geekyMany people think of Warren Harding as one of the worst presidents, because of the scandals that tarnished his administration and because of his womanizing. But on October 21, 1921, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was very popular, and at a time when white supremacy reigned supreme in the deep south, Harding very courageously became the first President to delivered a speech in a southern state condemning the practice of lynching. Whatever his faults may have been, Harding was very progressive in the field of civil rights. He was speaking in Birmingham, Alabama.
Following the first world war, large population shifts had raised racial tensions throughout much of the country. As the 1920 Republican presidential nominee, Harding had advocated civil rights for African-Americans, in spite of wide opposition among white voters. At the time, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reported that lynchings claimed the lives of an average of two African-Americans per week.
Speaking in Birmingham, Harding voiced his support for anti-lynching bills pending in Congress. Legislation seeking to curb the practice was initially sponsored in 1918 by Congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri and Senator (later Vice-President) Charles Curtis of Kansas, both Republicans. The bills called for $10,000 fines to be levied against any county where a lynching occurred, for the prosecution of negligent state and county officials in federal courts and for the lodging of federal murder charges against participants.
I have been searching online for a transcript of Harding's speech, but have been unsuccessful this far. However part of what he said to his audience was the following:
"I can say to you people of the South, both white and black, that the time has passed when you are entitled to assume that the problem of races is peculiarly and particularly your problem. It is the problem of democracy everywhere, if we mean the things we say about democracy as the ideal political state. Whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for that equality."
According to one account, the segregated section of the park where the African-American people were, erupted in applause and cheers. The white audience became very quiet. They had expected some sort of canned syrupy political speech. W.E.B. DuBois, who became the founder of the NAACP, said of the speech, “In this the president made a braver, clearer utterance than Theodore Roosevelt ever dared to make or than William Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of.”
Harding had succeeded President Woodrow Wilson, who had re-segregated the federal civil service. Harding advocated strong federal laws against lynching which, regrettably, the U.S. Senate defeated several times during his term.
Five days later, on October 26th, Harding gave another speech, celebrating the semi-centennial of the founding of Birmingham, Alabama. The text of that speech can be found here. In the speech Harding stated:
"I want to see the time come when black men will regard themselves as full participants in the benefits and duties of American citizenship; when they will vote for Democratic candidates, if they prefer the Democratic policy on tariff or taxation, or foreign relations, or what-not; and when they will vote the Republican ticket for like reasons...
"I believe in absolute equality in the paths of knowledge and culture, equality opportunity for those who strive, equal admiration for those who achieve; in matters social and racial a separate path, each pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race purity and race pride; equality in things spiritual; agreed divergence in the physical and material."
Although the House approved the anti-lynching bill in 1922, a group of Southern Democrats mounted a successful filibuster against it in the Senate. Efforts to enact similar legislation languished on Capitol Hill until the 1930s, when Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Congressman Edward Costigan of Colorado (both Democrats) took up the cause. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, refused to back their bill, fearing it would cost him Southern electoral support and jeopardize his 1936 reelection bid. It took 42 more years for Congress to enact broad civil rights legislation that, among other provisions, protected blacks against officially sanctioned discrimination. In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution formally apologizing for its repeated failure to enact anti-lynching bills.
Whatever his legacy may now be, Warren Harding is to be admired for his courageous advocacy for racial equality at a time and place in which such candor would not have been popular or politically advantageous. When it came to this issue, principle mattered more than politics to Harding. Author James David Rosenalt has an assessment of Harding in his 2009 book The Harding Affair (reviewed in this community here) that is more complimentary than most historians. Robenalt writes of Harding at pages 3-4:
He had a rare political attribute: courage. In his first address to Congress, he asked for the passage of an anti-lynching law. Six months after taking office, he was the first sitting president to travel into the deep south to make a bold civil rights speech. Democracy was a lie if blacks were denied political equality, he told an enormous crowd separated by color and a chain-link fence in Birmingham, Alabama. A few months later, on his first Christmas in the White House, he pardoned Socialist leader Eugene Debs, who was rotting away in an Atlanta prison. Debs's crime? He spoke out against the draft and the war after America entered the conflict.