Although the Civil War abolished slavery, a sense of white supremacy still prevailed and many inhabitants in the United States were still persecuted for their ethnicity. Some African Americans benefited economically but were still at a disadvantage due to racial segregation and inequality. Laws bounded them and forced blacks to be completely separate from white society. African Americans even had their own facilities, schools, transportation, seats and telephone booths. President Truman became the first president to try to end segregation by trying to reinstate the Fair Employment Practices Committee, to establish a civil rights commission, and to deny federal aid to states that participated in racial segregation of any kind. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case along with influential leaders such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., emphasized the need for civil liberties, while events such as Rosa Park's seat refusal, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Women's Political Caucus, and the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sparked the onset of the Civil Right's Movement. .
Truman attempted to end racial discrimination by re-establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee, civil rights commission and the refuting of federal aid to states that support and partake in racial segregation thus establishing the Fair Deal program. The Fair Deal program was never enacted due to its inability to gain support from the South although it was fully backed by the North. Though these legislatures did not pass, it succeeded in the way that it promoted the ideology by promoting debate on the issues of civil equality as well as civil liberties. On July 26, 1948 President Truman signed an order that outlawed segregation between soldiers in the war. This order in return created the Executive Order 9981, President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, and Order 9980, which became known as the Fair Employment Board that restricted employers to discriminate against it's employees.