Marco te´ orico

Following the Monroe (aka Moore’s Ford) lynching of four African Americans (two women and two men – one of whom was a World War II veteran), protestors from African American organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women, the National Ne- gro Congress, and female members of the NAACP picketed the White House demanding that Truman take action to end lynching.148 Additionally, the black press urged Truman to act, and private citizens – both black and white – wrote letters and sent telegrams to the White House, many of them also insisting that Truman take action.149

Although there were several heinous race crimes in 1946, Nash recalls that the beating and blinding of returning black veteran Isaac Woodward in February 1946 “moved President Truman to action,” and it was the description of the Woodward case that prompted Nash’s “long-dormant Commission – proposed but never actualized in WWII to be “revived.”150

Woodward, a World War II veteran trying to get to his home in North Carolina, was traveling from Camp Gordon in Georgia via Greyhound bus. After he had the effrontery to take too long at a rest stop, the angered bus driver made a stop at the Batesburg, South Carolina police station.

147

Nash, “Science, Politics, and Human Values: A Memoir,” p. 193. 148 _{Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights, p. 9.}

149 _{Wexler, pp. 106-107.}

There, Woodward was dragged from the bus and beaten brutally by police officers. The police chief, L. I. Shaw, “gouged Woodward’s eyes with a billy club.”151

In September, 1946, following lynchings that occurred over seven months from February to August, Truman met with a coalition comprised of members from the NAACP, Urban League, Federal Council of Churches and the American Federation of Labor. This group called them- selves the National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence (NECAMV). Four days later, Truman met with representatives from the “left wing of the civil rights spectrum,” including members “from the National Negro Congress, the SCHW, and the National Council of Negro Women.” It was during these series of meetings that the dormant idea for a national committee reemerged.152 This time around, with Truman in the White House and feeling intense pressure from an assertive black coalition and scrutiny from the eyes of the world upon the United States as the Cold War loomed, the president approved the idea.

In staffing the civil rights committee, Niles sought assistance from Nash and others, and he attempted to reach balance by amassing a group that was interracial and represented a cross section of “industry, labor, legal professionals, higher education in the South, the American Ne- gro community, and various religious denominations.”153 Ultimately, Niles selected fifteen peo- ple to staff the committee.

Two members represented corporate America. Heading the committee would be Charles E. Wilson, president of the General Electric Company. Wilson would have a colleague from corporate America in Charles Luckman. Luckman was a Jewish American who was the presi- dent of Lever Brothers.

151 _{Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision, (New York: Penguin} Books, 2002), p. 47.

152 _{Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights, p. 14.}

153 _{William C. Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration, (Ohio State University} Press, 1970), pp. 55-56.

Labor was represented on the committee by two members: James Carey, secretary- treasurer of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) and Boris Shiskin, an economist for the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

John S. Dickey, president of Dartmouth College, was one representative from higher ed- ucation. Dickey had previously served as Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1934-1936. He was also a United States delegate to the United Nations Conference on Interna- tional Organization held in San Francisco in 1945, serving as assistant to the legal advisor of the United States Department of State. 154

Another member was Morris Ernst, who was a New York City lawyer, author and co- founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., who had chaired the Housing Committee of the Americans Veterans Committee, also accepted an appointment to the committee.155

Various religious denominations were also represented. Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, the Jewish chaplain of the Fifth Marine Division at Iwo Jima, served along with the Reverend Fran- cis Haas, the Catholic bishop of Grand Rapids, Michigan and a well-reputed labor mediator, who had recently served as the chair of the President’s Committee of Fair Employment Practice. The Reverend Henry Knox Sherrill, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church also served.156 Francis P. Matthews, who had recently ended his tenure as the Supreme Chairman Knight of the Knights of Columbus, was from Omaha, Nebraska where he practiced law. During the war, he ran the

154

From the introduction to the Oral history interview, John S. Dickey, July 19, 1974, Truman Library, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/dickeyjs.htm (accessed March 26, 2012).

155 _{Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. would become the first chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-} mission (EEOC) in 1965. See the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website, www.eeoc.gov, for more information.

156 _{Thomas E. Blantz, "Francis J. Haas and the Minneapolis Truckers' Strike of 1934," Minnesota History} 42 (Spring 1970): 5-15.

Catholic Church’s “component of the United Services Organization”157

and afterward became the vice president of that organization. After his work on the PCCR, Truman appointed him Sec- retary of the Navy in 1949, and later Ambassador to Ireland. On the PCCR, he represented a lay religious affiliation.158

Two members were African Americans - Sarah (Sadie) Tanner Mossell Alexander and Dr. Channing Tobias. Alexander, of Philadelphia, was the first female African American to earn a Ph.D. in the United States, and the first woman to graduate from the law school at the Universi- ty of Pennsylvania.159 She was a partner in her husband’s Philadelphia law firm and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Urban League. Tobias had at one time been the Asso- ciate Director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and was former Senior Secretary to the Young Men’s Christian Association. At this time he directed the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Tobias would later serve as the Chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Col- ored People (NAACP), and he would be serving in this capacity in 1954 when the NAACP won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision at the United States Su- preme Court.160

Lastly, two members were white southern liberals. Dr. Frank Porter Graham, the presi- dent of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was a nationally-known southern liberal who had been a founder and president of the SCHW and was heavily involved with the War La- bor Board, the President’s Commission on Education, and the Council of United Nations on In-

157 _{Juhnke, “Creating a Charter for Freedom,” p. 55.}

158 _{From introduction to Francis P. Matthews Papers at the Harry S Truman Library, Independence, Mis-} souri, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/matthewsfp.htm#admin.

159

University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, “Biographical Sketch,” SADIE TANNER MOSSELL ALEXANDER (1898 - 1989) Record Group, 1817, 1858 – 1985, PENN, University Archives and Rec- ords Center, http://www.archives.upenn.edu/faids/upt/upt50/alexander html _stma.html (accessed March 26, 2012).

160

Juhnke, “Creating a New Charter of Freedom…,” p. 53; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1944), p. 844; Telegram of Anson Phelps Stokes to Dr. Channing Tobias, May 18, 1954, “With an Even Hand: Brown v. Board at Fifty,” Civil Rights Digital Library, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/images/br0096s.jpg (March 26, 2012).

donesia.161 Dorothy Tilly, Secretary of the Methodist Church Women’s Division, was also at the time serving on the National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital. In the 1930s, Tilly had built a reputation among southern churchwomen as an ardent anti-lynching activist in the ASWPL. During the war, Tilly had served under Will W. Alexander in the Farm Security Administration.162 Both Graham and Tilly believed that segregation was morally wrong and that eventually and gradually, through education, interracial experiences, and a focus on brother- hood and understanding between the races, segregation would be eliminated. They had partici- pated in activism in the South where they knew social progress had been made, albeit slowly but enduring.

While Niles worked at getting commitments from those invited to join this committee, Attorney General Tom Clark and others worked on the executive order that would officially cre- ate it.163 Before Truman created the PCCR, the term “civil rights” was not common in the Amer- ican lexicon. Nash recalled that it was “new terminology” in the 1940s and that “the use of the word ‘civil rights’… came about in the course of our staff studies. We thought it advisable to find a term that was slightly fresh, and the words civil rights were not used for this function at that time.”164

The term “civil rights” allowed the PCCR to redefine the problem of race relations in the United States in part because, as Nash recalled, this new term was critical, for “as soon as

161

“GRAHAM, Frank Porter (1886-1972)”, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress,

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=G000353. For more information on Frank Graham, see Ashby.

162 _{Information on Tilly’s membership on the National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital} is from Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Reutten, Quest and Response: Minority Rights in the Truman Admin- istration, (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1973), p. 151.

163 _{Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights, p. 14.} 164

Nash as quoted in Michael R. Gardner, Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), p. 15. Gardner notes that “Truman’s creation of the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights was unprecedented, but even the use of the term civil rights represented a new semantic approach to the old problem of racial discrimination in America.”

we created a President’s Committee on Civil Rights, it acquired its own meaning.”165

This use of the term “civil rights” to name the committee constituted a departure from the past because these words conveyed the concept that all Americans, including African Americans had civil rights that deserved and required protection.

With his issuing of Executive Order 9808 in December 1946, Truman officially created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights as conceived by Nash and Niles. The fact that Tru- man created a committee whose purpose was to investigate civil rights and to recommend, among other things, legislation to cure the ills of American society was indeed a political water- shed in United States history. No president before him had created a commission solely for the purpose of addressing civil rights of the country’s citizens. Admittedly, Roosevelt had taken a dramatic step when he created the FEPC, but he had acted politically in order to prevent poten- tially damaging mass protests during wartime. Furthermore, the FEPC was limited to address- ing employment discrimination in the defense industry, not to the broader issue of civil rights. The FEPC was never intended to be an ongoing watchdog agency, and when its charter expired and the war ended, it died and attempts to resurrect it at the federal level proved unsuccessful.166 Truman tasked his Committee with the following:

1. to consider and determine the adequacy of existing federal legislation and to recom- mend proposed new legislation

2. to consider the broader social, economic and educational aspects of promoting the cause of civil liberty throughout the country; and

3. to consider the work of private organizations whose activities affect civil rights.167

165 _{Nash, as quoted in Gardner, p. 15; Nash, as quoted in Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights p. 21.} 166

Egerton, pp. 216-217.

167 _{Meeting Minutes of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, February 5 and 6, 1947, Box 3, Folder} 2, Dorothy Rogers Tilly Papers, 1868-1970, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, At- lanta, Georgia (hereinafter Tilly Papers, Emory University).

Prior to the Committee beginning its work, its chair Charles E. Wilson named two mem- bers as vice-chairs, John S. Dickey and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. Additionally, Wilson orga- nized the Committee into three subcommittees, named the members of these subcommittees, and gave each a charter. Wilson tasked the first subcommittee with the issue of legislation, specifi- cally asking the group to decide “if existing legislation is adequate” and if not, then this sub- committee was tasked with recommending changes to existing legislation or proposing “new leg- islation.” Serving on this subcommittee were Sherrill, Graham, Matthews, Dickey, and Alexan- der.168

The second subcommittee’s charter was “to consider the broader aspects of the problem including social, economic, and educational programs that should be recommended and adopted. This group was to consider the effective utilization of existing organizations and mass media. Included in this group were Luckman, Haas, Carey, Tobias, and Gittelsohn.”169

The third subcommittee included Tilly, Ernst, Shiskin, and Roosevelt. Wilson directed this group to address and “consider any other related aspects of the Civil Rights question. For example, anti-racial and religious organizations, discrimination, registration statutes, and the general problem of anonymity of groups operating in derogation of minority and civil rights.”170

The members met over a period of nine months from January 15, 1947 to September 13, 1947,and their work involved both committee and subcommittee meetings. 171 They also gath- ered information from interviews they conducted and from reports and letters received “from for- ty witnesses, correspondence with nearly 250 private organizations and individuals, as well as

168 _{From Charles E. Wilson to Frank Graham, February 3, 1947, Folder 2026 in the Frank Porter Graham} Papers, 1908-1990, #01819, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, Uni- versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Hereinafter, Graham Papers).

169 _Ibid. 170 _Ibid.

information supplied by twenty-five government agencies and numerous state and local public agencies.”172

The PCCR’s staff, which actually researched and wrote the PCCR’s report, “were strong advocates of federal intervention to expand civil rights.” The staff included Robert K. Carr, who taught in the government department at Dartmouth; Frances Williams, an African American woman who was “involved in the YWCA…and had served as a race relations advisor in the Office of Price Administration,” a department that employed a lot of liberals; Nancy Wechsler, who “was active in the Americans for Democratic Action;” and Milton D. Stewart, “a former journalist who had studied economics and social philosophy at New York University.”173

Of course, Philleo Nash, educated as an anthropologist, was one member of the White House staff who “worked extensively with members of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights” and assisted the PCCR’s staff, as needed.174

On October 29, 1947 the PCCR delivered its comprehensive report to Truman, and in December 1947 it published its findings as a document entitled, To Secure These Rights, (a phrase they borrowed from the Declaration of Independence). 175 In it, the PCCR put forth three reasons for re-examining the country’s policies and practices on civil rights: “1) a moral reason – the United States can no longer countenance these burdens on our common conscience, these inroads of moral fiber; 2) an economic reason;” and 3) an international reason, because the United States could not “ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.”176

172 _{Berman, p. 67.}

173 _{Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights, p. 20.} 174

Gardner, p. 15 and Nash as quoted in Gardner, p. 15. 175 _{Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights, p. 28.}

176 _{“To Secure These Rights, A Brief Summary of the Report of the President’s Committee on Civil} Rights,”p. 3, Box 2, Folder 3, President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights Papers, edited by William E. Juhnke, Black Studies Research Sources: Microfilms from Major Archival and Manuscript Collections, A Microfilm Project of University Publications of America, Inc. Frederick, Maryland, 1984. Microfilm # 1729, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. (hereinafter, PCCR Papers, Emory University).

The Committee’s report made headline news in many papers across the United States.177

It exposed the lies behind segregation: separate was far from equal. Its overriding conclusion that segregation had no place in America and its recommendation that segregation be abolished meant that, for the first time, the federal government met the issue directly, through open and frank discussion among committee members about this topic “and its consequences.”178 There- fore, the PCCR broke through another semantic barrier by making segregation the term with which the government and the nation had to contend, dismissing what Nash described as the more “genteel” term, “discrimination.”179

The PCCR even debated the use of the two words seg- regation and discrimination, ultimately settling on segregation because they concluded that seg- regation inherently implied discrimination.180