The Second World War and civil rights
America Enters the War
On 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing around 2,400 Americans and destroying or damaging 19 naval vessels and over 300 aircraft. The following day, Congress declared war on Japan. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. America’s long period of isolationism was over. The country mobilised with extraordinary speed and scale.
Wartime mobilisation saw a dramatic expansion of federal government power. The War Production Board co-ordinated industrial output, directing factories from car production to tanks and aircraft. By 1944, the United States was producing more war material than all the Axis powers combined. The federal workforce grew enormously. Taxation rose sharply to fund the war. Selective Service conscripted around 10 million Americans. And the government took unprecedented control of prices, wages, and allocation of materials through rationing and production quotas.
Women and the War Effort
With millions of men serving overseas, women entered the paid workforce in numbers never seen before. By 1944, over 19 million American women were in paid employment, including in industries previously considered exclusively male — shipyards, aircraft factories, and munitions plants. The iconic cultural figure of Rosie the Riveter, with the slogan “We Can Do It!” captured the wartime shift in gender roles.
However, the changes in women’s employment were presented as temporary contributions to the war effort, not permanent shifts in their status. After 1945, social pressure and government policy actively encouraged women to return to domestic roles to free jobs for returning veterans. Women in defence industries often faced lower pay than male counterparts doing identical work, and African American women faced compounded discrimination.
One of the most serious violations of civil liberties in American history occurred in February 1942, when Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorising the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Approximately 120,000 people — around two-thirds of whom were American citizens born in the United States — were sent to internment camps in remote desert locations. Most lost their homes, businesses, and property. Fred Korematsu challenged his internment order in the courts; the Supreme Court upheld it in Korematsu v United States (1944), ruling that military necessity justified the measure. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, issuing a formal apology and paying $20,000 in reparations to surviving internees.
Race on the Home Front
African Americans served in the armed forces in a segregated military, fighting for a democracy that denied them rights at home. Before the war had even begun, labour leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to lead a March on Washington of 100,000 African Americans to demand an end to discrimination in defence industries. Roosevelt, alarmed by the prospect, signed Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, prohibiting racial discrimination in defence industries and federal agencies, and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee. It was the first presidential civil rights order since Reconstruction.
Executive Order 8802 was a landmark: it created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate complaints of racial discrimination in war industries. However, the FEPC was underfunded and had no enforcement powers. Discrimination continued in practice, and the military itself remained rigidly segregated throughout the war. The order had been won through the threat of mass protest rather than spontaneous presidential generosity, establishing a model of political pressure that would characterise the civil rights movement for decades.
In June 1943, the Detroit Race Riot killed 34 people — 25 of them African American — over three days of violence. The riot arose from the extreme pressure on Detroit’s housing and employment from the massive wartime migration of both white and Black southerners to defence industry jobs. Federal troops were needed to restore order. Meanwhile, the all-Black Tuskegee Airmen flew combat missions over Europe, demonstrating African American capability and providing a powerful argument against military segregation. They were long said never to have lost a bomber to enemy fighters. Later research showed that claim was not accurate, but their combat record remained a source of immense pride.
Truman and the Desegregation of the Military
Harry Truman, who became president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, took a more direct approach to racial equality than his predecessor. Influenced partly by reports of violence against returning Black veterans (who were beaten and even killed for wearing their uniforms in the South), Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, ordering the desegregation of the US armed forces. It was a landmark civil rights act, though full implementation took years. The order is seen as a founding moment of the post-war civil rights movement.