Dwight D. Murphey on progressivism and the civil rights movement from the early 1900s to 1930s

[Modern] liberals in the United States did not provide conspicuous leadership to a movement for racial and ethnic equality until the issue came to life during and after World War II.  Most Americans will be amazed to hear that it was the Progressives who were most instrumental in establishing the Jim Crow system in the South; they did so after the Populist movement created a fear of the potentially corrupting effects of a movement that would combine blacks and poor whites.  Theodore Roosevelt is reputed to have made an embarrassingly bigoted comment about Negroes at the time of the Brownsville Affair.  Woodrow Wilson originally wanted to include blacks in his administration, but backed off when this led to criticism from his Southern supporters.  Franklin Roosevelt did not make civil rights legislation for blacks a significant part of the New Deal. 

During all those years the many liberals connected with the liberal journals as editors and writers, while favorable to Negroes and horrified by lynchings, made no move to make "civil rights" a priority issue.  As we look back from the ethos of the 1980s and '90s, we tend to think, racial, ethnic and sexual equality have held a place in the pantheon of liberal philosophy from the beginning.  But that is just not so.

~ Dwight D. Murphey, Liberalism in Contemporary America, p. 19