jan 1, 1947 - To Secure These Rights published

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To Secure these rights: The 1947 report by the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights that called for robust federal action to ensure equality for African Americans. President Truman asked Congress to make all of the report’s recommendations — including the abolition of poll taxes and the restoration of the Fair Employment Practice Committee — into law, leading to discord in the Democratic Party.



Demands for justice persisted in the early years of the Cold War. Momentum built behind symbolic victories — such as Jackie Robinson breaking major league baseball’s color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 — but the growing black vote in northern cities proved more consequential. During World War II, more than a million African Americans migrated to northern and western cities. Leaving the Jim Crow South gave many the opportunity to vote for the first time. At the ballot box, African Americans increasingly sided with the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (Map 26.1). This newfound political leverage earned the attention of northern liberals, many of whom became allies of civil rights advocates. Ultimately, however, the Cold War climate produced mixed results for the movement, as the nation’s growing anticommunism opened some avenues for civil rights while closing others.

The migration of African Americans from the South to other regions of the country produced one of the most remarkable demographic shifts of the mid-twentieth century. Between World War I — which marked the start of the Great Migration — and the 1970s, more than 6 million African Americans left the South. Where they settled in the North and West, they helped change the politics of entire cities and even states. Seeking black votes, which had become a key to victory in major cities, liberal Democrats and Republicans alike in New York, Illinois, California, and Pennsylvania, for instance, increasingly made civil rights part of their platform. In this way, migration advanced the political cause of black equality.


Truman also feared that racial inequality tarnished America’s global image in the ideological battle with communism. When whites and blacks “fail to live together in peace,” he admonished, it harmed “the cause of democracy itself in the whole world.” Indeed, the Soviet Union used American racism to discredit the United States abroad. “We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics,” the Committee on Civil Rights wrote. This need to demonstrate an improving racial climate provided leverage to civil rights leaders.

But McCarthyism and the hunt for subversives at home also hampered the push for civil rights. Civil rights opponents charged that racial integration was “communistic,” and many southern states banned the NAACP as an “anti-American” organization. Black Americans who praised the Soviet Union, such as the actor and singer Paul Robeson, or had been “fellow travelers” (allied with communists on many issues) in the 1930s, such as the pacifist Rustin, were persecuted. When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the outspoken Robeson gave impassioned testimony. “My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to … have a part of it just like you,” he declared. But anticommunist hysteria effectively ended the career of Robeson and other activists. The Cold War also worked against the cause of civil rights

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