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Review
| To Secure These Rights: The Report of Harry S Truman's Committee on Civil Rights, by Steven F. Lawson, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.
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| Any instructor teaching the civil rights movement must choose from a formidable array of materials including thousands of primary and secondary sources. This slim volume includes the 142-page Truman committee report (first released in 1947) with a new 41-page introduction along with a chronology, questions for consideration, an index, and a bibliography by noted civil rights historian, Steven F. Lawson. Thus, this book contains two distinct voices. Both should engage students of history in an interesting discussion of the origins of the direct action civil rights movement. Lawson's material provides much needed context for the report. He makes the case that many of the seeds of the civil rights movement are contained in this report issued before the middle of the 1950s, generally considered the beginning of the movement. |
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The Truman Committee Report shares the strengths and weaknesses of other presidential reports on civil rights. After the Truman report, there were several influential reports by other presidential commissions, including the much better-known Kerner and the Moynihan reports under Lyndon B. Johnson which appeared two decades later. Like those later reports, the Truman Committee Report had the advantage of economic and social research, available to a presidential committee, at its base. Further, the carefully selected and diverse experts on the committee were able to craft a measured, liberal consensus statement. This statement provided a scathing indictment of the many forms of segregation, linked that injustice to the larger economic and social well-being of the nation, and offered precise suggestions for addressing the problem. At points, the report is almost charmingly naive, at other points it is embarrassingly paternalistic. These weaknesses proved difficult to avoid in reports of this type. Presidential commissions and committees cannot avoid the problem of a "top-down" perspective. While these weaknesses may have limited the Truman Committee's effectiveness in shaping the course of events in 1947, they serve now to enhance our understanding, as historians, of the role of government in shaping that course, thus making this book all the more useful. Despite these weaknesses, this report is remarkable for its insights into the problems facing the African-American community at the end of World War II and the meaning of those problems for the nation as a whole. Moreover, the report is prescient regarding the difficulties that awaited any serious attempts to remedy racial injustice. |
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The text of the report is deceptively timeless. The conclusions about the harm caused to the larger society by racism would likely have been challenging and novel to an American audience in 1947. A few decades later, however, that same text appears safe or even "politically correct." Today, little controversy would be stirred by a report that claims, "We should not fail to make use of [national power] in combating civil rights violations." (p. 127) Nor would any serious public figure today disagree that in 1947, "It is particularly unfortunate that the jury system has not always served to protect the right of the minority member to a fair trial." (p. 69) However, in 1947, many in Congress would have argued that there was nothing amiss in the South and more still would have balked at applying national power to the problem. While the bold statements of 1947 have become the truisms of today, the report is jarringly dated in other places. Lawson and the publisher wisely chose to leave the tables and illustrations from the original report in this reproduction. More effectively than the text, these graphics situate the report in its time. For example, one table, "The Bases of Job Discrimination" (p. 91) depicts "Negroes" with solid, featureless black faces and Mexican-Americans with little sombreros. The use of stereotypes for racial minorities in a ground-breaking report challenging racism is just the kind of contradiction that could be the basis of a fruitful discussion about how a society with unexamined racist assumptions was able to begin to examine itself and its assumptions. The story of the civil rights movement often becomes a bland celebration of superhuman heroes. That this remarkable report was also clearly the product of very real humans with disparate perspectives should make it a valuable tool for approaching the struggle for African-American civil rights. |
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| De Paul University, Chicago |
Benton Williams |
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