The President's Committee on Civil Rights
The President's Committee on Civil Rights was established by Executive Order 9808 on December 5, 1946, to strengthen and safeguard the rights of the American people. The Government's policy, announced in the same order, was that civil rights were guaranteed by the Constitution and essential to domestic tranquility, national security, the general welfare, and the continued existence of our free institutions. The advisory committee was chaired by Charles E. Wilson. The final report of the committee was published in 1947 as a one-hundred-and-seventy-eight page document entitled To Secure These Rights.
The President's Committee on Civil Rights had the following members: Ms. Sadie T. Alexander, Mr. James B. Carey, Mr. John S. Dickey, Mr. Morris L Ernst, Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, Dr. Frank P. Graham, The Most Reverend Francis J. Haas, Mr. Charles Luckman, Mr. Francis P. Matthews, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., The Right Reverend Henry Knox Sherrill, Mr. Boris Shishkin, Ms. M.E. Tilly, Mr. Channing H. Tobias, and Charles E. Wilson (Chairman). Robert K. Carr was Executive Secretary of the committee. All departments and agencies of the Federal Government were instructed to cooperate with the committee and furnish it with information and services as required.
The committee conducted an inquiry; held public hearings; solicited advice; examined the evidence; and made recommendations for policy improvements to carry out the mandate of Executive Order 9808. President Truman used the report as the basis for a special civil rights message to Congress and for executive orders leading to the desegregation of the armed forces and an end to discrimination in the Civil Service system.
Click on the image at left to read correspondence between Harry Truman and Attorney General Tom Clark that includes an early suggestion for the committee.
To read more about the South Carolina incident that Truman refers to in the letter, click here.
The Truman Library has digitized many more letters and other documents relating to the President's committee. They may be viewed by clicking here.
"The text of the report spells out in detail the liberal vision for expansion of civil rights in the years after World War II. The report's emphasis on the duty of the federal government to protect individuals from racial discrimination contained the basis of the liberal credo for decades to come."
"The thirty-four recommendations that appear in the report established the agenda for civil rights reforms for a generation to come. In addition to attacking disenfranchisement and advocating the strengthening of federal law enforcement machinery against racial crimes such as lynching, the document proposed to dismantle segregation throughout American society. It condemned racial separation in housing, interstate transportation, pubic accommodations, the military, and employment. Most remarkable of all was the stand it took against school segregation.* In challenging Jim Crow, the PCCR took aim at the ideology of white supremacy itself. 'The separate but equal doctrine,' the report chided, 'is inconsistent with the fundamental equalitarianism of the American way of life in that it marks groups with the brand of inferior status...There is no adequate defense of segregation.' Seven years later, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court would reach the same conclusion in its historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling."
-- excerpts from To Secure These Rights, edited and with an Introduction by Steven F. Lawson, The Bedford Series in History and Culture, 2004
To view the text of the complete report, click on the image above. To see the original charts and graphs, click here.