Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo
Authors: Matthew Algeo
Tags: United States, General, History, Biography & Autobiography, Travel, 20th Century, Essays & Travelogues, Presidents & Heads of State, Presidents, Automobile Travel
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perils involved in such a trip. “We drive for hours and hours,” he said. “We get hungry. But there’s no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat…. We keep goin’ ‘til night comes … it takes another hour or so to find a place to sleep. You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.”
Harry Truman was born into a family with Confederate sympathies less than twenty years after the Civil War ended. (His mother refused to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom when she visited the White House.) He was raised in a rigidly segregated society. It was probably inevitable that he would carry his own prejudices. He was known to use the word
nigger
casually. Yet, as president, he proved to be heroically enlightened on racial matters. He integrated the armed forces. He was the first president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His support of civil rights infuriated white Southern Democrats, many of whom defected to the Republican Party.
The civil rights movement was at a turning point in 1953. On June 8, the United States Supreme Court ordered new arguments in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Original arguments had been heard the previous December, but the justices were having trouble reaching a decision. Chief Justice Fred Vinson was reluctant to end school segregation. “We can’t close our eyes to the seriousness of the problem,” he told his colleagues on the court. “We face the complete abolition of the public school system.” Three other justices were leaning the same way as Vinson. That meant the court would overturn segregation—but only by a vote of five to four. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in the majority, knew a ruling by such a narrow margin would be difficult to enforce. He wanted it to be unanimous. To give himself more time to sway his colleagues, Frankfurter requested the new arguments. They were scheduled for the following December. But fate, perhaps, intervened. In September, Chief Justice Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack. “This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God,” said Frankfurter. Eisenhower replaced Vinson with Earl Warren, a liberal Republican. (“He’s a Democrat and doesn’t know it,” Truman once said of Warren.) When it finally issued its ruling on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ended segregation by a vote of nine to zero.
Meanwhile, at the very moment the Trumans were speeding across Missouri, a less celebrated but still pivotal chapter in the civil rights saga was being written two states to the south. African Americans were boycotting the buses in Baton Rouge. By law, blacks and whites were required to sit in different sections on buses in Louisiana. When African American leaders in Baton Rouge complained to the city council that black people were often forced to stand on buses with empty seats in the white section, the council passed an ordinance allowing blacks to fill buses from the back to the front and whites from the front to the back, on a first-come, first-served basis. The bus drivers—all white, of course—didn’t like the ordinance, because, they claimed, it “created incidents” in which “Negroes seated in the front seats of buses refused to move to make room for white passengers.” On June 15, the drivers went on strike. They ended the strike three days later, when Louisiana Attorney General Fred LeBlanc issued an opinion saying the ordinance conflicted with state law and was invalid. LeBlanc’s ruling angered African Americans in Baton Rouge, and that night a black organization in the city called the United Defense League (UDL) issued a statement urging blacks to boycott the buses.
The boycott began the next day, June 19, 1953 (the day Harry and Bess left Independence). The UDL organized alternate transportation for blacks, deploying a fleet of 150 vehicles
Harry Truman was born into a family with Confederate sympathies less than twenty years after the Civil War ended. (His mother refused to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom when she visited the White House.) He was raised in a rigidly segregated society. It was probably inevitable that he would carry his own prejudices. He was known to use the word
nigger
casually. Yet, as president, he proved to be heroically enlightened on racial matters. He integrated the armed forces. He was the first president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His support of civil rights infuriated white Southern Democrats, many of whom defected to the Republican Party.
The civil rights movement was at a turning point in 1953. On June 8, the United States Supreme Court ordered new arguments in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Original arguments had been heard the previous December, but the justices were having trouble reaching a decision. Chief Justice Fred Vinson was reluctant to end school segregation. “We can’t close our eyes to the seriousness of the problem,” he told his colleagues on the court. “We face the complete abolition of the public school system.” Three other justices were leaning the same way as Vinson. That meant the court would overturn segregation—but only by a vote of five to four. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in the majority, knew a ruling by such a narrow margin would be difficult to enforce. He wanted it to be unanimous. To give himself more time to sway his colleagues, Frankfurter requested the new arguments. They were scheduled for the following December. But fate, perhaps, intervened. In September, Chief Justice Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack. “This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God,” said Frankfurter. Eisenhower replaced Vinson with Earl Warren, a liberal Republican. (“He’s a Democrat and doesn’t know it,” Truman once said of Warren.) When it finally issued its ruling on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ended segregation by a vote of nine to zero.
Meanwhile, at the very moment the Trumans were speeding across Missouri, a less celebrated but still pivotal chapter in the civil rights saga was being written two states to the south. African Americans were boycotting the buses in Baton Rouge. By law, blacks and whites were required to sit in different sections on buses in Louisiana. When African American leaders in Baton Rouge complained to the city council that black people were often forced to stand on buses with empty seats in the white section, the council passed an ordinance allowing blacks to fill buses from the back to the front and whites from the front to the back, on a first-come, first-served basis. The bus drivers—all white, of course—didn’t like the ordinance, because, they claimed, it “created incidents” in which “Negroes seated in the front seats of buses refused to move to make room for white passengers.” On June 15, the drivers went on strike. They ended the strike three days later, when Louisiana Attorney General Fred LeBlanc issued an opinion saying the ordinance conflicted with state law and was invalid. LeBlanc’s ruling angered African Americans in Baton Rouge, and that night a black organization in the city called the United Defense League (UDL) issued a statement urging blacks to boycott the buses.
The boycott began the next day, June 19, 1953 (the day Harry and Bess left Independence). The UDL organized alternate transportation for blacks, deploying a fleet of 150 vehicles
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