1 juin 1945 - Eastland makes racist comments on senate floor

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In June 1945, even as African American troops fought with distinction in the last months of World War II, Senator James O. Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi, took to the floor of the U.S. Senate and brashly asserted that “the Negro race is an inferior race.” A lifetime after the Fourteenth Amendment promised “equal protection of the laws” and the Fifteenth guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” most white Americans held beliefs similar to Eastland’s and refused to accept racial equality as a legal or social fact.

Much of the Deep South, like Eastland’s Mississippi, was a “closed society”: black people had no political rights and lived on the margins of white society, impoverished and exploited. While African Americans outside the South could vote and found a measure of freedom, their lives were still constrained: schools, neighborhoods, public amenities like swimming pools, and many businesses remained segregated and unequal in the North and West as well. Segregationists such as Eastland were united in their opposition to reform, and numerous and powerful enough in the U.S. Congress to block proposed civil rights legislation.


The other half of the Double V — fighting abroad — also faced vigorous resistance from segregationists. Despite the fact that all-black units, such as the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion and the famous Tuskegee Airmen were widely praised by military commanders, Mississippi’s Senator Eastland ridiculed black troops at war’s end. “The Negro soldier was an utter and dismal failure in combat,” he said, a lie uttered from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

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