Eugenie Anderson Quotes
We support President Truman's civil rights program.
Anderson, Eugenie. Quoted in Mrs. Ambassador: The Life and Politics of Eugenie Anderson, by Mary Dupont, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2019.
This part of Taft’s Inaugural Address shocked the South and much of the North. But these were the days when the Republican Party was the liberal party on racial issues and the Democratic Party housed most racists and bigots. On this, the parties would flip flop after the Democrats passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Bill. Both Taft and TR were racial liberals and the South coalesced around Woodrow Wilson, an intellectual but an inveterate racist.
He maintained these policies even after President Eisenhower’s January 1954 speech calling for people who were displaced as the result of urban renewal projects to be provided with Federal assistance in housing regardless of race. It is not known whether Sherman Adams shared Cole’s position with the President. Adams himself was forced to resign in a corruption scandal.
He was the first FHA administrator to make statements saying that non-discriminatory housing services should be available to the American people. He was not able to change the agency’s equal opportunity performance because the Southern states had laws allowing and protecting legal segregation especially in housing. The Southern staff interpreted his position to be sure that both blacks and whites had access to FHA services, but they used the “separate but equal” doctrine: Provide services to both races but always in segregated housing projects. This was typical of the kinds of problems that motivated the Civil Rights Acts offered by President Kennedy in 1963 and passed by President Johnson in 1964 See {637271} for a similar Mason statement.
Eugenie Anderson, also known as Helen Eugenie Moore Anderson, was a United States diplomat. She is best known as the first woman appointed chief of mission at the ambassador level in US history.
