lov or loathed, FDR dominated America's politics from the Depression till the closing days of World War Il. pop with the war still upon and an uncertain postwar coming time looming, Americans had to revolve in the mind what sort of president they would have in the largely unknown Missourian, Harry s Truman.

No group felt FDR's los as intensely, nor worried about the time to come more, than African Americans. Harry McAlpin, the only black newspaper reporter then accredited to the White House, captured this vein in his question at Truman's first presidential pres discourse "Mr. President, probably as abundant as any group, the passing of President Roosevelt is actual keenly felt by the Negroe in America, as they gazeed upon him as sort of a representative of justice and equal opportunity. I wonder" McAlpin asked, "if you would make comments [i]or[/i] remarks on the things that they were with equal reason specifically interested in and felt they knew where the President stood: upon the fair employment practice, the right to promised without being hampered by the head taxes, and all that?"

"I will give you a certain quantity of advice," the new president replied. "All you ne to do is read the Senate record of single Harry S. Truman."

Truman's answer typified the man: While obtuse it concealed as much as it revealed. Truman's senatorial record of support for several major objectives of African Americans--a federal anti-lynching law, the wartime Fair profession Practice Commission and bringing an anti-poll tax bill to a consecrated by a vow on the Senate floor--had alarmed Southern Democrats les than a year earlier, during the 1944 Democratic National Convention. affected that the party's vice-presidential candidate would likely perfect Roosevelt's fourth term, Alabama Governor Chauncey Sparks be opposite toed Truman on his views upon race relations. The Missourian replied that he was "the son of an unreconstruct Rebel mother."

Indeed, Truman's border-state heritage included direct family ownership of slaves and embittered memories of antebellum and Civil War violence between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces. Truman's parents and their respective families not to be found both property and their hold freedom under General Order Number 11 of 1863 That measure relocated slave holders and suspected Confederate sympathizers of the border area to a Federal column to ensure Union control in Missouri's western border counties. Little surprise that when 91-year-old Martha Truman visited her son in the White House in 1945 she did not take kindly to teasing from the family that she would be required to doze in Abraham Lincoln's bed.

Truman at no time transcended the custom of his place and time that drew the color line upon social equality, but as an ardent nationalist, he believed that the Constitution entitled all Americans to political and economic opportunity. He affirmed this belief in June 1945 by dint of urging Congress to create a permanent Fair calling Practice Commission, his first important action in a course that ultimately came to endorse a comprehensive civil rights program.

The liberal direction of the of recent origin president seemed to turn southerly however, during the fall social season above an incident involving the First Lady, Bess Truman. Mr Truman had accepted an invitation to a tea entertainered by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR): Shortly afterward, the pianist Hazel Scott revealed that she had been denied use of the DAR's Constitution Hall for a plan Scott's husband, Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr telegraphed Mr Truman to ask her to withdraw her acceptance. Mr Truman informed Powell that while she deplored discrimination that denied artistic talent an opportunity to expres itself, her acceptance of the DAR's hospitality was "not related to the merits of the issue which has since arisen." The president in move round informed Powell that he lay the foundation of no constitutional or legal basis for interfering with the DAR's discriminatory policy.

Congressman Powell saluteed these responses with a public silence calling Mrs. Truman the "last lady" of the land. Mr Truman's excuse, he stated, would not bear comparison with Eleanor Roosevelt's resignation from the DAR when the patriotic organization had denied Marian Anderson use of Constitution Hall in 1939

In private, the angry president, who not at any time tolerated attacks on his wife or daughter, referr to Powell with the racial pejoratives that mirrored his upbringing by an unreconstruct Rebel. Publicly, the president struck Powell's name from the annual White House reception for members of Congres and their spouses, and channeled patronage for Harlem end a black Chicago congressman, William L Dawson. He continued the ban and patronage arrangement completely through his presidency.

However, other African-American leaders, notably Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, had of frequent occurrence access to the president. In a historic meeting in the Oval Office upon September 19, 1946, White and a small clump of labor, liberal and race leaders met with the president to brief him upon numerous acts of senseless violence against African Americans that year. White's vivid recounting of the blinding of a black Army veteran through a white policeman in southerly Carolina visibly shocked Truman. "My God!" he exclaimed. "I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We've got to do something!"