Table of Contents
To Secure These Rights
Overview
Context
About the Author
Explanation and Analysis of the Document
Audience
Impact
Document Text
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Abstract
Drafted by President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1947, To Secure These Rights (subtitled “The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights”) remains one of the most important federal civil rights reports in United States history. Issued on the heels of World War II, To Secure These Rights identified remarkable disparities in racial treatment in both the North and the South and called for a series of measures to improve race relations in the United States. Among them were police professionalization, federal protection of black voting rights, enforcement of antilynching laws, and an end to segregation in schools, housing, and public accommodations.
Book contents
- John Rolfe’s Letter to Sir Edwin Sandys 1619/1620
- Virginia’s Act XII: Negro Women’s Children to Serve according to the Condition of the Mother 1662
- Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage 1667
- “A Minute against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting” 1688
- John Woolman’s Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes 1754
- Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation 1775
- Petition of Prince Hall and Other African Americans to the Massachusetts General Court 1777
- Pennsylvania: An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery 1780
- Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia 1784
- Slavery Clauses in the U.S. Constitution 1787
- Benjamin Banneker’s Letter to Thomas Jefferson 1791
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 1793
- Richard Allen: “An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice” 1794
- Prince Hall: A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge 1797
- Ohio Black Code 1803–1807
- Peter Williams, Jr.’s “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” 1808
- Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm’s First Freedom’s Journal Editorial 1827
- David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the world 1829
- State v. Mann 1830
- William Lloyd Garrison’s First Liberator Editorial 1831
- The Confessions of Nat Turner 1831
- United States v. Amistad 1841
- Prigg v. Pennsylvania 1842
- Henry Highland Garnet: “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” 1843
- William Wells Brown’s “Slavery As It Is” 1847
- First Editorial of the North Star 1847
- Roberts v. City of Boston 1850
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 1850
- Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself 1851
- Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” 1851
- Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1852
- Martin Delany: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States 1852
- Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup 1853
- Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857
- John S. Rock’s “Whenever the Colored Man Is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions” 1858
- Virginia Slave Code 1860
- Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 1861
- Osborne P. Anderson: A Voice from Harper’s Ferry 1861
- Emancipation Proclamation 1863
- Frederick Douglass: “Men of Color, To Arms!” 1863
- War Department General Order 143 1863
- Thomas Morris Chester’s Civil War Dispatches 1864
- William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 1865
- Black Code of Mississippi 1865
- Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 1865
- Testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South against Blacks 1866
- Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 1868
- Henry McNeal Turner’s Speech on His Expulsion from the Georgia Legislature 1868
- Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 1870
- Ku Klux Klan Act 1871
- United States v. Cruikshank 1876
- Richard Harvey Cain’s “All That We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, and Equal Rights” 1874
- Civil Rights Cases 1883
- T. Thomas Fortune: “The Present Relations of Labor and Capital” 1886
- Anna Julia Cooper’s “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” 1864
- John Edward Bruce’s “Organized Resistance Is Our Best Remedy” 1889
- John L. Moore’s “In the Lion’s Mouth” 1891
- Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women” 1895
- Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address 1895
- Plessy v. Ferguson 1896
- Mary Church Terrell: “The Progress of Colored Women” 1898
- Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America” 1900
- George H. White’s Farewell Address to Congress 1901
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk 1903
- Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles 1905
- Theodore Roosevelt’s Brownsville Legacy Special Message to the Senate 1906
- Act in Relation to the Organization of a Colored Regiment in the City of New York 1913
- Monroe Trotter’s Protest to Woodrow Wilson 1914
- Guinn v. United States 1915
- William Pickens: “The Kind of Democracy the Negro Expects” 1918
- Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 1919
- Cyril Briggs’S Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood 1920
- Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa” 1921
- Marcus Garvey: “The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association” 1922
- Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro” 1925
- James Weldon Johnson’s “Harlem: The Culture Capital” 1925
- Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson: “The Negro Woman and the Ballot” 1927
- John P. Davis: “A Black Inventory of the New Deal” 1935
- Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts” 1935
- Charles Hamilton Houston’s “Educational Inequalities Must Go!” 1935
- Walter F. White’s “U.S. Department of (White) Justice” 1935
- Mary McLeod Bethune’s “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?” 1939
- A. Philip Randolph’s “Call to Negro America to March on Washington” 1941
- To Secure These Rights 1947
- Executive Order 9981 1948
- Ralph J. Bunche: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted” 1949
- Sweatt v. Painter 1950
- Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad’s Scottsboro Boy 1950
- Brown v. Board of Education 1954
- Marian Anderson’s My Lord, What a Morning 1956
- Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back” 1957
- George Wallace’s Inaugural Address as Governor 1963
- Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Letter from Birmingham Jail” 1963
- John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Address 1963
- Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I Have a Dream” 1963
- Civil Rights Act of 1964 1964
- Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony at the Democratic National Convention 1964
- Malcolm X: “After the Bombing” 1965
- Moynihan Report 1965
- South Carolina v. Katzenbach 1966
- Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power” 1966
- Bond v. Floyd 1966
- Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” 1967
- Loving v. Virginia 1967
- Kerner Commission Report Summary 1968
- Eldridge Cleaver’s “Education and Revolution” 1969
- Jesse Owens’s Blackthink: My Life as Black Man And White Man 1970
- Angela Davis’s “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation” 1971
- Clay v. United States 1971
- Jackie Robinson’s I Never Had it Made 1972
- Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study ad Hoc Advisory Panel 1973
- FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad 1973
- Shirley Chisholm: “The Black Woman in Contemporary America” 1974
- Thurgood Marshall’s Equality Speech 1978
- Jesse Jackson’s Democratic National Convention Keynote Address 1984
- Anita Hill’s Opening Statement at the Senate Confirmation Hearing of Clarence Thomas 1991
- A. Leon Higginbotham: “An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague” 1992
- Colin Powell’s Commencement Address at Howard University 1994
- Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March Pledge 1995
- One America in the 21st Century 1998
- Clarence Thomas’s Concurrence/Dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger 2003
- Barack Obama: “A More Perfect Union” 2008
- Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address 2009
- U.S. Senate Resolution Apologizing for the Enslavement and Racial Segregation of African Americans 2009
- Barack Obama’s Address to the NAACP Centennial Convention 2009