Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (58 page)

Neither the tentativeness of the Court nor the inaction of Eisenhower accounted for the outspoken resistance of men like Eastland and Talmadge. They and others were thoroughgoing segregationists who needed little if any prodding to speak out against the Court. Eisenhower, in short, had a point in maintaining that white feelings in parts of the South ran deep on the issue—so deep that in retrospect it is hard to imagine that school desegregation could ever have been accomplished there without governmental compulsion. He also had a point in reckoning that white Americans at that time did not wish to force recalcitrant school districts to desegregate: despite widespread noncompliance with
Brown
, civil rights played only a minor role in the 1956 campaign. Still, the President's stand was both morally obtuse and encouraging to anti-Brown activists. Had he praised the Court for its decision and made clear his determination to enforce it with whatever it took to do so, he would at the least have driven the Talmadges and the Eastlands more to the defensive. Some of the more violent southern assaults that damaged race relations in the next few years might have been avoided.

A year after
Brown
, in May 1955, the Court turned—as it had said it would—to the question of implementation. By then, however, resistance to
Brown
in the Deep South had spread widely. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the relocation of students posed complex and time-consuming problems. For these reasons the Court again backed off from confrontation by declining to define an acceptable standard for desegregated schooling. It also refused to set a timetable for compliance. "Brown II," as the court's implementation order was called, said instead that segregated school systems must make a "prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" and do so with "all deliberate speed."
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"Brown II" further emboldened southern opponents, some of whom resorted openly to violence. 1955, indeed, was an unusually violent time: eight of the eleven lynchings of blacks in the 1950s occurred in that year. Other blacks were killed for daring to assert their rights. In Belzoni, Mississippi, the Reverend George Lee was shot at point-blank range and killed for insisting that his name be kept on the voting lists. Evidence pointed to the sheriff, who was asked about the pellets found in Lee's mouth. "Maybe," he replied, "they're fillings from his teeth." No arrests were made. A few weeks later in Brookhaven, Mississippi, Lamar Smith was shot to death in broad daylight in front of the county courthouse. He, too, was a black man who had presumed to vote. As usual, no one was convicted of the crime.
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One of the most shocking incidents involved the killing in August of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was visiting relatives in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, an area that was two-thirds black and where no black person was on the rolls of registered voters or of juries. Till's "crime" was to whistle at a white woman in a grocery store. Hearing of the transgression—a tabu in much of the Deep South—the woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, John Milam, drove to the sharecropper shack of Moses Wright, Till's great-uncle, snatched Till, and drove off with him. Three days later Till was found dead in the Tallahatchie River. He had been shot in the head and tied to a cotton gin fan so that he would sink. His body was badly mangled. Till's mother, Mamie Bradley, had the body shipped back to Chicago, where she displayed it in an open casket for four days. Thousands of people paid their respects. National media carried the story to the country.
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To the surprise of many Americans who understood what Mississippi "justice" was like in such cases, Bryant and Milam were actually arrested and charged with murder. The trial, which took place before crowds of reporters, took place in September. But it was heard before an all-white all-male jury and was a charade and a circus. The sheriff greeted black people attending the trial with "Hello, niggers." Blacks, including reporters, were segregated in the courtroom. Wright courageously testified and identified Bryant and Milam as the abductors. But the defense attorney played openly to local white prejudices, reminding the jurors in his summation, "I am sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men." The jury took only an hour to deliver verdicts of not guilty. "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop," a juror explained, "it wouldn't have taken that long." A grand jury, ignoring Wright's eyewitness account, later declined to indict Bryant and Milam for kidnapping; their bail was returned, and they went free. Wright dared not return to his shack, moved to Chicago, and never came back home.
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The violence and intimidation employed by southern whites, while harshest in Mississippi, broke out all over the South in 1955 and 1956. By this time the angry but scattered outbursts that had greeted
Brown
in 1954 had spread much more widely. "Massive resistance" ensued, including more violence.
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In February 1956 Autherine Lucy, a young black woman, sought to become a student at the University of Alabama. She was almost lynched by white students, had to flee, and was formally expelled. "Bama" was not desegregated (tokenly) until 1963. In Birmingham a mob attacked and beat the famous black singer Nat "King" Cole when he sang at a whites-only concert in the city's auditorium. In the late summer of 1956 violence broke out in Clinton, Tennessee, where mobs of local whites, their numbers augmented to more than 2,000 by outsiders, terrorized black children seeking entry to the schools. The Highway Patrol and the National Guard used tanks and armored personnel carriers to curb the violence and desegregated the schools. But cross-burnings, torching of Negro homes, and marches sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan disrupted the area for years thereafter. Angry whites also prevented blacks from enrolling in the schools of Mansfield, Texas, in 1956. The governor sent in Texas Rangers to restore order, and the local school board removed the blacks from the schools. In all these cases the federal government did nothing, maintaining that they were matters for state and local authorities to handle.

Members of the Klan, which expanded considerably in the 1950s, provoked some of this violent activity. As in the past, Klansmen incited violent intimidation and terror, including night-riding, cross-burning, and mob assaults. They claimed to be deeply religious Christians dedicated to the preservation of the Anglo-Saxon white race not only against the incursions of blacks but also of Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and all kinds of "immoral" sinners. As one Klan speaker put it in 1956, "The Ku Klux Klan is the only white Christian Protestant 100 percent American organization in America today." Another Klansman added, "We are gonna stay white, we are going to keep the nigger black, with the help of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."
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Most of these overtly violent southern racists and Klansmen hailed from the lower classes of white society. Ill-educated, often almost as poor as the blacks, they whipped up a ferocious Negrophobia aimed at keeping blacks in their place. But intimidators of blacks included more than the lower classes. Thousands of more "respectable" people, including bankers, lawyers, and businessmen, openly identified with organizations such as the Citizens' Councils, which enjoyed great success at the time. The Citizens' Councils, indeed, were central in cementing a quasi-respectable facade onto massive resistance. They publicly deplored violence but condoned a great deal of it and did not act to bring perpetrators to justice. They stood foursquare for the perpetuation of Jim Crow, including racial segregation in the schools. They repeatedly denounced the Supreme Court, liberals, and northerners in general. What the North was trying to do, they complained, was to impose a "Reconstruction II" on the South. This, they charged, was more insidious than "Reconstruction I" following the Civil War.
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Southern politicians came together to present a near-united front against desegregation of the schools. In early 1956 the Georgia legislature voted to adopt as its new state flag a design that prominently featured the Confederate battle insignia. (Even in 1994, thirty-eight years later, state officials refused to take it down, protests notwithstanding, from the Georgia Dome in Atlanta when the predominantly black players of the National Football League's top two teams battled in the Dome for the Super Bowl.) A much more potent sign of resistance occurred in March 1956, when nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators and eighty-two of the 106 southern representatives joined to issue the so-called Southern Manifesto. This widely noted declaration accused the Supreme Court of "clear abuse of judicial power." It promised to use "all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation." The signers included every senator and representative from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. The only southern senators who did not sign were Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee and Lyndon Johnson of Texas. All three were relatively liberal and cherished hopes of running for President.
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The politicians opposed to desegregation did their most effective work by conjuring up a range of imaginative ruses to evade implementation of
Brown
. States cut off aid to desegregated schools, provided tuition grants to students who attended "private" all-white institutions, denied licenses to teachers who tried to work at desegregated schools, and barred members of the NAACP from public employment. "Freedom of choice" laws authorized parents to send their children to schools of their own choosing. Many opted for all-white private schools, then intimidated black parents who tried to follow suit. "Pupil placement" laws were a favorite dodge. These enabled school officials to use the results of racially biased scholastic or psychological tests as grounds for assigning students to segregated schools. In 1959 Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed all its public schools, offering children private education in their place. When blacks refused to accept what was offered them, they went without any formal schooling at all for three years while litigation ran its course.
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In the long run the courts, which time and again proved vital to quests for legal equality in the 1960s, stepped in to put an end to ruses such as these. But it was a long, long run that accelerated only in 1969.
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In 1962 there were still no black children in schools with whites in the states of Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama. In 1964 fewer than 2 percent of blacks attended multi-racial schools in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy. Many southern colleges and universities excluded blacks until the 1960s or accepted only a token few. Very few black teachers were allowed to work in white or desegregated schools. Where dual systems remained, large disparities in funding and other resources persisted.
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Forty years after
Brown
, in 1994, Summerton, South Carolina, where Pearson had brought suit, had an all-black high school and an all-white town council. White children from the area went elsewhere to school.
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This was the South, which northern liberals repeatedly berated. But Americans in the North, where de facto school segregation reflected racially separate neighborhoods, could hardly claim to be color-blind.
Brown
had nothing to say about de facto school segregation, which frequently grew more pronounced as black migrations continued after 1954. So little change occurred in Topeka that the American Civil Liberties Union reopened
Brown
in 1979, asserting that thirteen of the city's schools were highly segregated by race. The suit was not settled (in favor of the ACLU) until 1993, after fourteen years of wrangling, at which point desegregation plans still awaited implementation.
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Similar stonewalling happened elsewhere in the North: thirty-five years after
Brown
it was estimated that nearly two-thirds of minority schoolchildren in the United States attended public schools in which they exceeded 50 percent of enrollment. More than 30 percent of black children went to public schools that were at least 90 percent non-white.
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Developments such as these indicated that Supreme Court decisions, no matter how bold, by themselves could fail to work major changes in the behavior of people in their communities, at least in the short run. Indeed, much broader effort, including congressional action, was required to force compliance with the law. The massive resistance indicated further how deeply racial prejudice and institutionalized discrimination undercut the supposedly egalitarian ideals of the country. Conservatives, Eisenhower among them, readily accepted these dispiriting lessons; they had never had much faith in social engineering. A minority of Americans, however, persisted in demanding a racially more egalitarian world. Among them were many black people, who angrily resented southern defiance of
Brown
. The dissidents would not wait forever for courts and politicians to help them. They would take action themselves.

I
N THE 1950S
they acted most dramatically in Montgomery, Alabama. Briefly the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, Montgomery in the mid-twentieth century was a city of some 70,000 whites and 50,000 blacks. Like other southern cities, it enforced Jim Crow, segregating not only schools but virtually all public accommodations, barring most blacks from voting and limiting them mainly to menial work. Some 60 percent of employed black women were domestics, and nearly 50 percent of the employed men were domestics or laborers. The median annual income of whites in Montgomery was $1,732; of blacks it was $970. Roughly 90 percent of white homes had flush toilets, compared to 30 percent of black homes. Because few black people had cars, they had to use buses to get around.
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