White Rage

by Carol Anderson

  White leaders in the South saw no such thing; they saw themselves as defenders of the Constitution and saviors of states’ rights against a federal Leviathan. In their minds, they were patriots not racists. In this reworking of history, “black parents were to blame for the interruption of their children’s education, since blacks had chosen integration over education” and had joined “the federal courts and the NAACP as the aggressors.”104

  Because the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was supposedly at the epicenter of the tumult and rebellion in the South, the next round in the chamber of Massive Resistance had the NAACP’s name all over it.105 Wilkins would shudder as he recounted how “there was nothing abstract about the South’s hatred of the N.A.A.C.P. at that time.”106 Starting in 1956, legislatures from Virginia to Texas passed a series of laws that banned the Association from operating within the Southern states’ borders. An especially pernicious law, barratry, cast the NAACP’s formidable legal team as nothing more than ambulance chasers, drumming up business by cajoling both the unwitting and the amoral into a series of dubious lawsuits alleging violations of constitutional rights. Not only did the cynical enforcement of barratry statutes stop the Association from providing legal counsel to those taking the brunt of Jim Crow, but it prevented the NAACP from giving financial support to those suing the state as well.107

  Southern governments also went after the Association where it hurt, demanding that the organization either hand over or publicly post its membership lists. Louisiana, in a rather unsavory twist, resurrected an old anti-Klan law and used it against the NAACP, which was now required to file membership lists with the state. That would have meant putting a bull’s-eye on every dues-paying member, inviting, at bare minimum, economic extortion as credit was cut off, mortgages called in, and jobs suddenly withdrawn. Indeed, in five states, NAACP members were banned from holding public employment. Moreover, identifying who paid dues to the Association meant that NAACP members would also be targeted for violence. Fully comprehending that black people’s lives and livelihoods hung in the balance, the Association refused to comply. That noncompliance led to a series of injunctions and fines, some totaling one hundred thousand dollars, that effectively crippled the NAACP below the Mason-Dixon Line. For eight years, at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, which had been spurred on by Brown, the Association was severely hampered in the South. Not until 1964 could the NAACP resume operations in Alabama.108

  One year after Brown II and the same year that segregationists in Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, Attorney General Eugene Cook of Georgia capriciously decided that the NAACP was, despite its tax-exempt status, a for-profit organization that owed the state $17,000 in back taxes, or the equivalent in 2014 of $150,000. Cook then insisted, and a local judge concurred, that until the NAACP paid what it supposedly owed Georgia, the Association would not be able to operate in the state. Just to drive home the point, authorities arrested the head of the NAACP’s branch in Atlanta. Similarly, in 1956, Texas attorney general John Ben Shepperd instructed armed Texas Rangers and state highway patrolmen to raid local NAACP offices searching for proof of failure “to pay taxes and engaging in unlawful political activity.” Despite an utter lack of evidence, a local judge issued the requisite injunction to put the NAACP, which refused to turn over its membership lists, out of business in Texas.109

  The recalcitrant South swaddled itself in the American flag, portraying its efforts as the last holdout of patriotism.110 Georgia’s Eugene Cook, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, and Arkansas congressman Ezekiel Gathings combined two of their favorite villains—the NAACP and the Communist Party, USA—into one treasonous behemoth, which they unveiled during a series of congressional and state hearings.111 Senator Eastland, for example, ignoring that in his own Mississippi, Amite County officials spent only $3.51 per black student while providing $30.24 for every white one, claimed that Brown “was the result of communist manipulation.” Drawing on questionable records from the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the Mississippi senator insisted that the scholars the Association had relied on in Brown, such as sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, had “no less than 18 citations” before HUAC. It “is evident,” Eastland roared, “that the decision of the Supreme Court in the school segregation cases was based upon the writings and teachings of pro-communist agitators and other enemies of the American form of government.” Gathings, to give an air of legitimacy to the charges, filled more than eighty pages in the Congressional Record with assertions that the NAACP’s effort to destroy Jim Crow was actually an “Anti-White Plot Hatched in Moscow.” Cook similarly sounded the alarm that the NAACP seized the racial issue “as a convenient front for their more nefarious activities” including “delivering this nation into the hands of international Communism.”112

  Sensitivity to such arguments, no matter how specious, only increased when a Cold War crisis hit in 1957. On Friday, October 4, of that year, America’s sense of nuclear invincibility was shattered by the faint beep, beep, beep sound heard over a radio receiver. The Soviets had successfully launched a satellite, Sputnik, that circled Earth every ninety-six minutes. Until then, the threat of the Kremlin’s nuclear arsenal had been mitigated by the USSR’s seeming inability to send a payload of destruction across the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans. Suddenly, though, with that ominous beeping, traveling thousands of miles had been reduced to the equivalent of crossing the street.

  The New Republic feared that Sputnik was “proof of the fact that the Soviet Union has gained a commanding lead in certain vital sectors of the race for world scientific and technological supremacy.”113 The New York Times glumly reported that the Department of Defense’s missile experts were “shaken by Sputnik,” because it was “evidence of Soviet superiority in rocketry.”114 The Washington Post intoned, “This is confirmation, if any really is needed, of Soviet progress with the intercontinental ballistic missile and intermediate range ballistic missile.” The grave consequences were not just military, however; they also threatened the entire structure of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. “Let no one mistake the political significance of the Soviet accomplishment,” continued the Post’s gloomy editorial, “It will have a strong psychological effect in intimidating wavering allies and uncommitted countries, for it will seem to say that the Soviet Union is irresistible.”115

  This was a national security crisis. President Eisenhower had earlier commissioned a blue-ribbon panel, led by the head of the Ford Foundation, H. Rowan Gaither, to prepare an analysis for the National Security Council on the state of America’s military preparedness. Sputnik had launched right before the final report hit the president’s desk. The reaction to the report was as thunderous as that to the Soviet satellite itself. The top-secret Gaither Report detailed America’s shocking descent into “a second-class power … in the face of rocketing Soviet military might,” and “portray[ed] a United States in the gravest danger in its history.”116 Even Eisenhower, who had received enormous criticism for his “apparent complacency,” had to shake off the charge peppering newspaper op-eds that the White House was the “Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier” and admit that if things didn’t change soon, the United States would not be able to recover.117

  In some measure of silver lining, the Sputnik debacle, many agreed, could be traced right back to the schoolhouse door. There was a general consensus that this Cold War defeat was a direct result of something the nation’s educational institutions did or did not do.118 Some pointed to the trend toward progressive education and the lack of attention to the basics, especially math and science. Most had identified the source of the problem, however, as the unconscionable waste of intellectual talent as poor and unmotivated youth failed to go on to college. Changing his tune, Eisenhower now asserted that the United States had to do everything it could to prevent “the loss of a student with real ability.”119 He “stressed” that it was vital that this generation of American youth get the education necessary t
o be “equipped to live in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles.” Delay or failure to act, Eisenhower insisted, would leave the United States “irretrievably behind.”120

  In fact, the president, politicians, educators, and pundits all hammered on this imperative against waste, arguing that the hundreds of thousands of students who did not go on to college were being “lost” to the nation. Alabama congressman Carl Elliott, who would take the lead in this crusade to transform education in the United States by backing the National Defense Education Act, argued that “in the context of critical national needs … a valuable national resource must not be lost through lack of action.” And, he warned: “Whatever happens in America’s classrooms during the next fifty years will eventually happen to America.”121

  What was happening to millions of students in America’s classrooms in 1957, as Elliott well knew, was the direct outcome of Jim Crow. The long shadow it cast on a nation struggling to produce enough scientists and engineers should have signaled a turning point in the war over Brown: an acknowledgement that schools with no libraries and no labs had no chance of training the next generation of inventors and theoreticians. Grappling with America’s trenchant refusal to open up the doors to quality education, Time announced that the “gap between what the Negro now achieves and what he might achieve indicates that he is the nation’s most wasted resource.”122

  For all his hand-wringing, Representative Elliott had no intention of doing anything to repair the structural threat to national security posed by a system that deliberately starved millions of its citizens of adequate education. While he was clear that, after Sputnik, the nation had to “mobilize [its] brainpower, including schoolchildren and undergraduate and graduate students, on an emergency basis,” he was equally resolute in his conviction that maintaining racial segregation and the built-in inequality that came with it, was more critical to the nation.123

  Thus, while bills for the National Defense Education Act bounced through Congress, seeking ways to provide unprecedented federal financial support to schools and universities, Elliott, along with his fellow Alabamian senator Lister Hill, both of whom had signed the Southern Manifesto, were insistent that any movement on education funding, even if for national security, could not, in any way, dismantle Jim Crow or penalize Southern schools and universities for refusing to integrate.

  The Alabamians had a strong ally in Eisenhower. Even before Brown he had voiced great skepticism about the validity of integration that did not spring organically from, say, Mississippi or South Carolina. He was a states’ rights man. Therefore, in his eyes, the Supreme Court was wrong to insert the federal government into local race relations. In 1953, he complained that “two or three court decisions of recent years … have tended to becloud the original decision of ‘equal but separate’ facilities.” He was especially piqued at the McLaurin decision, which ruled that “a Negro in graduate school attending exactly the same classes as whites, but separated from them by some kind of railing was … the victim of discrimination.”124 That just seemed preposterous.

  After the Brown decision and despite the rumblings in the South about a declaration of war, the president still wanted implementation “to accord a maximum of initiative to local courts.”125 The Southern Manifesto, the outlawing of the NAACP, and the murder of Emmett Till led Eisenhower in 1957 to write to his best friend, Edward “Swede” Hazlett, that “no other single event has so disturbed the domestic scene in many years as did the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 in the school segregation case.” To find some manner of peace, the president laid out his priorities: empathy for how hard it would be for the South to jettison its way of life on the basis of a “mere decision of the Supreme Court,” especially after building and maintaining a legally segregated society for more than “three score years”; and respect for the Supreme Court’s authority. The president hoped to reconcile the two. “The plan of the Supreme Court to accomplish integration gradually and sensibly,” he conveyed to Hazlett, “seems to me to provide the only possible answer if we are to consider on the one hand the customs and fears of a great section of our population, and on the other the binding effect that Supreme Court decisions must have on all of us if our form of government is to survive and prosper.”126 Noticeably absent from the president’s list of priorities were the rights and educational needs of African Americans.

  Thus, as the National Defense Education Act was being debated and crafted, Eisenhower had no intention of using tens of millions of federal dollars to finally gain compliance with Brown by “threatening to withhold funds from segregated educational institutions.”127 Wilkins, who later assessed Eisenhower’s leadership in the face of Massive Resistance, could say only that at virtually every turn “the president had left us all out in the cold.”128

  The White House’s icy stance was affirmed by the attorney for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), Richard Conley, who explained during the House-Senate conference proceedings on the proposed National Defense Education Act that although Brown was the law of the land, his agency had no intention of enforcing that ruling. “Integration,” he assured Representative Elliott, “would not be a precondition for obtaining funds unless” the Southern-dominated “Congress decided it should be”—which was highly unlikely. In addition, when selecting universities to house the federally sponsored language-training centers, the lawyer continued, the overall quality of the school would determine choices, rather than the “segregation practices of the institution,” which “would not be a controlling factor.” Similarly, Conley explained to Congress, HEW would have no problem providing fellowships and student loan funds to institutions that “still practice[d] segregation,” so long as those awards to students were made “without discrimination.”129 Thus, the University of Georgia, Ole Miss, and the University of Alabama, among other universities in the South, could continue to deny African Americans admission on the basis of race, as long as fellowships went to any of the enrolled white students on a nonracially discriminatory basis.

  Assured that Brown would have no effect on the proposed National Defense Education Act, Elliott and Hill, desperate to pour federal dollars into the white schools in Alabama, marshaled all their legislative wizardry to guide the bill through both houses of Congress and dodge the amendment from Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-NY) that restricted federal funding to only those institutions in full compliance with the Supreme Court decision. And so, when House Resolution 13247 successfully emerged, allocating $183 million in 1959 and another $222 million in 1960 to schools and universities for fellowships, facility upgrades, and state-of-the-art equipment, the desperate conditions that faced African American students remained in full force.130

  Given Congressman Elliott’s prediction that whatever happened in America’s classrooms in the 1950s would determine what the United States would look like half a century later, the deliberate omission of African Americans from the National Defense Education Act bore its bitter fruit.131 In 2004, fifty years after Brown, “not a single African American earned a Ph.D. in astronomy or astrophysics,” according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. In fact, of the 2,100 Ph.Ds. awarded in forty-three different fields in the natural sciences, not one of these doctoral degrees went to an African American.132 The refusal to implement Brown throughout the South even in the face of Sputnik—not only as the law or as simple humanity might have dictated but also as demanded by national interest and patriotism—compromised and undermined American strength. Now, in the twenty-first century, the sector of the U.S. economy that accounts for more than 50 percent of our sustained economic expansion, science and engineering, is relying on an ever-dwindling skilled and educated workforce. Whereas at one point, “about 40% of the world’s scientists and engineers resided in the U.S.,” according to Rodney C. Adkins, senior vice president of IBM, “that number [had] shrunk to about 15%” by 2012.133

  The 1950s, then, should be seen as a fateful moment in America when histor
y failed to turn and alter the trajectory of the nation. Brown held out hope to millions desperately seeking a quality education. Children clamored to go to school, fought for it, even. A teenage Barbara Johns, for example, rallied her classmates in 1951 to take a stand against the horrible conditions at Moton High in Prince Edward County. Yet, for fighting to be educated, she had to be spirited out of the state by her parents to go live with her uncle, the Reverend Vernon Johns, in Alabama. Black adults, too, put their lives on the line for the children. Reverend Joseph DeLaine, who sued Clarendon County, South Carolina, for gross unequal education and became one of the cases bundled in Brown, faced the unbridled wrath of local whites: “They fired him … they fired his wife and two of his sisters and a niece … And they sued him on trumped-up charges and convicted him in a kangaroo court and left him with a judgment that denied him credit from any bank. And they burned his house to the ground while the fire department stood around watching the flames consume the night.”134

  Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy.

  As if sensing this threat, white opposition careened from the Massive Resistance of disfranchisement, interposition, school closures, and harassment of the NAACP to the passive resistance of pupil placement laws, residential segregation, token integration, and “neighborhood schools.”136 In Little Rock, when the schools were forced to reopen, the most liberal member of the school board, sounding eerily similar to Georgia attorney general Eugene Cook, proposed using the law to undercut Brown and limit how integrated Little Rock schools would be. He argued that pupil-assignment plans, using the same factors that Mississippi had considered—“ability,” “whether a good fit or not”—could ensure that most African Americans stayed right where they were in their “well-segregated neighborhoods.” Meanwhile, a handful of blacks could be enrolled in white schools; just enough, he explained, to “satisfy the federal courts,” but at the same time, “small enough to satisfy the reluctant and vocal whites in the community.”137 This tactical shift from stall and defy to stall and undermine effectively “clogged” court dockets for more than forty years, as African Americans struggled to nail down a moving target whose goal had not changed: Stop black advancement.138