Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington

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      Figure 5. President Eisenhower meets with E. Frederic Morrow in the White House, October 4, 1956. National Park Service photo, 72-1908, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

      A distraught E. Frederic Morrow wrote in his diary that though “the bombings and the racial strife in the country continues…. There does not seem to be leadership forthcoming from anywhere.” When juxtaposed to the presidential proclamations against Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe, he observed, “Hungarians seem to be getting a better break in their efforts to find freedom” than black citizens of America. Roy Wilkins believed that “the ‘soft’ and ‘slow’ policy of the President” bore “some blame for the tensions and ugliness now breaking out all over,” and Martin Luther King, Jr., feared that Eisenhower’s inability “to render positive leadership in this area … will serve to push the moderates more and more in the background.” Soon after King became head of the newly created Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization joined with Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and other civil rights leaders in announcing a large-scale demonstration in Washington, D.C. A primary intent of the 1957 “Prayer Pilgrimage,” scheduled on the third anniversary of Brown, was to condemn Eisenhower’s silence on racial violence. Speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King denounced the president as “all too silent and apathetic.”¹⁶

      Much to the chagrin of black Republicans, on the few occasions when Eisenhower mentioned civil rights, he emphasized gradualism. In a letter to Roy Wilkins, he repeated his standard response when addressing the issue, arguing that “laws on the statute book are not enough … patience and forbearance and wisdom are required of all of us if we are to solve effectively the perplexing problems of this trying period of adjustment.” Such language was seen as antiquated not only by civil rights leaders, but by black Republicans as well. Throughout his time in the White House, E. Frederic Morrow constantly reminded members of the administration that most blacks “are against any talk of moderation and the use of the term ‘gradualism’ is fatal when addressing any Negro audience.” George W. Lee of Memphis told Young Republicans in Atlanta, “we would have been in a devil of a fix if gradualism had been employed” during Reconstruction, when Republicans used “rapid right now action” to push through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Jackie Robinson, who would become the best-known black Republican of the 1960s, asked the president, to “whom you are referring when you say we must be patient,” reminding him that African Americans “have patiently waited all these years for the rights supposedly guaranteed us under our Constitution.”¹⁷

      After “much sparring behind the scenes” and “several conferences” with Sherman Adams, Morrow convinced the president to speak before the Negro Publishers Association’s annual meeting in May 1958. Recognizing Eisenhower’s unpopular rhetoric, Morrow prepared a “fact sheet” on the terms and phrases to avoid when speaking to black audiences. During the limousine ride with the president to the event, he again emphasized black discomfort with Eisenhower’s standard responses. After receiving loud cheers from a crowd of nearly four hundred leading black newspaper publishers, editors, and journalists, many of whom were sympathetic to the GOP, Eisenhower began his speech by describing a variety of domestic and international issues confronting the nation. As he transitioned to the topic of civil rights, he set aside his prepared remarks to speak extemporaneously, and told the audience that “you people” need to have “patience and forbearance,” as “there are no revolutionary cures” to combat discrimination. Upon hearing the president repeat this string of objectionable phrases, Morrow observed, “the audience reacted as if a time bomb had exploded. Their contorted and pained faces expressed their disbelief and disdain. Sitting on the platform next to the President, I could feel life draining from me.”¹⁸

      The reaction of black Republicans to the speech was overwhelmingly negative. The chairman of the meeting, William O. Walker, whose Cleveland Call and Post had consistently been one of the most loyal Republican newspapers in the country, declined to accompany Eisenhower out of the room, complaining that this was “the kind of advice we have been getting” since the Brown decision. The Iowa Bystander, another solidly Republican paper, editorialized that the president had pulled “the rug from under law abiding citizens … and has encouraged the rabble to push harder against the very thing he is pledged to uphold—law and order.” Jackie Robinson, who was in attendance, wrote Eisenhower that he “felt like standing up and saying ‘Oh no! Not again,’” and reminded him that “we have been the most patient of all people.” The president’s words, “unwittingly crush the spirit of freedom in Negroes by constantly urging forbearance and give hope to those … who would take from us even those freedoms we now enjoy.”¹⁹

      The fall 1957 desegregation crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, further exposed the inadequacies of Eisenhower’s gradualist approach to race relations. As his former speechwriter, Emmet John Hughes, later wrote, Eisenhower’s “limp direction” in the field of civil rights “served almost as a pathetic and inviting prologue to Little Rock.” Prior to the crisis, the president’s rhetoric regarding school desegregation suggested to many southern whites that there was little he would do to actively enforce desegregation. In April 1956, he remarked, “civil rights extremists never stop to consider that although you can send in troops, troops can’t make anyone operate schools,” and as late as July 1957 claimed, “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops … to enforce the orders of a federal court.” As Little Rock officials prepared to implement the court-ordered desegregation of Central High in September, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state National Guard to block the nine enrolled black students from entering the school. Seeking a quiet solution, Eisenhower publicly stated, “you cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws,” and expressed his hope that the people of Little Rock would peacefully comply with the court order. He invited Faubus to join him in Newport, Rhode Island, and convinced the governor to call off the National Guard. Many of Little Rock’s white citizens, however, were not prepared to have their children attend an integrated school, and the black students faced a rabid mob as they approached Central High. Police and law enforcement personnel tepidly intervened only after the confrontation descended into violent chaos.²⁰

      As photographs of defenseless black children accosted by angry crowds circulated throughout the country, African Americans blamed Eisenhower for not denouncing violence and enforcing the court order. Roy Wilkins claimed that the president “has been absolutely and thoroughly disappointing and disillusioning” in his handling of the crisis. Helen Edmonds, who had endorsed Eisenhower at the national convention just one year earlier, reported to Val Washington that even African Americans who “formerly manifested a love for the President, are saying that they are no longer enchanted and that the seeming indecision on the Arkansas situation was the breaking point.” The crisis galvanized the nation, and threatened America’s self-portrayal as an international beacon of freedom, giving the president little choice but to act. On September 24, weeks after the crisis began, Eisenhower finally addressed the nation in a televised speech. Surrounded by portraits that strategically included both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, the president sympathized with white southerners, but claimed that even if the Supreme Court was wrong in Brown, “Our personal opinions about the decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement; the responsibility and authority of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution are very clear.” He then federalized Arkansas’s National Guard and sent a thousand troops from the 101st Airborne Division to supervise the desegregation of Central High. Though some whites harassed the black students throughout the rest of the school year, the continued presence of armed soldiers, the first federal troops dispatched to the South since Reconstruction, were a visible sign of Eisenhower’s reluctant action to preserve the credibility of the federal judiciary. Little Rock would hardly become an integration success story, however, as Governor Faubus closed all four of Little Rock’s high СКАЧАТЬ