The First African-American Appointment
President Kennedy's new frontier was to push the envelop in areas of national life that had not been reached during the terms of President Harry S. Truman or President Dwight D. Eisenhower. A Presidential Executive Order 9981 issued by President Truman had desegregated the armed forces on July 26, 1948, but the service academies were lagging in officer recruiting. As a precursor to President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs (Head Start, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court Justice) President Kennedy challenged the U. S. Coast Guard Academy to tender appointments to black high school students soon after his inauguration.
Read more about this topic: Black Cadets At The Coast Guard Academy
Famous quotes containing the word appointment:
“Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)