Executive Order 9981

Based on Wikipedia: Executive Order 9981

The Blinding That Changed Everything

On February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard was heading home. He had just been honorably discharged from the United States Army after serving his country in World War II. He was still wearing his uniform.

Hours later, he was completely and permanently blind.

South Carolina police officers attacked Woodard while he was riding a bus. The assault was so brutal that it destroyed both of his eyes. A decorated veteran, in uniform, blinded by American law enforcement on American soil, simply for being Black.

When President Harry S. Truman learned what had happened to Sergeant Woodard, something shifted. The attack became one of the catalysts for what would become Executive Order 9981—the presidential directive that, on July 26, 1948, abolished racial discrimination in the United States Armed Forces and set in motion one of the most significant civil rights achievements of the twentieth century.

A Military Divided Against Itself

To understand what Executive Order 9981 actually did, you first need to understand what the American military looked like before it. The armed forces didn't just happen to be segregated—they were deliberately, systematically designed to keep Black and white service members apart and unequal.

The disparities were staggering. A white American who qualified for combat could begin training within months. A Black American had to wait four years. Four years of delay, four years of being told you weren't ready, while the military claimed it needed more manpower and white soldiers shipped out to war.

The Army Air Corps—precursor to today's Air Force—was actively, deliberately slowing the training of Black pilots. This wasn't bureaucratic accident. It was policy. The Women's Army Corps technically allowed Black women to reenlist, but banned them from overseas assignments. You could serve your country, as long as you served it within carefully prescribed limits.

Even the Marine Corps maintained a completely segregated boot camp at Montford Point, North Carolina. Black Marines trained separately, lived separately, and were kept apart from white recruits from the moment they arrived until the moment they deployed.

Britain Held Up a Mirror

Sometimes you don't realize how bizarre your own customs are until you see them through someone else's eyes.

During World War II, thousands of Black American soldiers were stationed in Britain. The United States military, accustomed to Jim Crow segregation back home, tried to impose those same rules on British soil. They pressured British pub owners to segregate their establishments—to create separate areas for white and Black soldiers, or to refuse service to Black troops entirely.

The British response was telling. In the village of Bamber Bridge, pub owners did put up signs in response to the American military's request. The signs read: "Black Troops Only."

It was a pointed rebuke, a way of saying that if anyone was going to be excluded, it wouldn't be the Black soldiers. The British, who had their own complicated history with race and empire, nonetheless found American military segregation strange and objectionable. One white American soldier stationed in Britain complained in his letters home that "the English don't draw any color line" and called British women "ignorant" for socializing with Black troops.

The irony was apparently lost on him. He was fighting a war against Nazi Germany's ideology of racial supremacy while being upset that the British didn't share his own beliefs about racial hierarchy.

The Evidence Was Already There

Here's what makes military segregation particularly indefensible: the Army's own research showed it was pointless.

In 1945, the military surveyed 250 white officers and sergeants who had worked with integrated units—companies where a Black platoon had been assigned alongside white troops. The results demolished every argument for keeping the races apart.

Seventy-seven percent of both officers and sergeants said their attitude toward Black soldiers had become more favorable after serving together. Not a single respondent said their attitude had become less favorable. Zero. Eighty-four percent of officers and 81 percent of sergeants rated Black soldiers' combat performance as "very good." Only 4 to 5 percent—a tiny fraction—thought Black infantry soldiers were inferior to white infantry soldiers.

And crucially, 73 percent of officers and 60 percent of sergeants said Black and white soldiers "got along very well" when serving together.

The military had the data. Integration worked. Segregation had no reasonable basis. The only thing holding it in place was inertia and prejudice.

Truman Acts

Harry Truman was not an obvious civil rights champion. He came from Missouri, a border state with deep Southern sympathies. He had used racial slurs in private correspondence. His rise through Democratic politics in Kansas City had been facilitated by the Pendergast political machine, which was not known for progressive racial views.

But Truman was also a pragmatist who could be moved by evidence and by moral arguments. After the Woodard blinding, he established the President's Committee on Civil Rights, which produced a landmark report called "To Secure These Rights." The report was unflinching. It condemned the state of civil rights in America and recommended sweeping action.

In June 1947, Truman gave a historic address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the NAACP—in which he framed civil rights as a moral imperative, not just a political issue. In February 1948, he sent a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress.

Congress, predictably, did nothing.

So Truman did what presidents can do when Congress won't act: he used his executive power. On July 26, 1948, he signed Executive Order 9981.

What the Order Actually Said

The language of Executive Order 9981 was remarkably straightforward:

It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.

That last clause—"having due regard to the time required"—was a concession to military brass who argued that integration couldn't happen overnight. It gave the Pentagon some flexibility in implementation. Critics worried it was a loophole that would allow indefinite delay.

The order also created a committee to investigate and recommend how to implement desegregation. This was crucial. Truman wasn't just announcing a policy; he was creating a mechanism to enforce it.

Resistance From the Top

Not everyone in uniform was pleased.

General Omar Bradley, the Army Chief of Staff and one of the most celebrated commanders of World War II, publicly complained that "the Army is not out to make any social reforms." It was a stunning statement from a senior military leader—essentially saying that equality was someone else's problem.

Truman forced Bradley to issue a public apology. The president had given an order, and he expected it to be followed.

Kenneth Claiborne Royall, who had served as Secretary of the Army since 1947, proved even more recalcitrant. For nearly a year after Truman signed the executive order, Royall continued to refuse to desegregate the Army. In April 1949, Truman forced him into retirement. The message was clear: this was not optional.

Implementation: Slower Than Promised

Despite Truman's resolve, actual desegregation happened more slowly than the order suggested. The real enforcement work fell to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration, which took office in 1953.

Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, oversaw the desegregation of military schools, hospitals, and bases. The process was methodical and sometimes contentious. The last all-Black unit in the United States military wasn't abolished until September 1954—more than six years after Truman signed the order.

But it did happen. Montford Point closed as a segregated facility, becoming instead a satellite campus of the main Marine base at Camp Lejeune. Black and white soldiers began training together, living together, fighting together.

The Korean War Accelerates Change

War has a way of making abstract policies concrete.

When the Korean War began in June 1950, the military was still in the middle of desegregating. The demands of combat accelerated the process. Commanders in Korea discovered what the 1945 surveys had already shown: integrated units fought effectively. The artificial barriers of segregation became impossible to maintain when units were taking casualties and needed replacements immediately, regardless of race.

By the end of the Korean War in 1953, the re-integration of the armed services was largely complete. What had seemed impossible just a few years earlier—Black and white Americans serving side by side as equals in the military—had become ordinary reality.

The Exceptions and the Limits

Executive Order 9981 was transformative, but it wasn't absolute.

In one remarkable exception, the United States quietly complied with a request from the Icelandic government not to station Black soldiers at the American military base in Keflavík, Iceland. This arrangement—a direct violation of Truman's order—continued for decades. Black service members didn't begin serving in Iceland until the 1970s and 1980s.

Iceland at the time was an extremely homogeneous society with almost no non-white population. The Icelandic government apparently worried about the social impact of stationing Black troops there. The United States, which had just fought a war partly justified by opposition to Nazi racial ideology, agreed to this racist request and kept the agreement secret.

The contradiction is jarring but instructive. Executive orders are powerful, but they operate within political constraints. Iceland was strategically important during the Cold War. Challenging their racial preferences was apparently not worth the diplomatic friction.

Beyond the Military

Executive Order 9981 didn't just affect the armed forces. It was part of a broader push by Truman to address discrimination throughout the federal government.

On the same day he signed 9981, Truman also signed Executive Order 9980, which established fair employment practices across all federal agencies. The two orders together represented the most significant presidential action on civil rights since Reconstruction.

Fifteen years later, the work continued. On July 26, 1963—the anniversary of Truman's order—Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara issued Directive 5120.36. This new policy encouraged military commanders to use their economic power against businesses that discriminated. If a restaurant or hotel near a military base refused to serve Black soldiers or their families, commanders could declare those establishments off-limits, effectively cutting off their military customer base.

It was a recognition that desegregating the military wasn't enough if service members faced discrimination the moment they stepped off base. The fight for equality had to extend beyond the barracks.

A. Philip Randolph's Long Campaign

Executive Order 9981 didn't emerge from nowhere. It was the product of years of activism and pressure.

A. Philip Randolph was one of the most important figures in this story. Randolph was the founder and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Black labor union to win a major contract with a corporation. He understood the power of organized pressure.

In 1941, Randolph had threatened to lead a march on Washington to demand equal employment opportunities for Black workers in defense industries. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, wanting to avoid the embarrassment of a massive civil rights protest during wartime, negotiated. The result was Executive Order 8802, which banned discriminatory employment practices in the defense industry and federal agencies.

But 8802 hadn't touched the military itself. So in 1947, Randolph—now in his late fifties and still fighting—formed the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training, along with colleague Grant Reynolds. They later renamed it the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation.

The name was a declaration of tactics. Randolph threatened a campaign of civil disobedience if the military wasn't desegregated. Young Black men, he warned, would refuse to register for the draft. It was a bold threat that raised the stakes considerably.

Truman's Executive Order 9981 was, in part, a response to this pressure. Randolph's willingness to push hard—to risk accusations of disloyalty during the early Cold War—helped make change possible.

The Larger Context

Executive Order 9981 came at a particular moment in American history. World War II had just ended, and the Cold War was beginning. The United States was positioning itself as the leader of the "free world" against Soviet communism.

This created a problem. How could America credibly present itself as a beacon of freedom and democracy while maintaining a system of racial segregation? Soviet propaganda made hay of American racism, pointing to lynchings, segregation, and discrimination as evidence that American claims to moral leadership were hypocritical.

Some historians argue that Cold War competition pushed Truman toward civil rights action. Desegregating the military wasn't just the right thing to do—it was strategically useful. It undermined Soviet propaganda and strengthened America's position in the ideological battle for hearts and minds around the world.

This doesn't diminish the achievement. But it reminds us that moral progress often happens when principle and pragmatism align.

What Changed, and What Didn't

The military that emerged from desegregation was genuinely different. By the 1960s and 1970s, the armed forces had become one of the most integrated institutions in American society. For many Black Americans, military service offered opportunities—education, training, advancement—that were harder to find in civilian life.

Colin Powell, who would become the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later Secretary of State, often spoke about how the military had given him opportunities that might not have existed elsewhere. The desegregated military became a pathway to the middle class for generations of Black families.

But desegregation wasn't the same as equality. Discrimination persisted in subtler forms. Black service members were sometimes passed over for promotions, assigned to less desirable duties, or subjected to harassment. The percentage of Black officers remained far below the percentage of Black enlisted personnel. The work of creating a truly equal military continued long after the last segregated unit was disbanded.

Isaac Woodard's Legacy

And what of Isaac Woodard, the blinded veteran whose attack helped catalyze this transformation?

The police officer who blinded Woodard, Lynwood Shull, was tried and acquitted by an all-white jury in South Carolina. The jury deliberated for less than thirty minutes. Shull remained in law enforcement.

Woodard spent the rest of his life blind. He received a small disability pension from the Veterans Administration. He died in 1992, at the age of 73.

His suffering produced no justice for himself. But it helped produce justice for millions of others—the Black men and women who would serve in an integrated military, who would rise through the ranks, who would fight and lead and serve their country without the formal barriers that had constrained their predecessors.

Executive Order 9981 didn't end racism in America or even in the military. But it ended one form of official, state-sanctioned discrimination. It established, as a matter of presidential policy and eventually of military culture, that the armed forces of the United States would not discriminate on the basis of race.

That principle, born partly from the horror of what happened to Isaac Woodard on a South Carolina bus, remains in force today.