Democracy And Freedom

Democracy and freedom: the two things the founding fathers used as the basis of the United States. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone, right? Wrong. Well at least for a majority of the history of the US. After years of fighting two of the earliest wars of America’s history is about freedom, the ancestors finally eradicated official ball-and-chain slavery from our cities upon the hills. But even if literal slavery passed, Jim Crow laws, arguably one of the most unjustifiable crimes to the American Dream, brought segregation, causing the freedom to be not so free after all. Blacks weren’t the only ones that faced discrimination either: women, natives, and other minorities had to work their way through life, dealing with

WW2 started off with a blast in the US, and the government called black and white troops alike to fight for their country. “One million African American men and women served in the military, in segregated units. Blacks in the military and civilian wartime jobs saw themselves as waging a ‘double victory’ campaign to secure democracy abroad and for themselves in their own country” (Alvah). This campaign caused many African Americans to agree that, as they fought for the liberation of Europe, they should fight for their freedom as well. After all, as Michael J. Klarman, a graduate of Harvard Law School, puts it, “Many black servicemen apparently calculated that if they were good enough to die for their country, they were also good enough to vote, to work, or to attend school with white people” (Klarman 17). The philosophy the veterans obtained sped up the civil rights movement because now the people coming back from the battle were tired of second-hand citizenship in a country that they just defended. The only problem with this philosophy was that the freedoms for which they fought so hard to earn weren’t given to them when they got back home. The servicemen, seeing the injustice that they faced, decided to protest for their rights by holding rallies and marches, asking the government to take action: and action they took. Truman was president post-war and during his presidency people like A Philip Randolph, a civil rights activist, were able to convince his administration and Congress to make reforms. Two of these reforms Truman himself signed were Executive Order 9980, which barred racial discrimination in civil service and Executive Order 9981, which called for the “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces” (Alvah). Truman’s executive orders are prime examples that the government was