Paul Robeson Confronts President Truman in Oval Office Over Lynching; Truman Ends Meeting
The noted African American leader Paul Robeson and six others met with President Harry Truman on this day to demand action on lynching. Truman objected to Robeson’s forceful language and abruptly ended the meeting.
The issue of lynching became an important issue with the end of World War II. A number of returning African American veterans were lynched as southern racists sought to reinforce the racial caste system, and were frightened at the prospect that African American veterans had taken seriously the official U.S. position that the war was a war for democracy and that Nazi Germany was a murderous, racist, totalitarian regime. The brutal beating and blinding of veteran Isaac Woodard in South Carolina on February 12 , 1946 provoked national outrage.
Robeson and the great African American leader W. E. DuBois organized an anti-lynching rally in Washington, which drew an interracial crowd of 3,000. The politically moderate NAACP opposed the rally because of the left-wing beliefs and associations of Robeson and DuBois. NAACP leader Walter White refused to attend. After the rally, the group of seven led by Paul Robeson went to the White House for the meeting with President Truman.
In the Oval Office, Robeson began reading a statement, but was interrupted by Truman before he was even finished with the first paragraph. Truman, referring to the recently ended World War I, then lectured the group that the U.S. and England were the “last refuge of freedom in the world.” Robeson replied that England had been “one of the greatest enslavers of human beings.” Truman then declared the meeting over.
Just four days before the rally and the Oval Office meeting, on September 19th, Truman had met with NAACP leaders in the White House, and in response to the evidence they presented about lynchings and other attacks on African American veterans, promised to take action on civil rights. On December 5th he announced the creation of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, the first-ever presidential commission or task force on civil rights. The committee delivered is report, “To Secure These Rights,” on October 29, 1947. The report covered a wide range of issues and mapped out the agenda of the civil rights movement for the next twenty years.
Learn about Robeson and the Oval Office incident: Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (1989) (the incident in discussed on pp. 306-7)
Read Robeson’s FBI file.
Read Robeson’s autobiography: Paul Robeson Here I Stand (orig. 1958; new edition 1998)
Visit the Paul Robeson House and Museum in Philadelphia.
Listen to eight digitally restored Robeson recordings.
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here