Truman Orders the Armed Forces Desegregated
Executive Order 9981 ends a decade of Black pressure to make the military match its wartime rhetoric of freedom
Quick facts
- Signed by
- President Harry S. Truman
- Date
- July 26, 1948
- Effect
- Ended official segregation in the U.S. armed forces
What happened
President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, declaring "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin." The National Archives holds the original order as a milestone document. It created a presidential committee to oversee compliance and effectively ended the practice of segregated units that had persisted through World War II, when Black soldiers served in separate divisions even as they fought and died for a country that denied them equal citizenship at home. Full implementation took several years, playing out through the Korean War, but the order set desegregation as federal policy.
Why it matters
The order made the military the first major American institution to desegregate by federal mandate, six years before Brown v. Board, giving the movement a working precedent that federal power could override Jim Crow custom when a president chose to use it.
How we know
The National Archives holds Truman's signed executive order in Record Group 11, the same series that preserves the country's enrolled federal statutes.
Sources
- National Archives. Executive Order 9981: Desegregation of the Armed Forces (1948) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- HISTORY (A&E Networks). Why Harry Truman Ended Segregation in the US Military in 1948 · Reputable sourcehistory.com · The domain "history.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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