African Americans and the Executive Power - Coursework Example

African-Americans and the Executive Power The United States is one of many countries which has long been divided by racial tension: persistent concepts of superiority and inferiority on the basis on skin color have even today not been truly eradicated. Fortunately, though, we have moved on from the legal enslavement of African American people, with thanks going in large parts to the Executive Order Power. Although this power is but vaguely specified in the Constitution, and has been a source of conflict as recently as the twenty-first century (“The Use and Abuse of Executive Orders and Other Presidential Directives”, Gaziano), it was originally intended to strengthen the weak original model of government developed by the Founding Fathers according to the Articles of Confederation in 1783. Executive orders allow presidents to create law without the agreement of Congress, and is rarely used to maintain a sense of fairness and to avoid controversy in the workings of government. However, three times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presidents made executive orders which helped overturn the accepted institution of racism against black Americans. This paper will look at Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 of 1941, and Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981 of 1946, to show that these three situations were ones in which the executive power was used to create the less racist society of modern America. In 1863, the United States was in a horrific racial situation: it was the year of the New York Draft Riots, in which countless black people were murdered and lynched on the streets of the city; on a larger scale, the country was torn in civil war over the fate of black slaves. It was into this context that President Lincoln introduced the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, an executive order which was more symbolic than effective: the Proclamation stated that slaves in the Confederate States of America were to be set free, an area over which Lincoln had no practical power at the time. Furthermore, it specifically did not suggest emancipation in the northern states which, ironically, were fighting in order to obtain the freedom of black slaves. Lincoln's aim was to starve the southern forces of free labor by popularizing this message to encourage black slaves to escape and be granted their freedom in the north – it was a purely tactical manoeuvre, and really not much more than a stepping stone on the way to true abolition, which was achieved with the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of 1865. Sadly, it was not until this point that the fifty thousand or so remaining slaves in the northern states were emancipated. Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation remains an important milestone for black civil rights, and one of the few which was granted exclusively by the President through an executive order. In fact, the three Executive Orders discussed in this paper were not really as powerful as they are often thought of – they were merely baby steps along a path to increased civil liberties and diminished discrimination. Although these three presidents, as well as the forty-one other men who have held this position, effectively had absolute power through the medium of the executive order, they only proposed small (if radical) changes to the racist fabric of society. This shows that presidents have (in the past, if not now) the power to initiate great change, and provides hope for the future. The effects of the Emancipation Proclamation were far-reaching: theoretically, if not effectively, it released about five million people from slavery, and significantly was the first instance of the US government using their authority to further the rights of black people, as opposed to increasing the powers of slave-owners. Lincoln's executive order clearly indicated to the African-American population that the Republican Party was on their side, an attitude only confirmed five years later when it introduced the Fifteenth Amendment which granted black men the right to vote (black women were finally given suffrage in 1920 along with white women). In fact, the loyalty of black voters earned the Republican Party dominance over US politics until 1933, when Roosevelt was voted into power. Of the preceding seventy-one years, the Republican Party had been in power for fifty-one of those. The switch in African-American voter loyalty came with the eminently popular Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and is part of the reason that Barack Obama was able to win the presidential vote of 2008. After the Great Depression of the 1920s, the public reacted by changing their ruling party (much as has happened in many countries recently, after the multiple recessions of the late 2000s). African-American voters were disproportionately poorer during the depression, and as such voted in swathes for Roosevelt, who promised concrete action in order to turn the economy round, and became the much-adored and longest-serving US president of all time. One of Roosevelt's most popular acts amongst the African-American community was to introduce the Executive Order 8802, also known as the Fair Employment Act, in 1941. At this point the US was preparing to enter World War II against Germany and its allies – in fact, just six months after this order, the United States were dragged into the war due to Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawai'i. Arms manufacturers were working hard to meet the challenges of producing enough military power to give the United States a fair chance in the war; however, black Americans were not among the vast quantity of citizens being recruited by such companies to build up this might. Roosevelt's executive order demanded that discriminatory recruitment practices be abandoned under threat of losing governmental funding – effectively, any company which did not employ black people would not be allowed to provide the government with arms for the inevitable war. Although little more than a precursor of true employment non-discrimination, Executive Order 8802 paved the way for greater rights for and less institutional bias against African-American people. As the first federal action to promote racial equality in the workplace, Executive Order 8802 guaranteed Roosevelt's popularity within the African-American community, and initiated the Democratic Party's reputation as the governmental authority which supported the black minority. However, Roosevelt's civil rights record is not entirely spotless: although he hired many African-American employees to work in administration for the government, and ensured that at least ten percent of his New Deal relief programs would go to help the inordinately poor black community (Sitkoff), his cabinet made no efforts to end segregation, nor did they attempt to improve African-American rights in the still deeply racist southern areas of the country; the conditions of Social Security made this safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of [African-Americans] to fall through” (Katznelson). More pro-African-American policies were needed, and the next stage of anti-racism again took the form of an executive order. Another executive order which cemented African-American support for the Democratic Party, and improved the condition of the black community in the US, was Harry S. Truman's Order 9981: this desegregated the military, which had continued a policy of separate racial units throughout and beyond the Second World War. This had been such a sensitive issue that Roosevelt had not dared to implement such a policy during the turbulent war years, and military desegregation was not ordered until 1948. After this, racist institutions toppled, not quickly in terms of personal history but rapidly compared with the history that had gone before: iconic black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks took on the mantle of these executive orders and continued them to their rightful end, until the African-American community had all the legal rights of white people. Perhaps it is just that Truman's order came at a time when the United States was more receptive than ever to black civil rights, but either way it heralded the start of a new era. Truman started off America's journey to black civil rights, at the end of which lies the statement with which our nation began: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among them are the rights to life, liberty and and the pursuit of happiness. But did the three executive orders accomplish this? Have we, in 2011, reached the destination of true equality for all? Are we living in a post-racial society, as many people believe after the election of Obama to power? On the contrary, the United States today is a land in which people of color are paid 69-75% of their white counterparts' wages (“The Wage Gap, by Gender and Race”), are disproportionately hounded by police (Davis, 5), and are subject to “racial vulnerability [and] shame” on the basis of black culture being 'inferior' (Lippi-Green, 197). Black history is appropriated by privileged politicians to callously compare events as dissimilar as lynching and the investigation into sexual assault charges (Dickerson); recently a white policeman accused an imaginary black man of committing a crime he was himself guilty of, just one in a long line of such “racial hoaxes” (McEwan, “Stuff White People Do: Blame Their Crimes on Phantom People of Color”). This description is just scratching the tip of a disturbingly racist country hiding its prejudicial tendencies beneath its black president and the appearance of racial equality. In spite of emancipation, equal employment opportunities, and racial desegregation, black America is a much worse place to live than white America. Now the problem is social rather than legal – as Jesse Taylor eloquently put it, “post-racial my black ass” – although the increasingly racist Republican Party could soon make the struggle a legal one once again. It is of little wonder that the African-American community has continued, over the last eighty years to vote against the party which originally granted them freedom from slavery, given that the Tea Party, a dangerously right-wing but increasingly mainstream faction of the party, is openly linked with some of the most dangerous white supremacist names of modern times (Neiwart); nor given that John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate for 2008, endorsed the political campaign of a member of a hate group, a group which was created from the old mailing lists of the white supremacist White Citizens' Council and which “opposes all efforts to … promote non-white races” (McEwan, “The Future's So White, He's Gotta Wear Shades”). Roosevelt gained black support from the Republican Party in the 1930s; Truman cemented it by taking the first step towards desegregation; in the twenty-first century, the Democratic Party has to do very little to continue earning that support, except present themselves as the lesser of two evils. Bibliography Davis, Kelvin R. Driving While Black: Coverup. Ohio: Interstate International Publishing of Cincinnati, 2001. Print. Dickerson, John. “When Herman Met Clarence.” Slate.com. November 1 2011. Web. November 28 2011. Gaziano, Todd. “The Use and Abuse of Executive Orders and Other Presidental Directives.” The Heritage Foundation. February 21 2001. Web. November 28 2011. Katznelson, Ira. When Welfare Was White: The Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print. Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. McEwan, Melissa. “The Future's So White, He's Gotta Wear Shades.” Shakesville. November 21 2005. Web. November 28 2011. McEwan, Melissa. “Stuff White People Do: Blame Their Crimes on Phantom People of Colour.” Shakesville. May 13 2010. Web. November 28 2011. “The Wage Gap, by Gender and Race.” InfoPlease. Web. November 28 2011. Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. Taylor, Jesse. “Post-Racial My Black Ass.” Pandagon. July 26 2009. Web. November 28 2011. Read More