Civil Rights Actions of the Presidents

Abraham Lincoln (Republican)

1856 - Organized the Republican Party and became its chief; nominated vice-president, but was not chosen by its first convention; worked for the Fremont-Dayton presidential ticket.
1861 - March 4, inaugurated sixteenth President; succeeds Buchanan, and precedes his vice - Andrew Johnson, whom General Grant succeeded. Civil War began by firing on Fort Sumter, April 12.
1862 - September 22, emancipation announced.
1863 - January 1, emancipation proclaimed. November 19, Gettysburg Cemetery address. December 9, pardon to rebels proclaimed.
 

In April 1866, Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill that was designed to protect freed slaves from Southern Black Codes (laws that placed severe restrictions on freed slaves such as prohibiting their right to vote, forbidding them to sit on juries, limiting their right to testify against white men, carrying weapons in public places and working in certain occupations). On 6th April, Johnson's veto was overridden in the Senate by 33 to 15.
 

Ulysses S. Grant (Republican)

Lincoln appointed Grant General-in-Chief of the Union Army in March 1864.

President Grant's role in securing the full political equality of all Americans regardless of color is unsurpassed in presidential history. Even after the popular will overwhelmingly turned against the President's efforts to protect the political and civil rights of former slaves, Ulysses S. Grant refused to abandon his commitment to those for whose freedom he had fought. After he left office, the federal government ended the policy of military intervention in the South and allowed the South to enter a new era of segregation and disfranchisement. During this period, President Grant's efforts to protect the freedmen during Reconstruction were widely ridiculed and declared to be misguided. Such criticism, however, has crumbled in the face of history

Ratified the 15th amendment - The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Civil Rights Act of 1875 - This groundbreaking act prohibited segregation in various modes of public accommodations and transportation and discrimination in jury selection.

October 12, 1871  President Grant issues proclamation ordering the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina to disperse and surrender arms.

April 20, 1871 Signed of the Second Enforcement Act protected black suffrage and targeted the activities of such violent groups as the Ku Klux Klan.

May 31, 1870 - Signed of the first "Enforcement Act" - This act substantially secured the voting rights of freedmen.
 

Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican)

As a Republican and former anti-slavery Whig, many of Hayes' policies toward the greatest issue of the day - the issue of southern reconstruction - were guided by his personal ideology, which favored giving more rights to southern blacks.
 

James Garfield (Republican)

Garfield raised a volunteer force to fight on the Union side in the Civil War and saw action at Shiloh and Chickamauga.

Garfield believed that blacks deserved the exact same rights as whites, and that they were essential to the country. This clearly clashed with most of the thoughts at the time, but is a nice change from some of our earlier Presidents.
 

Chester Arthur (Republican)

Before becoming president, Chester Arthur won two important Civil Rights cases, one of which decided that slaves were free once they reached New York, and the other of which clarified that blacks had the same rights as others to ride street cars. In that case he won $500 in damages for a black woman who was thrown off a New York City bus.

Arthur vetoed a Chinese exclusion bill and was later overridden by a democratic controlled congress.

Chester Arthur's greatest achievement as President was signing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. This act established the Civil Service Commission. It also established the merit system, whereby government jobs were given based on a person's ability instead of a person's politics. Prior to that, government jobs were often given as rewards for political loyalty, a practice that had resulted in widespread fraud and corruption.
 

As a Democrat, he possessed certain sympathies for the southerners who still attempted to limit the civil rights of blacks in those states. He became a friend of the former members of the Confederacy, favoring segregation in schools and elsewhere.

Cleveland renews the Chinese Exclusion Act restricting Chinese immigration to the U.S. 

Cleveland signs Dawes Severalty Act to end tribal control of reservations and divide their land into individual holdings; reversed the long-standing American policy of allowing Indian tribes to maintain their traditional practice of communal use and control of their lands; gave the president the power to divide Indian reservations into individual, privately owned plots, dictated that men with families would receive 160 acres (effort to encourage Native Americans to take up farming, live in smaller family units that were considered more "American" and renounce tribal loyalties), single adult men were given 80 acres, and boys received 40 acres.

Cleveland signs the Chinese Exclusion Act marking first time that the U.S. excluded immigrants based on race and nationality. China approves a treaty forbidding Chinese laborers to enter the United States for 20 years.

President Grover Cleveland asks leaders of federal departments to investigate how many aliens (foreign nationals) are currently employed in the federal government, specifically directing his request to the secretaries of state, treasury, war, navy, interior and agriculture, the postmaster general and the attorney general. Cleveland firmly believed that the government carried the unquestionable authority to "prevent the influx of elements hostile to its internal peace and security…even where there is not treaty stipulation on the subject." His fear of what he thought would be damaging immigrant influence prompted him to investigate potential subversive behavior among federal employees of foreign birth as part of a larger program to stave off the negative effects of immigration on the nation’s political and economic security.
 

William McKinley (Republican)

McKinley demonstrated a remarkable sense of courage and intellectual determination by being one of the fervent defenders of civil rights for African-Americans in the 1890s:

McKinley favored enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment by reducing Southern representation in Congress until the Negroes were enfranchised.

The U.S. issued the "Open-Door" notes asking for equality of trade in the China market.
 

Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive)

In 1899, while he was Governor of the State of New York, Theodore Roosevelt pushed a bill desegregating state schools through the State Assembly, sending the Assembly a note saying that his own children went to school with colored children (the politically correct term at the time) and that it did them no harm.

In 1901, right after he was sworn in as President after the death of President William McKinley, he invited Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute to the White House for a meeting. The meeting ran late, and TR invited Mr. Washington to dinner. This was the first time that an African-American was entertained at the White House as a guest.

Roosevelt appointed an African-American, a Dr. Crum, as Collector of the Port of Charleston (collector of tariffs) in South Carolina. He was put under pressure to withdraw the appointment, but refused to do so. In a letter to a citizen of Charleston who wrote to protest the appointment.

The San Francisco Board of Education passed a regulation whereby children of Japanese descent would be required to attend racially segregatedseparate schools. TR pushed the San Francisco School Board to reverse itself and allow Japanese Americans to be sent to school.

Minnie Cox was head of the post office in Indianola, Mississippi, down in the Delta region, by Benjamin Harrison, in an area where blacks were in the majority, and she was still in office when TR became President. When we would nto remove her, white racist politicians, particularly the infamous James K. Vardaman, running for governor, in 1902 used Minnie Cox as proof that African Americans had too much power, and that President Theodore Roosevelt was a Negrophile. Vardaman, who was indeed elected governor, called TR that "coon-flavored miscegenationist in the White House."

Theodore Roosevelt also had great respect for the environment and natural treasures. The U.S. Forest Service was established under a national conservation program during his administration.
 

William H. Taft (Republican)

A supporter of free immigration, Taft vetoed a law passed by Congress that would have restricted admissions to the US by imposing a literacy test.

Taft publicly endorsed Booker T. Washington's program for uplifting the black race.
 

As President of Princeton University, Wilson barred the entry of black students regarding their desire for education to be "unwarranted."

Upon taking office, he fired most of the African Americans who held posts within the federal government including the black Postmaster General, and segregated the Navy, which until then had been desegregated. Many of the newly segregated parts of Wilson’s federal government would remain so, clear into the 1950s.  Wilson implemented a rule that photographs were required of all applicants for federal jobs.

Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments. One justification involved health: White government workers had to be protected from contagious diseases, especially venereal diseases, that racists imagined were being spread by blacks. In extreme cases, federal officials built separate structures to house black workers.

Wilson’s two-volume book, "A History of the American People", was so racially biased that D.W. Griffith quoted the sitting president’s writings in his 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation, "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self preservation… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." Not only did Wilson proudly stand by those words, but he also had a private showing of the movie at the White House.

During his first term in office passed a law making racial intermarriage a felony in the District of Columbia.
 

Warren Harding (Republican)

By the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had its largest membership ever and had become a formidable political force in many parts of the nation.  On October 26, 1921, in a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, President Harding advocated civil rights for all segments of the American populace, including African Americans. Earlier, he had proposed appointing African Americans to federal positions.

Harding promoted the establishment of an interracial commission to find ways to improve race relations.  Politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties had a hand in thwarting these presidential initiatives.

During Harding's time, he also spoke out on civil rights and pardoned Socialist Eugene V. Debs who had been convicted of anti-war demonstrations during World War I under Wilson.

Harding supported Congressman Leonidas Dyer's federal anti-lynching bill, known as the Dyer Bill, which passed the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922. The bill was defeated in the Senate by a filibuster.

The Per Centum Act of 1921 signed by President Harding in 1921 severely reduced the amount of immigration into the United States to 3% of their represented population based on the 1910 census. The Act allowed unauthorized immigrants to be deported.
 

Calvin Coolidge (Republican)

In 1923 Coolidge urged the creation of a "Negro Industrial Commission" to promote a better policy of mutual understanding.

Coolidge was also an outspoken supporter of civil rights for Catholics and African-Americans. He refused to grant Cabinet positions to anyone with known ties to white supremacist groups. As a result, hate groups such as the KKK saw a significant reduction in numbers and influence during the Coolidge Administration.
 

Herbert C. Hoover (Republican)

Hoover seldom mentioned civil rights while he was President. Hoover believed that African-Americans and other races could improve themselves with education and wanted the races assimilated into white culture

Charles Curtis, the nation's first Native American Vice President, was from the Kaw tribe in Kansas. [34] Hoover's humanitarian and Quaker reputation, along with Curtis as a vice-president, gave special meaning to his Indian policies. His Quaker upbringing influenced his views that Native Americans needed to achieve economic self-sufficiency. As President, he appointed Charles J. Rhoads as commissioner of Indian affairs.

On February 19, President Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066. It authorizes the Secretary of War and his subordinates to designate military zones from which "any or all persons May be excluded." All persons of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry residing in "zone No. 1," which includes most of the Western United States, are ordered to give military authorities notice if they decide to change residence. On May 3, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt issues Civilian Exclusion Order 34, which states that all persons of Japanese ancestry -- including both Japanese resident aliens and American citizens-- are to be removed from Military Area No. 1 and placed in internment camps. Many of them remain in the camps until 1946. 
 

President Truman creates the President's Committee on Civil Rights. The Committee's October 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, calls for a broad range of policies against racism: elimination of discrimination and segregation in employment, housing, health facilities, interstate transportation, and public accommodations; a federal law making lynching a crime; abolition of the poll tax; federal protection of voting rights; and Executive Orders against discrimination in the federal civil service and the armed forces. 
 

Dwight Eisenhower (Republican)

Eisenhower appointed California Governor Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren molded a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down public school segregation. Eisenhower also appointed outstanding jurists such as Potter Stewart, William Brennan, John Marshall Harlan II, and Charles Evans Whittaker to the Warren court. 

Eisenhower achieved Congressional passage of the first civil rights legislation in the 82 years following Reconstruction.

Eisenhower implemented the integration of the U.S. military forces

Eisenhower was the first president to elevate an African-American to an executive level position in the White House.

The Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional Eisenhower orders federal troops to escort Nine black students to attend an integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas

Eisenhower established the first comprehensive regulations prohibiting racial discrimination in the federal workforce.
 

Eisenhower was the first president since Reconstruction to meet personally in the White House with black civil rights leaders.  He discussed national policy on civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Lester B. Granger.
 

Kennedy put political realism before any form of beliefs when he voted against Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act.

Later, during the presidential campaign and after he was nominated for the Democrats, Kennedy made it clear in his speeches that he was a supporter of civil rights. Historians are divided as to why he was ‘suddenly’ converted.

After he was elected Kennedy did nothing to help and push forward the civil rights issue. Why? International factors meant that the president could never focus attention on domestic issues in that year. He also knew that there was no great public support for such legislation. Opinion polls indicated that in 1960 and 1961, civil rights was at the bottom of the list when people were asked "what needs to be done in America to advance society?

In the violence seen at Albany in 1961, Kennedy again did nothing as he believed that the trouble had been precipitated by SNCC who were referred to as "sons of bitches" by the president.
 

Johnson however, voted with his fellow Southern Democrats in Congress, against civil rights measures such as banning lynching, eliminating poll taxes and denying federal funding to segregated schools, measures which later would make up ground breaking legislation.

As a senator, Johnson’s opposition to Truman’s civil rights programme disgusted Texas blacks. His explanations were clearly within the contemporary Southern political context; he claimed the bills would never have passed anyway.

Johnson did work behind the scenes to get black farmers and schoolchildren equal treatment in his congressional district, believing small, but real developments would be better than ground- breaking legislation. In 1938 Johnson secured federal funding for housing in Austin, Texas to benefit Mexican, African American and White slum dwellers.

Johnson continued to remain careful and appeased the Southern racists, such as in 1956 when he killed a civil rights bill in Congress. Again, in keeping with his Jekyll and Hyde stance he changed his opinion in 1957.

Johnson became President of the USA, in November 1963 after the assassination of Kennedy. It was then that Lyndon Johnson announced his vision of a "Great Society" for America, with "an end to poverty and racial injustice". Johnson felt he and Congress owed it to the late president to see his civil rights bill passed.

Johnson was also seen to be pro-African American in other ways, by appointing an African American Supreme Court judge, Thurgood Marshall. Johnson also had African American advisors, hoping this would counteract the images of lawless African American rioters.
 

Richard Nixon (Republican)

Starting in Mississippi and moving across the South, the Nixon administration set up biracial state committees to plan and implement school desegregation. The appeal to local control succeeded. By the end of 1970, with little of the anticipated violence and little fanfare, the committees had made significant progress -- only about 18% of black children in the South attended all-black schools.

Despite the opposition of many men in his administration, Nixon increased the number of female appointments to administration positions. He created a Presidential Task Force on Women's Rights. He asked the Justice Department to bring sex discrimination suits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. And he ordered the Labor Department to add sex discrimination provisions to the guidelines for its Office of Federal Contract Compliance.
 

By the time Jimmy Carter was elected most of the important civil rights legislation had been enacted.

Carter received praise for announcing that aid would be cut to those foreign governments guilty of human rights violations.
 

Ronald Reagan (Republican)

Reagan appointed the first woman to the high court, Sandra Day O’Connor, fulfilling a pledge he had made during his presidential campaign.

Regan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Reagan said the Voting Rights Act was humiliating to the South, however he later supported extending the Act.

Congress overrode Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988. Reagan said the Restoration Act would impose too many regulations on churches, the private sector and state and local governments.
 

George H. W. Bush (Republican)

Despite the unpopularity with his constituents, he voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1968.

Bush signed a number of major laws in his presidency, including the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 which was one of the most pro-civil rights bills in decades.
 

President Clinton supports the Supreme Court’s decision in Bragdon v. Abbott, which reinforces the protections offered by the Americans With Disabilities Act for Americans living with HIV and AIDS. The President directed the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to vigorously prosecute those who discriminate against people with AIDS, leading to actions against health care providers and facilities that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
 

George W. Bush (Republican)

George W Bush supported a citizenship path for undocumented immigrants as well as guest worker programs. He stated on more than one occasion that mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is not a viable option, and backed a bipartisan immigration reform bill in early 2007. While he increased enforcement of existing anti-immigrant ordinances, his opposition to punitive federal anti-immigrant proposals in 2005 and 2006 may have blocked their passage.

In his first term, Bush appointed Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Powell was the first African-American man to serve in that position, and was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice: Rice became the first African-American woman to hold the post. In 2005, he appointed Alberto Gonzalez as the United States Attorney General, the first Hispanic to hold that position.