“If I live and have my health,” Whitney said in a speech to union workers in Cleveland, “I’ll be fighting the infamy of such work when Harry Truman is back in Missouri and forgotten.”
The biggest story in Washington became the unraveling of the Truman administration. The president was the butt of jokes. “I’m just mild about Harry” punned off the popular song “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” “To err is Truman” became a popular quip. The star New York entertainer Billy Rose suggested that the comedian W. C. Fields run for president in 1948: “If we’re going to have a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” Columnists poured on the vitriol, criticizing everything from Truman’s choice of neckties to his plan to add a balcony to the White House. His advisers were hacks, the critics said—“a lot of second-rate guys trying to function in an atom bomb world,” in the words of one administration official, speaking to reporters anonymously.
Republicans feasted on schadenfreude. “If Truman wanted to elect a Republican Congress,” Senator Robert Taft joked in a letter to the Republican governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, “he could not be doing a better job.”
At 11:45 a.m. on September 19, 1946, Truman arose from behind the Oval Office desk to greet a delegation of black activists led by Walter Francis White. Truman expected the meeting to be another of the usual affairs that crowded his office calendar. Few came to see the president unless they wanted something from him, and Truman cynically called these visitors his “customers,” whether they were Democrats or Republicans, white or black.
Walter Francis White, however, was no ordinary customer.
White was the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This struck Truman as odd, because White did not appear to be colored. He was of mixed race, and with his light skin and blue eyes, he could easily pass as Caucasian, which, it turns out, he sometimes did.
He had been raised in Atlanta, had gone to a black college, and had become involved in race activism soon after, moving to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance to work for a fledgling organization called the NAACP. During the 1920s, he had gone undercover as a white man to investigate lynchings of black men in the South, and his reports on these crimes in his writings had shocked the nation. He became head of the NAACP in 1931. During the war, the organization had grown considerably, and with it, the stature of Walter White.
Following the end of the war, a horrifying spate of violence against black men in the South had mobilized White and the NAACP to fight back. Some of the victims had been black soldiers recently discharged from the United States military. In the Oval Office, White began to tell harrowing stories as Truman sat in his chair with his arms folded in front of him.
There was the story of John C. Jones, a corporal recently honorably discharged from the army, who had returned to his home in Minden, Louisiana. Jones had been suspected of loitering in the backyard of a home where a white woman lived. In August 1946, just a month before White’s meeting with Truman, Jones was brutally tortured with a blowtorch, and then lynched. “The undertaker described him to us later,” White recalled, “as having been jet black in color though his skin had been light yellow.” Even though the perpetrators were known in their community, they were never charged. With an all-white police force, an all-white courtroom jury, a white judge and white lawyers guiding the rule of law, the family of John Jones had no shot at justice.
Jones had served his country during wartime. His own countrymen had killed him and had gotten away with it.
In another incident—also in the summer of 1946—two black couples were murdered in rural Monroe, Georgia. “The facts discovered by our investigators revealed a sordid background of twisted, sadistic sexuality,” White recorded. “One of the lynched Negroes had become involved in a fight with a white man over the attentions which the latter had been paying to the Negro’s wife.” Within hours, the black man, his wife, and another black couple were rounded up and slain by a white mob.
“We turned over to the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the evidence gathered by our investigators,” White recorded, “naming seven ringleaders of the lynching party.” The accused were known to members of their community. However, “a reign of terror and fear swept over Walton County and effectively shut the mouths of both whites and Negroes,” according to White. One man who testified before a federal grand jury was beaten nearly to death.
Truman grew increasingly uncomfortable as White arrived at the story of Isaac Woodard, an army veteran who had spent fifteen months serving his country in the jungles of the South Pacific. On February 12, 1946, just hours after Woodard had been honorably discharged from the army, he was riding a bus in South Carolina, eager to reunite with his wife and family. At a stop near a small town he got off to use a bathroom, and when he went to get back on, the bus driver complained that Woodard had taken too long. The driver had Woodard arrested for being drunk, and when Woodard protested that he did not drink, a police officer attacked him, gouging out Woodard’s eyes with a blackjack. Woodard was still wearing his military uniform at the time. He was placed overnight in a jail cell without medical care.
The NAACP had
