Franklin Roosevelt's great constitutional mistake was not that he considered that U.S. citizens might be enemy combatants who should be handled under the laws of war, rather than by the criminal law. Instead, it was the use of skin color as a proxy for loyalty to the nation.

-John Yoo

Among FDR’s Supreme Court appointments was Hugo Black, a Klansman who claimed FDR knew this when he named him in 1937 and that FDR told him that “some of his best friends” in Georgia were Klansmen.

-Patrick J. Buchanan

Roosevelt didn’t address these issues publicly, but confidential files kept in his personal safe in the White House and released to the public decades after his death, as well as correspondence in his personal files, provide valuable clues.

  They make it clear that the question of where to settle the Jews had been on FDR’s mind for years. While he was uncertain about whether they would be better off on the slopes of the Andes or the savannahs of central Africa, there was one place he knew he didn’t want them: the United States of America.

-Steve Usdin

In 1941, FDR named South Carolina Sen. "Jimmy" Byrnes to the Supreme Court. Byrnes had led filibusters in 1935 and 1938 that killed anti-lynching bills, arguing that lynching was necessary "to hold in check the Negro in the South." FDR refused to back the 1938 anti-lynching law. -Pat Buchanan