Making Our Democracy Work (10 page)

Throughout the South these and other integration opponents took punitive actions against those attempting integration. They threatened integration’s supporters with loss of jobs or credit. Southern voting registrars increased their efforts to keep black citizens from the polls. The worst forms of racial violence increased. In early 1955, in Mississippi, after several years of relative racial peace, three lynchings took
place. These included the lynching of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy from Chicago who, reportedly, had spoken too informally to a white woman. An all-white jury acquitted those charged with his murder just as all-white juries had recently acquitted thirteen out of fourteen defendants in cases involving serious civil rights violations.
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Congress did not help. The Senate refused to enact key provisions of President Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Bill, including permission for the attorney general to sue to prevent interference with the constitutional rights of any American. The Senate insisted on jury trials, meaning likely acquittals given local prejudice and exclusion of black citizens from juries. And Congress rejected legislation that would give federal financial aid to local school systems to prevent courts from using that law to advance integration, say by forbidding school districts that received aid from maintaining segregated schools. At the same time, the House passed a bill that stripped civil rights jurisdiction from the federal courts, failing to obtain full consideration in the Senate by only one vote.
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Yet there were favorable signs. The District of Columbia, a defendant in the
Brown
case, began to integrate its schools. The other four cities that were defendants in
Brown
prepared to comply. In addition, school officials in a handful of other cities—such as Houston, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; Greensboro, North Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Arlington, Virginia—issued statements saying that they too would seek to comply, regardless of how they felt about the merits of
Brown
. In Alabama that same year, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a public bus. The Montgomery bus boycott had begun. In Little Rock, the school board, pledging to carry out the law, advanced a plan to begin to integrate the public schools.
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T
HE EVENTS THAT
unfolded in Little Rock in 1957 and 1958 highlight differences between the president’s role and that of the Court. In 1954, Little Rock was a segregated city with a segregated school system. Yet
the city had a reputation for racial moderation, and in 1952 the school board had considered the possibility of racial integration. In late May 1954, just after
Brown
, the board met, declared that it disagreed with
Brown
, and refused to integrate immediately. But it also recognized its own “responsibility to comply with Federal Constitutional Requirements,” and promised to comply after the Supreme Court specified what method to follow. Arkansas filed a brief in
Brown II
, informing the Court that its own remedial policy recognized the Supreme Court’s decision and would implement it properly.
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In May 1955, just before the Supreme Court issued
Brown II
, the Little Rock School Board announced an integration plan. Its “Phase Program” would begin two years later in September 1957. It would admit a handful of screened black students to Central High School, with a junior high school phase beginning in 1960 and an elementary school phase starting in 1963. A transfer option would assure all white students that they need not attend any high school that was predominantly black.
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The NAACP thought the Little Rock Phase Program inadequate and brought a lawsuit, but the federal district court upheld the plan. And in April 1957, the Eighth Circuit rejected the NAACP appeal. However, the NAACP lawsuit was not brought entirely in vain: Even though the district court did not order a speedier integration of Little Rock’s schools, it did retain jurisdiction over the case to ensure the school board would follow the integration plan that the board had proposed. Accordingly, during the summer of 1957 the school board picked nine black students for transfer to Central High the coming September. These were the “Little Rock Nine,” all of whom had excellent academic records, were intellectually ambitious, and lived near Central High.
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During that same summer, however, opposing political forces began to gather. Arkansas voters had approved an amendment to the state constitution requiring the state to oppose “in every constitutional manner the un-constitutional decisions of … the United States Supreme Court.” The legislature enacted a statute saying that no child need attend a racially mixed school (implicitly threatening to close the public schools). Members of Citizens’ Council chapters attended school board meetings where they repeated their claims that the law
did not require integration, that the governor could “interpose” the state between the Court and
Brown
’s implementation, and that, no matter what, they would “shed blood if necessary” to stop integration. They gathered support by pointing out that only Central High would be integrated and not Hall High, a school in a higher-income neighborhood.
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The Citizens’ Council also contacted Arkansas’s governor, Orval Faubus, an economic liberal elected as a racially moderate alternative to the segregationists’ candidate, Jim Johnson. The council nonetheless tried to convince him to resist integration. They argued that segregation was politically popular, that he was immune from federal court orders, that the board’s alternative would bring violence to Little Rock, and that he must stop integration in order to “preserve tranquility.” Under this kind of pressure, Faubus began to change his views.
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Central High was to open on Tuesday, September 3, 1957, with the nine black students in attendance. As the day approached, political pressure to keep the school segregated increased. In mid-August, Georgia’s governor spoke in Arkansas and poured fuel on the flames. Georgia’s schools had not yet been forced to integrate. Why, he asked, did Arkansas families have to accept integration when Georgia’s families did not? That same night someone threw a stone through the window of the home of the local NAACP president, Daisy Bates. “Stone this time,” a note read, “dynamite next.”
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Governor Faubus sought a state court order to stop Central High’s integration. On August 29 that court issued an order complying with the governor’s request. The school board immediately asked the federal court to set aside the state court order. The federal court did so the next day, reasoning that the state court injunction would “paralyze the decree of this court entered under Federal law, which is supreme under the provisions of Article 6 of the Constitution of the United States.”
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On the evening of Monday, September 2, the day before school would begin, Governor Faubus made a televised address to the state. He said he had heard armed caravans were approaching Little Rock, and moreover he, like much of the public, doubted the lawfulness of “forcing integration” on “the people” against their will. For these reasons, at least for “the time being,” the schools “must be operated on the
same basis as they have before.” He announced that he had sent National Guard units to Central High. The audience understood that the guard would prevent integration.
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That same night the school board held an emergency meeting. The board asked the black students not to go to Central High until the issue was legally resolved. On Tuesday, September 3, the nine students stayed home, and Central High opened with an all-white student body. Yet that same day the school board returned to federal court to ask for guidance. The judge, finding no evidence of any potential disorder, said that integration should proceed “forthwith.”
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The board again told the students not to try to attend the school. On Wednesday morning several of the students nevertheless coordinated an attempt to enter Central High, but were turned away by the National Guard. No one, however, could coordinate the entry effort with Elizabeth Eckford, who had no phone, so she arrived at Central High alone.
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A large hostile crowd had gathered at the school. Some in the crowd seemingly mistook a black photographer for a student and beat him severely. When Elizabeth Eckford arrived, the National Guard stopped her from entering the school. As she was leaving, a journalist photographed her near a white woman whose face was distorted with rage. The picture quickly became famous around the world.
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On Thursday the federal court asked the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate whether the governor had told the National Guard to prevent enforcement of the court’s integration order. The court scheduled a hearing for September 20. The governor agreed to appear. As the world watched, integration at Central High was on hold.
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Then, at the request of Brooks Hays, Little Rock’s respected member of Congress, President Eisenhower and Governor Faubus agreed to a meeting. On Saturday morning, September 14, Faubus went to Eisenhower’s “summer White House” in Newport, Rhode Island, where they first met privately. Eisenhower, Faubus recounted, dressed him down, telling him “like a general tells a lieutenant” that no one would benefit from “a trial of strength between the President and a Governor,” and instructing him to have the National Guard protect the black students, not bar their entry into the school.
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Although Governor Faubus gave the president the impression that he would permit integration, he did not take that position in front of the press, acting noncommittal instead. Faubus waited for Friday’s federal court hearing, where he reported to the judge that he had acted to prevent violence. But when the judge ordered him to stop barring students from entering the school, the governor, along with his lawyers, walked out of the courtroom. Later that day the governor announced that he would withdraw the guard from the school.
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On Monday morning, September 23, the Little Rock Nine arrived at Central High. The governor’s hostility and the attendant publicity, however, had done their work, and a mob of fifteen hundred waited outside. Some broke through police barricades. Eight of the nine black students managed to slip past the mob and enter the school through a side door. But the chaos was such that by noon police and school officials agreed that the students should go home. The Little Rock mayor blamed the governor, suspecting that his aides and his friends had been present in the crowd urging on the mob. The mayor then sent a telegram to President Eisenhower appealing for help.
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A
T THIS POINT
, Eisenhower, like Andrew Jackson at the time of the Cherokees, had to consider whether to send federal troops into a state to enforce a federal court order. Eisenhower debated the merits of the decision. What would happen to integration plans if the troops met physical resistance and ended up killing, say, women supporting segregation? Suppose other southern cities copied Little Rock? Would sending troops require some form of military occupation, as in the days of Reconstruction?

Moreover, what would happen to the public schools? Jimmy Byrnes, the former governor of South Carolina, a trusted friend of presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and a former Supreme Court justice, had earlier warned Eisenhower that
Brown
would lead the South to abolish those schools. Would precipitating federal action end up depriving both blacks and poor whites of any public education at all?
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Furthermore, Eisenhower thought that public education was a local
matter for which the states must remain primarily responsible. He had to consider whether the presence of federal troops would play into the hands of segregationists gathered under the popular banner of “state sovereignty” and “no federal interference.” An aide wrote privately that the president “is loath to use troops—thinks movement might spread—violence would come.”
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Yet Eisenhower found the countervailing considerations more compelling. First, the federal court’s orders, including an order prohibiting state interference with a local school board’s integration plan, made clear that the key issue was whether federal law or state law was supreme. The nation had fought a civil war over the question. By the 1950s the need to maintain federal supremacy was well accepted in both North and South, even among those who hesitated to embrace racial integration.
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Second, recent history suggested that without enforcement the court’s order would become a dead letter. Governor Allan Shivers of Texas had recently faced a similar order, and his refusal to help with enforcement resulted in no integration.
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Finally, there is much indicating that Eisenhower favored racial integration on principle, although historians debate the strength of his commitment. Eisenhower had grown up in a segregated society, but he had witnessed the bravery of World War II’s black battalions in action at the Battle of the Bulge. (Indeed, some said, perhaps with only slight overstatement, that the black 332nd Fighter Group had never lost a bomber.) Eisenhower also had begun to understand the injustice of segregation and the need to bring it to a speedy end. In addition, he liked to lead by example. He had already desegregated military bases throughout the South, he had desegregated much federal contracting, and he had desegregated both schools and public accommodations in the District of Columbia.
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