Another front in the Cold War concerned race relations. How could African and Asian leaders be persuaded to reject communism and follow the example of the United States when American blacks were treated so poorly? American diplomats winced when the finance minister of Ghana was refused a meal at the Howard Johnson’s, a chain restaurant, in Dover, Delaware. “Colored people are not allowed to eat in here,” the manager explained to the African leader. Vice President Nixon, no liberal on racial matters but an ardent enemy of communism, declared, “In the world-wide struggle in which we are engaged, racial prejudice is a gun we point at ourselves.”
But racial confrontations remained in the news. During and after World War II, like a glacier, slowly but with massive force, a demand for change had developed in the South. Its roots lay in southern industrialization, in the shift from small sharecropping holdings to large commercial farms, in the vast wartime expenditures of the federal government on aircraft factories and army bases in the region; in the impact of the GI Bill on southern colleges and universities, and in the gradual development of a southern black middle class.
Black soldiers who had served abroad demanded that they be treated with respect when they returned home. In 1947 Jackie Robinson, a black officer who had been court-martialed—and acquitted—for refusing to move to the back of a segregated military bus during World War II, was ready to integrate major league baseball. When his team—the Brooklyn Dodgers—checked into the Ben Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia, he was refused a room. A week later the Dodgers went to Pittsburgh. When he took his position at second base, the Pirates refused to come onto the field. Only under threat of forfeiting the game would they play against Robinson.
In this photo opportunity, Phillies manager Ben Chapman refused to shake Jackie Robinson's hand. Instead, he leaned toward Robinson and said quietly, "Jackie, you know, you're a good ballplayer, but you're still a nigger to me.” Robinson replied by leading the Dodgers to the pennant and winning Rookie of the Year honors.
Ordinary blacks, too, demanded fairer treatment. More insisted on their right to vote—and many got it. In 1940 only 2 percent of African Americans in the south were registered to vote; by 1947, that had increased to 12 percent. But white resistance remained formidable. In 1946 Eugene Talmadge, behind in the polls, won his race for governor by promising that if he were elected “no Negro will vote in Georgia for four years.” One black man who succeeded in registering was gunned down in front of his house.
The NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) decided that the time had come to challenge segregation in the courts. Thurgood Marshall, the organization’s chief staff lawyer, went from state to state filing legal challenges to the “separate but equal” principle laid down in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 (see Chapter 20.) In 1938 the Supreme Court had ordered the University of Missouri law school to admit a black student because no law school for blacks existed in the state. This decision gradually forced some southern states to admit blacks to advanced programs. “You can’t build a cyclotron
Angry jeers from whites rain down on Elizabeth Eckford, one of the first black students to arrive for registration at Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. State troops turned black students away from the school until President Eisenhower overruled the state decision and called in the National Guard to enforce integration.
For one student,” the president of the University of Oklahoma confessed when the Court, in 1948, ordered Oklahoma to provide equal facilities. Two years later, when Texas actually attempted to create a separate law school for a single black applicant, the Court ruled that truly equal education could not be provided under such circumstances.
In 1953 President Eisenhower appointed California’s Governor Earl Warren chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. Convinced that the Court must take the offensive in the cause of civil rights, Warren succeeded in welding his associates into a unit on this question. In 1954 an NAACP-sponsored case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, came up for decision. Marshall submitted a mass of sociological evidence to show that the mere fact of segregation made equal education impossible and did serious psychological damage to both black and white children. Speaking for a unanimous Court, Warren reversed the Plessy decision. “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” he declared. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The next year the Court ordered the states to end segregation “with all deliberate speed.”
Flouting the Court’s decision, few districts in the southern and border states integrated their schools. As late as September 1956, barely 700 of the South’s
10,000 school districts had been desegregated.
White citizens’ councils dedicated to all-out opposition sprang up throughout the South. When the school board of Clinton, Tennessee, integrated the local high school in September 1956, a mob rioted in protest, shouting “Kill the niggers!” and destroying the property of blacks. The school was kept open with the help of the National Guard until segregationists blew up the building with dynamite. In Virginia the governor announced a plan for “massive resistance” to integration that denied state aid to local school systems that wished to desegregate. When the University of Alabama admitted a single black woman in 1956, riots broke out. University officials forced the student to withdraw temporarily and then expelled her when she complained more forcefully than they deemed proper.
President Eisenhower thought equality for blacks could not be obtained by government edict. He said that the Court’s ruling must be obeyed, but he did little to discourage southern resistance to desegregation. “I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the South at least fifteen years,” he remarked to one of his advisers. “The fellow who tries to tell me you can do these things by force is just plain nuts.”
However, in 1957 events compelled him to act. When the school board of Little Rock, Arkansas, opened Central High School to a handful of black students, the governor of the state, Orval M. Faubus, called out the National Guard to prevent them from entering the school. Unruly crowds taunted the students and their parents. Eisenhower could not ignore the direct flouting of federal authority. After the mayor of Little Rock sent him a telegram saying, in part, “situation is out of control and police cannot disperse the mob,” Eisenhower dispatched 1,000 paratroopers to Little Rock and summoned 10,000 National Guardsmen to federal duty, thus removing them from Faubus’s control. The black students then began to attend class. A token force of soldiers was stationed at Central High for the entire school year to protect them.
•••-[Read the Document Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas at Www. myhistorylab. com
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