In 1947, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, commissioned by Harry S. Truman, delivered a report outlining the many ways in which the United States was failing to live up to the Fourteenth Amendment’s promises of equal protection and due process of law for all people. Recalling the first civil rights movement, the committee emphasized the still-unmet goal of securing for “each individual” the right “to physical freedom, to security against illegal violence, and to fair, orderly legal process.”
