1946

Thurgood Marshall establishes the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

December
President Truman creates the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. The Committee’s October 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, calls for a broad range of policies against racism: elimination of discrimination and segregation in employment, housing, health facilities, interstate transportation, and public accommodations; a federal law making lynching a crime; abolition of the poll tax; federal protection of voting rights; and Executive Orders against discrimination in the federal civil service and the armed forces.