In 1954 the US Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and several related cases. The Court ruled that in the field of public education, the old segregationist doctrine of separate and equal has no place. Separate educational faciltiies are inherently unequal. They deny the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that no state shall deny any person the equal protection of the law. Segregation is not equal protection or equal treatment or equal educational opportunity. Furthermore, segregation creates in those who are kept separated a feeling of inferiority. This is the psychological damage or harm that school segregation inflicts on Afro American children. In May 1955 the Court denied the request of the NAACP that it order immediate de-segregation. Instead, the Court ordered that school de-segregation should occur with all deliberate speed.
However if segregation is unconstitutional in the public schools, how can segregation be constitutional in restaurants, restrooms, waiting rooms, on busses, and so on? Obviously it could not.
In March 1956 more than 100 Representatives and Senators from the Southern states issued a "Southern Manifesto." The Congressmen asserted that the Brown decision of the Supreme Court was invalid, because the Court had no jurisdiction over the question of segregation. They said this was a matter reserved to the states. They rejected the decision. In essence, the leaders of the South served notice that they refused to obey the Supreme Court. Senators Albert Gore, Sr. and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee did not sign the Manifesto, nor did Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas. They were the only Southern Congressmen who did not endorse the Manifesto. Johnson aspired to be president one day, and did not wish to alienate the liberal Northern wing of the Democratic Party.
School officials in Arkansas tried to obey the Brown decision, and in the town of Little Rock they came up with a plan to desegregate the schools gradually. They would start with the high school and desegregate two grades per year, eventually working down to the elementary schools. The reasoning was that parents might find "integration" among teenagers less threatening than a process that exposed their babies to the "dangers of integration." For September 1957, nine African American children with exceptionally good grades would be permitted to attend Central High School. Their parents had applied to send the children to the school. But in the summer of 1957 Governor Orval Faubus realized that he would face a tough re-election battle. His opponents, Jim Johnson and Bruce Bennett, were staunch segregationists. Faubus would be running for an unprecedented third term. Faubus decided to manipulate the desegregation issue to win segregationist voters to his candidacy, and appear more segregationist than his opponents. The political game was who was more segregationist than whom.
What would follow would be a back and forth tug-of-war between Faubus and the courts, with the local police and State National Guard caught in the middle along with the nine black students. The nine African American students, who were 11th and 12th graders, were Minniejean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Terrance Roberts, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls (6 girls and 3 boys). L.C. Bates and Daisy Bates, of the local NAACP, were the coordinators for the African American families.
Governor Faubus declared that there was a danger that African American students would create danger by bringing weapons into the school. To protect public safety, he opposed proceeding with desegregation. Faubus ordered the Little Rock police and Arkansas National Guard to keep the African American students out of the school, and physically prevent them from entering the building.
When school opened on Sept. 3rd, eight of the AA children gathered to be taken to the school by car. The ninth student was Elizabeth Eckford. Her family did not have a telephone. She did not receive the message to meet with the other students to get a ride to school. When she arrived at the school an angry mob of hundreds of whites had gathered at the school. People yelled racial epithets at her and yelled "lynch her, lynch her." A white woman, Grace Lorch, escorted Elizabeth out of the crowd and to a car. Mrs. Lorch’s husband was an instructor at a local college.
African American parents and the local NAACP filed a petition in federal court. And President Eisenhower invited Governor Faubus to meet with him on Sept. 14th.
On Sept. 20 the federal district court ordered Faubus to remove his armed forces from around the school, and stop interfering with desegregation. Faubus obeyed the letter of the order. He removed the National Guard. But this left only a handful of policemen with an angry white mob of hundreds. On Monday, Sept. 23rd the African American students again tried to attend school. When the African American students were snuck into the school by a side door, the mob rioted. The police had to resort to a diversionary tactic, by bringing a decoy bus to the front of the school, in order to sneak the AA children safely out of the school through a side door.
This incident was shown on national television. Newspapers reported around the world. A year after Soviet tanks had invaded Hungary, and the US had condemned Soviet aggression, the world saw white mobs rioting because nine innocent children tried to attend a school in the United States. It was difficult for the US to ask countries in Africa and Asia to support the US in its Cold War rivalry against the Soviet Union and China when white Americans discriminated against people of color in the US. It was difficult for the US to condemn other countries for their human rights abuses, or communism, when the US was guilty of its own human rights abuses, and racism. How does the pot call the kettle black without looking like a hypocrite? Segregation hurt American foreign policy in the Cold War.
President Eisenhower felt that Faubus had betrayed him. As a general from World war II who had shed blood to protect America, he had little patience with politicians who would defy the supreme Constitutional authority of the federal government over state and local government. Eisenhower was angered and embarrassed by what happened in Little Rock. Therefore, as president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, on Sept. 24th he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent more than 1,000 members of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. That night he went on national television to explain his actions. He said that "mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts," and said in essence that we must obey the law regardless of our personal feelings and even if we do not agree with the law. On Sept. 25th, with bayonets drawn, the soldiers protected the nine African American students as they entered Central High School.
Eisenhower had not WANTED to intervene. It was not what he preferred. Indeed he condemned the "extremists on both sides." He felt the Brown decision had been a mistake. He felt it was a mistake for African Americans to "push too hard" and try to go "too far, too fast," to force others to accept them. But he felt that he could not permit mob rule to defy the courts. He felt that Faubus had left him no choice but to intervene. And he felt that the prestige of the presidency and the Federal Government were "on the line." The troops remained for a year. Faubus was triumphantly re-elected to a third term in July 1958. Faubus could pose as the great champion of segregation, who had been overwhelmed by superior federal power. In defeat, he was victorious.
In Sept. 1958 Governor Faubus closed the public high schools in Little Rock to obstruct desegregation, and segregationists set up a Private School Corporation. Half the white high school students in Little Rock, in the 1959-59 school year, enrolled in private schools. Another third went to school outside the city. Some 643 white students did not attend ANY school. Most black high school students did not attend school either. Faubus and the segregationists preferred no school to desegregated public schools.
In 1959 the Supreme Court ruled that closing the Little Rock public schools was an unconstitutional evasive scheme designed to circumvent desegregation. It ordered the schools re-opened. In August 1959 the Little Rock public schools re-opened on a de-segregated basis. In Virginia, Governor Harry Byrd closed the schools in Prince Edward County rather than de-segregate. In 1964, ten years after the Brown decision, most schools in the South remained segregated-Supreme Court or no Supreme Court.
But even desegregation could not guarantee that once black children and white children sat in the same classroom that they would be treated with dignity or respect by their teachers or classmates. In some schools, black children were almost crucified emotionally and psychologically by the abuse that they received. One may debate whether the price that was paid to desegregate the public schools was worth it.
In 1957 Martin Luther King and other African American clergymen sought to institutionalize the Montgomery Improvement Association as a regional group. They formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with MLK as president.
THE SIT-IN MOVEMENT (1960)
In February 1960 four Afro-American students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College began a nonviolent sit-in at the Woolworth’s dept. store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Woolworths stores throughout the South were segregated. African Americans could not be served at the lunch counter. They could buy food, but could not sit in a chair at the counter and eat it. Sitting and eating was "for whites only." The students sat quietly and waited to be served, but declined to leave. The next day they repeated the same form of nonviolent protest. But it "caught on," and four became eight and eight became twenty and twenty became a hundred, day after day. College students, both black and white, all over the South, jumped on the bandwagon. In Nashville, Tennessee, student such as Diane Nash, at Fisk, led the sit-in movement. Ministers such as Jim Lawson and C.T. Vivian supported the students. The police would come to arrest the sitters. But when they arrested one group, a second wave would take their place. And then a third…and a fourth. The sit-in movement, inspired by the spontaneous action of college students, and without adult leadership, was born. In time white "toughs" and "hoodlums" attacked the sitters, beating them or throwing food on them or spitting on them. In some instances the stores closed to avoid further violence. In the North, many liberal whites picketed Woolworths and other national chain stores in sympathy with the cause of African Americans in the South.
In 1960 there were literally hundreds of sit-ins in cities and towns all over the South. The adverse publicity embarrassed the stores, and during 1960 in many of the towns of the upper South (Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina) desegregated their lunch counters and stores. The Deep South (South Carolina, GA, FL, MS, AL, LA) resisted. For example, there was a protracted struggle in St. Augustine, Florida and in Albany, GA. The students formed their own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, pronounced SNICK. Robert Moses became an early leader of SNCC. SNCC began as a biracial organization, with black and white college students together.
THE FREEDOM RIDES
In December 1960 the Supreme court issued a ruling in the case of Boynton v. Virginia. It expanded on the earlier, ignored, Morgan decision. In Boynton, the Court said that not only was segregation unconstitutional on interstate carriers, but it was also unconstitutional in terminal facilities involved in interstate commerce. Recall that Congress and the Federal government have jurisdiction over interstate commerce. Members of the Congress Of Racial Equality decided to test whether the Southern states were complying with the ruling. Of course they knew that the South was NOT complying, and they wanted to dramatize this failure and exert pressure on public opinion and on the Federal Government to enforce the ruling.
A biracial group of thirteen whites and blacks, including John Lewis, William Barbee, Jim Zwerg and James Peck boarded a Greyhound bus on May 4th. It was supposed to travel through Virginia and the Carolinas and into the Deep South to New Orlans, Louisiana. Blacks sat in the front. In those days, busses and trains had to practice segregation once they left Washington, DC and proceeded South. The Freedom riders also used the "wrong" restrooms and waited in the wrong waiting rooms.
On Mother’s day, May 14, 1961, in Anniston, Alabama one of the two buses was stoned by an angry mob of 200 whites. They slashed the tires, and six miles outside of town the bus had to stop to fix the tires. Members of the white mob were in pursuit, and hurled a firebomb through the rear door. Then, as the bus caught fire, the mob tried to block the exits. A state investigator "brandished" his revolver and the mob backed away. The state police carried the victims to the hospital. Newspapers carried the shocking photograph of the bus in flames. Segregationists harassed the victims at the hospital, and the hospital wanted the injured Freedom Riders to leave (Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 423). Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth organized a caravan of eight cars of African American churchmen, armed with guns, to go to Anniston to get the Freedom Riders from the hospital.
The second bus was a Trailways bus. When it pulled into Birmingham, AL, Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor had arranged for the police NOT to be present at the bus terminal for 15 minutes. This was to give the KKK a chance to attack the Freedom Riders. A mob of whites attacked and beat the Freedom Riders, and William Barbee was paralyzed. Jim Peck, a white Freedom Rider, was beat and hospitalized.
The attack on Freedom Riders was international news, and embarrassed President Kennedy, who was at that time preparing for a summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at Vienna. After the Mother’s Day attacks Diane Nash and a group of eight African American and two Euro-American students went to Birmingham to began a second Freedom Ride. Diane Nash felt that the movement could not give in to white supremacist violence. After all, the Freedom Riders were acting in accord with the Boynton decision of the Supreme Court. It was segregationist white Southerners and officials who were disobeying the Supreme Court.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy tried to get Governor John Patterson to protect the Freedom Riders. Patterson was not eager to do so, but promised to try. Robert Kennedy placed pressure on the bus companies as well, as drivers did not want to drive the busses with the 21 new Freedom Riders.
In Montgomery Alabama another mob materialized. A white Freedom Rider, Jim Zerg, from Madison, Wisconsin, came off the bus first. The mob of Southern whites was transfixed by him for half a minute, and the attack on Jim Zwerg gave Freddy Leonard and Bernard Lafayette and the black activists a chance to run for their lives as the mob yelled "Kill the niggers." John Siegenthaler, an aide to Attorney General Kennedy, was knocked unconscious. The mob set cars on fire. The police arrived to arrest the Freedom Riders, not their attackers.
The Kennedy’s were furious that Patterson had permitted the violence in Montgomery. In response, president Kennedy sent 600 federal marshals to nearby Maxwell Air Force base. Martin Luther King flew into Montgomery to express solidarity with the Freedom Riders. When King met a mass meeting at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church that night, a mob of hundreds of whites surrounded it and attempted to invade the church. The Afro-Americans were trapped inside the church. Amazingly, King called Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the telephone. Federal marshals clashed with the mob, which threw bottles and set cars on fire. The marshals fired tear gas. Robert Kennedy talked to Governor Patterson and warned him that the Federal Government would intervene. Governor Patterson declared martial law, and sent in the Alabama State Police and Alabama National Guard to disperse the mob.
King was on probation for a sit-in in Atlanta, and so could not personally participate in the Freedom Rides. The Ride continued from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi. The busses had police protection. When the busses stopped in Jackson, the Freedom riders were escorted to JAIL for violating Mississippi’s laws on segregation. Robert Kennedy had made a deal with Mississippi senator James Eastland. Mississippi would protect the Freedom Riders. There would be no mob violence. But the Freedom riders would be arrested! On May 25th the Freedom Riders were sentenced to sixty days in the state penitentiary (Parchman). Kennedy was trying to protect the lives of the Riders and deter violence. But he sacrificed principle and what was morally right in doing so. Perhaps principle and morality were luxuries he felt he could not afford at that moment. Or perhaps it was the politics of expediency and cowardice and timidity. Sadly, opinion polls in 1961 showed that more than sixty percent of those surveyed disapproved of the Freedom rides because they felt the Rides caused too much trouble. Many Americans were more concerned about peace, and calm and ORDER than what was right. The Freedom Rides were INCONVENIENT.
THE ICC ORDER
Nevertheless, throughout the summer, 300 Freedom Riders defied Southern law and custom to dramatize the fact that the South was failing to obey the Supreme Court. Martin Luther King suggested that maybe the Interstate Commerce Commission should issue a regulation (Branch, Parting Waters, p. 477).. On May 29 Attorney General Kennedy’s announced that he would petition a reluctant Interstate Commerce Commission to issue a regulation on interstate travel. The ruling required all interstate carriers to post signs that seating is without regard to race or color. The ruling was issued in September, and would go into effect in November. If a town did not obey the ruling, it would lose its bus or train route. The bus or train could not stop at that town. In this way, the PRICE for failure to comply would be to penalize an entire town by taking away its service. This was a consequence that the opponents of desegregation understood, and were not willing to pay. And an ICC regulation is a federal policy that the president is responsible to enforce. In the realm of interstate bus and train service, the walls of segregation began to come down as a consequence of the ICC order (but som eplaces still resisted). But the ICC had only acted because the Attorney General requested it to do so, and he had responded to the pressure from the Freedom Rides. Again, it took initiative and direct action by the civil rights movement to bring about change.
JAMES MEREDITH AND "OLE MISS" (Branch, Chapter 17)
James Meredith was an African American, and an Air Force veteran. He had nine years of military service. He sought to attend the all-white University of Mississippi. Mississippi rejected the application, and Meredith sued. In 1962 the federal district court ordered that he be admitted. The Mississippi state legislature then enacted legislation making Governor Ross Barnett the emergency registrar for the University of Mississippi (Branch, p. 647). When Meredith tried to register, Ross Barnett appeared and refused to permit him to do so. Thereafter he Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals hauled the actual Ole Miss registrar and university trustees into a hearing and threatened them with contempt. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Justice Dept. now found themselves like firemen trying to prevent a fire or stamp one out. On Sept. 25, 1962 US Marshal James McShane and John Doar picked up Meredith. When they arrived to register James Meredith, a jeering crowd of two thousand had gathered outside the building. When they arrived at the room where the registration was supposed to occur, camera crews were present. Governor Ross Barnett stepped forward and "interposed" Mississippi’s sovereignty, between Meredith and the university officials (Branch, p. 648). He proclaimed that he did "hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi." The federal officials retreated.
A furious Robert Kennedy called Governor Barnett to warn him that the federal government would undertake to register Meredith, and that Barnett was on notice that it was going to happen. Later that night three judges of the Fifth Circuit Court signed an order commanding Barnett to appear before them in New Orleans for a hearing on whether the governor should be held in contempt of court for violating a federal court order. Robert Kennedy and Governor Barnett now tried to fashion a staged capitulation. Barnett wanted all of the federal marshals to pull their guns so that when Mississippi backed down it would look as if it had been overwhelmed by superior force. Robert Kennedy did not want to bruise the sensibilities of white Southerners by making it appear as if the federal marshals were throwing their weight around. The federal court tried Barnett in absentia and found him guilty of contempt (Branch, p. 653), and threatened both Barnett and lieutenant governor Paul Johnson with indefinite prison terms.
The Justice Dept. decided to take James Meredith to the Oxford campus of Ole Miss. It put together a rag tag collection of marshals improvised from 500 prison guards, Border Patrol agents and deputy marshals. The Kennedy White House hoped that Barnett would guarantee to maintain order at Oxford, where thousands were gathering for a football game. In the end, Barnett backed out of making such a commitment (Branch, p. 659). Therefore on Sept. 29th President Kennedy signed a proclamation authorizing the use of federal marshals. Some 300 federal marshals were deployed at the Lyceum (the Administration Building), and Meredith was taken to a dormitory while the football game was underway. The plan was to register him the next day. Barnett announced that Meredith had been brought onto the campus and the state’s defenders had been "overpowered" at Oxford. A crowd estimated at 1,000 people, many with guns, gathered at the Lyceum. Students and others slashed tires and threw bottles, bricks and Molotov cocktails. The Mississippi State Troopers had no desire to be caught in the middle between the federal marshals and the mob that was beginning to riot. The state troopers withdrew at 7:25. The marshals responded with tear gas. The mob grew to two thousand, and many of these people were not students but Mississippians who converged on Oxford. In time shotguns blasts were heard. In the melee that ensued, two journalists were killed. Twenty eight marshals were shot (Branch, p. 668). People tried to storm Baxter Hall to "get" James Meredith. President Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard, and the United States Army was dispatched from Memphis, Tennessee by air. However it took the Army four hours to arrive. The great irony of Oxford is that the US military was slow to "wind up," but once "wound up" it proved all but impossible to stop. The Air Force and the Marines sent troops, and after the riot was over troops were still streaming into Oxford. In all, 23,000 soldiers arrived—three times the population of Oxford. Had they been present BEFORE the riot, they might have PREVENTED it. But the Kennedy administration had underestimated its opponent. On the other hand, the violence that took place could serve to justify what it had been necessary to send any troops at all.
James Meredith was registered the next day. Marshal Shane’s car was riddled with bullets and the glass broken, and James Meredith had to be covered in blankets so that he would not be cut by the shards of glass. The Kennedy administration then sought not to inflame white Mississippi further. African Americans were pulled out of the Mississippi National Guard units at Oxford. And the Justice Dept. contrived to get the federal court NOT to collect the contempt fines levied against Barnett. Troops remained at Oxford for almost a year (the last 500 departed in June 1963). Meredith received his degree. Most of the time he was shunned and given the "silent treatment." But on at least one occasion, as he sat alone at a table in a cafeteria, a group of six or seven white students came over and sat with him to let him know that they did not condone bigotry and prejudice.
The episode at Ole Miss confirmed what the Kennedy’s already knew. Taking risks for "integration" was politically expensive. It would cost the administration support among white voters in the South. Indeed, taking risks for "integration" was political suicide. But James Meredith had a federal court order. And it is the job of any president of the United States to enforce the decisions of the courts. Enforcement of the law is a president’s job. The dilemma for Kennedy was how to enforce laws and court decisions and orders that the segregationist South hated, while suffering as little political damage as possible. It was a like walking a tightrope. The civil rights movement was frustrated because it seemed that the Kennedy’s had to be pushed and shoved to take action, and they only did what they could NOT AVOID doing. Still, for all the footdragging, King saw the Kennedy’s as potential allies who could be pushed and prodded to take action. And we always have to ask, would Richard Nixon have done as much (if he had won the presidential election in 1960)? The Kennedy’s were not "out in front" leading the charge. They were in a "no win" situation. Change is not easy. It is not painless. And it almost always entails some cost or price.
EXECUTIVE ORDER AGAINST DISCRIMINATION IN PUBLIC HOUSING
In the 1960 presidential campaign, candidate John Kennedy had said that there was an entire area of racial discrimination that could be ended with the stroke of a pen. It was discrimination in federally funded public housing. But for 20 months Kennedy took no action. He did not want to do anything that would alienate white voters BEFORE the Congressional elections of November 1962. Kennedy waited until after the elections were safely over, and then waited until Congress recessed for the Thanksgiving holiday. Then, quietly, he issued an executive order forbidding discrimination in any NEW public housing, constructed with FEDERAL MONEY, from that point FORWARD. The timid executive order did not cover public housing that had already been constructed prior to that date, or public housing that might be constructed in the FUTURE with PRIVATE funds (Branch, p. 679). Kennedy also sandwiched the announcement between announcements about Soviet bombers and a border war between India and China. The administration did its best to quietly sneak the executive order past the Congress and the public. The administration acted, but tried to hide what it was doing so as not to "rock the boat" or "ruffle any segregationist feathers." It was more of the pragmatic politics of minimalism and caution and expediency, designed to minimize political damage for the re-election campaign of 1964.