Historians Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten write that Truman "was the first president to have a civil rights program, the first to try to come to grips with the basic problems of minorities, and the first to condemn, vigorously and consistently, the presence of discrimination and inequality in America." A 1947 report by the President's Committee on Civil Rights titled "To Secure These Rights" presented a detailed ten-point agenda of civil rights reforms. In February 1948, the president submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress that proposed creating several federal offices devoted to issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices. This provoked a storm of criticism from Southern Democrats in the runup to the 1948 Democratic National Convention, but Truman refused to compromise, saying: "My forebears were Confederates ... but my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten." At the start of the 81st Congress, pro-civil rights congressmen attempted to reform the Senate's filibuster rules so that a filibuster could be defeated by a simple majority vote. Southern senators blocked this reform, thereby ensuring that civil rights would not emerge as an important legislative issue until the late 1950s.