The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  In truth Eisenhower was caught between two powerful forces, and he did not know how to resolve the tension between them. On the one hand, he believed that equality between citizens and the rule of law were the bedrock ideals of “Americanism” as he understood that term. Therefore defiance of the Supreme Court was unthinkable. Yet he also believed that the federal government must respect local customs, habits, laws, and desires. His speechwriter Emmet Hughes wrote that Eisenhower was determined not to use federal power to push southern states toward dramatic social change: “His political faith rested on the slow, gradual power of persuasion.” According to Hughes, Eisenhower insisted, “We can’t demand perfection in these moral questions. All we can do is keep working toward a goal and keep it high. And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by force is just plain nuts.”40

  His go-slow instincts were driven also by certain cultural assumptions that he shared with his southern white friends. For example, the president was not above invoking the specter of race-mixing between black men and white women—an apparition many white people then considered truly horrific—to explain why the South must be allowed time to evolve in its opinions. In a vulgar exchange with Warren at a stag dinner, the president is alleged to have said that white southerners were “not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” This sort of language was regrettably common among men of Eisenhower’s inner circle. Byrnes had evoked similar images when speaking to a reporter about the Brown decision, painting the following scene: “White girl in shorts plays tennis in the yard of a segregated school; Negro boy enters playground; the basic wall between the species begins to crumble and social chaos has begun.”41

  Even Ike’s old chum Swede Hazlett stirred the pot of race and sex in a personal letter to the president. Writing in early 1955 about southern reaction to the ruling, he opined that children had no apprehension about integrated schools and would readily adapt to the new landscape. The problem lay with the “racist parents” who had “visions of walking into their parlour some night and finding a black buck courting their own blonde honey-chile. If honey-chile wants a negro date let her have it. But the chances are 1000 to 1 that she won’t—with several centuries of tradition and social usage behind it. When I was a freshman at A[bilene] H[igh] S[chool] Gertie Tyler was a classmate of mine, and a sleek good-looking negress. But I can’t recall ever having even thought of social or any other kind of intercourse with her. Ridiculous!” Hazlett thus captured Ike’s own racial sensibilities in a nutshell.42

  The Supreme Court convened its new term in October 1954 and called for briefs to discuss the practical aspects of desegregating public schools. But on October 9 Associate Justice Robert Jackson died, and the chief justice suspended discussion of the matter until a replacement was named. Eisenhower nominated John Marshall Harlan II, the grandson of the Supreme Court justice who, in 1896, had been the sole vote against the Plessy decision. A conservative New York lawyer and judge, and a close friend and law partner of Herbert Brownell, Harlan had impeccable legal credentials. Yet to men of the South, he was associated with the work of his famous grandfather, who had declared the Constitution to be “color blind.” Southern senators seized on the opportunity of a vacancy on the bench to slow down the work of the Court. The Judiciary Committee elected to delay consideration of the Harlan nomination. The president resubmitted the nomination in January 1955 to the new Congress, but once again hearings were delayed. Not until April 1955, after Harlan’s confirmation—in the face of vigorous opposition from southern Democrats—did the Court take up the debate about how to implement desegregation in public schools.43

  When the debate before the Court resumed on precisely how to advise lower courts in their handling of integrating public schools, the NAACP was ready. Under Thurgood Marshall’s direction, NAACP lawyers submitted arguments calling for prompt and immediate desegregation, allowing at most a one-year grace period, until the fall of 1956, by which time desegregation would have to be fully implemented. Marshall said there could be no “moratorium on the Fourteenth Amendment.”44

  The lawyers for the four states that were defendants in the case argued against rapid implementation and asked for time—perhaps an indefinite amount of time—to desegregate the schools. The attorney general of Virginia, J. Lindsay Almond, claimed that a Court order for immediate desegregation “would be pre-emptive of the rights of a sovereign people” and would not be obeyed. The NAACP was asking the Court “to press this crown of thorns upon our brows and press the hemlock cup to our lips.” Not to be outdone in fearmongering, I. Beverly Lake, assistant attorney general of North Carolina, claimed that a Court order for immediate desegregation would provoke “racial tension and animosities unparalleled since those terrible days that gave rise to the original Ku Klux Klan.”45

  Which side would Ike take? As in the previous round of arguments, the Eisenhower administration leaned toward the position of the NAACP, but this time it offered an olive branch to the states. The Justice Department brief, submitted on November 24, 1954, at the request of the Court, argued that school boards should be given 90 days to submit plans to end segregation. Federal district courts would then supervise the implementation of those plans, and there would be no hard deadline by which these plans would have to be fulfilled. Arguing that the Court had now decided that the rights of black citizens were being violated, the Justice Department asserted, “Relief short of immediate admission to non-segregated schools necessarily implies the continuing deprivation of those rights.” The right of children to attend public schools without encountering racial barriers was “a fundamental human right supported by morality as well as law.” That said, Brownell’s brief, which was carefully edited by Eisenhower himself, took particular note of the historical context: racial segregation had been practiced for many decades and had long been upheld by the Supreme Court. Therefore, as it was rolled back, local anxieties must be met with “understanding and good will.”46

  When Solicitor General Simon Sobeloff made this case in oral argument before the Court on April 13, 1955, he made it plain that while the government wanted prompt desegregation, it would be content with a “middle course.” The government asked that district courts be allowed to supervise desegregation, thus returning to states a role in the process. Yet states must not be allowed “to delay for the mere sake of delay.” Local attitudes against desegregation should be taken into account, and local communities should not be ridden over “rough-shod.” Even so, “a Constitutional right ought not to depend upon a public opinion poll.” States could implement their own plans but must demonstrate a “bona fide advance toward desegregation.” Sobeloff recognized that states would need some time to act, but “time should not be allowed for paralyzing action.” There was more hope than certainty in his argument.47

  On May 31, 1955, just over a year since the first Brown ruling, the Court issued its decision on the remedy in the case, often referred to as Brown II. It reaffirmed its 1954 judgment and called for a “prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance” with the previous ruling. The justices took note of administrative and logistical tangles that would emerge as schools integrated but ruled that “the burden rests on the defendants” to show why any delay was needed. The wording of the ruling made it clear that simply disagreeing with the Court was not a valid reason for delay. Therefore desegregation must proceed under court supervision “with all deliberate speed.” Following closely the arguments of the Eisenhower team, the Court did not demand immediate desegregation, nor did it set a date by which integration must be completed. This ambiguity would create many problems in the future. But taken as a whole, there could be no doubt that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and must end. “The more I think about it,” said Thurgood Marshall two days later, “I think it’s a damned good decision!”48

  VI

  Historians who wis
h to portray Eisenhower as a failure on civil rights cannot look to the first three years of his administration for much supporting evidence. In fact Eisenhower presided over a significant acceleration of civil rights reform. In the summer of 1955, in the wake of the Brown decisions, he received accolades from African American leaders for the progress he had encouraged. The NAACP expressed a “debt of gratitude” to the president at its 46th annual convention in Atlantic City, detailing the considerable success of the previous few years: “During 1954, America turned the corner from partial toward full freedom for all citizens.” At the end of July 1955 the Republican Party released a report hailing Eisenhower’s achievements on civil rights policy, and in early August Eisenhower himself took a victory lap, boasting that his record on civil rights had been “one of action, not words.”49

  Yet in the months after the second Brown ruling, as the South erupted in anger and division, Eisenhower’s enthusiasm notably cooled. The reaction he had long feared burst out around the country. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the original five school districts in the Brown case, the school board refused to pass a budget and planned to close its schools rather than integrate them. In Georgia the attorney general and governor announced that the Court’s decision would not be recognized in their state and banned any state funds from being spent on interracial schools. Former Georgia governor Talmadge likened the actions of the Court to fascist tyranny. The Mississippi state education advisory committee declared it would “never compromise on segregation.” The Alabama State Senate passed legislation to ensure the continuation of segregation and called for the impeachment of the U.S. Supreme Court. State legislators in Louisiana foamed in anger. “We do not intend by any stretch of the imagination to mix whites and Negroes in our schools, regardless of the Supreme Court decision,” said one lawmaker, and funds were to be cut off from any schools than did so.50

  In the weeks after the second Brown ruling, southern whites ran a campaign of intimidation and reprisal against African Americans that was designed to raise the price they would have to pay if they persisted in challenging Jim Crow. Across the South white community leaders formed citizens’ councils to spearhead a campaign of economic retaliation against black citizens. New state laws further restricted the right to vote and allowed the purging of voter rolls. State governments sought to close down the activities of the NAACP, and by the middle of 1956 Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas were successful in doing so. State governments sought to seize the membership lists of the NAACP, the easier to target blacks for retribution. Black citizens known to be favorable to NAACP activities lost their jobs or had their bank accounts closed. Mass rallies in southern cities were held at which leading public figures spoke about preserving states’ rights, while Confederate flags flapped in the breeze and local marching bands thumped out “Dixie.” In December 1955 Mississippi Senator Eastland, a militant segregationist, formed the Federation for Constitutional Government to coordinate the southern white reaction. Eastland’s aim: to preserve the “untainted racial heritage” of “generations of Southerners yet unborn.” State officeholders across the South flocked to Eastland’s side.51

  The United States was on the threshold of decades of unsettling conflict over civil rights. Perhaps no one in the White House was more sensitive to the emerging crisis than E. Frederic Morrow, the only African American to work on the White House executive staff. The grandson of a Presbyterian minister who was born a slave, Morrow grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, a town he described as rigidly segregated by custom and habit, if not by law. He attended Bowdoin College, then worked for the National Urban League and then the NAACP in the 1930s, where he came to know Lester Granger, Roy Wilkins, and Thurgood Marshall. He traveled throughout the South, opening up NAACP chapters and raising funds for the organization. When war came in 1941, he volunteered for military service and endured what he termed four years of “ignominy and personal shame” at the hands of the U.S. Army. He was assigned to menial jobs on bases across the South, humiliated by racist officers, and at every step confronted “injustice, segregation, discrimination and dishonest public servants.” After the war he entered Rutgers Law School on the GI Bill and earned a law degree.52

  Morrow was recruited into the Republican Party by Val Washington, a black journalist and advertising executive who had worked for the Chicago Defender before becoming an assistant to Herbert Brownell in New York in the late 1940s. By 1952 Washington was the Republican Party’s director of minority affairs, and he urged Morrow to join the Eisenhower campaign. After his years in the South, Morrow had no affection for the Democratic Party; he accepted Washington’s invitation to work for the GOP and in the fall of 1952 was assigned to the Eisenhower campaign train. Soaking up the hectic, thrilling atmosphere of the presidential race, he befriended Sherman Adams and came to know Eisenhower himself. On the campaign trail he was often mistaken for a butler or asked to stay in black-only hotels away from the rest of the campaign staff. But he enjoyed the work and admired Eisenhower for his decency and integrity. In 1953 he took a position in the Commerce Department, and in mid-1955 Adams appointed him to the Executive White House staff. From there Morrow would be a close observer of Eisenhower’s response to the civil rights crisis that was just breaking upon the country.

  In the wake of Emmett Till’s murder as well as the brazen shootings of Lamar Smith and Rev. George Lee, African American leaders demanded action. In a letter to the president, Roy Wilkins declared that “a reign of terror against Negro citizens of Mississippi” had broken out and urged Eisenhower not to “stand mute and inactive when brutality and violence are used against United States citizens.” He wanted a “public denunciation” of such barbarism. The NAACP placed full-page ads in major newspapers: “HELP END RACIAL TYRANNY IN MISSISSIPPI,” blazed block-letter text in the New York Times above a detailed accounting of murder, intimidation, and voting rights violations.53

  Inside the White House Fred Morrow also painted a dire picture of the racial climate in the South. Writing to Max Rabb, the cabinet secretary, who also supervised civil rights affairs, Morrow asserted that the country was “on the verge of a dangerous racial conflagration,” that mass meetings were being held by angry and bitter African Americans, and that sermons in black churches spoke of little else. Morrow believed that “Negroes in Mississippi have formed an underground” to protect themselves from armed white mobs. “There is a clamor for some kind of statement from the White House,” he told Rabb.54

  Yet it appeared that the White House did not wish to involve itself too directly in the affairs of the South. One reason for this excess of caution lies in the fears stoked by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that black activists were tools of the Communist Party. In a series of reports to the White House, Hoover connected the national outcry for justice in the Till case to Communist Party activity. Hoover’s weekly memos to the president’s office and the attorney general painted a picture of a mobilized communist apparatus attempting to use the Till slaying to arouse black opinion, trigger mob violence, embarrass the president, and inflame the South. According to Hoover, “the over-all objective” of communist-planned mass meetings, demonstrations, press articles, and letter-writing campaigns was “to put the heat on Federal authorities and condemn them for not protecting constitutional guarantees in the State of Mississippi.”

  Hoover sought to link NAACP demands for justice with Communist Party subversion. “Militant resources of both organizations,” he wrote, “have been mobilized to attain recognition and favorable action. . . . The potential for violence not only is present but is daily increasing in intensity.” One FBI source reported that “some sort of revolt by Negroes in the South” was being planned and that “arms and ammunition were being taken into the South from the North.” For a White House already growing wary of black social activism in the South, Hoover’s reports provided yet another reason to steer clear of any close affiliation with the civil rights movement.55

  But events in the South made
it hard for the administration to stay quiet. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a bespectacled 42-year-old African American woman, refused to give up her seat on a crowded Montgomery, Alabama, public bus to a white person. Parks was hardly an accidental activist. She was “deeply rooted in the black protest tradition,” according to one historian, and had been ejected years earlier from a public bus for refusing to comply with the Jim Crow rules. She had long-standing ties to E. D. Nixon, the president of the local NAACP chapter. Her arrest that day on charges of violating the city’s segregation codes triggered an immediate response among local black citizens, especially the Women’s Political Council, which spread the word that until the city changed its rules, African American riders would boycott the buses. To direct the boycott, Nixon founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and on December 5 secured a charismatic 27-year-old Baptist preacher to serve as its president. His name was Martin Luther King Jr., and his nonviolent boycott would soon transform the politics of the South and the country.56