What Did It Look Like for a U.S. President to Condemn Racism in 1921?

Warren G. Harding was hardly a people’s president. Handpicked by the Republican Party as an inoffensive alternative to the erratic tenure of Woodrow Wilson (and as a likely candidate to win Ohio, his home state), Harding was the first to admit his own shortcomings: he once called himself “a man of limited talents” and repeatedly warned reporters not to expect too much. But on October 26, 1921, Harding delivered a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, that showed he was capable of eliciting extreme reactions despite being chosen for his blandness.

Though Harding’s speech is often identified today as the first time a sitting U.S. president condemned lynching, the speech was actually a much broader discussion of racism and race relations. (Harding did condemn “the stain of barbaric lynching” in front of Congress in April of 1921, but he wasn’t the first president to do so; Woodrow Wilson spoke out against lynching in 1918. Similarly, Harding’s support for the Dyer Bill, which would have established lynching as a federal crime, wasn’t voiced in Birmingham. The Dyer Bill passed in the House of Representatives in 1922 but never made it out of the Senate, and new legislation protecting the civil rights of African Americans wasn’t enacted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) Harding’s speech was part of Birmingham’s 50th-anniversary celebration, delivered to a multiracial crowd that, according to a New York Times report, was “conservatively estimated to have numbered more than 100,000 persons.” The Times led with the fact that would be most shocking to white audiences: Harding had revealed he was in favour of equal educational and economic status for Black and white Americans. He began, though, by discussing industry—before noting how the South would be hurt financially if Black Americans continued leaving the area for the North, the West, or Europe.

Harding’s introduction, then, established his argument as economic rather than social. Still, the Times report seems to suggest that his audience, or at least the 1 out of 10 persons who could hear him clearly, interpreted his words as radical. It noted that Black audience members “gave vent to loud and lusty cheers to evidence their approval. On the other hand only once or twice was there any applause from the white section and in both instances it was scattered.” The most notable quality of Harding’s speech may have been the clarity with which he discussed race, especially considering the white Southerners in his audience—people who were accustomed to the political and social power they gained from being white. “Politically and economically,” Harding said, “there need be no occasion for great and permanent differentiation [between white and Black people], for limitations of the individual’s opportunity, provided that on both sides there shall be recognition of the absolute divergence in things social and racial.…I would say, let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.…I would insist upon equal educational opportunity for both.”

Apart from the “scattered” claps from a few white audience members, white Southerners reacted poorly to Harding’s speech. Georgia Senator Thomas Watson was quoted by the Owensboro Messenger as saying that it was “a great pity that a northern man, holding the highest office on earth, should go down into the South and plant there fatal germs in the minds of the black race.” Though today’s audiences can see the irony in Watson’s claim that there was “no such thing as economic discrimination against” Black people in the South, public endorsement for any kind of racial equality was often political suicide—something that a friend of Harding, Alabama Senator Oscar Underwood, would find personally true the next year, after his public denouncement of the Ku Klux Klan contributed to his failure to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924.

But, though Harding’s speech was brave for its time and setting in regard to political and educational equality (regarding quality of instruction, at least—Harding wasn’t advocating for integrating schools) for Black and white Americans, he was less progressive in other aspects of interracial relations. “Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality,” Harding said. “Indeed, it would be helpful to have that word ‘equality’ eliminated from this consideration.”

Black writer and activist W.E.B. DuBois recognized both the potential and the danger in Harding’s ideas. Though he credited Harding for arguing for economic, educational, and political equality, saying that Harding “made a braver, clearer utterance than Theodore Roosevelt ever dared to make or than William Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of,” he saw the president’s indictment of social equality as indicative of a “grave crisis”:

For fifty years the Southern white man has said to the Negro: Do you mean to say that you consider yourself fit to associate with white people? And the Negro has answered; but the question which he answered was not the one asked, but rather the other totally different question: Do you mean to say that you want to force your friendship and company on persons who do not want them? The answer to this is obviously an emphatic and indignant No. But when the Negro said No, he knew that he was not answering the question the white man intended to ask and the white man knew that the Negro knew this, and that he himself had purposely asked a question of double and irreconcilable meaning, when he said, “Do you want Social Equality?”

The type of equality that Harding wanted was one that, ultimately, benefited his nation’s economy more than it did any community of people. In his speech, he repeatedly emphasized the individual, calling on each person to participate in society to the best of his or her ability, regardless of their race. But Harding still welcomed social separation between white and Black Americans, even claiming that Black Americans weren’t looking for social equality at all. For 1921, his speech was groundbreaking—and may well have made his Republican bosses realize that if they wanted someone inoffensive, they should have picked another man. But after the speech was done, there was still much to be desired. At no point in it did Harding condemn lynching. He did not even mention it.

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