Theodore Roosevelt reviews race relations, Feb. 13, 1905
On this day in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt, having recently been elected to the presidency in his own right, spoke to the New York City Republican Club about the state of race relations in the United States. At the time, there was widespread racial prejudice among white Americans. An influx of Asian immigrants in the West created a fresh set of racial tensions.
Roosevelt, the nation’s 26th president, used the “rising tide raises all ships” metaphor. He said that if “morality and thrift among the colored men can be raised,” then those same virtues among whites, which most Americans assumed to be more advanced, would “rise to an even higher degree.” At the same time, he warned that “the debasement of the blacks will, in the end, carry with it [the] debasement of the whites.”
One of his first challenges on the race issue occurred early in his first term, which he had entered after being elevated from the vice presidency. In 1901, Booker T. Washington, the most important black leader of the time, was the first African-American to be invited to dine at the White House. The two discussed politics and racism. When word of the dinner reached the press two days later, there was an outcry of criticism from many white people, particularly in the South. Roosevelt never invited another African-American to the White House again.
Roosevelt’s approach to racial issues was to proceed slowly toward the goal of social and economic equality. He cautioned against imposing radical changes in government policy, favoring, hopefully, gradual adjustments in the attitudes of white Americans toward ethnic minorities.
He referred to white Americans as “the forward race,” who had the responsibility to raise the status of minorities through training “the backward race[s] in industrial efficiency, political capacity and domestic morality.” He asserted that the white citizenry bore the burden of “preserving the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.”
In sum, “TR,” as he was known, took a passive, long-term approach toward extending full civil rights to African-Americans. Most of his immediate successors in the White House would follow a similar path, although President Woodrow Wilson retarded desegregation. For blacks — who since the Civil War had witnessed some measure of equity from the federal government — the sense of betrayal ran deep.
Change was in the air after World War II when President Harry S. Truman (at least theoretically) desegregated the Armed Forces. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman’s successor, facing a school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to assist them in restoring order.
But it was not until President Lyndon B. Johnson steered the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts through Congress in the mid-1960s that the federal government’s efforts to deter racial bias would become a paramount objective.
SOURCE: “THEODORE ROOSEVELT: A STRENUOUS LIFE,” BY KATHLEEN DALTON (2002)