The Civil Rights Act of 1957 satisfied no one. Segregationists denounced it, of course. The white supremacist Citizens’ Councils of America issued a statement declaring the Act “coercive and vicious.” Senator Russell railed against the law as heralding a new era of Reconstruction, in which “Negro political leaders will direct the attorneys of the Justice Department” in an all-out attack on the South. Nonetheless he boasted that the fight he waged to cripple the measure had been “the greatest victory of his 25 years in the Senate.” Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender called the law “a Confederate victory,” and in a way Russell agreed. The Chicago Defender editorial page said it did not go nearly far enough, as it left intact a wide array of devices the South had used to disenfranchise black voters, from the poll tax to literacy tests. Signing the bill, Eisenhower expressed little pride. “I think the President’s views on the bill are well known,” a fatigued Jim Hagerty told the press.33
Not everyone saw the act through jaundiced eyes, however. In a letter to Nixon on August 30, Rev. King wrote, “The present bill is far better than no bill at all.” It was the first civil rights law in 82 years. It created a Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, a new assistant attorney general for civil rights, and a bipartisan congressional commission to investigate civil rights abuses. It gave the attorney general powers to seek injunctions in cases of voting rights violations, though the penalty for such violations would likely remain little more than a gentle wrist slap. And it signaled that the Congress had started to take seriously the crisis in the South. Powerful arguments had been made that Eisenhower should veto the bill because of its flaws. “While I sympathize with this point of view,” King wrote, “I feel that civil rights legislation is urgent now.” King knew the struggle was not going to be won all at once, nor could many centuries of violence be righted by the stroke of a president’s pen. Change would come through “a sustained mass movement on the part of Negroes” and would take decades to achieve. Every step toward that goal helped. King thanked Nixon for his efforts on behalf of civil rights, welcoming any sign of progress. “I am sure we will soon emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice for all men.”34
V
The battle over the Civil Rights Act left Eisenhower weary and in need of a break from politics. He looked forward to spending most of September at the Naval Station in Newport, Rhode Island, where he would have peace and quiet and play a great deal of golf at the Newport Country Club. He imagined leaving the subject of civil rights behind for a while, but at his weekly press conference the day before leaving town, he received a question from Merriman Smith of United Press. Would the president comment on the situation in Arkansas, “where the Governor has ordered state troops around a school that a Federal court had ordered integrated”? The school in question was Central High School in Little Rock.
Eisenhower said he first heard of the matter that very morning, and the attorney general was looking into it. Then, in his practiced way, he equivocated. The decision in Brown v. Board of Education must be “executed gradually, according to the dictum of the Supreme Court,” but everyone must remember “you cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws.”
Every reporter in the room had heard this sort of doublespeak many times from the president. Anthony Lewis of the New York Times pushed a bit harder. Did the president “have any plans to take a personal part in the problem” of school integration, he asked. Did he plan to speak out, to guide, in short, to lead? Ike refused to make any moral judgments on the matter. Certainly, he said, the Supreme Court’s decision must be obeyed. “But there are very strong emotions on the other side, people that see a picture of a mongrelization of the race, they call it. There are very strong emotions, and we are going to whip this thing in the long run by Americans being true to themselves, and not merely by law.”35
Hearing these words, it was impossible to divine Eisenhower’s beliefs on the subject of desegregation. He respected the Supreme Court’s role in interpreting the Constitution and believed he had a duty to implement the Brown decision, but he seemed no less insistent that customs and habits of the South be respected as well. Was there common ground here? Eisenhower did not say. He preferred to reassure everyone that “being American” was enough to solve the country’s problems. And with these baffling and contradictory phrases lingering in the air, he departed for a New England vacation. It would not be a restful one.
Few could have predicted that the nation’s greatest crisis over school desegregation would break out in Little Rock, Arkansas. Some cities in the state had already started along the road of gradual compliance with the Supreme Court demand to integrate the public schools. The University of Arkansas had admitted black students, and school boards in Fayetteville, Hoxie, Fort Smith, Van Buren, Ozark, and North Little Rock had made modest progress on school desegregation with little public outcry. In 1955 the Little Rock school board adopted a plan to implement a very gradual, indeed token desegregation of Central High School (but not the junior high or elementary schools), starting in fall 1957.
In Little Rock, however, a white segregationist group, the Capital Citizens’ Council, was formed in 1956 and put heavy pressure on Governor Orval Faubus to block the integration plan. The group also sponsored the Mothers’ League of Central High School, which vocally opposed integration. Faubus, a 47-year-old army veteran from the Ozarks in just his second two-year term, had a record as a moderate on race relations, at least in southern terms. But he was facing a stiff challenge from a rabid race-baiting state legislator named Jim Johnson who planned to use the segregation issue to win the next gubernatorial election. Faubus calculated that his political fortunes would be improved if he openly took sides on the issue. Backed by Faubus, these segregationist groups asked for an injunction from the county court to delay Little Rock’s desegregation plan, claiming that the school would erupt with bloody violence if the plan went forward. The governor himself testified that revolvers and knives had been confiscated from students in the preceding days. Even though the school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, disagreed with Faubus’s account, the court on August 29 granted the injunction and halted the integration plan.36
The next day, however, Judge Ronald N. Davies of the federal Eastern Arkansas District Court overruled the county court. He found the rumors of violence insufficient to warrant a delay and ordered Central High School to open its doors to the dozen or so carefully screened African American students who had been chosen by the school board as the vanguard of integration. Dr. Blossom announced that the school would comply. “I am confident the problem will be resolved in a peaceful manner,” he said.37
Faubus now confronted a challenge to his authority as governor, and he meant to meet it aggressively. The federal government “is cramming integration down our throats,” he told the press, and wants to “make an object lesson out of Arkansas.” He chose to fight back. Rejecting the court order, he sent 200 soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard to take up positions around the high school on the evening of September 2. In a televised speech he declared this was necessary to prevent the violence that would surely break out if black children were allowed to enroll in school the following morning. He insisted that he wanted only to maintain peace and order, and since desegregation was a threat to peace and order, it had to be refused. The school board promptly issued a statement asking black children not to come to school and breach the line of soldiers, for fear of violence. A state governor, backed by an armed militia, now stood in defiance of a federal court order. The battle lines were drawn.38
On Tuesday morning, September 3, the first day of school, some 500 townspeople converged on the school, some perhaps just curious, some spoiling for a fight. No black students appeared, and the crowd dispersed. But in the chambers of Judge Davies, school board officials were ordered once again to proceed with their plan to enroll the African American students. Davies noted that Govern
or Faubus had directed the soldiers only to “keep order.” He would “take the Governor at his word.”39
Thus on the morning of September 4, 1957, under the glare of the national spotlight, nine nervous black teenagers, six girls and three boys, set out for school. Eight of the children traveled together under the guidance of Daisy Bates, a prominent black newspaper publisher and the local leader of NAACP. They were joined by four ministers—two black, two white. Jostled and heckled by the crowd, the group made it as far as the cordon of troops at the school’s front entrance, where they were turned away. They returned to their cars and drove off, leaving behind a noisy and restive mob. But the one child who came to school alone, Elizabeth Eckford, endured an hour of terror that morning. Immaculate in her handmade cotton dress and white bobby socks, she took the city bus to school, unaccompanied. As she walked toward the school, the mob of hundreds shouted at her. When she too was denied admittance by the National Guard and began to walk back to the bus stop, the abuse grew louder and more horrific. Angry whites, their sneering faces full of hate, shouted “Lynch her!” and “No nigger bitch is going to get into our school!” As Elizabeth sat waiting for the bus, tears running down her cheeks, the crowd moved in closer, the vulgar abuse increased, and it seemed only the arrival of the bus saved her from physical harm.40
The next morning the events at Little Rock became a national and indeed global news story. This may have been because of the astonishing photographs taken that day. On the front page of most papers across the country, readers saw a stoic, well-dressed Elizabeth Eckford walking away from a mob of angry hecklers, one petite young white girl in a mint-green dress following closely behind. That was Hazel Bryan, her face twisted into a mask of hatred as she shouted at Elizabeth. These photographs perfectly captured the cruelty that lay behind the practice of Jim Crow segregation. And they traveled across the world, putting on display the most shameful of American customs, contradicting in an instant any American claim to moral superiority.41
VI
Between the time Eisenhower left the White House at 9:30 a.m. on September 4 and the time his aircraft landed at Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Newport two hours later, the events in Little Rock had become a national crisis. As Ike met with Rhode Island’s governor and other local dignitaries, receiving gifts and shaking hands and getting settled into his Newport headquarters, a telegram from Orval Faubus was making its way to the president’s office. It was a declaration of defiance.
“I was one of the soldiers of your command in World War II,” Faubus began. “I spent 300 days of combat with an infantry division defending our country, its people and their rights on the battlefields of five nations.” Having established his record of selfless patriotism, Faubus claimed that the issue in Little Rock was not one of integration versus segregation but whether “the head of a sovereign state can exercise his constitutional powers and discretion in maintaining peace and good order within his jurisdiction.” Alleging a plot by the FBI to arrest him, Faubus asserted that any interference in his actions at Little Rock would amount to a violation of the “rights and powers of a state.” If any challenge were made to his authority, Faubus warned, the situation might soon spiral out of control. In that case “the blood that may be shed will be on the hands of the Federal government.” He asked the president to stop federal interference in Little Rock so the townspeople could “again enjoy domestic tranquility and continue in our pursuit of ideal relations between the races.”42
Faubus’s challenge to the president triggered a public statement from Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP. Wilkins accused Faubus of “deliberately provoking a test of the authority of the Federal government to enforce the orders of Federal courts.” Faubus seemed to think that “states are free to decide whether to abide by the Constitution and the Federal rulings or not.” Lester Granger of the National Urban League added his voice, asking Eisenhower to resolve once and for all whether a state could defy the federal government in opposing court-ordered desegregation.43
Eisenhower replied to Faubus on September 5 with a brief and elliptical message: “The Federal Constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command.” Eisenhower intended this to sound like a thinly veiled threat. Yet no one could be certain how he would act in the face of Faubus’s defiance. Nor did his highly publicized rounds of golf lend any sense of urgency to the issue; every day from 9:00 to noon, with national attention riveted on Little Rock, Ike could be found on the fairways of the Newport Country Club, working on his game with the club pro.
On Saturday, September 7, Eisenhower flew to Washington. His trip had been scheduled in advance, for he planned to attend the debutante ball of his niece, Ruth Eisenhower, in Baltimore. But in light of the school crisis, he decided to stop at the White House to consult with the attorney general. According to both Brownell and Sherman Adams, Eisenhower wished to avoid a confrontation with Faubus. He wanted to give the governor a way to save face and conduct “an orderly retreat.” Yet the ground for such a backward maneuver had already disappeared, for that day Judge Davies had made headlines when he denied a request from the Little Rock school board to halt the desegregation plan due to the threat of mob violence. Insisting that the integration plan move forward, Davies declared, “There can be nothing but ultimate confusion and chaos if court decrees are flaunted.”44
On Sunday afternoon, while Eisenhower was back in Newport playing a round of golf, Faubus replied to Judge Davies’s order by saying that the National Guard would remain in place and no black students would be allowed to enroll on Monday morning. “I sincerely hope,” he said menacingly, “that no one is shot or that violence or harm comes to no one.” With the National Guard out in force around the school, there was no chance the African American students would attempt to enter on Monday morning. With the city tense but quiet, Davies asked the Justice Department to issue an injunction against Governor Faubus, and he sent Faubus a summons to appear in his court on September 20 to explain his actions. The stalemate between the federal court and Faubus, backed by his state guard, would last another 10 days.45
Here, Eisenhower made a tactical mistake. Sherman Adams’s good friend Congressman Brooks Hays, who represented the Little Rock district, had approached Adams suggesting the president meet with Faubus in person in Newport. When Adams proposed this to Eisenhower, saying he thought Faubus “realizes he has made a mistake and is looking for a way out,” the president accepted “without a moment of hesitation.” Ike believed his personal touch might be able to persuade Faubus to do what a federal court order had failed to accomplish. Brownell advised against the meeting, pointing out that Faubus had no incentive to back down now and that meeting with a governor who was openly defying federal authority was unwise. Ike believed Brownell failed to account for “the seething in the South” and agreed to the meeting anyway.46
Faubus arrived at the Newport headquarters at 8:45 a.m. on September 14 and met with the president privately for 20 minutes. Eisenhower later dictated his account of the meeting: “Faubus protested that he was a law abiding citizen, that he was a veteran, fought in the war, and that everyone recognizes that the Federal law is supreme to state law.” Eisenhower then gave Faubus a means to save face and end the conflict in Little Rock: simply order the troops in place at the high school to allow the black children to enter the school. The troops could then “preserve order” should there be any trouble. If Faubus did this, Eisenhower would make sure that the Justice Department found a way to revoke Judge Davies’s order that Faubus appear in court. Ike saw this as a good deal; he wanted to avoid “a trial of strength between the President and a Governor because . . . there could only be one outcome—that is, the State would lose, and I did not want to see any Governor humiliated.” Ike’s proposal also squared with his own sensitivity toward states’ rights. He thought Faubus seemed “very appreciative” and would go “back to Arkansas to act within a matter of hours to revoke his orders to the Guard.”47
In fact Faubus did not agree to any kind of deal. After their meeting, Faubus and Eisenhower were joined by Brownell, Adams, Congressman Hays, and Jim Hagerty. The conversation went on for another two hours. Brownell asserted the responsibility of the federal government to carry out the Supreme Court’s orders on school desegregation. His message was unambiguous: “The desegregation law did not have to be liked or approved, but it had to be obeyed.” Adams recalled that Faubus “listened intently in inscrutable silence.” Adams thought Brownell condescending, the Yale man and prominent New York lawyer dictating to the country politician with barely a high school education. When the meeting ended, according to Adams, Faubus was “noncommittal.” By 3:00 Ike was back on the links at Newport Country Club.48
No one knew just what the meeting signified. Ann Whitman jotted down in her diary that “the meeting had not gone as well as had been hoped” and that Faubus “stirred the whole thing up for his own political advantage.” Adams confessed, “We were not sure that anything had been accomplished at the meeting. The President was hopeful and somewhat optimistic. Brownell was quietly skeptical.” Hagerty prepared a statement for the press that described the meeting as “constructive” and said that Faubus had given his word he would “respect the decisions of the United States District Court.” But when it came time for Faubus to issue his own statement, he refused to cooperate. Rather than abide by the court order, he claimed he was obliged to “harmonize [his] actions under the Constitution of Arkansas with the requirements of the Constitution of the United States”—as if he had a right to choose which document he would obey. When he returned to Little Rock, he did not withdraw the National Guard, nor did he issue them a change of orders. The stalemate endured. Eisenhower called Brownell and admitted, “You were right. Faubus broke his word.”49
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