1948 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

President Truman sends a message to Congress February 2 proposing passage of a federal anti-lynching law and desegregation of the armed forces, but a Gallup Poll survey shows that a large majority of Americans oppose the ideas.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules May 3 that a state court may not enforce private acts of discrimination (Shelley v. Kraemer). Restrictive covenants in deeds have prohibited sales of houses to minorities, but such covenants are not legally enforceable, the Court rules in an opinion written by Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson.

President Truman addresses the NAACP convention at Kansas City June 29, telling the delegates that there is no justifiable reason for discrimination on the basis of ancestry, religion, race, or color (see 1917). He is the first president ever to address the association; the NAACP decides to give up its fight for equalization of separate black facilities and push instead for integration, especially of schools (see 1954).

Executive Order 9981 ends racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces (see 1945). President Truman signs the order July 26 in response to a civil disobedience campaign organized by A. Philip Randolph (see 1941), and he orders racial integration of federal jobs that the late Woodrow Wilson segregated after becoming president in 1913, but Southern Democrats attack Truman for his policies; federal offices at Washington, D.C., will remain segregated for the most part until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The California Supreme Court strikes down racial discrimination in marriage October 1, ruling 4 to 3 in Perez v. Sharp that a person seeking a license to marry the "wrong" kind of person "finds himself barred by law from marrying the person of his choice and that person to him may be irreplaceable. Human beings are bereft of worth and dignity by a doctrine that would make them as interchangeable as trains." But most other states continue to prohibit interracial marriage (see Loving v. Virginia, 1967).

The U.S. Supreme Court agrees in October to hear an appeal by Elmer Henderson to overturn a federal court's ruling in the racial-segregation case that he filed against the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Southern Railway in 1942. Solicitor General Philip Perlman agrees at the urging of his assistant Philip Elman to tell the high court that dining car segregation is indefensible, and Elman writes a brief saying, in part, "Segregation of Negroes, as practiced in this country, is universally understood as imposing on them a badge of inferiority." The Court rules unanimously that segregated dining cars violate the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, that the practice calls "attention to a racial classification of passengers." While it does not face the constitutionality of segregation per se, the Court begins striking down state rules requiring that blacks attend separate law schools or be segregated in university classrooms (see Brown v. Board of Education, 1954).

South African activist Helen Beatrice May Joseph (née Fennell), 43, obtains a divorce from her dentist husband and helps found the Congress of Democrats, the white wing of the African National Congress, to fight racial discrimination (see politics, 1948). Born in England, Mrs. Joseph served as an information and welfare officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during World War II and later became a social worker in Cape Town and Johannesburg, where she saw the realities of South Africa's racial policies, designed to segregate the races completely except where whites need blacks for menial labor (see 1956).

Israel, Iraq, the Republic of Korea, and the Dutch colony of Surinam grant women the right to vote on the same basis as men (see Iran, 1980).

French authorities in occupied Germany arrest steel mogul Hermann Rechling, 76, on charges of crimes against peace and humanity. Rechling is credited with having developed the Saar Basin's iron and steel industries at the turn of the century; he used slave labor to keep the late Adolf Hitler's war machine supplied with steel during World War II, he receives a prison sentence of 7 years (it will later be extended to 10 but he will serve only 3), his family is expelled from the Saar, and it is denied entrance to its plants (see commerce, 1954).

A Universal Declaration of Human Rights of Man adopted by the United Nations General Assembly at Paris December 10 is based on the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Eleanor Roosevelt has fought for the Declaration (authored primarily by UN Human Rights Commission president René Cassin, 61) and wins a standing ovation at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Hungarian police arrest Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty December 26 for his anticommunist statements (see 1944). Cardinal Mindszenty will have a show trial next year and be sentenced to death, but the sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment (see 1956).