by John Egerton
In the House of Representatives, there had been a scattering of New Deal liberals throughout the Roosevelt years. Most of the more progressive senators of the fifties had been House members in the thirties and forties—Kefauver and Gore, Hill and Sparkman, Fulbright and LBJ. Others stayed in the House—Sam Rayburn of Texas, Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Wilbur Mills and Brooks Hays of Arkansas, J. Percy Priest and Joe L. Evins of Tennessee. In the first decade following the war, such men as Robert E. Jones and Carl Elliott of Alabama, Jim Wright and Jack Brooks of Texas, Dante Fascell of Florida, and Frank E. Smith of Mississippi were a moderating influence in their delegations. Thomas G. Abernethy of Mississippi was certainly no left-winger, but he almost looked like one compared to the man he beat in 1952—the notorious John E. Rankin.
Nothing revolutionary came out of Congress in these years; in fact, very little that was evolutionary could be detected. No significant piece of the Truman civil rights package became law, and when groups and individuals interested in social reform looked to Washington for support and encouragement, they got little except more empty promises and calls for patience. The White House and the Democratic Party had failed to subdue their Southern reactionary wing or the far-right Republicans, and the smear tactics of Joe McCarthy and the red-hunters kept creative and progressive ideas bottled up for the duration of the Truman presidency.
Only in the federal courts did the ideals and principles of equal rights under the law move closer to reality. One of the great untold stories of the civil rights era, in fact, is that of the judges—white, upper-class, conservative Southern males, for the most part—who were appointed to district and appellate courts in the South over a thirty-year period by five Democratic and Republican presidents beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, and who honored the letter and spirit of their oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. Not all of the appointees were so virtuous, to be sure—but those who did summon the honesty and courage to follow the documents, regardless of their own private attitudes and biases, deserve recognition as stewards of the highest American ideals.
The twenty-year-long New Deal–Fair Deal era was drawing to a close in 1952 when Aubrey Williams went before the resolutions committee at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to appeal for a strong, affirmative civil rights plank in the party platform. He found the conservatives to be openly hostile to his ideas, and the liberals to be nervously unsettled by them. The moment of opportunity had passed; the South and the nation had lost their last chance to orchestrate a voluntary social reformation.
Soon after his post-election honeymoon ended in 1949, Harry Truman must have found himself wondering why in the world he had decided to run for a full term of his own. Coming in for the fallen hero, FDR, had been a tough assignment, but the man from Missouri had performed admirably on the whole, and he could have bowed out in 1948 with the grateful thanks of the nation for a job well done. But later, looking back on his last four years in office, he could not have failed to see the frustrations and humiliations visited upon him by the arch-conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats who were his bitterest enemies.
On the surface, two issues and the men who symbolized them were Truman’s undoing: Korea and communism, Douglas MacArthur and Joseph McCarthy. The Asian war and the imperious general’s conduct of it were not problems of the President’s making, but they were enough to give him ulcers. Domestic anticommunist hysteria whipped up by the unstable Wisconsin senator owed its origin in part to Truman’s own authorization of loyalty oaths and investigative sweeps through the private lives of millions of citizens, and his regret of that made him hate “that son of a bitch McCarthy” all the more.
Everywhere the President turned, it seemed, these two willful and egotistical men were taunting him, defying him, thwarting his efforts to govern—MacArthur in the Pacific, or before a joint session of Congress, or in a ticker-tape parade on Broadway; McCarthy in the Senate, or in the papers, or on television. They were a double-scotch hangover that wouldn’t go away, and the bourbon-sipping Truman was almost obsessed by them. It was frustrations of this sort that finally sapped his energy and his will. By November 1951 he had made up his mind not to run for reelection, and he announced the decision the following March, just as the primary season was heating up. Never in his last two years in office would his approval rating in the polls rise above thirty-two percent.
In point of fact, however, it wasn’t these two men or the war or the red scare that got Truman in trouble in the South; it was his words and actions on the subject of race. The Southern members of Congress and their closest allies back home grew to hate the President for not behaving like a white supremacist, and it was they who joined with right-wing Republicans to shred his domestic agenda and generally to oppose his administration’s initiatives both at home and abroad. They would not forgive him for creating the Committee on Civil Rights, or for heeding its recommendations and trying to implement many of them; they felt the same about his executive orders aimed at ending discrimination in the District of Columbia, in federal employment, and in the armed forces. Not even the morale-boosting unity and efficiency of the racially integrated military effort in Korea placated the diehard racists.
Harry Truman and his top presidential advisers had come to see that segregation and discrimination could not possibly be justified or sustained in the largest and most successful democratic nation of all time. In recognizing the inevitability of racial equality, they also acknowledged the rightness of it—socially and morally, politically and economically. And, not least, they understood the international propaganda value of it as well.
But in 1951, after six years on the job, the President was compelled to conclude (though not to concede) that he had lost the civil rights fight to a Congress that had neither the motivation, the will, the concern, nor the consensus to bring the country’s behavior into harmony with its stated laws and ideals. It may have been that realization, as much as any other, that largely accounted for his unproductive last years in office, his low standing in the polls, and his decision to quit.
There was no shortage of Democrats who wanted to replace him. Estes Kefauver was already in the race, hoping to parlay his coonskin-cap folksiness and his freshly minted reputation as a TV crime-buster into a campaign that would play well in the South and elsewhere. Vice President Alben Barkley had aspirations, but he was thought to be too old. Richard Russell was touted as the man to carry the segregationist banner, but few fell in behind him. Former New York Governor Averell Harriman was briefly in the running too. But the man Truman finally favored—and the eventual winner, on the third ballot at the Chicago convention—was Governor Adlai M. Stevenson of Illinois. In a bid to hold the dissatisfied South, the party put Senator John Sparkman of Alabama on the ticket with him. Philosophically and temperamentally, both men were peaceable moderates who wanted to operate between the reactionary right and the liberal left. In stark contrast to the explosive 1948 campaign, it seemed this time that almost everyone was trying to avoid conflict—and no white Democrats anywhere wanted to talk about race.
The Republicans were in an ideological mood to pick their longtime right-wing leader, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, but patriotism—and an insatiable passion for victory—turned them instead to the conquering hero of the war in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In many ways, the grandfatherly Ike was the perfect candidate for these times. He was a man with no known views on public issues, no clearly articulated philosophy, no designated religion, and, best of all, no politics (he had never even voted). He was a genial, easygoing fellow with a quick grin and a somewhat simplistic approach to the problems of a deeply divided nation. Reporters pulled from him the news that he was a fiscal conservative (“a Harry Byrd Republican”); he also came across as a peacemaker (“I will go to Korea”) and a chairman-of-the-board type of manager. He was deferential to Congress, wary of Senator McCarthy, and favorably disposed only to the most limited and symbolic federal efforts to guaran
tee civil rights. (Earlier he had expressed doubts about the wisdom of desegregating the armed forces, testifying in 1949 to his personal belief that the branches of service were not ready—“spiritually, philosophically, or mentally”—for racial equality.)
With California Senator Richard M. Nixon as his vice-presidential choice, Eisenhower stuck to inoffensive generalities as much as he could, and left the low-road red-baiting to his Communist-hunting subordinate. A mean-spirited mood of nastiness crept into the campaign, thanks in part to the continuing accusations of McCarthy. At the expense of some personal honor, Eisenhower joined Nixon in endorsing the Wisconsinites ends, if not his means. Even though McCarthy had slanderously cast suspicion on the loyalty of Ike’s patron and wartime superior, General (and later Secretary of State) George C. Marshall, the presidential candidate refused to call the reckless senator’s hand.
Almost every political advantage seemed to turn in Eisenhower’s favor: Prosperity was not just around the corner but in plain view; unemployment was in the low single digits; a large majority of Americans seemed more comfortable and complacent than they had ever been; dissatisfied citizens kept quiet for fear of being branded as Communists. With a ten-to-one bulge in press endorsements, with plenty of money for television commercials, and with race and the South all but ignored as campaign issues, Ike breezed to an easy victory. His margin was more than six million popular votes, and 442 to 89 in the electoral count. Stevenson carried nine Southern and border states and lost all the rest, including his Illinois homeland.
When he took office in January 1953, President Eisenhower was about as far removed as he could possibly be from a conscious concern about the racial problems of the United States—or the broader social problems of the South. Not many others were thinking about these matters either, except the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a scattering of federal judges—and, of course, Southerners themselves, white and black. Like Harry Truman before him, Eisenhower had his hands full with Korea, with the aggressions of the Communist empire in other parts of the world, and with the fear of Communist infiltration at home.
Joe McCarthy was now Ike’s cross to bear, and he chafed under the load. A year into the new administration, McCarthy picked a fight with the U.S. Army—by no coincidence, the President’s alma mater of sorts—and soon the senator was enticed into letting live television cameras broadcast his baritone accusations that the army was shot through with subversives and traitors. From late April until early June 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings were the talk of the nation, a daily drama better by far than soap operas.
As a backdrop to this event, there was more discouraging news from overseas. Another Southeast Asian territory, the longtime French colony of Vietnam, was falling day by agonizing day into the hands of Communist-backed anticolonial forces. Through television reports, the American viewing public was introduced to the heroic but doomed defenders of a remote outpost called Dien Bien Phu.
And in the midst of all this came still another dramatic—though not unexpected—event: On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in a cluster of school desegregation cases styled as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
“One day it will be Monday,” Ralph McGill had been telling his readers for some time now, and numerous others had said it too. It was customary for the court to issue rulings on the first workday of the week. This was the day that McGill and practically everyone else had been waiting for, some with fear and loathing, some with faith and hope.
4. Courts of Last Resort
“Black Monday,” the segregationists would call it, with unintended irony: a dark and dreadful day for the forces of white supremacy. It was certainly that—but it was also a bright day of hope and promise for the ten million black Southerners and other Americans who had fought for an equal claim to the promises of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In the most fundamental way, everything came together around this court decision, around the issue of race and education. For the past quarter of a century, Americans in general and Southerners in particular had been contending with one another over rights and privileges and responsibilities, over race and color, caste and class. They might have chosen another issue, such as the right to vote, as the primary vehicle for this monumental debate. They might have, but they didn’t. Every American citizen had a direct interest in public education; millions of them saw it as the key to the future well-being of their families. The ballot was crucial, without a doubt, but education struck every chord on the scale: age, sex, race, religion, occupation, residence, language, nationality.
All the players were drawn into this game: the President, the federal judiciary, politicians at all levels of government, the universities, the schools with all their teachers and students, the churches, the press, business and labor, the legal profession, the NAACP, the Southern Regional Council and other social reform groups, the soon-to-be-founded white supremacist Citizens’ Council and other resistance groups, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, the reactionary right and the radical left, whites and blacks and all shades of color in between. Everybody.
When the New Deal liberals put race on the American agenda in the thirties, their faith was in economics. Recovery and growth would point the way to social reform, they said; if people have jobs and money, then nice houses and good health and educational opportunity will follow, and the problems of discrimination will disappear. In his turn, Harry Truman tried to effect a political solution, reasoning that if the government guaranteed the basic rights of all its people, the majority would see the fairness of that idea and rise to the challenge. Both initiatives helped, but neither brought an end to racism; in fact, though conditions did improve somewhat, the problems of racial discrimination were more divisive in 1952 than they had been in 1932.
The beginning of desegregation in higher education and the prospect of more in the lower schools introduced an educational solution to the problem of racial injustice. For the next quarter of a century or more, a substantial segment of the American population, particularly in the South, would work sacrificially to achieve this objective, while many more opposed it. John N. Popham of the New York Times, recalling years later his reporting on these efforts in the Southern states, would remember best “the dedicated people who had a transforming faith in the power of education.”
Still, none of these strategies alone—economic, political, educational—would do as much to spark a new spirit of liberty in the United States as the federal courts and the church-based multitude of black Southerners did in the fifties and sixties. The other efforts were substantial and vital, and they would continue, but it would be the judicial and moral responses to segregation and white supremacy that would have the most pervasive and durable impact throughout the rest of the twentieth century.
The enormous symbolic and tactical importance of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 could hardly be overstated; they would be hailed in the future as the two events that gave birth to the civil rights movement—and historical immortality to attorney Thurgood Marshall and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (That “big bang” theory of movement history obscured some pivotal earlier events, though, as well as the heroic and prophetic acts of many individuals and groups in the previous generation—including those of Marshall and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.)
For three-quarters of a century, from Reconstruction to the 1950s, no racial development in the South sparked as much reaction, pro and con, as the Brown decision and the black nonviolent protest in Montgomery—the one predictable and inexorable, the other spontaneous and surprising, and both of them ultimately inevitable. Those who took an active interest in the world around them knew that Brown was imminent; they had seen it, or something like it, coming for a long time. It was like an earthquake or a hurricane: Your intelligence and your common sense t
old you it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it was still a profound shock when it finally hit.
Dozens of individuals—blacks and whites, and most of them Southern—had written or spoken prophetically on the future consequences of racial chauvinism. The immovable object of white supremacy and the irresistible force of racial equality had been on a collision course since the end of World War II—had been cemented in irreconcilable opposition, in fact, for centuries. Against all the progressive forces of change that had buffeted them from within and without since the early days of slavery, the ruling white oligarchs of the South had always reacted defiantly. Not even the Lost Cause and the lost war had been enough to dispel the myth of racial superiority and open the way for whites and blacks—and the South and the nation—to live with one another on an equal footing.
Now and again, a contrary voice of admonition had echoed through the Dixie wilderness as some troubled native son or daughter between the shades of alabaster and ebony dared to stand and speak from the heart. But too few heard, and fewer heeded. As the years and the opportunities slipped away, the paradox of better times obscured the problem of racial injustice, pushing it ever further back into the corners of life and memory. By 1950, relatively fewer African-American Southerners were lynched or terrorized or kept in peonage; relatively more of them voted and went to college and got good jobs. The South, white and black, had made economic, political, educational progress since the early thirties—but it still suffered grievously from the causes and effects of racial discrimination, and no amount of denial or finger-pointing at the North would make the problem disappear. Now, finally, forces beyond its control would compel the region to change.