Harry Truman, Walter White, and the origins of the modern Civil Rights movement

On Sunday afternoon, June 29, 1947, President Harry Truman’s motorcade pulled up to the rear of the Lincoln Memorial. There, he was greeted by Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who was chair of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Each was scheduled to speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but Truman’s speech was to be the main event. This would be the first time an American president addressed the NAACP with a message proclaiming support for civil rights.

An expectant crowd of 5,000 — a sea of Black and white faces — awaited him, arrayed in front of and along both sides of the reflecting pool.

Truman was an unlikely advocate of civil rights for African Americans. He had grown up in Missouri, formerly a slave state, with grandparents on both sides who had enslaved Blacks, a mother who refused to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom and a vocabulary that included the “N-word" and similar racial slurs throughout his presidency.

The idea for the president’s speech had been originated by Walter White, who had managed in April to score an appointment with Truman in the Oval Office. Having had a role in persuading Truman to establish a Civil Rights Commission, White sensed that the president was ready to take another step forward toward the promotion of civil rights.

According to White’s autobiography, he told Truman that a speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the last day of the NAACP’s 38th annual convention would tell the world that America was committed to narrowing the margin between “our protestations of freedom and our practice of them.” The NAACP leader was surprised when Truman accepted on the spot.

It is an understatement to say that White was an unusual individual. In the opening sentences of his autobiography, he wrote: “I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.”

In other words, he could pass for white, and he did. White’s parents were both pale-skinned African Americans who had descended from enslaved families in Georgia. His maternal great grandmother had given birth to six light-skinned children whose father had been William Henry Harrison, future president of the United States.

Born in 1893, White was raised as a Black child, attended an all-Black university, became an activist for racial equality and joined the NAACP in New York City. He was eventually promoted to permanent secretary (CEO) in 1931. For  White, his success in convincing Truman to address the NAACP at the Lincoln Memorial was the crowning achievement of his professional life.

When President Truman, Walter White and Eleanor Roosevelt took their seats on the stage partway up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the rain had stopped and the skies had cleared, though the air remained hot and humid. The presence of old Abe, deep in the shadows above them, could be felt but not seen.

A Howard University chorus began the program with a rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song of faith and hope. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote eloquently of that moment: “The sun made the top of the Washington Monument glisten before us, and somehow it seemed as though the years of our history lay between the two monuments. In my heart I said a prayer that this meeting might be the symbol that we really would lead the world in justice and brotherhood.”

At 4:30 p.m. Truman approached the podium, which was topped with microphones of all four radio networks that would broadcast his speech to the nation. The president’s flat, clipped delivery was for the most part ordinary, nothing like the cadence and timing of FDR. But his words conveyed a commitment to civil rights that no president since Abraham Lincoln had ever made to the American people.

“It is my deep conviction,” he declared, “that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens." Then Truman, with evident passion, followed with an applause line that he had penciled into his speech: “And when I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.” 

The power of Truman’s speech lay in his vision of the rights that “all Americans” are entitled to, how those rights would be guaranteed and the urgency of the task. The rights as to which Truman “pledged [his] full and continued support” ranged from the most immediate, that is freedom from discrimination and the right to a fair trial, to the most expansive — rights to education, housing, medical care and equal opportunity.

Stressing the urgency of addressing discrimination and equal rights, Truman declared, “We cannot, any longer, await the growth of a will to action” by the states. And then he uttered the sentence that brought Walter White and his NAACP colleagues to their feet: Our national government must show the way. This was the most significant pledge in Truman’s speech. If kept — and this was by no means a certainty — it meant that the federal government would actually intervene and both protect and advocate for minority rights.

When the president finished his 12-minute speech he returned to his seat and whispered to White. “I said what I did because I meant every word of it — and I am going to prove that I do mean it.”

Did he mean every word? No. In fact, Truman drew a line at what he called “social equality.” In previous speeches, he had made clear that he was opposed to laws and policies that would lead to “the social equality of the Negro.” Speaking to a group of Black Democrats in Chicago, Truman had the temerity to inform them that “Negroes” preferred the “society of their own people” and desired “justice,” but not “social relations.”

Thus, while the president in his address to the NAACP professed that he was all for racial equality, he was against it if it meant mixed neighborhoods, clubs and sports teams or, heaven forbid, integrated schools where white girls would sit beside Black boys (the primordial fear of Southern segregationists). Consequently, there were unspoken limits to Truman’s assurance to Walter White that he would take action to “prove” that he meant “every word” of his speech.

As revisionist historian Carol Anderson argued in her book "Eyes Off the Prize," Truman was not "philosophically or psychologically equipped  to accept true Black equality" because of his “Confederate-leaning, slaveholding roots.”  

As events unfolded, the only effective action that Truman initiated to prove his sincerity to Walter White was to issue executive orders designed to integrate the armed forces and federal employees. These two orders provided a measure of social equality in the workplace, but only to a small fraction of the Black population.

While Truman is to be lauded for issuing these orders, he could have done much more with his executive powers if he had elevated racial justice and discrimination in America to his top priority — equal to or even above his administration’s focus on providing massive relief to millions of white Europeans through the Marshall Plan.

Nevertheless, his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1947 mattered. It gave hope to the African American community. It laid the groundwork for the historic legislation that was enacted in the 1960s. And for Truman, it was an act of courage, because at the time 80 percent of Americans opposed his civil rights agenda.

In his farewell address, Truman declared that his racial equality advocacy caused a “tremendous awakening of the American conscience on the great issue of civil rights.” Walter White’s NAACP applauded his efforts, but his constituents would have to struggle for many more years before conscience would yield concrete results.

David L. Roll is a trustee of the George C. Marshall Foundation and founder of the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation. He is the author of "George Marshall: Defender of the Republic"; "The Hopkins Touch"; as well as "Louis Johnson and The Arming of America."