January 26, 1948 – President Truman Signs Executive Order Ending Segregation in U.S. Armed Forces

Executive Order 9981 was issued on this day in history, July 26, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. It abolished discrimination “on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin” in the United States Armed Forces.

A post on the history blog of the National Archives points out that the order does not have the word “desegregate” anywhere in it. They explain:

While President Truman felt strongly that everyone should have an equal chance to advance in the military, or obtain a job with the Federal government, he did not agree with the concept of social equality. Desegregation implied a different set of ideas, ones that made Truman, fundamentally a Southerner, uncomfortable. Years later, during the sit-ins at lunch counters and other civil rights protests, former President Truman spoke out against the young people participating in that movement, implying they were inspired by Communists.”

In a book on this landmark order, Freedom to Serve: Truman, Civil Rights, and Executive Order 9981 by Jon E. Taylor (Routledge, 2013), the author recounts that on July 24, 1998, General Colin Powell went to Independence, Missouri, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Executive Order (EO). Powell recalled in his speech that he was eleven when Truman issued the EO, and “he knew there were places he could not go, opportunities he could not have. There were dreams he dared not dream.” But he entered the military in 1958, noting:

The military was the only institution in all of America – because of Harry Truman – where a young black kid, now twenty-one years old, could dream the dream he dared not think about at age eleven. It was the one place where the only thing that counted was courage, where the color of your guts and the color of your blood was more important than  the color of your skin.”

General Colin Powell