Courting Racial Justice

A sharply observed account of how Harry Truman skirted Congress and used the Justice Department to support the rights of black Americans.


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President Harry Truman is widely heralded for commanding the integration of the armed forces by executive order in 1948. Less recognized is Truman’s bold use of the Justice Department to support the civil rights of black Americans in a variety of significant cases, culminating in the Supreme Court’s famous Brown decision that outlawed school segregation. When Truman ascended to the presidency upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death, black leaders greeted him with skepticism and apprehension. They scarcely expected this undistinguished politician from Missouri to push a civil rights agenda. But Truman surprised them—and in the process confounded Southern Democrats in Congress. How he did it, and his effort’s lasting consequences, are told in this sharply observed account by Robert Shogan, from his forthcoming book.


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Robert Shogan, author of Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice (University Press of Kansas, 2013), for more than thirty years covered politics from Washington for Newsweek and for the Los Angeles Times as national political correspondent. He has written fifteen books on national and political affairs, including Prelude to Catastrophe: FDR’s Jews and the Menace of Nazism; No Sense of Decency:  The Army McCarthy Hearings; Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; and The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America’s Largest Labor Uprising. Mr. Shogan has been adjunct professor of government at the Center for the Study of American Government of the Johns Hopkins University; professional in residence at the Annenberg School of Communication of the University of Pennsylvania; a Robert R. McCormick fellow at the Hoover Presidential Library; and a fellow at the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center in York City. Among many prizes, he has received the American Political Science Association award for Distinguished Reporting of Public Affairs. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.