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March 2 - March 31, 2019
Eisenhower believed that by acclaiming the end of the colonial era and the independence of African peoples, the United States could more readily keep these nations out of the clutches of Soviet influence.
gathered on March 5 for a reception at the University College of Ghana. Standing just outside the university’s large hall, King and Nixon met for the first time. As they shook hands, Nixon smiling warmly, King did not miss his opportunity. “I’m very glad to meet you here,” he said. “But I want you to come visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom the Gold Coast is celebrating.”4
When asked about King’s plea in a press conference on February 6 Ike said, “[I have] a pretty good and sizable agenda on my desk every day, and as you know I insist on going for a bit of recreation every once in a while. . . . I have expressed myself on this subject so often in the South, in the North, wherever I have been, that I don’t know what another speech would do about the thing right now.” In an act of astonishing bad taste, he then departed Washington for 10 days of turkey shooting at the Humphrey plantation in Georgia. Knowing that Eisenhower was in the South, King sent another
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King’s very presence in Ghana revealed the profound hypocrisy of America’s policies on race: while the U.S. government acclaimed the birth of freedom in Ghana, it still barred blacks and whites from attending school together, riding buses together, or eating together.
Eisenhower may at times have been an unwilling combatant in these struggles, yet in the end he did act, and decisively, to advance the progress of civil rights.10
At the start of the 85th Congress in January 1957, the Democratic Party held a slim majority with 49 seats against the Republicans’ 47—unchanged
Twenty-two of those Democratic senators came from the 11 states of the Confederacy, and at least 19 of them were dead-set against any civil rights legislation.
38 senators, working together, could ensure that the Senate never even held a vote on a pending bill. Southern Democrats, allied with a handful of archconservative Old Guard Republicans and a few uneasy midwestern Democrats could stymie progress on civil rights legislation.
Nor did it seem likely that the leader of the majority party, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, would help pass a civil rights bill.
he knew that the way to augment his personal power in the Senate was to lead the southern caucus, and the southern caucus demanded strict adherence to this racial code. Johnson followed the rules.
However, LBJ’s political calculations changed after November 1956,
Johnson saw a vacancy at the head of the table, and he meant to occupy it.
So Johnson’s future, if not the country’s, depended on passing a civil rights bill.
persuade his southern colleagues that a defanged civil rights bill should be allowed to come to the floor of the Senate for a vote.
they had to voluntarily stand aside and let others—mainly northern Democrats and moderate Republicans—pass the bill and make it the law of the land.
His fellow southerners would thereby raise Johnson to such a level of national prominence that they could be assured he would become president—and all the more able to propitiate...
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Senate leaders connived to keep the bill out of Eastland’s Judiciary Committee.
path cleared by LBJ who had marshalled just enough votes to ensure the bill would not be derailed into Eastland’s graveyard.
If the president did not understand how the South viewed his “moderate” civil rights bill, he found out on July 2, 1957, when Senator Richard Russell of Georgia rose to speak on the floor of the Senate.
“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.”
“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.”
Section 3 was somewhat obscure, and Russell meant to shed light on it. It proposed to give the attorney general the power to appeal to a federal court for an injunction against any individual who obstructed, or who was planning to obstruct, a citizen’s right to equal protection of the laws.
allowed the Justice Department to use the federal courts to bypass local police forces and municipal and state authorities when a citizen’s civil rights were at risk. And those civil rights were not precisely defined in the bill,
Brownell later admitted in his memoirs that Section 3 “gave the attorney general direct authority to enforce Court orders to desegregate public schools and to enter cases such as the Emmett Till murder.”
In essence Russell was right: Ike did not grasp the scope of his own bill.19
“Johnson went directly to the Oval Office” and told Eisenhower “that the entire bill would be defeated on the Senate floor if section three . . . was included. He said he had the votes to do this. The president was convinced and agreed that this provision be dropped.”
“I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send Federal troops . . . to enforce the orders of a Federal court.”
Not only had they lost the battle for Section 3, but now they had been outmaneuvered on Section 4 as well. In a meeting of his cabinet the next morning, Eisenhower seethed with rage.
He issued a public statement to the press, effectively labeling the Senate action an assault on the right to vote.
It was immensely frustrating for Eisenhower to discover that while his appeal to moderation made him admired in the country as a whole, it disarmed him in Congress.
Compromise was the ultimate outcome of most congressional proceedings, but to win even half a loaf, you had to fight fiendishly for a whole one while threatening to burn down the bakery. This was not Eisenhower’s style.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 satisfied no one.
Few could have predicted that the nation’s greatest crisis over school desegregation would break out in Little Rock, Arkansas.
A state governor, backed by an armed militia, now stood in defiance of a federal court order. The battle lines were drawn.
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.
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.
it seemed only the arrival of the bus saved her from physical harm.
The next morning the events at Little Rock became a national and indeed global news story.
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.
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
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.
Brownell advised against the meeting,
Faubus arrived at the Newport headquarters at 8:45 a.m. on September 14 and met with the president privately for 20 minutes.
In fact Faubus did not agree to any kind of deal.
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.”
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.
he did not withdraw the National Guard, nor did he issue them a change of orders. The stalemate endured.
September 24, 1957, marks one of the most significant dates in the Age of Eisenhower. Although no black students appeared at Little Rock High School that morning, a crowd of angry protestors gathered menacingly.
“The immediate need for federal troops is urgent. . . . Mob is armed and engaging in fisticuffs and other acts of violence. Situation is out of control.”
Here was the invitation Brownell needed to complete his legal case that local authorities had asked for federal intervention to halt the actions of mob violence.
