It is hard to say if Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was a racist. I suspect he was not a racist but I can understand why some people might think that he was because he ordered the detainment of Japanese-Americans. Many historians believe he succumbed to political pressure to do something after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The main reason I do not believe he was a racist is that he was fairly well known, before the detainment, as a “champion of human rights and individual liberties here at home and around the world”.
In 1941, before the US entered World War II, he signed an Executive Order (8802) which “required defense contractors to include a ‘provision obligating contractors not to discriminate against any worker regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin”.
