Harry Truman and Civil Rights

Harry Truman and Civil Rights PDF Author: Michael R. Gardner
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809388967
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Given his background, President Truman was an unlikely champion of civil rights. Where he grew up--the border state of Missouri--segregation was accepted and largely unquestioned. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents had owned slaves, and his beloved mother, victimized by Yankee forces, railed against Abraham Lincoln for the remainder of her ninety-four years. When Truman assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, Michael R. Gardner points out, Washington, DC, in many ways resembled Cape Town, South Africa, under apartheid rule circa 1985. Truman's background notwithstanding, Gardner shows that it was Harry Truman--not Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, or John F. Kennedy--who energized the modern civil rights movement, a movement that basically had stalled since Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves. Gardner recounts Truman's public and private actions regarding black Americans. He analyzes speeches, private conversations with colleagues, the executive orders that shattered federal segregation policies, and the appointments of like-minded civil rights activists to important positions. Among those appointments was the first black federal judge in the continental United States. Gardner characterizes Truman's evolution from a man who grew up in a racist household into a president willing to put his political career at mortal risk by actively supporting the interests of black Americans.

Harry Truman and Civil Rights

Harry Truman and Civil Rights PDF Author: Michael R. Gardner
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809388967
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Given his background, President Truman was an unlikely champion of civil rights. Where he grew up--the border state of Missouri--segregation was accepted and largely unquestioned. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents had owned slaves, and his beloved mother, victimized by Yankee forces, railed against Abraham Lincoln for the remainder of her ninety-four years. When Truman assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, Michael R. Gardner points out, Washington, DC, in many ways resembled Cape Town, South Africa, under apartheid rule circa 1985. Truman's background notwithstanding, Gardner shows that it was Harry Truman--not Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, or John F. Kennedy--who energized the modern civil rights movement, a movement that basically had stalled since Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves. Gardner recounts Truman's public and private actions regarding black Americans. He analyzes speeches, private conversations with colleagues, the executive orders that shattered federal segregation policies, and the appointments of like-minded civil rights activists to important positions. Among those appointments was the first black federal judge in the continental United States. Gardner characterizes Truman's evolution from a man who grew up in a racist household into a president willing to put his political career at mortal risk by actively supporting the interests of black Americans.

The Civil Rights Legacy of Harry S. Truman

The Civil Rights Legacy of Harry S. Truman PDF Author: Raymond H. Geselbracht
Publisher: Truman State Univ Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
"Based in part on the Second Truman Legacy Symposium, Harry Truman and civil rights, 14-15 May 2004, Key West, Florida."--P. [ii].

Stride Toward Freedom

Stride Toward Freedom PDF Author: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807000701
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
MLK’s classic account of the first successful large-scale act of nonviolent resistance in America: the Montgomery bus boycott. A young Dr. King wrote Stride Toward Freedom just 2 years after the successful completion of the boycott. In his memoir about the event, he tells the stories that informed his radical political thinking before, during, and after the boycott—from first witnessing economic injustice as a teenager and watching his parents experience discrimination to his decision to begin working with the NAACP. Throughout, he demonstrates how activism and leadership can come from any experience at any age. Comprehensive and intimate, Stride Toward Freedom emphasizes the collective nature of the movement and includes King’s experiences learning from other activists working on the boycott, including Mrs. Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin. It traces the phenomenal journey of a community and shows how the 28-year-old Dr. King, with his conviction for equality and nonviolence, helped transform the nation and the world.

Freedom to Serve

Freedom to Serve PDF Author: Jon Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136174257
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, African American leaders pushed for inclusion in the war effort and, after the war, they mounted a concerted effort to integrate the armed services. Harry S. Truman’s decision to issue Executive Order 9981 in 1948, which resulted in the integration of the armed forces, was an important event in twentieth century American history. In Freedom to Serve, Jon E. Taylor gives an account of the presidential order as an event which forever changed the U.S. armed forces, and set a political precedent for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Including press releases, newspaper articles, presidential speeches, and biographical sidebars, Freedom to Serve introduces students to an under-examined event while illuminating the period in a new way. For additional documents, images, and resources please visit the Freedom to Serve companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/criticalmoments

The Double V

The Double V PDF Author: Rawn James, Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608196224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The century-long struggle to achieve equality for America's black soldiers and sailors, in a stirring narrative history by the author of Root and Branch

The Trials of Harry S. Truman

The Trials of Harry S. Truman PDF Author: Jeffrey Frank
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501102907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, returns with the “beguiling” (The New York Times) first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly thirty years, recounting how a seemingly ordinary man met the extraordinary challenge of leading America through the pivotal years of the mid-20th century. The nearly eight years of Harry Truman’s presidency—among the most turbulent in American history—were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan; the first use of an atomic bomb and the development of far deadlier weapons; the start of the Cold War and the creation of the NATO alliance; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit troops to fight a costly “limited war” in Korea. Historians have tended to portray Truman as stolid and decisive, with a homespun manner, but the man who emerges in The Trials of Harry S. Truman is complex and surprising. He believed that the point of public service was to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens and fought for a national health insurance plan. While he was disturbed by the brutal treatment of African Americans and came to support stronger civil rights laws, he never relinquished the deep-rooted outlook of someone with Confederate ancestry reared in rural Missouri. He was often carried along by the rush of events and guided by men who succeeded in refining his fixed and facile view of the postwar world. And while he prided himself on his Midwestern rationality, he could act out of instinct and combativeness, as when he asserted a president’s untested power to seize the nation’s steel mills. The Truman who emerges in these pages is a man with generous impulses, loyal to friends and family, and blessed with keen political instincts, but insecure, quick to anger, and prone to hasty decisions. Archival discoveries, and research that led from Missouri to Washington, Berlin and Korea, have contributed to an indelible and “intimate” (The Washington Post) portrait of a man, born in the 19th century, who set the nation on a course that reverberates in the 21st century, a leader who never lost a schoolboy’s love for his country and its Constitution.

War! What Is It Good For?

War! What Is It Good For? PDF Author: Kimberley Phillips Boehm
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807869086
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
African Americans' long campaign for "the right to fight" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom. Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labor, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.

Whistle Stop

Whistle Stop PDF Author: Philip White
Publisher: ForeEdge from University Press of New England
ISBN: 1611686490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
President Harry Truman was a disappointment to the Democrats, and a godsend to the Republicans. Every attempt to paint Truman with the grace, charm, and grandeur of Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been a dismal failure: Truman's virtues were simpler, plainer, more direct. The challenges he faced--stirrings of civil rights and southern resentment at home, and communist aggression and brinkmanship abroad--could not have been more critical. By the summer of 1948 the prospects of a second term for Truman looked bleak. Newspapers and popular opinion nationwide had all but anointed as president Thomas Dewey, the Republican New York Governor. Truman could not even be certain of his own party's nomination: the Democrats, still in mourning for FDR, were deeply riven, with Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond leading breakaway Progressive and Dixiecrat factions. Finally, with ingenuity born of desperation, Truman's aides hit upon a plan: get the president in front of as many regular voters as possible, preferably in intimate settings, all across the country. To the surprise of everyone but Harry Truman, it worked. Whistle Stop is the first book of its kind: a micro-history of the summer and fall of 1948 when Truman took to the rails, crisscrossing the country from June right up to Election Day in November. The tour and the campaign culminated with the iconic image of a grinning, victorious Truman holding aloft the famous Chicago Tribune headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman."

Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism

Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism PDF Author: Thomas W. Devine
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469602040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
In the presidential campaign of 1948, Henry Wallace set out to challenge the conventional wisdom of his time, blaming the United States, instead of the Soviet Union, for the Cold War, denouncing the popular Marshall Plan, and calling for an end to segregation. In addition, he argued that domestic fascism--rather than international communism--posed the primary threat to the nation. He even welcomed Communists into his campaign, admiring their commitment to peace. Focusing on what Wallace himself later considered his campaign's most important aspect, the troubled relationship between non-Communist progressives like himself and members of the American Communist Party, Thomas W. Devine demonstrates that such an alliance was not only untenable but, from the perspective of the American Communists, undesirable. Rather than romanticizing the political culture of the Popular Front, Devine provides a detailed account of the Communists' self-destructive behavior throughout the campaign and chronicles the frustrating challenges that non-Communist progressives faced in trying to sustain a movement that critiqued American Cold War policies and championed civil rights for African Americans without becoming a sounding board for pro-Soviet propaganda.

Truman Speaks

Truman Speaks PDF Author: Harry S. Truman
Publisher: New York : Columbia University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Lectures and discussions held at Columbia University on April 27, 28, and 29, 1959.