Truman pushed civil rights despite white opposition, citing America’s world position

Evidence

On February 2, 1948, Truman urged Congress to implement the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, regardless of the lack of support among White Americans. “[The] position of the United States in the world today” made civil rights “especially urgent,” Truman stressed. The backlash was significant. One Texas representative kicked off his winning US Senate campaign by rallying 10,000 supporters in Austin to view Truman’s civil rights proposals as “a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.” Lyndon Baines Johnson did not, however, join the “Dixiecrats” who bolted from the Democratic Party on account of Truman’s civil rights agenda. The Dixiecrats ran South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond for president on a segregationist platform that read eerily like South Africa’s apartheid Nationalist Party, which rose to power in 1948. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 914

Categorization

• SHARE: The LBJ tidbit — that Johnson notably did NOT join the Dixiecrat walkout on civil rights, years before the Voting Rights Act — is exactly the kind of detail a Johnson scholar or political-history friend would enjoy.
• XREF: connects to: President Truman sought to execute congressionally prescribed policy, disputing Black’s framing — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2934