The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

Russell began by crying foul: the president, he said, had told the country he wanted a bill to protect voting rights. But what the attorney general had sent to Congress was something else altogether. It had been “cunningly designed to vest in the Attorney General unprecedented power to bring to bear the whole might of the Federal government, including the armed forces if necessary, to force a commingling of white and Negro children in the state-supported public schools of the South.” Not only that, but the bill proposed to give the attorney general such sweeping powers that he could “force the white people of the South at the point of a Federal bayonet to conform to almost any conceivable edict directed at the destruction of local custom, law or practice separating the races, and enforce a commingling of the races throughout the social order of the South.”