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. 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.'
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