Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Civil Rights

Civil Rights

Roosevelt was a hero to major minority groups, especially African-Americans, Catholics, and Jews, and was highly successful in attracting large majorities of these voters into his New Deal coalition. He won strong support from Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans, but not Japanese Americans.

African-Americans and Native Americans fared well in two New Deal relief programs, the Indian Reorganization Act and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Sitkoff reported that the WPA "provided an economic floor for the whole black community in the 1930s, rivaling both agriculture and domestic service as the chief source" of income.

Roosevelt needed the support of Southern Democrats for his New Deal programs, and he therefore decided not to push for anti-lynching legislation that could not pass and might threaten his ability to pass his highest priority programs—though he did denounce lynchings as "a vile form of collective murder".

Historian Kevin J. McMahon claims that strides were made for the civil rights of African Americans. In Roosevelt's Justice Department, the Civil Rights Section worked closely with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Roosevelt worked with other civil rights groups on cases dealing with police brutality, lynching, and voting rights abuses.

Beginning in the 1960s FDR was charged with not acting decisively enough to prevent or stop the Holocaust. Critics cite instances such as the 1939 episode in which 936 Jewish refugees on the SS St. Louis were denied asylum and not allowed into the United States because of strict laws passed by Congress.

The issue of desegregating the armed forces did not arise, but in 1940 Roosevelt appointed Hastie to be a civilian aide to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. On the home front on June 25, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, forbidding discrimination on account of "race, creed, color, or national origin" in the hiring of workers in defense related industries. This was a precursor to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to come decades later.

Enemy aliens and people of Japanese ancestry fared badly. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that applied to everyone classified as an "enemy alien", including people who had dual citizenship living in designated high-risk areas that covered most of the cities on the West Coast. With the U.S at war with Italy, some 600,000 Italian aliens (citizens of Italy who did not have U.S. citizenship) were subjected to strict travel restrictions; the restrictions were lifted in October 1942.

Some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced to leave the West Coast. From 1942 to 1945, they lived in internment camps inland. Those outside the West Coast, and in Hawaii, were not affected.