by Hugh Brogan
So it can be argued that by the end of the war the blacks had discovered the three weapons with which, in the fifties and sixties, they were to achieve such striking victories: the imaginative use of political and economic pressure; the appeal to the courts and the Constitution; violence. In addition, wartime service and wartime mobility had not only widened black horizons, but made the blacks more conscious of their strength, and of the need for united action. But the immediate post-war period was not one in which these discoveries could be put to use. The majority of the people – the whites – were rejoicing in the return of peace and its opportunities, while in Congress the alliance of reactionaries was rising to the peak of its influence. Social statistics indicated that black folk were continuing to gain ground: black incomes were rising, more workers were skilled or semi-skilled, more were going to university and fewer were earning their living on the land. But such political momentum as the black cause retained was attributable to the actions of the new President. Harry Truman was not untouched by the prejudices of his native state, Missouri, but he was too intelligent and had too lively a sense of decency and justice to let them rule him. Besides, he knew the increasing importance of the black vote to the Democratic party and, above all, to the New Deal, which he was determined to carry to renewed victories. So as well as ordering the desegregation of the armed services he set up a new FEP C, using his executive authority (the wartime FEPC had lapsed after the return of peace, and filibustering Southern Senators made sure that Congress did not revive it on a statutory footing), he forbade the Federal Housing Administration to lend money to racially segregated building projects, and he opened vast numbers of civil service jobs to blacks. He also made various symbolic gestures, calculated to advertise the blacks’ cause and his own attachment to it: he proposed a civil rights Act, and appointed Dr Ralph Bunche to be American ambassador to the United Nations. Best of all, perhaps, by defying the Dixiecrats in 1948 and yet managing to get re-elected he showed that the power of the Solid South was waning at last, in the Democratic party and in the nation at large.
If the black vote was worth winning, it was worth competing for: in and after the 1952 election the Republicans were careful to show themselves liberal on the race issue, and won some friends thereby. Eisenhower completed the desegregation of the armed services and followed Truman’s policy of making numerous black appointments. But if the African-Americans allowed their progress to wait on the actions of the federal government it would be very slow. So the NAACP stuck to its own line. It tried hard to get the federal courts to declare segregation in schools unconstitutional, and in 1954 it succeeded. In that year the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson at last. It had been whittling away at that notorious precedent ever since the Gaines case; now, under the leadership of the new Chief Justice, Earl Warren of California, a unanimous Court accepted the arguments of the NAACP that ‘separate but equal’ was a contradiction in terms, and in its decision in the case of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education,4 after citing the Fourteenth Amendment, found for the plaintiff. Next year it followed up this finding with a decree that school desegregation should begin everywhere ‘with all deliberate speed’. In so doing it touched off a revolution.
The detailed reasoning of the Court need not detain us. Some of it was dictated by the necessity of getting a unanimous bench, which would make the decision sufficiently impressive to public and legal opinion. Some of it was shaped by sociological arguments which nowadays look sadly unconvincing, as sociological arguments tend to do once their time has passed. At least one justice was influenced by the knowledge that segregation damaged America’s claim to be the leader of the free world in the Cold War. In short, the legal logic was not impeccable – few of the great decisions of the Warren Court were to be so. It scarcely matters. Essentially the Court was responding to three considerations. First, the rise of the African-American community in numbers, assertiveness and even wealth (there was now a quite large black middle class) required acknowledgement by the law, and if Congress was still unable to make the necessary adjustment then the courts must, for not until he had the sanction of either the legislature or the judiciary could the President – any President – take the initiative. Second, ‘separate but equal’ had had over sixty years in which to prove itself, and it had proved to be a farce. Even if the Southern States had had the will to provide equal facilities for their black citizens the task would have been beyond their financial resources. As it was, the existence of two parallel school systems proved such a burden that neither was up to much. The Supreme Court may have been philosophically injudicious in declaring that separate schooling was ‘inherently’ unequal; there could be no doubt that in American circumstances it was in fact wholly unequal and certain to remain so while it lasted. Third, there could be no doubt that a system of unequal, racist, pseudo-education was in 1954 as offensive to the ideals for which America so ostentatiously stood as slavery had been in its day. Mr Justice Frankfurter believed that ‘the effect of changes in men’s feelings for what is right and just is equally relevant in determining whether a discrimination denies the equal protection of the laws’. The NAACP addressed itself to the consciences of judges well aware that the antics of Joe McCarthy had already made the name of America stink in too many nostrils; well aware, also, of what racist doctrines had led to in Nazi Germany. Such an appeal could hardly fail. As the Knoxville Journal put it (a newspaper from the Republican, formerly Unionist, eastern part of Tennessee – but still, a newspaper from the South), ‘No citizen, fitted by character and intelligence to sit as a justice of the Supreme Court, and sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, could have decided this question other than the way it was decided.’
But of course the process of dismantling segregation could not be plain sailing. For one thing, to attack it in the schools was to attack it everywhere. The structure of white supremacy tottered. The Deep South rose in wrath and came together in fear. It resolved to evade or defeat this decision as it had so many others, and in carrying out this resolution it had, to start with, considerable success. Brown v. Board of Education turned out to be only the first blow in a new battle in the long, long war.
In the wake of the great decision it was possible for Southern black schoolchildren and college-age students to claim admission to formerly all-white institutions; but making good that claim was another matter. The resources of the enemy seemed to be limitless. The Ku Klux Klan had yet another revival, though not a very effective one (no one could weld it into a single movement); more ominously, the New South expressed itself in the so-called White Citizens’ Councils, middle-class affairs (‘country club Klans,’ somebody said) which tried to draw in the new urban, professional whites (many of whom originated outside Dixie) to the old cause. For a few years, in the Deep South, and especially in Alabama and Mississippi, the Citizens’ Councils had great success in creating an atmosphere of intimidation. The old reliable weapon of violence proved its usefulness yet again: in 1955 a black fourteen-year-old, Emmett Till, was lynched in Mississippi. Then there was the legal arm. Perhaps individual cases could be dragged out until the children involved grew up or gave up; perhaps the Citizens’ Councils could turn the public schools of the South into private white academies and so evade the law. Worth trying, anyway. Best of all, the instruments of law enforcement might be emasculated. The government in Washington was remote, and unless Congress acted (which, thanks to the ascendancy of white Southern committee chairmen, it was unlikely to do) its powers were too restricted and clumsy to be of much help to blacks, even if President Eisenhower had been eager to act, which he wasn’t. Local authorities were easy to intimidate. The stark old questions were once more posed to office-holders and office-seekers, and unless their answer was sufficiently racist – unless they committed themselves to resist integration – they were driven back into private life. Governors, Senators, Congressmen; mayors, sheriffs, commissioners; all got the message, and, with a few brave exceptions such
as Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, responded accordingly.
The years of aggressive white reaction which followed the Brown decision saw a great many dramatic incidents, of which the best remembered is the attempted desegregation of the school system in Little Rock, Arkansas. This project was undertaken by the local school board in 1957, after securing the approval of the federal courts for its highly deliberate processes. The Citizens’ Council led the bitter resistance, which was fanned by the self-serving rhetoric of the state’s Governor, Orval Faubus, formerly a racial moderate, who now raised the old cry of ‘states’ rights’ for the old, self-serving reasons. When the school term began on 2 September, Faubus sent in the state’s National Guard to preserve order by denying a handful of black children admission to Little Rock High School. This was a flagrant defiance of federal law, and although the National Guard was withdrawn after a few weeks it was replaced by a mob which made matters worse. On 24 September, Eisenhower, very reluctantly, sent in 500 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to preserve true order in Little Rock for the rest of the school year. The black children got their education, but in 1958 the High School was closed; Faubus was re-elected governor four times. Arkansas was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly rabid state: its most eminent representative in Congress was Senator J. William Fulbright, who was no bigot, and after 1959 the Little Rock High School was reopened. Elsewhere the white supremacists’ tactics were much more successful, if less newsworthy. By 1963 only 9 per cent of the South’s bi-racial school districts had been desegregated; and in the Deep South the percentage was much, much less.
Yet Southern resistance, though bitter, prolonged and occasionally murderous, lacked the dynamism of the black movement and therefore, at the last, succumbed to it. An early sign of what was to come was the boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, from December 1955 to December 1956. The boycott was the response of the black community of Montgomery to the arrest of Mrs Rosa Parks for sitting down in one of the front seats of a city bus – seats reserved for whites. Mrs Parks said she felt too tired to do anything else. She was fined $10. But this episode was something the black leadership of the town had been waiting for. The result was a boycott, sustained for nearly a year. The economic impact on the bus company was severe, but more important was the nationwide publicity the boycott received. The two sides battled each other through the courts, but victory came to the blacks when, in November 1956, the US Supreme Court found that all Alabama’s laws enforcing segregation on buses were unconstitutional. At 5.55 a.m. on 21 December, slightly more than a year since the boycott started, Martin Luther King Jr, the young black minister who had emerged as his community’s most eloquent and inspiring leader, boarded a bus, sat where he chose and got only civility from the white driver. The struggle for racial justice in Alabama was far from over, but this was a famous victory. It served notice to the world that the NAACP path, of patient litigation, was not the only route that African–Americans would take, and that Southern blacks, traditionally far less assertive than those of the North, were now equally ready to take the initiative.
The embodiment of this development, Martin Luther King, was an extraordinary man, the most remarkable, perhaps, of all those prophets thrown up in a few years by the civil rights movement. Born in Atlanta, and with a doctor of theology’s degree from Boston University, he combined the traditional fervour of Southern black Christianity with trained philosophical insight. Profoundly influenced by the example of Mohandas Gandhi, who by displaying moral authority (Satyagraha) through nonviolence had overthrown the British Empire in India, King’s peculiar contributions were his perception that the same philosophy and similar tactics could overthrow white supremacy in America, and his ability to dramatize this doctrine for millions. He was not the first to spot the weak point in white armour. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, in his classical study of the race problem, An American Dilemma, had pointed out that the blacks had a ‘powerful tool’ in their struggle, ‘the glorious American ideals of democracy, liberty, and equality to which America is pledged not only by its political Constitution but also by the sincere devotion of its citizens… The whites have all the power, but they are split in their moral personality. Their better selves are with the insurgents. The Negroes do not need any other allies.’5 Nor was King the first to hold up the ideal of non-violence: his associate during the bus boycott, Bayard Rustin, was a fervent pacifist. But the success of that boycott, and King’s leading role in it, gave him such an opportunity as Myrdal and Rustin never had. Black and white liberals, by their millions, and not only within the United States, looked to Montgomery, and heard a voice:
Give us the ballot. Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights… We will no longer plead – we will write the proper laws on the books. Give us the ballot and we will get the people judges who love mercy. Give us the ballot and we will quietly, lawfully, and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the May 17, 1954, decision of the Supreme Court.6
Presently they saw an example. The demands of the Southern blacks were now spreading out to touch every aspect of segregation. On 1 February 1960, two black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, invented the sit-in when they were refused service at a whites-only lunch counter: they returned, day after day, to sit peacefully at the counter and demand service. Their example spread like lightning over the South: the philosophy of Satyagraha, of non-violent confrontation, had won thousands of adherents through King’s teaching. He became the acknowledged leader of the movement: his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), gave birth to the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (S N C C); and finally he himself (having previously had his house dynamited, during the boycott, and suffered malignantly untrue accusations of peculation and tax-evasion) was arrested for sirting-in at a lunch counter in Atlanta, and, on a further trumped-up charge, sentenced to four months’ hard labour in a prison camp. It seemed, all too probably, to be a prelude to a lynching. But King had good lawyers, and it was election year: though Eisenhower and Nixon were, as it turned out unwisely, silent, Jack Kennedy and his brother Robert were not: Jack phoned Mrs King, Robert phoned the judge in the case, and King was released next day. The Kennedys had not, actually, had much to do with the release, but they got the credit and the black vote and thereby won their election, a fact they were never to be allowed to forget. The experience did nothing to discourage the hero of the hour: during the next few years Martin Luther King was to go to prison sixteen more times.
The Kennedy intervention showed how central the black question was again becoming to American politics. The last years of the Eisenhower administration had witnessed a gentlemanly competition between Republicans and Democrats for credit with the blacks, which the Democrats had won, largely because of Eisenhower’s passivity in the matter. In 1957, the same year as Little Rock, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction. It only did so under the joint pressure of Attorney-General Herbert Brownell and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, and the act did not amount to very much – its provisions are not worth listing; but it was one more sign that the old South was no longer invincible and that the national government was stirring on the side of the blacks. The same alliance was able to push through a slightly stronger Civil Rights Act in 1960, which increased the powers of the Attorney-General to protect the rights of black citizens to vote, but did not increase them nearly enough. Plenty more remained to be done when John F. Kennedy became President.
Yet Kennedy did not attach any particular urgency to black demands. He favoured them, of course; but he had so much else to do, and, like Franklin Roosevelt, needed the co-operation of a Southern-dominated Congress to do it. He had proclaimed a ‘new frontier’, in which all America’s problems, from her fiscal system to her symphony orchestras, would feel the helpful touch of his creating hand. Besides all that, there was the tangled challenge of foreign affairs. Under Nikita K
hrushchev, the Soviet Union’s ebullient, rather brutal, unpredictable leader, the Russians were asserting themselves by flaunting their bombs and their nuclear tests in the face of the West, and probing every hint of American weakness (they were also beginning their long quarrel with China, but the importance of this was as yet far from clear). Khrushchev was inclined to think that Kennedy was no more than the beardless boy that Fidel Castro of Cuba had called him, and behaved accordingly. Castro himself was a problem almost as taxing. Before the success of his revolution in 1959, while the dictator Batista ruled, Cuba had been the merest vassal of the United States, and Havana had been treated as if it were no more than an offshore Miami. Hundreds of millions of US dollars had been invested in the place. The revolution then swept away all these tawdry vestiges and undertook the wholesale reconstruction of the island’s politics, society and economy. By the time Eisenhower left office, official Washington was convinced that Cuba had become an intolerable affront, a communist state, a Russian satellite in the heart of the American sphere of influence. An expeditionary force of Cuban exiles had been prepared for dispatch against it. Kennedy ordered the enterprise to go ahead. It met total, humiliating disaster at the Bay of Pigs on the Cuban coast on 17 April 1961. This defeat enraged American public opinion and encouraged Khrushchev’s adventurism: eighteen months later he secretly began to install nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, an operation which, if successful, would bring the heartlands of the United States into danger. Thanks to the CIA, Washington discovered this threat in time, and Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba. For a moment the world held its breath; but then the Soviet ships which were carrying the missiles sheered away rather than challenge the blockade. Americans relaxed, congratulating themselves and their President on having defused the threat of Castro, and thereafter a better respect developed between Kennedy and Khrushchev, so much so that in July 1963 they and the British were able to sign a treaty by which they undertook to conduct no more atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. The Senate ratified this agreement in September; more than ninety other nations adhered to it; it was immensely popular with American opinion, and seemed likely to guarantee Kennedy’s re-election in 1964.