

Since homosexuality was still a crime in the 1950s, communists could allegedly blackmail LGBTQ workers to share government secrets. government of suspected communists during a period known as the “ Red Scare.” Many of those same politicians falsely claimed that gay and lesbian government workers were also a threat. Gay rights picketers protesting outside of the White House, 1965Īfter World War II, anti-communist crusaders like Senator Joseph McCarthy strove to purge the U.S.

LGBTQ Workers Barred from Government Jobs (1953) READ MORE: Why Truman Ended Segregation in the Military in 1948 5. military set a huge precedent that significantly advanced the cause of civil rights. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in 1948 to maintain “equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve in our country's defense” for all American servicemen and women “without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” Desegregating the U.S. In belated recognition of that service and sacrifice, President Harry S. Despite these racist policies, Black units like the 332nd Fighter Group ( Tuskegee Airmen) and the 761st Tank Battalion ( Black Panthers) fought with “conspicuous courage” and valor. military followed the segregation model of the Jim Crow-era South, built upon the lie that Black servicemen were inherently less capable than whites.

More than a million African American men and women served their country in World War II, but they did so in racially segregated units. The government created 10 such “relocation centers,” where they incarcerated Japanese Americans (men, women and children) in remote locations under harsh conditions. citizens by birth, were forcibly removed from their homes and confined in “relocation centers” that could more accurately be called concentration camps. Secretary of War to “prescribe military areas…from which any or all persons may be excluded.”Īs a result, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of them U.S. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. On February 19, 1942, roughly two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. It’s one of the darkest chapters of American history. Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans (1942) More than 130,000 people contributed to the effort, at a cost of $2 billion ($29 billion in 2022). American and British physicists set to work on achieving nuclear fission with uranium, and a few months after issuing Executive Order 8807, FDR secretly approved the creation of the Manhattan Project. Funding from the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development paid for the massive, top-secret nuclear weapon program known as the Manhattan Project.Īs early as 1939, FDR was alerted that German scientists were working on a new type of bomb with unrivaled destructive power. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8807 to create a government agency overseeing scientific research into defense technology. The United States didn’t enter World War II until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but months earlier President Franklin D.
LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS BY TRUMP DECEMBER CODE
Funding for the Manhattan Project (1941)Ī group of men preparing 'Little Boy,' code name for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 The 13th Amendment, signed and ratified in 1865, officially abolished slavery in America. While the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t abolish slavery, it signaled that the freedom of enslaved people in the South depended on a Union victory, and it imbued the bloody conflict with a clear moral imperative. He also welcomed formerly enslaved people into the Union Army and Navy, in which some 200,000 Black soldiers ultimately enlisted. Lincoln specified that enslaved people in the Confederate states “are, and henceforward shall be free,” but made no such provision for those in border states. It’s important to note, however, that the Emancipation Proclamation itself didn’t end slavery. When Abraham Lincoln issued his historic Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the Civil War officially became a war to end the shameful practice of slavery in the United States. President Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, in Washington, D.C.
