The Fifties

by David Halberstam

He even prepared a draft, which was one of the more illuminating documents of the time. The time was ripe for an assault on legal segregation, he wrote. The racism of the Nazis had caused a broad and powerful sense of revulsion among the American people, which extended even to our own treatment of the Japanese-Americans. It was foolish to say that blacks were not ready for greater political freedom, and it was a mistake to cite the Constitution of the United States as the reason to deny those freedoms. It was not the Constitution that had changed in the past sixty years but the blacks themselves; according to Jackson, they had shown a far greater capacity for assimilation than had been thought possible in the days of Plessy.

So it was that on May 17, 1954, Earl Warren read the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court on an issue that had haunted America for almost a century: “We conclude that in the field of public opinion the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Not all black leaders were satisfied, although almost everyone was stunned that it was a unanimous decision.

The Brown v. Board of Education decision not only legally ended segregation, it deprived segregationist practices of their moral legitimacy as well. It was therefore perhaps the single most important moment in the decade, the moment that separated the old order from the new and helped create the tumultuous era just arriving.

This had a profound effect on the growing and increasingly powerful communications industry in the United States. Because of Brown, reporters for the national press, print and now television, felt emboldened to cover stories of racial prejudice. Those blacks who went into the streets in search of greater freedom found that in this new era, they were not only covered but treated with respect and courtesy by journalists.

When Morrow represented the President at a Lincoln Day ceremony in Topeka, Kansas, a woman came over near the end of the reception and told him, “Boy, I am ready to go now; go outside and get me a taxi.”

BROWN V. BOARD OF Education had been the first great step in giving equality to blacks, but nonetheless only one of the three branches of government had acted. And yet the law, it soon became clear, was not merely an abstract concept—it possessed a moral and social weight of its own. So it was that the country, without even knowing it, had passed on to the next phase of the civil-rights struggle: education. The educational process began as a journalistic one. It took place first in the nation’s newspapers and then, even more dramatically, on the nation’s television screens.

Together, the Movement and the media educated America about civil rights. In Mississippi, the most reactionary of the Southern states, the resistance to integration was immediate and overwhelming on the part of whites. The moment the Supreme Court ruled in Brown, the existing white power structure moved to defy the law. White Citizens’ Councils, often made up of the most respectable people in town, were formed to stop any attempts to integrate the schools.

For example, a local weekly, the Yazoo City Herald, printed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of blacks who signed such a petition, in an advertisement taken out by the local citizens’ council. The result was the complete crushing of even this most tentative gesture. The blacks who had held jobs lost them. Their credit was cut off. One grocer who had a little money in the local bank was told to take it elsewhere. Of the fifty-three people who put their names on the list, fifty-one took their names off. Even then many of them did not get their jobs back.

A few weeks later in Brookhaven, a black man named Lamar Smith was shot down in cold blood in the middle of the day in front of the county courthouse. Smith was a registered voter who had just voted in the state’s primary election, and he had encouraged others to vote as well. A white farmer was arrested but not indicted. Again the national press did not cover the story.

Blacks in Mississippi seemed not only outside the legal protection of the police, but also outside the moral protection of the press. Then just a few weeks after Lamar Smith was murdered, Emmett Till was killed in Tallahatchie County. It was this event that at last galvanized the national press corps, and eventually the nation. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who had gone south for the summer; it was his second trip back to his family’s home.

Mississippi was a poor state, perennially either forty-seventh or forty-eighth in the union in education and per capita income (“Thank God for Mississippi,” officiais in Alabama and Arkansas allegedly claimed after the results of every census were published), and Tallahatchie, a county that was half Delta and half hill country, was one of the poorest areas in the state. Four fifths of its inhabitants earned under two thousand dollars a year. The educational levels were the third worst in the state. The average white adult had completed only 5.7 years of school, and the average black only 3.9. The largest town was Charleston, one of its two capitals, which had 2,629 people. Emmett Till was rather short but already possessed the body of a man and weighed 160 pounds. It was said by some who knew him that he was a sharp dresser and perhaps a little cocky. Neither of these qualities seemed criminal back in Chicago, but in Money, Mississippi, they were the kind of things that could easily get a young black in trouble.

Then they wired him to the gin fan, which weighed seventy-four pounds, and they tossed the body in the Tallahatchie River.

Moses Wright did not call the police, as ordered by the two white men, but Curtis Jones did.

The body was shipped north to Chicago, where Mamie Bradley opened the coffin and decided to hold an open-casket funeral. “Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box so horribly battered and waterlogged that this sickening sight is your son—lynched?”

The murder electrified the large black communities in the nation’s Northern industrial cities. White newspapers, aware of this new constituency and of the magnitude of the black emotional response, began to pay attention. White readers, as well, were stunned by the sheer brutality of the act and the idea of vigilante justice at work. In Mississippi, Milam and Bryant were arrested and charged with the murder of Emmett Till. For whatever reason—the brutality of the murder of a child, the public funeral in Chicago, or the vague sense

The Till case marked a critical junction for the national media. Obviously, the Supreme Court decision had made a critical difference morally and socially; for the first time there was a national agenda on civil rights. The national media was going to cover not just the killers but the entire South.

Two was, among other things, about changing America and the South, where things like this could happen. They had long been ready to cover the South. Now they had their chance. The educational process had begun: The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of murdering him became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what had happened.

Until then John Popham, of The New York Times, was the only full-time national newspaper correspondent working the South. Popham, then forty-five, had been covering the beat for eight years, at the request of the Times managing editor, Turner Catledge, who was from Mississippi and who knew that profound changes were about to take place. Popham was a true American original: a Virginia aristocrat with a secret radical heart.

Rule number one was: No reporter was to hang around the town at night. Instead, Popham decided, the white reporters should all stay in Clarksdale, some fifty miles away. He also instructed his colleagues on dress codes (once, Murray Kempton, of the New York Post, possibly the most talented man covering the trial, came down to dinner in British walking shorts. Popham went over and gently suggested that this was not the time or the place for shorts). He also made sure that the black reporters had a place to stay in Mound Bayou, an all-black community. When one of the blacks was arrested and put in jail for a minor parking violation by Sheriff Strider, it was Popham who got the judge to let him out.

When Charles Diggs, a black congressman from Detroit, showed up to witness the trial, Strider was furious. His deputies refused to believe that Diggs was actually a congressman. Jim Hicks, a black reporter, took Diggs’s congressional ID card to show one of his deputies in order to get Diggs a seat. “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a congressman,” one deputy said to another. “A nigger congressman?” the other deputy asked. “That’s what this nigger said,” the first deputy added. In the face of such behavior, the national press corps was prepared to judge Mississippi by the actions of Milam, Bryant, and Strider.

“Your ancestors will turn over in their graves [if Milam and Bryant] are found guilty and I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure.” The jury deliberated sixty-seven minutes and then set them free. “Well,” said Clarence Strider to reporters. “I hope the Chicago niggers and the NAACP are happy.” It would have been a quicker decision, said the foreman, if we hadn’t stopped to drink a bottle of pop. Later it was said that the jury deliberately prolonged its decision at the request of sheriff-elect Harry Dogan, in order to make it look better to outsiders. The trial was over. Milam and Bryant stood acquitted in Mississippi and convicted by most of the nation.

Right after the trial, he gave away his dog, drove his car to the train station, left it there, and boarded a train to Chicago. He no longer wanted to be a terrified, celebrity witness; instead, he became one more anonymous figure among millions of other blacks who were part of one of the greatest but least reported migrations in American history.

Journalists, as the noted New York Times columnist James Reston once noted, do a better job covering revolution than they do evolution.

They did not, by and large, travel by bus or train; but if they had, they might have noticed another story: At the Memphis bus and train stations every day, large families of poor blacks clustered, often two or three generations huddling together.

When Britain and France ended their colonial rules in the middle of this century, they merely cut all ties to the regions they had exploited. In America, the exploited were American citizens living on American soil, mostly in the South. Thus a great migration began from the rural South—the colonial region—to the great metropolitan centers of the North, which they saw as a new homeland. But they came north with terrible disadvantages; most particularly, they had been denied the education that would allow them to make an easy transition to a more prosperous life.

The word Negro was not used in the paper, because it was too close to the pejorative nigger; instead, in his pages a black man was a race man.

“A colored man caught with a copy in his possession,” wrote Carl Sandburg in the Chicago Daily News, “was suspected of having ‘Northern fever’ and other so-called disloyalties.”

The Memphis Commercial-Appeal ran a cartoon of a black field hand with an empty sack saying, “If it does my work—whose work am I going to do?” The Jackson (Mississippi Daily) News suggested that the machine be thrown in the Mississippi River.

THE SUPREME COURT RULING on Brown v. Board of Education, which occurred in the middle of the decade, was the first important break between the older, more staid America that existed at the start of the era and the new, fast-paced, tumultuous America that saw the decade’s end. The second was Elvis Presley. In cultural terms, his coming was nothing less than the start of a revolution.

“No,” Bernstein insisted, and Clurman could tell that he was deadly serious, “it’s Elvis. He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything—music, language, clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution—the Sixties comes from it. Because of him a man like me barely knows his musical grammar anymore.” Or, as John Lennon, one of Elvis’s admirers, once said, “Before Elvis there was nothing.” If he was a revolutionary, then he was an accidental one, an innately talented young man who arrived at the right place at the right time. He had no political interests at all, and though his music symbolized the coming together of black and white cultures into the mainstream in a way that had never happened before, that seemed to hold little interest for him. Though much of his music had its roots among blacks, he, unlike many young white musicians, seemed to have little interest in the black world and the dramatic changes then taking place there.

Everyone was sir or ma’am. Few young Americans, before or after, have looked so rebellious and been so polite.

Country blended with black blues was a strain that some would come to call rock-a-billy, something so powerful that it would go right to the center of American popular culture.

Religion was important to them, and when Elvis was nine he was baptized in the Pentecostal church. As a symbol of Christian charity, he was supposed to give away some of his prized possessions, so he gave his comic books to other children.

As the decade began, there were signs that young white kids were buying black rhythm and blues records; this was happening in pockets throughout the country, but no one sensed it as a trend until early 1951.

A new young generation of Americans was breaking away from the habits of its parents and defining itself by its music. There was nothing the parents could do: This new generation was armed with both money and the new inexpensive appliances with which to listen to it.

The postwar economic boom may have benefited many Americans, but no one benefited more than General Motors. By rough estimates, 49.3 million motor vehicles were registered when the decade began, 73.8 when it ended; by some estimates, an average of 4.5 million cars, many of them that might have stayed on the road in a less prosperous economy, were scrapped annually. That means as many as 68 to 70 million cars, ever larger, ever heavier, ever more expensive, were sold, and General Motors sold virtually half of them. The average car, which had cost $1,270 at the beginning of the decade, had risen to $1,822 by the end of it; that rate, Edward Cray noted in his book Chrome Colossus, was twice as fast as the rest of the wholesale cost index.

General Motors was Republican, not Eastern sophisticated Republican but heartland conservative Republican—insular, suspicious of anything different. Zora Arkus-Duntov, a top GM designer and an émigré, once complained to a friend of the insularity of the culture and noted that the problem in the company was that it was run in every department by men “who believe that the world is bordered on the East by Lake Huron, and on the West by Lake Michigan.”

The culture was first and foremost hierarchical: An enterprising young executive tended to take all signals, share all attitudes and prejudices of the men above him, as his wife tended to play the sports and card games favored by the boss’s wife, to emulate how she dressed and even to serve the same foods for dinner.

Yet for all of Chevrolet’s great wealth and power, if there was a potential weakness in General Motors as Curtice took over (replacing Wilson who had joined Eisenhower’s cabinet), it was the car itself.

Life in America, it appeared, was in all ways going to get better: A new car could replace an old one, and a larger, more modern refrigerator would take the place of one bought three years earlier, just as a new car had replaced an old one. Thus, the great fear of manufacturers, as they watched their markets reach saturation points, was that their sales would decline; this proved to be false.

were small, understaffed, and lost money. That changed quickly enough. “We discovered,” said Rosser Reeves, one of the prime architects and beneficiaries of television advertising, “that this was no tame kitten; we had a ferocious man-eating tiger. We could take the same advertising campaign from print or radio and put it on TV, and even when there were very few sets, sales would go through the roof.”

Advertising men became the new heroes, or antiheroes, of American life. Novels and movies appeared about them. They were said to dress more stylishly than the mere businessmen they served: They lived somewhat unconventional, even racy lives and were supposedly torn between guarding the public good and using their great gifts to manipulate people for profit.

“Advertising,” he wrote, “now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.”

Studies comparing the health of men in advertising with that of executives in other professions showed them to be consistently in poorer health than their peers. It was an enormously stressful calling; if the rewards were great, so were the pitfalls.

But in the new age of television advertising, talent was everything, and by the fifties J. Walter Thompson was regarded as so stodgy by the bright young men on Madison Avenue that it was called J. Walter Tombstone.

Some auto executives later decided that television advertising tilted the balance within their companies, making marketing and sales gradually more important than engineering and manufacturing. A kind of misguided ethic began to take root, one of great and dangerous hubris—that it did not really matter how well made the cars were; if the styling was halfway decent and the ad campaign was good enough, the marketing department could sell them.

McDonald’s slogans began as “Give Mom a Break” and ended with the classic “You Deserve a Break Today.” America, it appeared, was slowly but surely learning to live with affluence, convincing itself that it had earned the right to its new appliances and cars. Each year seemed to take the country further from its old puritan restraints; each year, it was a little easier to sell than in the past.

gag, there was no discrimination. Everyone belonged to

Dads were good dads whose worst sin was that they did not know their way around the house and could not find common household objects or that they were prone to give lectures about how much tougher things had been when they were boys. The dads were, above all else, steady and steadfast. They symbolized a secure world. Moms in the sitcoms were, if anything, more interesting; they were at once more comforting and the perfect mistresses of their household premises, although the farther they ventured from their houses the less competent they seemed.

By contrast, Ozzie seemed to work such flexible hours that he was home all the time. He never seemed to be at work, and yet he was successful.