world." it's now my great honor to introduce the man who will officially open our proceedings, the 41st president of the united states, george herbert walker bush. [ applause ] >> let me start by saluting our friends at the john f. kennedy presidential library and museum for launching their jfk 50 justice for all program. i'm particularly happy to single out carolyn kennedy and todd putnam as well as bringham mccutchen and jay zimmer for making this program a reality. your topic strikes a real chord with me, as a young congressman from texas, i well remember the open housing vote back in 1968. i voted with those who were fighting to give americans of all races and creeds the chance to buy a good home and a good neighborhood.

later, as president, we got the americans with disabilities act passed, to make sure that tens of millions with disabilities had fuller access to the american dream. of course, these two instances are only part of a broader struggle for civil rights here at this forum and at other programs, you can learn how and why so many americans across this great land came together for a noble cause, basic human dignity, equal opportunity under the law, recognizing our diversity as a strength and a blessing. these are the values that define more than a movement, but a nation realizing its destiny, our potential for greatness. barbara joins me in sending our best wishes for an informative and enjoyable event. [ applause ]

>> so good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all so much for coming on behalf of my colleague, tom mcnaught, executive director of the kennedy library foundation, i want to especially thank the archivists of the united states for being here and opening our proceedings. i also want to thank the law firm of bingham mccutcheon, who are the underwriters of a special initiative called jfk 50, justice for all. and they've helped to sponsor today's conference. i'd also like to thank our media sponsors wbur and the "boston globe." we could have an hour and a half or whole conference on franklin roosevelt and civil rights and you'll see from your schedule that we only have about 20 minutes to do that, and i was suggesting to allida, who is an expert on both franklin and eleanor roosevelt, that their courtship lasted about two years and trying to cover this topic in 20 minutes is a bit like the modern phenomenon of speed dating, so we'll do our best to

cover this topic. fortunately, allida is not only a wonderful storyteller but a very fast talker, so allida, there's a debate among historians about franklin roosevelt and civil rights and maybe you -- when he became president, he faced a country that was not only facing depression, but was a seg gated nation. and like president kennedy and others, he faced conservative leaders in congress and within his own party and so as he was trying to put forth legislation, if he moved too quickly on integration in terms of some of that legislation, that could have held back some of his other legislative accomplishments. so give us the quick gloss of franklin roosevelt and civil rights. >> this is like doing my whole life in 15 seconds, just so you know. [ laughter ] >> well, i think first of all, we have to remember that the democratic party was profoundly southern and a western party so

when roosevelt comes into office he has not yet realigned the party to become the party that we all know today, but so it's quite interesting to me that some of the things that immediately happened with the staff that he picks. i mean, you immediately integrate -- and i use that word deliberately -- you abolish segregation in federal cafeterias in the interior department and other places. when, in fact, d.c. is a profoundly segregated city, and was segregated by a democrat, woodrow wilson. so his appointments, i think, are quite interesting in that way. you've got harold ickies, harry hopkins, aubrey williams, and of course, the incomparable mary mcleod bethune. who before september 11th i used to lump with eleanor roosevelt and say they were the twin towers of the pre-war civil rights movement.

so there's a huge risk taking mind-set there. now, does that mean that it goes as far as we want? no. but i have been all over the map on this and i have come to a very eleanor-like conclusion. and that is, you can look at a glass and you can see it half- empty or you can see the water keep increasing. and what i think both roosevelts did was really introduce to america the concept that the federal government was not just for the forgotten man or for the forgotten woman, but as fdr said when he spoke at howard, not only will there be no forgotten men, there will be no forgotten races. so we have policies. we have two executive orders that fdr issues, one for the wpa, the works progress administration, that outlaws segregation in wpa hiring practices, and then you have the fair employment practices commission doing that for the defense industry. now, do they work?

no. do they help some people? yes. is there a long way that we have to go? yes. do we still have to do it now? yes. but when you look at this, i want you to remember that they were the first executive orders passed or any type of federal legislation since reconstruction, which i think says a lot. also, if you look at the risks that they took in terms of setting up the civil rights division of the justice department, and although i'm supposed to talk about fdr and my colleagues at the project will expect me and pardon me as will the fdr library people to say you cannot talk about fdr and race without talking about eleanor. eleanor traveled without secret service protection. there were assassination attempts on her life, not threats, attempts, as first lady. the ku klux klan places the largest bounty in history on her head. they firebomb trees next to revolutionary era churches that

she spoke in, in north carolina, in 1937, 1938, when she's talking about the poll tax, she joined polly murray in chairing the national commission to abolish the poll tax, and so there were profound risks that were taken. and if i may sort of goad friendly with great respect to my colleagues who write on this, for once -- just for once, please, as a favor to me, when you when i about fdr and you write about race, will you please say that people were trying to kill his wife and in a she could have shut up if he said to her on this you will not cross me? like he did in internment? there's a huge difference here, and the untold story of the roosevelts and race, which if i could ever go back and be a fly on a wall and engage in the what if school of history moment would be the conversations that they had one on one about the

risk that she was taking to aggressively change her position from being truly separate but equal, but moving toward integration. and so by the time that garner murdell and ralph bunch do their landmark study, the american dilemma, ralph bunch will say, of all the people that i have interviewed in the united states, the person on whose sincerity i have no doubt is eleanor roosevelt. now, when you get to the war, which i guess we'll talk about, you'll really see the impact there, but, and the other thing about we all want anti-lynching passed. i grew up in memphis. i'm not that chunky white child on the back of the wall in 1968, when dr. king was giving the mountaintop speech. i was two blocks away when he was assassinated at the lorraine motel. it changed my life. nobody on the planet wants fdr

to engage in the anti-lynching legislation more than i do, but let's look at 1934 and let's see what dubois says when fdr calls lynching murder. he's the first president in the history of the united states to call it murder, and w.e.b. dubois editorializes on the front page of "the crisis." fdr does not support the legislation in '35, '36, '37 or '38 when it comes up, by 1938, eleanor roosevelt spends seven days sitting in the gallery of the united states senate, and she's surrounded by civil rights leaders, all people of color. when they ask her what eleanor is doing, she says, "i am bearing witness," and that to me is a powerful, powerful statement. so you have to look at, granted there was no legislation passed, but there were internal policies changed. there was eleanor's outspokenness.

there was her literally putting her life on the line for this, and there were executive orders written, and the justice department created. so i look at his record as a huge step forward to help jump-start where we want to be. was that good in three minutes? [ laughter ] >> i've never done it this fast. ever. [ applause ] >> so let's move to another small topic. [ laughter ] >> the desegregation of the armed forces, we'll have a panel that's going to talk about president truman, but where did fdr stand, and i think it would be of interest to people that, you know, who have seen the recent movie on the tuskegee airmen. did he know those stories? his main accident was to win the his main intent was to win war but how did he face this issue? >> well, fdr always thought that the primary responsibility was to win the war. there was never any doubt in his mind about doing that. fdr did instruct the war

department to, in fact, allow to remove the barriers placed in front of african-americans who wanted to enlist and serve. at this point 9% of the population was african-american. less than 1% were allowed to serve in the united states military. now, for those of you who may be suspect to propaganda and say, only 1% of the african-americans served in the draft, there were laws that prevented people from enlisting. and so fdr worked with the war department, who was profoundly opposed to this to, in fact, remove barriers. it didn't work that much. it went from 1% to 5% as opposed to 9%. if you go back again, the glass is half-full. when fdr meets with a. philip

randolph and walter wright and leaders from the urban league to discuss this, it's the exact same day that the tripartite pact is announced. that means at the same time he's learning that germany, japan and russia all have signed a pack against us. and when randolph and company come, they come in a meeting eleanor has facilitated. they have a list of seven demands. of those demands, four are met. the full integration of the service is not met, obviously, because that's left for truman to do. the steps that fdr does take, i think, are not just incremental, but are a slap in the face. he has gotten rave reviews for changing his cabinet and bringing in a new secretary of war and a new secretary of the navy. they're republicans, it's supposed to be a bipartisan cabinet.

and they are absolutely adamantly opposed to any activity that will advance negros through the ranks. simpson says leadership is not embedded in the negro race. he's secretary of war. the secretary of the navy knox says he will resign if in fact this happens. what does fdr do? he brings the dean of the law school to be simpson's aide. he appoints a colonel to advise the african-american colonel to advise the selective service. and he gives simpson, the first african-american general to, in fact, ride sort of roughshod on them.

the big obstacle in this, however, is george marshall. if you're go to look who's going to block a lot of stuff, fdr doesn't push hard but marshall says not on my watch. we got to win the war. eleanor works to have the 99th squadron, the tuskegee airmen through. she works to have african-american women who want to become nurses do this. there's a riot in that. eleanor goes to the city the night after the riot to calm things down. stays with the waves and in fact insists the swimming pools they're in to train in be integrated so they can have the same training that their white counterparts are. so it's complicated. >> let's go to another complicated issue, which is japanese interment. probably the case in history where the federal government actually imprisons people based on race and ethnicity. >> i wouldn't say it's the first time.

but i would say it's one of the major times. there's no doubt in my mind that fdr considered the emergency of wartime overrode civil liberties protections. there's just no doubt in my mind about this. he looked at a lot of precedents. he knew immediately. it was a decision that was greatly opposed within the administration. eleanor, for one, strongly opposed it. as did the attorney general of the united states, bittel, as did the military command in hawaii. as did justice douglas, who really violated legal protocol when he met with eleanor to advise her on arguments to present to the president. but fdr -- i think the best book on this is a shoutout to my friend greg robinson whose book order of the president is hands down i think the best study of this.

and i think greg is absolutely right, that fdr did not think it through in the sense of thinking there would be long-range questions of patriotism or, you know, suspicion of people or really understand the theft of property that went on. and so when there is a riot in manson r. camps and the heila river in july of -- i mean in the summer of 1943, he sends eleanor out to meet with them. and i know that they had numerous conversations on this. there's not a shred of paper anywhere in the world on it i give you my word, i've looked for it since the day that i was born, you know? it's not there. i strongly suspect there were countless conversations about this. eleanor wanted to adopt japanese-american families to

get them out of camps, she wrote countless letters attesting to people's patriotism. she facilitated their entry into the war. i would stake my mortgage and my soul on the fact that there were conversations about this that we'll never be privy to. >> let's end with you giving us the back story to the iconic concert that marianne anderson gave at the lincoln memorial. >> well, i love eleanor roosevelt. i love franklin roosevelt. their pictures are in every room of my house. we have to give harold ickes a shoutout. he's the one that really got the lincoln memorial. we need to give both roosevelts credit for is eleanor's understanding of how to use her newspaper column, "my day," to turn this concert in from a local, i.e., regional

washington, d.c., slap in the face, to turn it into a national civil rights event. when eleanor resigned from the d.a.r. in 1939 that column goes on the front page of 483 newspapers, and marianne anderson stays on the front page of 483 newspapers for seven weeks. and it's eleanor who goes to the radio programs to say, you -- you know, basically in polite eleanor language, which i will never in my life be accused of having, if you want me on the radio, you need to carry this. and so it's eleanor's pressure on the radio stations that make it the first live coast-to-coast nationally broadcast radio event in the history of radio. she also works with walter white to schedule the concert at 4:00 in the afternoon, so churches around the country,

african-american churches in particular, on easter sunday, can have picnics. and she suggests to walter white that perhaps they can make arrangements for those collections that are kept to be donated to the naacp, and the collections that are are raised that day are the second largest donation in the history of the naacp, only surpassed by duke ellington's national concert tour when he gave the proceeds of that to the naacp. she also had -- before the -- the debacle that was -- the insult to marianne anderson, eleanor invited her to the white house, she had stayed in the white house. eleanor had talked about her voice in the column and said singing, hearing marianne anderson singing is like sitting in the lap of god. and after the concert, eleanor went july 4, 1939, to richmond, the capital of the confederacy,

where she gives marianne anderson the spring arm medal and gives a speech on -- in nonconfrontational terms about the horror that unequal education inflicts on the united states. so in many ways, to me, the back story of marianne anderson is how this extraordinary woman got the courage to come up and shift from being an artist to a symbol which she knew absolutely she was going to become, she was terrified of doing it. i talked with her before she died, and the courage that she took with the support that she got from eleanor, the friendship that developed about that, the phone calls, the letters that went back and forth, together really is a phenomenal story, and it does my heart good to know that when dr. king stood on the steps of the lincoln memorial, he stood on the exact

same spot, and in my lexicon, the two angels that sat on his shoulder were marianne and eleanor. [ applause ] >> so we did it, fdr and civil rights in 20 minutes much >> we really did it see, did i it. >> thank you very much. we're going to try to start the next panel in literally four or five minutes. we'll bring some chairs up and bring our next group of panelists up. >> good afternoon, everybody. good morning, late early day, whatever. i always think it's nice if you are marking the occasion, and we are, of presidents' day, to say a little bit of something about the presidents for whom this day is named. and that's george washington and abraham lincoln, i found something from george washington i thought was appropriate for our conversation. let me share it with you.

george washington, we should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience. and i think no better way to discuss this, because we got some useful lessons out of the presidency and the civil rights movement, and certainly we profited dearly by experience and that's george washington on this presidents' day. so our task is to answer a couple of questions. this discussion is about truman and eisenhower, and the questions on your book will say what prompted president truman to issue the 1948 executive order to desegregate the armed forces, declaring that there should be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services? and similarly, how did president eisenhower decide to call in the united states army to little rock and to federalize the arkansas national guard? now, we're going to answer those questions. the first thing to do is to put this in context, so i'm going to

ask our historians, both carol and david, to do that right now. and that is to say, as i look at this time period with truman and eisenhower, it struck me that two wars really frame the civil rights movement and the interaction and the response of the presidents. so, if you would, david, actually, carol, if you would, talk to me about truman and at that time where we were as a nation and while this world war ii, these african-americans coming back after world war ii started to make a difference in how people thought about civil rights. >> when you think about it, the second world war was an amazing war because it was the war against the nazis. it was a war where both roosevelt and churchill had issued the atlantic charter, and that atlantic charter talked about the four freedoms. african-americans works were dealing with double-digit unemployment, who were dealing with massive jim crow, dealing

with the systematic denial of the right to education, who were basically dealing with the systematic denial of the basic and civil and human rights looked at these four freedoms and you start getting mass mobilization and organization within their organization such as the naacp. and you also got veterans, veterans who were fighting in this war, understanding that when you are fighting against the nazis, you know, this is the era of the double "v" campaign and this doesn't mean peace. this is the double "v" campaign. victory against the nazis overseas and the nazis at home, and this is what is framing and stealing these veterans who are then coming back to the united states determined that the u.s. will live up to what is called its vaunted democracy. will live up to its bill of rights. these veterans were not playing. and when you begin to think about some of the key leaders in the civil rights movement, these are black veterans coming out of the second world war. >> david? >> well, i'd go to president

truman right away, i think, because carol understands that international perspective so much better than i ever would. but president truman i think did issue the executive order in 1948 for two basic reasons. one was his own personal conviction. the other was he was in the fight of his life for an election. and he issues it on july 26th, 1948, and calculation of black votes in that is apparent. i don't mean that's the only motivation. these are complicated people, eisenhower and truman, and they do things for multiple reasons. and i think from -- from an african-american perspective, all of these guys don't quite get it sometimes, but they still were in a political context where they were trying to do things, so truman issued that order in 1948. the story i'll want to get into, when we have time, is that he didn't enforce it very well until we got into korea and then they began to be some desegregation in the armed forces in korea, but four years later, most of the american combat units were still segregated.

dwight eisenhower did most of that, and frankly i think it's a disgrace to my profession that the textbooks still say truman did it without mentioning eisenhower when eisenhower came in, most of the units were still segregated, and by october of 1954 there wasn't a single segregated combat unit left. >> so, ernie, i'm just going to ask you from a personal standpoint if you, as a young man then, remember the impact of uncles, brothers, whomever coming back from the war and a change in a sentiment at that time. >> well, i had an experience, my dad actually fought in world war i, and he went to france, and i always wanted to know why would you go to the army and then come back home, and you couldn't vote, the world was segregated, and that was an atmosphere that i grew up in. and i think that the returning veterans, african-american

veterans in the south, really had a lot to do. it's what i think is one of the untold stories about the civil rights movement, is that these men for the most part came back home after freeing germany, and when they came back home, they met the same issues. as they say s.o.s., same old stuff. >> thank you for the stuff. >> yeah. >> and that that really was sort of an underpinning, that in many of these communities you found activism resulting from that, and in my case, in little rock, the weekly paper, the bates, daisy bates and her husband l.c.

ran, he was a veteran of world war ii, and you felt the impact of that. >> okay. >> it was something -- and the other point about it is that it probably -- it spurred activism in a lot of ways. my mother was a schoolteacher, and she was part of the suit that -- for equal pay between black and white teachers. in fact, a lot of the public school deseg cases arose out of equal teacher pay activity. and the lawyer that argued the case in the '40s in little rock was bhar shall, arthur god marshall. and you get brushed again, that thurgood marshall couldn't stay in the holiday inn or the sheraton or whatever in little rock. he was staying at various houses, and they stayed -- he stayed at our house for a couple of times. so being involved in it -- in

this unintended consequences out of the return of black veterans, i think, had a lot to do with spurring the modern civil rights movement. >> callie, permit me to dramatize that briefly. >> mm-hmm. >> when an african-american veteran came back to visit the nation's capital, even as late as 1953, a black person could not attend a movie, buy a meal, get a hotel room or find a restroom in downtown washington, d.c., the capitol. and again, i'll be dwight eisenhower's advocate, because he desegregated all of that within about a year and a half. most of it was gone not in the entire district th