Retropod is sponsored by Tito's handmade vodka. Drink responsibly.

Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

In an age of fierce polarization in politics, it seems particularly impossible to change anyone's minds.

But history has shown that in politics, sometimes minds... particularly impossible to change anyone's minds.

But history has shown that in politics, sometimes minds do change.

Take President Harry Truman, for example.

His transformation from segregationist to civil rights advocate was nothing short of astonishing. Truman was born nearly 20 years after the end of the Civil War.

He was a farm boy raised in a segregated town in Missouri, which was once pro-slavery. His grandparents

had been slave owners. His mother hated President Abraham Lincoln. Truman himself had horribly racist views.

In his letters, he would often refer to people of color by derogatory slurs.

So when he became president in 1945, after Franklin Roosevelt's death,

Southern members of Congress were delighted.

They thought he'd be sympathetic

to segregationists. They were wrong. The pivotal moment came in the summer of 1946 when a black

military officer named R.R. Wright wrote a letter to Truman. Wright informed the president of an attack on a

Black World War II veteran named Isaac Woodard. Woodard had been pulled off a bus in South Carolina

months earlier and was beaten and blinded by the police chief. That letter struck a nerve with Truman. He had a soft spot for soldiers.

Carrie Fredrickson, the author of The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South,

wrote that from that point on, Truman changed course. In September of that year, Truman met with the National Emergency Committee

Against Mob Violence, composed of civil rights, labor, and religious leaders. During the meeting,

NAACP executive secretary Walter White, who had gone undercover in the South to investigate lynchings,

read a list of lynchings that had occurred

...