That Eisenhower held such views is not surprising. He had lived in small-town Kansas or on army bases all his life, and he knew nothing of the crisis of black life in modern America. He had seen Jim Crow in operation and given it little thought. He had grown up in a world that was dominated by whites and in which black people had no power or prominence. He knew very little about the aspirations of black Americans. He had no black friends, no black teachers, no black role models, and no black colleagues. His favorite place to unwind was Augusta National Golf Club, a bastion of white male privilege in the heart of the Old South. He simply had no inkling that the struggle for African American civil rights was going to become perhaps the defining social problem of his era and of the next half-century.
Eisenhower was hardly alone among white Americans in failing to perceive the depth of black anger and the urgent need for action, although already in the mid-1940s some leaders had begun to press for change. Truman had taken important steps, setting up the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1946. It produced a landmark report, To Secure These Rights, in October 1947, which outlined specific policy proposals to advance civil rights. In July 1948 Truman ordered the desegregation of the federal workforce and the armed services, a major accomplishment. He called for a federal antilynching law and a ban on the poll tax. He also wanted to create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission to ensure nondiscrimination in hiring in industries that were working on government contracts. But Truman was stymied by his own Democratic Party, which was deeply cleft on the issue of race. Segregationist southern Democrats held a stranglehold on the Senate; no civil rights legislation had a chance in that chamber. Many of Truman’s civil rights policies were stillborn.6
During the 1952 presidential campaign, Eisenhower shied away from making strong statements in support of civil rights. In his first press conference as a candidate, held in Abilene on June 5, 1952, he declared his “unalterable support of fairness and equality among all types of American citizens,” but quickly hedged: “I do not believe we can cure all the evils in men’s hearts by law,” an echo of his 1948 congressional testimony. “I do repeat again and again my fear,” he told the press in New York on June 7, “that in law itself we do not find the answer always.” In Detroit a week later he again extolled equality as “the basic conception of our whole government.” But he insisted that he would “never use a coercive law when we might aggravate instead of help to advance the program of pure equality of opportunity in this country.”
By September 1952 Eisenhower had broadened his message somewhat, stating that he would eagerly abolish segregation in the nation’s capital and continue to expunge it from the armed services. In enforcing Jim Crow segregation in Washington, D.C., he said, “we have the poorest possible example given to those of other lands of what this country is and what it means.” But he would not impose new laws on the South. “An ounce of leadership,” he said in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, “is worth a pound of law.” In a major address on civil rights in Newark, New Jersey, on October 17, Eisenhower said his goal was to act “in a spirit of good will” toward states where segregation still persisted. He wished to “enlist cooperation, not invite resistance.” Framing his statement as a criticism of Truman’s failures to get results, he insisted that what was needed “to deal with the problem of race relations, to provide equal opportunities and to end racism, is leadership.” Leading by example and exhortation rather than using federal law: that was Eisenhower’s preferred method. On civil rights, it seemed, he planned to speak loudly and carry a small stick.7
III
To his credit, Eisenhower followed through on his modest campaign promises on civil rights. In his first State of the Union address just two weeks after his inauguration, he drew the nation’s attention to the question of racial injustice: “We know that discrimination against minorities persists [in America]. Such discrimination—confined to no one section of the Nation—is but the outward testimony to the persistence of distrust and of fear in the hearts of men. This fact makes all the more vital the fighting of these wrongs by each individual, in every station of life, in his every deed.” He then announced a concrete action: “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.”8
Washington was a southern town in the 1950s, and segregation had been in place there for many decades. President Wilson had overseen the formal segregation of the federal workforce upon taking office in 1913, and in a city in which one-third of all jobs were in federal service, this denial of opportunity had a huge economic impact on black city residents. Cafés and restaurants, buses, movie houses, public housing, and schools were mostly segregated. No black person could stay overnight in a downtown hotel. Black citizens who rode trains from the North to the South had to switch to segregated cars in Washington. When Eisenhower came into office, a court case was already pending that challenged Jim Crow in the capital city. The plaintiffs argued that there were already laws on the books in Washington, dating from the Reconstruction era, which banned racial discrimination in restaurants. The laws had been passed by the local government in 1872 and 1873 and had long been ignored but never legally repealed. The case, District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., made its way to the Supreme Court, where arguments were heard on April 30, 1953.
Eisenhower and his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, showing considerable creativity, seized the opportunity to join the case and filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the plaintiffs. Brownell, who held progressive views on race and civil rights, wanted the Justice Department to deliver on the president’s pledge to end segregation in the capital. His brief certainly pleased Thurgood Marshall, the chief legal counsel for the NAACP, who publicly praised the attorney general for his support. On June 8, 1953, the Court unanimously found that the earlier statutes banning “whites only” cafés were valid. At a stroke the Court opened up the capital’s dining places to African American patrons, with the overt support of the administration. Movie theaters followed suit. It was only a start: the capital’s public schools were still segregated, but that issue was also being taken up in the courts. For the city’s African American residents, this was a major victory, and the administration would seek to take political credit for the Court’s decision.9
Equally impressive was the speed with which Eisenhower embraced the tricky issue of segregation in the military. Of course Truman had started the process to desegregate the armed forces, but much remained to be done. Across the country in the early 1950s army and navy bases were still segregated, including military housing, schools, cafeterias, drinking fountains, and workplaces. In mid-March 1953 Eisenhower was asked at a press conference by an African American journalist, Alice A. Dunnigan, if he was aware that the army continued to operate white-only schools, which seemed incompatible with his declared policy of eliminating segregation in areas of federal responsibility. The question caught Ike off guard. “I haven’t heard it; I will look it up,” he replied. But he went on to say, “Wherever federal funds are expended for anything, I do not see how any American can justify—legally, or logically, or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds among our citizens.” There was little ambiguity in this message.10
The next day Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens produced a memo for the president’s press secretary, James Hagerty, that confirmed Dunnigan’s assertion: there were indeed segregated schools being operated on military installations in Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas. These schools, however, were funded by the states and supervised by local school boards. The only way to integrate these schools, Stevens believed, was to have base commanders negotiate with local authorities, and if they proved unwilling to comply, the Department of the Army would have to build and run new, integrated schools. If this happened, wrote Stevens, the administration would surely be attacked in Congress and the press “for needlessly spend
ing public funds.” Eisenhower brushed aside this objection and directed the army and navy to conduct a survey of their installations and report on the progress toward desegregation of their facilities.11
In early June, however, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the charismatic Baptist clergyman from Harlem who had served in Congress since 1945 and gained a national reputation as an outspoken civil rights advocate, made an embarrassing allegation: Eisenhower’s own staff was blocking the president’s policies. “Your official family,” Powell charged in an open letter to the president, “has completely undermined your stated position on segregation.” Officials in the Veterans Administration, the navy, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare were countermanding desegregation orders. “The hour has arrived for you to decisively assert your integrity,” demanded Powell.12
The accusation stung, and it prodded Maxwell Rabb into action. Rabb, a Harvard-trained lawyer, was officially the secretary to the cabinet, but he was also a seasoned congressional hand and a former aide to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. By default he had been given the unofficial portfolio of “minorities officer” in the Eisenhower White House. Rabb reached out to Powell and cut a deal: Eisenhower would issue a temperate public reply that promised swift action on Powell’s charges. In return, Powell would declare himself satisfied. The deal stuck: Rabb’s draft had Eisenhower declare “I will carry out every pledge I have made with regard to segregation.” He said his staff was working hard to achieve his program: “We have not taken and we shall not take a single backward step. There must be no second class citizens in this country.” Powell, with characteristic overstatement, hailed Ike’s pledge as “a Magna Carta for minorities and a second Emancipation Proclamaton.” For the black community, so starved for official recognition of their struggle, Ike’s commitment marked a breakthrough.13
Rabb now pushed White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams to make sure the president did indeed hold up his end of the bargain. In particular Rabb and Adams put great pressure on Secretary of the Navy Robert Anderson to abolish the last vestiges of segregation on naval bases. Under orders from the White House, two navy officials made visits to the large navy bases at Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, to investigate the status of the desegregation effort. Reports came in from dozens of other naval facilities across the South. The picture was entirely predictable: washrooms, cafeterias, drinking fountains, and some work spaces were still segregated—fully five years after Truman’s July 1948 Executive Order that commanded desegregation of the armed forces. Under direct pressure from the president, Anderson moved fast. In August 1953 he ordered the removal of “Colored” and “White” signs over water fountains and toilet facilities. Mess halls were next. By November 1 Eisenhower could proudly and truthfully state that at the 60 naval facilities in the South, segregation had been eliminated.14
And he was not finished. On August 13, when he was putting pressure on the armed services to root out the last vestiges of segregation, Eisenhower announced the creation of the Committee on Government Contracts, a body designed to oversee nondiscrimination policies in the allocation of federal contracts. It marked a definite reversal for the president, who in the campaign had rejected Truman’s proposal to create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Yet now, under pressure from black leaders, Ike relented. He named Nixon as its co-chairman to indicate the seriousness of the committee. In correspondence with Nixon, he stated that the Government Contracts Committee was “proof of our own faith” in the principle of equality. “On no level of our national existence can inequality be justified.”15
Of course this was only an advisory body, designed, Ike wrote, to “find out whether existing laws are being enforced.” It had no coercive authority. But Executive Order 10479 was hailed by black leaders as a sign of progress. Given the significance of federal contracts in the American economy, Eisenhower was ensuring that a major segment of jobs would now be subject to federal nondiscrimination policy. Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP and a frequent critic of Eisenhower, praised the president’s action, which “merits the gratitude of thousands who are now denied a chance to work or use their highest skills in the mills and factories that hold government contracts.”16
Eisenhower’s southern friends took notice, as the president learned in July at a lunch with his “great friend,” Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina. A former Democratic senator, Supreme Court justice, and secretary of state under Truman, Byrnes had backed Eisenhower in 1952. At their lunch, according to Eisenhower’s diary, Byrnes expressed his anxiety that the Supreme Court might soon issue a ruling banning segregation in public schools. If that happened, Byrnes warned, there would not only be “riots, resultant ill feeling and the like,” but the southern states would “immediately cease support for public schools.” Byrnes seemed to suggest that while opinion in the South was evolving with respect to the desegregation of public places, buses, and the workplace, schooling was a different matter: “They are frightened of putting the children together.” Eisenhower wrote that Byrnes was “afraid that I would be carried away by the hope of capturing the Negro vote in this country.”
But Ike reassured the South Carolinian of his belief that “improvement in race relations is one of those things that will be healthy and sound only if it starts locally.” Prejudice, Ike insisted, will not “succumb to compulsion,” and any imposition of federal law on states “would set back the cause of progress in race relations for a long, long time.” This was a classic expression of Eisenhower’s inner convictions: racial discrimination was wrong, but its remedy must emerge from within the communities and states themselves. Federal legislation could only make trouble. The president made every effort to signal to white southerners that he did not plan to confront Jim Crow in the South.17
Eisenhower’s first eight months in office had brought about meaningful progress, including the desegregation of restaurants in the nation’s capital, the vigorous attack on the remaining segregated practices in military installations, and the creation of a “little FEPC” in the form of the Government Contracts Committee. Yet these were relatively easy triumphs, at little cost, fought on ground chosen by the administration. A far greater test came when African Americans challenged the segregation of public schools and compelled Eisenhower to take a public stand: Would he support them in their bid to open public schools to all, or side with his friends in the South?
IV
The segregation by race of public schools in the United States had won legal sanction through the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. In that case the Court ruled that the state of Louisiana could legally separate whites from blacks on public railway cars, provided that the cars themselves were of equal quality. The Court concluded that while the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution enforced the equality of all people before the law, it did not “abolish distinctions based upon color,” nor did it insist on “commingling the two races.” In Plessy, the Court implied, people could be equal before the law but unequal among each other. In society distinctions of race, color, religion, and social status clearly still mattered, and on such social customs the Constitution was silent. Simply separating citizens according to their color did not imply the inferiority of one race. If separate public facilities provided to black and white citizens were equal, the state was free to decide which citizens could use which facilities. The Plessy decision was of monumental significance, for it provided legal validity to racial segregation in “separate but equal” public schools.18
For over half a century the doctrine of “separate but equal” served as a legal barrier to black schoolchildren who wished to attend white-only local schools. Seventeen southern and border states required public schools to be segregated by race; other states chose to allow segregation on a school-by-school basis. Not until June 1950 did a few cracks appear in the legal edifice that supported such segregation. In two decisions the Supreme Court ruled that the universit
ies of Texas and Oklahoma had to admit two black men to their graduate schools because they had failed to provide these men with equal facilities to pursue their studies. The Court meant not just equal facilities but equal treatment inside the classroom. The plaintiff in the Oklahoma case, George McLaurin, was studying for a doctoral degree in education. He was forced to sit in a sort of alcove in the classroom, separated from the white students; he was assigned to a separate table in the library and took his meals at a separate table in the cafeteria. The Court objected to this treatment, ruling that “the Fourteenth Amendment precludes differences in treatment by the state based upon race.” McLaurin, “having been admitted to a state-supported graduate school, must receive the same treatment at the hands of the state as students of other races.” This was a major blow against Plessy, for it suggested that the “separate but equal” principle was not in fact protected by the Constitution.19
Sensing an opportunity, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund decided in October 1950 on a legal challenge to the entire “separate but equal” doctrine in all public schooling. Marshall’s team provided legal advice and lawyers to assist plaintiffs in five separate cases, in South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and Kansas. These cases would be grouped together by the Supreme Court when it decided to hear the case of Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in December 1952. At the very moment Eisenhower was taking the helm of the nation, the Supreme Court was preparing to pass judgment on one of the thorniest, most explosive social issues in the nation’s history.20
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