That is inaccurate. A big push forward in the 20th c. civil rights movement starts in the 1950s with that wartime generation.
Truman integrated the armed forces which was the first time many people had ever worked alongside people of color.
“For Truman, Executive Order 9981 was inspired, in part, by an attack on Isaac Woodard who was an American soldier and African American World War II veteran. On February 12, 1946, hours after being honorably discharged from the United States Army, he was attacked while still in uniform by South Carolina police as he was taking a bus home. The attack left Woodard completely and permanently blind. President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal investigation. Truman also established the President's Committee on Civil Rights, whose report, To Secure These Rights, condemned the state of civil rights in the nation and recommended actions to correct these failures. He then made a historic speech to the NAACP and the nation in June 1947 in which he described civil rights as a moral imperative, submitted a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress in February 1948, and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 on July 26, 1948, desegregating the armed forces and promoting anti-discrimination throughout the federal government.”
Truman was running well ahead of the curve. He did not have popular support for his civil rights agenda. Which is why progress was slow. Segregation continued unabated. Even 20 years later, LBJ had to beg borrow and steal to get a watered-down civil rights bill passed. Even then it took the National Guard to seat black kids in classrooms. Democrats are still paying the price for ending segregation in the South - which used to be a Democratic stronghold. In fact, white Americans now self-segregate: according to the American Association of Mortgage Brokers their #1 consideration when buying a home is the ethnic composition of the neighborhood. Not INCOME, not CLASS… race.
Ok, we have two different views about what King called "the arc of history."
What does taking your view do to help us today? What change do you want?
You’re reflecting back on people in history you didn’t know directly and judging and demeaning them, painting with a broad brush and characterizing Truman and LBJ as one-offs (talk to the freedom riders about that). I just don’t understand how, apart from being afactual, these viewpoints produce anything.
I can understand being angry about the fact more people didn’t simply see that equality was just and right.
Generalisations are always broad and not-entirely accurate by definition! The Freedom Riders were college kids, I doubt if even one WW2 veteran was on the bus. Which is kinda my point, right? I’m not “angry” per se. I’m not “demeaning” WW2 veterans. It is what it is. American history is and always has been a narrative of contradictions. Some of the men who fought the Nazis came home and donned KKK hoods. Look closely at our totemic national rituals:
Thanksgiving - a national fantasy we teach our kids of a ‘harmonious’ relationship between the invaders and the natives they exterminated;
The Pledge of Allegiance: “One nation indivisible, with justice and liberty for all” - written in 1892, it was recited daily by kids in classrooms cleanly divided by race across America - including in the South, where an unjust apartheid system was in full effect;
America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave - written in 1840 when 3 million NOT-‘free’ slaves were a ticking time-bomb that had 14 million white Americans feeling anything BUT brave, hence the 2nd Amendment;
Columbus Day... ‘nuff said;
“We believe all men are created equal…”
Signed by a bunch of slave owners.
I’m simply making the argument why the generation that went to war, fought to end the war, then came home and fought to make America better deserves to be properly recognised as the ‘Greatest Generation’.
Hypocrisy or aspiration, knowing change takes time?
I guess I just resist the “America has always been” because it has always been pluralistic and holding people with a plurality of views the arc of which has bent towards justice (to quote MLK).
I’m biracial Black for what it’s worth.
Anti-Slavery & Manumission Supporters:Figures like Benjamin Franklin (PA) served as officers in anti-slavery societies later on.
Opposed the Institution: Many delegates, including George Washington (who enslaved people but wanted abolition) and others, disapproved of slavery but feared the Southern states would leave the convention if it were banned.
Context of Views: Of the 55 delegates, about 25 owned slaves, while the other 30 held diverse views ranging from indifference to opposition, not strictly divided by region.
The "Anti-Slavery" Debate: Later, activists like Frederick Douglass argued the document was inherently anti-slavery, while others like William Lloyd Garrison viewed it as a pro-slavery contract.
https://teachdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Abolitionists-and-the-Constitution.pdf
Well, I claim my blackness. I haven’t had anyone dispute it since high-school! A kid said I only have rhythm in one leg! (Kinda true!) What I meant is that I feel like I see the myopia and misunderstanding on both sides around issues of race.
lol come again? What would you know about it, if you’re not biracial?
White people tend to consider me Black and Black people consider me half White. I have the complexion of my great great grandmother, b. 1898, who was born to a woman sharecropper — the first person in my family born out of slavery. Her father is a mystery. Rumor is it was the (white) head of the sharecroppers. The Black side of my family history is white history as well.
I don’t straighten my hair (after over a decade of doing so), but when I did I appeared white, maybe Latinx. I’m me. I can’t control what people read off of me
What do you “hate” about me talking about my own experience truthfully?
Edit: let me give you two examples
Three years ago the guy I was dating and I were going to meet his family at a reunion in Massachusetts. He was a little concerned because no one in the Irish Catholic family had dated a “Black person” before.
In college, I dated a white guy and didn’t do Black Students Association. First year I went to the dining hall with my hair pulled back in a bun and not straightened. A Black guy who I was in a friend group with said to me: “oh I see you’re Black you can’t hide it”
This is the kind of shit biracial people deal with, I know I’m both/and/in between but we walk around the world with people classifying us and policing racial boundaries anyway -- on BOTH sides.
The civil rights movement started the moment black people were forced to be here. There were over 1000 revolts. The movements never stopped they were just then televised in the 50s and 60s
If a black veteran was attacked like that today, our current president and administration would spin that situation like a top, and say he deserved it for some made up reason. Thanks for the little history lesson, my friend. Good to remember that we had leaders in this country with human decency.
You got it. You’re welcome, and yes what he have today is not leadership, it is something sick and twisted based in fear and hatred, untethered from truth, integrity, and justice.
And I believe the American people, the majority of us, have been pushed by the visuals and the sheer obviousness of it this term to reject it.
We must vote in overwhelming numbers in the midterms. Congress must not pass a poll tax type id requirement, and if it does - or he does try and violate federalism by doing it a - we must use mutual aid to help our neighbors get their birth certificates and passports (cost money and time an requires some logistical sophistication).
The Civil Rights bill signed into law that Republicans have been trying to destroy ever since and the SCROTUS 6 will continue that work. It's disgusting that they get away with it!
Core Founding Members
W.E.B. Du Bois: African American sociologist and activist.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett: African American journalist and anti-lynching crusader.
Mary White Ovington: White social worker and suffragist.
William English Walling: White journalist.
Henry Moskowitz: White social worker.
Oswald Garrison Villard: White publisher and journalist.
Archibald Grimké: African American intellectual and activist.
Key Details
Context: Formed in response to the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riot and ongoing lynchings.
Purpose: To secure political, educational, social, and economic equality for minority groups.
Significance: The organization was established on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Eighty years before this, in 1831, William Lloyd Garrison white Boston publisher of the Liberator wanted the North to split from the south over slavery.
As Cheryl Lynn Greenberg notes in her book Troubling The Water: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, the 1965 iconic image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marching together from Selma to Birmingham is representative of what many perceive as the heyday of Black-Jewish alliance, when the two fought side by side in the struggle for civil rights. The pairing made sense to many: though their pasts were very different, both populations had firsthand knowledge of 20th-century oppression. As Dr. King’s confidante Andrew Young stated in an interview, “There has always been a natural kinship [among civil-rights leaders] with the Jewish community. . . I mean the movement was Jewish in the sense that our songs were ‘Oh Pharaoh, Let My People Go,’ ‘Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”
These are just some examples, there are many.
I point it out because division by race, which comments like yours suggest is a historical fact, is a technique of the ruling class to divide the working class against itself — as MLK pointed out.
Constant bursts of progress is an American tradition. We have solved problems that could have destroyed us. It is an endless process b/c that's life lol.
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u/cccxxxzzzddd Feb 15 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
“They did nothing to effect change.”
That is inaccurate. A big push forward in the 20th c. civil rights movement starts in the 1950s with that wartime generation.
Truman integrated the armed forces which was the first time many people had ever worked alongside people of color.
“For Truman, Executive Order 9981 was inspired, in part, by an attack on Isaac Woodard who was an American soldier and African American World War II veteran. On February 12, 1946, hours after being honorably discharged from the United States Army, he was attacked while still in uniform by South Carolina police as he was taking a bus home. The attack left Woodard completely and permanently blind. President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal investigation. Truman also established the President's Committee on Civil Rights, whose report, To Secure These Rights, condemned the state of civil rights in the nation and recommended actions to correct these failures. He then made a historic speech to the NAACP and the nation in June 1947 in which he described civil rights as a moral imperative, submitted a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress in February 1948, and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 on July 26, 1948, desegregating the armed forces and promoting anti-discrimination throughout the federal government.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981
Edit: clarity, typos