Leadership: When Harry Truman threw Jim Crow out of the Army

This comment, from Ed Brayton's blog, needs no gassy annotation by me: President Harry S Truman, Brayton writes,

signed the first executive calling for 'equality of treatment for all persons in the armed services, without regard to race, color, religion or national origin' on July 26, 1948 -- a scant few months before a presidential election, with polls showing 82% opposition to the idea in the country. Can you imagine a president today having the courage to do such a thing under those circumstances? I can't either.

Truman certainly made huge mistakes -- deploying of nightmarish weapons of mass destruction against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and, even more, Nagasaki; abandoning Roosevelt's plans to extend the New Deal; among others -- but, like so many politicians of his era, he was unafraid to accept the responsibilities of leadership, in that unlike the moral and political dwarfs who have held power since the early 1970s. -- Truman's Moral Courage by Ed Brayton (Dispatches from the Culture Wars 2010-05-04).