Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the
United
States from 1933 through 1945, in January 1941 called on all
governments to assure their citizens freedom from want and fear,
as well as freedom of speech and worship. Credit: USIA Files.
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Although Roosevelt saw himself
very much in
the tradition of
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in terms of his concern for
political rights, he was, by necessity, preoccupied with the
problems of poverty and basic economic needs. The outbreak of war
in Europe in 1939 forced Roosevelt to turn from the country's
pressing domestic problems and begin considering the kind of
world that might emerge from the devastation of so many millions.
In January of 1941, in what came to be known as the "Four
Freedoms" address, Roosevelt called on all governments to
guarantee their citizens freedom from want and fear, as well as
freedom of speech and worship.
In August 1941, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill agreed on the Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed a
broad vision of a new postwar world order based on democracy,
freedom, disarmament, and international cooperation. In January
1942, two dozen nations fighting Japan and Nazi Germany adopted
the charter's basic principles. Roosevelt's term "the United
Nations" was used for the first time in this document.
In December 1941, the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The viciousness of the attack and fear of
Asian espionage led the U.S. government to inter
Japanese-Americans without due process of law. In February 1942,
nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans residing in California were
removed from their homes and placed behind barbed wire in 10
temporary camps, later to be moved to "relocation centers"
outside isolated southwestern towns. More than 60 percent of
these Japanese-Americans were American born and were U.S.
citizens. No evidence of espionage ever surfaced. In fact,
Japanese-Americans from Hawaii and the continental United States
fought with distinction on the Italian front, while others served
as interpreters and translators in the Pacific. Although the
exclusion of the Japanese from the U.S. West Coast was upheld in
1944 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Korematsu v. U.S., in
1983, the
U.S. government acknowledged the injustice of its actions with
payments to those Japanese-Americans of that era who were still
living.
Throughout World War II, Roosevelt remained intensely interested
in the peace to follow and in establishing effective
international institutions to promote the fundamental human
rights of all mankind, not just Americans. As political
philosopher Isaiah Berlin said, Roosevelt's vision of
international responsibility made him a hero "to the indigent and
oppressed far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world."
Roosevelt's belief that a better world lay ahead after the war
never dimmed. "The great fact to remember is that the trend of
civilization is forever upward," he noted in his January 1945
inaugural address -- his fourth and his last. At the time he died
later in 1945, the United Nations and the international financial
institutions he had done so much to create were well on their way
to becoming enduring institutions. In contrast to the years
following World War I, when the United States rejected membership
in the League of Nations and adopted a policy of isolationism,
its participation in the 1945 San Francisco conference to erect
the framework of the United Nations signaled to the world that
the United States intended to play a key role in international
affairs.
T
he Civil Rights Movement
The changes that Franklin Roosevelt and World War II wrought upon
the United States helped begin the process of extending the full
benefits of freedom to African-Americans. Despite the Bill of
Rights, amendments to the U.S. Constitution granting full
citizenship rights, and numerous presidential executive orders,
African-Americans continued to suffer from widespread, blatant,
and often legal discrimination.
African-Americans became increasingly restive in the postwar
years. During the war they had challenged discrimination in the
military services and in the work force, and they had made
limited gains. Millions of blacks had left southern farms for
northern cities, where they hoped to find better jobs. They
found, instead, crowded conditions in urban slums. Now, black
servicemen returned home, intent on rejecting second-class
citizenship, as other blacks began to argue that the time was
ripe for racial equality.
Blacks in the South then enjoyed few, if any, civil and political
rights. More than one million black soldiers had fought in World
War II, but those who came from the South could not vote. Blacks
who tried to register to vote faced the likelihood of beatings,
loss of jobs, loss of credit, or eviction from their land.
Lynchings still occurred, and Jim Crow laws enforced segregation
of the races in street cars, trains, hotels, restaurants,
hospitals, recreational facilities, and employment.
President Harry Truman, a Democrat, supported the campaign for
civil rights, and he responded by sending a 10-point civil rights
program to the Congress. When southern Democrats, angry about a
strong civil rights stance, left the Democratic party in 1948,
Truman issued an executive order barring discrimination in
federal employment, ordered equal treatment in the armed forces,
and appointed a committee to work toward an end to military
segregation.
Blacks also began to take matters into their own hands. In the
years after slavery ended, blacks had formed scores of
nongovernmental organizations to organize and lobby for the
rights that other Americans took for granted. The most
influential of these was the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in
1909 and included the participation of many non-blacks who
believed in equal justice.
In the decade following World War II, attorney Thurgood Marshall,
then the NAACP's chief legal counsel and later to become the
first black to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, traveled
throughout the country, laying the legal foundations for an
assault on racial segregation. His efforts culminated in a U.S.
Supreme Court decision in 1954 -- Brown v. Board of
Education --
outlawing the segregation of black and white students in public
schools. A year later, the Supreme Court demanded that local
school boards move with "all deliberate speed" to implement the
decision.
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, black Americans were
impatient at the slow rate of progress toward full integration.
On December 1, 1955, a seemingly insignificant event took place
in Montgomery, Alabama -- then still a southern stronghold of
segregation -- that ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement. An
African-American woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her
seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man, as was then
required by Alabama law. She was arrested.
Her act of defiance might have gone unnoticed had it not been for
Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Baptist minister. King led a
382-day boycott of the city's public transportation system that
forced the city to integrate it.
In 1960, black college students sat down at a segregated lunch
counter in North Carolina and refused to leave. Their sit-in
captured media attention and led to similar demonstrations
throughout the South. The next year, civil rights workers
organized "freedom rides" in which blacks and whites boarded
buses heading south toward segregated terminals.
Martin Luther King, Jr., continued to be part of these
activities. A life-long advocate of nonviolence, King, with other
ministers, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
which was dedicated to the nonviolent struggle against racism and
discrimination. But in his quest for racial justice, he joined
forces with many other organizations to, as he put it, "make
America what it ought to be."
There were many important milestones in the Civil Rights
Movement. One of the most memorable took place on an August day
in 1963, when over 200,000 Americans, black and white, assembled
at the memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. Scores of
speakers addressed the crowd, but the day belonged to King, who
set aside his prepared text and spoke from his heart. "I have a
dream," he said. "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American
dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and
live out the true meaning of its creed: ` We hold these truths to
be self-evident; that all men are created equal.' "
King was to see the U.S. Congress in 1964 pass the Civil Rights
Act, which outlawed discrimination in all public accommodation,
and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, which authorized the federal
government to appoint examiners to register voters where local
officials made black registration impossible. The year after
passage, 400,000 blacks registered in the Deep South. King was
killed by an assassin's bullet in April 1968, while on a visit to
the city of Memphis, Tennessee, to champion the rights of
sanitation workers there, most of whom were black and poor.
King's primary objective was equality for African-Americans, but
he realized that racism is not just an American problem but a
global one. "Among the moral imperatives of our time," he said,
"we are challenged to work all over the world with unshakable
determination to wipe out the last vestiges of racism. It is no
mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasp knows no geographical
boundaries."
D
iscontent and Change
During the debate on the 1964 Civil Rights bill, some legislators
had hoped to defeat the measure by proposing an amendment to
outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender as well as race.
First the amendment, then the bill itself, passed, giving women
the legal tool to secure their rights.
Women themselves took measures to improve their lot. In 1966, 28
professional women established the National Organization for
Women (NOW) "to take action to bring American women into full
participation in the mainstream of American society now." Four
years later, membership had reached 15,000. NOW and similar
organizations helped make women increasingly aware of their
limited opportunities and strengthened their resolve to increase
them.
Organized activity on behalf of women's rights reached its peak
in the early 1970s. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights
Amendment to the Constitution, which declared: "Equality of
rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of sex." Over the next
several years, 35 of the necessary 38 states ratified the
amendment, but this was not enough for passage, and the amendment
died in 1982 as the women's movement stagnated. Although the
effort to protect women from gender discrimination continues
today, the gains made by women during the 1970s and in the years
following firmly established their place in all aspects of
American life.
In post-World War II America, Spanish-speaking groups faced
discrimination as well. Coming from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico,
and Central America, they were often unskilled and unable to
speak English. Some worked as farm laborers and, at times, were
cruelly exploited while harvesting crops; others gravitated to
the cities where, like earlier immigrant groups, they encountered
difficulties in their quest for a better life.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which secured many
gains for U.S. workers, had excluded agricultural workers from
its guarantee of the right of labor to organize and bargain
collectively. But the example of black activism had taught
Hispanics the importance of pressure politics in a pluralistic
society. Cesar Chavez, founder of the overwhelmingly Hispanic
United Farm Workers, called for a nationwide consumer boycott of
selected agricultural products that laid the foundation for
representation to secure higher wages and improved working
conditions for migrants. Also during this time, Hispanics became
politically active, further increasing their assimilation into
American society.
One final group that worked to claim their rights in the wake of
the Civil Rights Movement were Native Americans. In the 1950s,
the federal government had undertaken a program of moving Native
Americans off reservations and into cities, where they might
become part of "mainstream America." Not only did they face the
loss of land; many of the uprooted Indians often had difficulties
adjusting to urban life.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans became aggressive in
pressing for their rights. A new generation of leaders went to
court to protect what was left of tribal lands or to recover that
which had been taken, often illegally, in previous times. In
state after state, they challenged treaty violations and, in
1967, won the first of many victories guaranteeing long-abused
land and water rights. The American Indian Movement, founded in
1968, helped channel government funds to Indian-controlled
organizations and assisted neglected Indians in the cities.
Indian activism brought results. Other Americans became more
aware of Native American needs, and officials in all branches of
government had to respond to pressure for equal treatment that
was long overdue.
T
he Cold War and Beyond
From its beginning, the Cold War put limits on those who hoped to
make human rights America's top international priority. Locked in
competition with the Soviet Union, the United States chose to
accept responsibility for countering Communist moves in Eastern
and Central Europe and elsewhere.
The most dramatic defense of Western freedom took place in
Berlin, when Soviet occupation forces closed off the city, still
struggling to recover from wartime devastation, in June 1948.
U.S. and Allied forces flew 277,000 missions, keeping the city
alive until the Soviets lifted the embargo some 10 months later.
With the arrival of détente, an era of lowered
U.S.-Soviet
tensions began. A high point of the era was the Helsinki Accords.
Signed in 1975, they set the stage for the struggle for freedom
and human rights that would culminate in the fall of the Berlin
Wall 14 years later.
In November 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected president of the
United States. Carter took office two months later with a strong
commitment to human rights. In 1977, a human rights bureau was
created within the U.S. Department of State. Its first human
rights reports were issued that year. Since then, reports have
been produced every year; they now cover every country,
including, for the first time in 1995, the United States itself.
To some, Carter's belief in the universality of human rights was
too idealistic. Nonetheless, despite ideological differences, the
succeeding U.S. presidential administrations have made human
rights a fundamental tenet of national policy.