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This study evaluates executive orders issued by President Franklin Roosevelt and President Harry Truman before and after World War II, analyzing how black and white newspapers across the United States responded to the presidents’ attempts to addressing segregation and civil rights, while illustrating the diversity and complexity of national newspaper coverage. Current historical scholarship often portrays the two presses as being diametrically different to one another, ignoring instances where their coverage mirrored, or at least expressed similar sentiments, to the other. As a result, this thesis demonstrates that despite the black and white press having fundamental differences of background and opinions, their coverage surrounding Executives Order 8802 and 9981 paralleled at times, on account of their editors’ nuanced opinions, their regionality in the U.S., and each papers’ political affiliations.
Executive Order 8802, signed into law on June 25, 1941, barred government agencies and defense industry contractors from maintaining segregated hiring practices and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to oversee this process. The order represented one of the federal government’s earliest shifts into addressing segregation and African Americans’ rights since Reconstruction. Meanwhile, Executive Order 9981, issued by President Truman on July 26, 1948, ordered that all branches of the United States military desegregate, similarly establishing a committee to oversee the process. In both cases, the presidents’ orders produced a range of reactions throughout the black and white press, editors and readers responding with a mix of optimism, skepticism, or disregard. The two orders represented a watershed moment in the country’s history as World War II provided African Americans with new justifications for expanded civil and labor rights. Additionally, the orders emboldened members of the black press and the African American public, as social movements in favor of desegregation, both led by A. Philip Randolph, played substantial roles in moving the presidents to action while demonstrating the effectiveness of mass political mobilization.
This thesis utilizes twelve prominent national newspapers from the 1940s (six from the black press and six from the white press), as well oral histories by black and white editors, to demonstrate the complexity of American press coverage and to argue that Executive Orders 8802 and 9981 elucidated a diverse range of responses across either press with opinions that intersected over racial, regional and political lines. In addition, it describes how the orders profoundly affected African Americans’ support for each president before and after World War II, with President Roosevelt ensuring African Americans’ support for the war effort in 1941 while elevating President Truman’s chances in 1948 presidential election. Finally, this thesis discusses the relationship between the newspapers and their readers, detailing instances where the American public disagreed with local and national publications’ opinions on occasion, demonstrating that while newspapers often shaped opinions, other social circumstances may have moved their readers to disagree with them.
Overall, this thesis highlights black and white newspapers’ diverse opinions. This is most effectively expressed in relation to Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces, where elements of both presses were laudatory and skeptical about its staying power and whether to support Truman in the 1948 presidential election. The response to Executive Order 8802, represented a pre-WWII position where the white press largely disregarded African American issues and civil rights’ progress. As a result, the analysis elucidates this shift in attention by white newspapers, detailing how World War II affected how the United States viewed itself.