July 26 · This Day in America
President Harry Truman signs Executive Order 9981, declaring "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin." Black Americans had fought in every American war and come home to segregated barracks, segregated mess halls, the back of the bus near the base they had defended. Truman, warned that the order could cost him the election, signs it anyway, after Southern senators threaten a filibuster of anything Congress might pass. Integration does not happen overnight — the last segregated Army units survive into 1954, prodded along by a war in Korea where the old lines simply could not hold. But here, on this day, a commander in chief used the stroke of a pen to put the most powerful institution in America on the side of equality, years before the courts caught up.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1990
On the White House South Lawn, before 3,000 people, President George H. W. Bush signs the Americans with Disabilities Act — the world's first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities. Curb cuts, ramps, lifts, captions, the right to a job and a way through the front door. It was, the country decided, simply a question of access being a right. Forty-two years to the week after Truman's order, another wall came down.
Source: www.archives.gov
“I now lift my pen to sign this Americans with Disabilities Act and say: Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”President George H. W. Bush, 1990