Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (57 page)

At that time the Supreme Court seemed a fragile reed for civil rights activists to hang on to. Although the Court had agreed to challenge "separate but equal" at the graduate level, it remained divided internally on many other questions. Its most prominent liberal justices, Hugo Black and William Douglas, fought openly with its most celebrated advocates of judicial restraint, Robert Jackson and Felix Frankfurter. The Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, commanded little respect from either camp. When the school cases reached the Court in 1953, Frankfurter helped to arrange a rehearing of the arguments rather than face what he thought would happen if the cases were decided then: a narrow, 5-4 decision against "separate but equal" that would invite southern resistance and destroy chances for meaningful implementation. With the new hearings set for December, Vinson died in September. "This is the first indication I have ever had," Frankfurter confided with relief to a former law clerk, "that there is a God."
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The new Chief Justice, Governor Earl Warren of California, emerged as proof that people matter in history. In appointing him, President Eisenhower knew that the Court would soon have to decide the segregation cases—High Court decisions do not bolt from the blue—and he should have guessed that Warren, a Republican liberal, would support the plaintiffs. What the President did not suspect was how dramatically Warren, a warm, gregarious, and straightforward man with a great gift for friendship, would succeed in curbing the animosities that had polarized the Court. Warren started on this effort immediately following his appointment in October 1953, concentrating on securing consensus in the school cases. Eisenhower also did not recognize how deeply Warren felt about racial injustice. Although the new Chief Justice had helped as California's attorney general in 1942 to intern Japanese-Americans, he had deeply regretted this lapse in judgment, and he determined to do what he thought was right for black children and their parents in 1954.
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On the school cases, as on much else during his historic fifteen-year career as Chief Justice, Warren approached issues without worrying too much about the niceties of legal precedent or about judicial restraint. What the Court must do, he made clear, was to promote social justice.
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Warren managed to bring colleagues into line, and on May 17, 1954—Black Monday, his critics called it—the Court electrified the nation by unanimously overturning de jure racial segregation in the public schools. "In the field of public education," Warren declared, "the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Drawing on psychological theories raised by the plaintiffs, Warren added that segregation "generates a feeling of inferiority [among students] as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."
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Opponents of segregation hailed the decision. The
Brown
case, said the
Chicago Defender
, a leading black newspaper, was a "second emancipation proclamation . . . more important to our democracy than the atomic bomb or the hydrogen bomb." That was an understandable and for the most part accurate observation. The Court, which enjoyed immense standing in the eyes of the people, had spoken, and in so doing had overturned nearly sixty years of legally sanctioned injustice. No longer, it seemed, could segregated public schools hide behind the law. Moreover, Americans had always placed enormous faith in the capacity of schools to promote equal opportunity and social mobility. In 1954 they imagined optimistically that racial prejudice would decline if children of different colors were brought together in the classroom. For all these reasons
Brown
conveyed profound moral legitimacy to the struggle for racial justice, not only in the schools but also in other walks of life. Activists seeking voting rights immediately redoubled their efforts, even in the Deep South. Without
Brown
, the civil rights movement would not have been quite the same.

A few southern political leaders announced that they would try to comply with the ruling. Governor "Big Jim" Folsom of Alabama, a liberal by southern standards, declared, "When the Supreme Court speaks, that's the law." The governor of Arkansas added, "Arkansas will obey the law. It always has."
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Many border-state school districts went further, taking action to bring about substantial changes. By the end of the 1956–57 school year, 723 school districts, most of them in these areas, had desegregated their schools. In these ways
Brown
mattered: it had quick and tangible consequences for thousands of children and their families.

Whether these consequences were wholly positive was less than 100 percent clear to experts who later surveyed the impact of school desegregation over time. Virtually all agreed heartily that legally mandated segregation was wrong: equal access must be a fundamental right. They also tended to agree (though some were not so sure) that minorities who attended desegregated schools scored slightly better on standardized tests than other minority students and that they were less likely to be truants, delinquents, or dropouts. Researchers also thought (although again there were dissenters) that blacks who went to desegregated schools more frequently went on to college, succeeded there, and found work outside of all-black settings.
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But some observers of the decision, including the black writer Zora Neale Hurston, complained as early as 1955 that it defamed all-black schools and their teachers. Hurston, a conservative Republican in her politics, wondered why black children would want to go where they were likely to be humiliated or threatened. Desegregation, she added, was different from integration—a (rare) situation in which people of different colors more or less willingly mix with one another. "How much satisfaction can I get," she demanded, "from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me to be near them?"
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She called instead for strict enforcement of compulsory school laws and more funding for social workers and truant officers. Other doubters asked what would happen to all the black teachers and principals and coaches who had depended on the dual education system for employment. The answer, as it turned out, was that some did lose their jobs or had to take lesser positions doing something else.

Some critics of
Brown
also questioned a controversial premise of the decision: that black schools necessarily induced feelings of "inferiority" among African-American children. This assumption rested in large part on research done by Kenneth Clark, an eminent black psychologist. Clark had concluded, on the basis of experiments showing that black children often preferred white dolls to black dolls, that blacks had low self-regard. Desegregated schools, he thought, would counter such feelings. But this research was dubious and subject to different interpretations. Black children attending desegregated schools in the North, for instance, seemed to have lower self-esteem,. as Clark defined it, than black children in segregated schools. The fact of the matter was that in 1954 there simply did not exist sufficient research that could "prove" whether any particular racial mix in schools was superior—or in what ways—to any other. The Court would have done better to avoid socio-psychological speculation, which opened it to criticism.
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Educational progress also involved family values and social class. These
Brown
was not asked to address, but it became increasingly clear over time that they remained central to any understanding of what schools could do. Schools in middle-class areas received considerably greater funding per pupil than did schools catering to the working classes. Moreover, parental values and the stability of neighborhoods obviously mattered a great deal: why expect schools to compensate much for disadvantages that children brought with them from their homes? Desegregating schools, it turned out, was not the deliverance that some contemporary enthusiasts, understandably swept off their feet by the moral power of
Brown
, tended to imagine. Changing the racial character of schools could not do much to redress the larger social and economic inequality of American life.
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These were some of the thoughtful questions about
Brown
. From the start, however, there were openly racist responses, especially from leading southern politicians. The decision of the Court, indeed, greatly weakened racial moderates in southern politics, emboldened racists, and unleashed violent tendencies among extremists.
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Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, a power on the Judiciary Committee (which passed on nominations of federal judges), explained that Communists were behind the ruling of the Court. "The Negroes," he said, "did not themselves instigate the agitation against segregation. They were put up to it by radical busybodies who are intent upon overthrowing American institutions."
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Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina (once a Supreme Court justice himself, as well as Truman's Secretary of State) announced, "South Carolina will not now nor for some years to come mix white and colored children in our schools." Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia added, "I do not believe in Negroes and whites associating with each other socially or in our school systems, and as long as I am governor, it won't happen."
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Leaders such as these drew heart from the tentativeness of the ruling. The Court was silent in 1954 about how and when its order should be carried out. That was because Warren and his fellow justices feared to move too far too fast. If they had said that desegregation must be carried out without delay (as they had concerning the Texas law school case in 1950), angry southern opponents might have flouted them, thereby undermining the legitimacy of the Court.

Anti-
Brown
agitators took further heart from the attitude of President Eisenhower. Like most Americans, Ike had grown up in a white world. There had been no blacks in his hometown or at West Point. He had risen in a Jim Crow army and had opposed Truman's order to desegregate the armed services in 1948. He had many wealthy southern friends who talked about the incompetence of their "darkies" and about the absolute need to segregate the races.
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Conservative by temperament, he was deeply pessimistic about the possibility of significant changes in race relations and dead-set against using the federal government to force the South to mend its ways. "The improvement of race relations," he wrote in his diary in 1953, "is one of those things that will be healthy and sound only if it starts locally. I do not believe that prejudices . . . will succumb to compulsion. Consequently I believe that Federal law imposed upon our states . . . would set back the cause of race relations a long, long time."
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As President, Eisenhower held firm to these opinions. Where he could issue executive orders to desegregate facilities—as in federally run shipyards or veterans' hospitals—he did so. He encouraged efforts to desegregate District of Columbia schools. But he otherwise adhered to a strict constructionist view of the federal-state relationship. "Where we have to change the hearts of men," he told Booker T. Washington's daughter, "we cannot do it by cold lawmaking, but must make these changes by appealing to reason, by prayer, and by constantly working at it through our own efforts."
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When his Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, a liberal Republican, entered an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Brown and fellow plaintiffs, the President did not stop him, but he was careful not to associate himself personally with it. While the court was considering the school cases in the spring of 1954, he invited Warren to dinner at the White House and sat him next to John W. Davis, the attorney (and Democratic presidential candidate of 1924) who was leading the legal defense team against desegregation at the time. After praising Davis as a great American, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm and privately tried to get him to understand the southern point of view. "These are not bad people," he said. "All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negro."
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When the Court issued its ruling a little later, Eisenhower was upset. Sure that the decision would make matters worse, he became disenchanted with Warren, later grumbling privately that appointing him Chief Justice was the "biggest damn fool mistake" he ever had made. When reporters pressed him for his reaction to the Court's decision, he said that he was duty-bound to accept it. But he refused to endorse it. "I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it," he said. "What I say is the—the Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it; and I must conform to that and do my very best to see that it is carried out in this country." But "very best" did not move him to action. He told a trusted speechwriter, "I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the South at least fifteen years. . . . It's all very well to talk about school integration—if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration. Feelings are deep on this, especially where children are involved. . . . We can't demand perfection in these moral things. All we can do is keep working toward a goal and keep it high. And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by FORCE is just plain NUTS.
"
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