HIS 359
Yaolee Chen
Robert McCoy

The Eisenhower Administration

The Eisenhower administration had little to do with the civil rights movement. The Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott were the two major civil rights movements done by the blacks themselves. Yet, Eisenhower was not really so interested in the black civil right movement. Eisenhower sent troops and policemen because the states disobeyed to the federal laws.

Often confused by the college students, although the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was taken place in the Eisenhower’s administration. But these two cases had, actually, little to do with Eisenhower.

The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a more far-reaching attack consisted of the proposition that, even when equal financial resources were allocated to black and white institutions, government-imposed (de jure) separation of the races necessarily violated the constitution's requirement of racial equality. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously embraced this argument, with a conclusion that "in the field of public education the doctrine of [separate but equal] has no place that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal".

Segregationists resisted Brown in a wide variety of ways. Many southern white members of Congress signed the "Southern Manifesto," which condemned Brown as illegitimate and asserted the right of states to ignore it. Some officials closed all public schools rather than desegregate them. Others resorted to tokenism as a way of minimizing the actual effects of Brown, instituting policies that provided, for instance, that schools would be desegregated a grade per year. But the results of such a rejection by the southern whites ran the American societies into an opposite direction. Eisenhower had just followed the orders from the constitution and had made the desegregation on the right time.

Regardless of theses contra viewpoints, in 1958 Aaron v. Cooper, the Court ordered the immediate desegregation of a public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, at which state National Guard troops, under instructions from Governor Orval Faubus, had prevented the admission of nine black youngsters. Once the admission was done, the textbooks of the blacks students were thrown with eggs. The white students and the white faculties protested against the admission for the blacks, and it angered the President Eisenhower because the local whites disobeyed to the federal laws. Nevertheless the regulation was radical, and the idea of the desegregation was not acceptable by most of the students in the schools.

Public education is but one of many arenas in which reformers has sought to desegregate American society. Many of these laws apply to private individuals as well as government officials and have undoubtedly improved the status and living conditions of racial minorities under the oppose by the majority.

The ideas of the desegregation were more acceptable by the blacks than by the whites. The initial phase of the black protest activity in the post-Brown period began on December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white bus rider, thereby defying a southern custom that required blacks to give seats toward the front of buses to whites. When she was jailed, a black community boycott of the city's buses began. The boycott lasted more than a year, demonstrating the unity and determination of black residents and inspiring blacks elsewhere. TV also played a significant role in this movement. Elvis Presley combined the black music of 1920s (Jazz) whit the blue songs and introduced it into the societies of the 1950s and the 1960s as a symbol of protest that against the traditional culture of segregation. The civil rights movement was rather done by the African Americans themselves then by the Eisenhower administration.

Luther was the key to its succeed. Martin Luther King, Jr., who emerged as the boycott movement's most effective leader, possessed unique conciliatory and oratorical skills. He understood the larger significance of the boycott and quickly realized that the nonviolent tactics used by the Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi could be used by southern blacks. "I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom," he explained. Although Parks and King were members of the NAACP, the Montgomery movement led to the creation in 1957 of a new regional organization, the clergy-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC with King as its president.

Another promotion of the black civil rights movement was by the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE was founded on the University of Chicago Campus in 1942 as an outgrowth of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. For the next two decades, CORE introduced a small group of civil rights activists to the idea of achieving change through nonviolence, but during these years, its chapters were all in the North and its membership predominantly white and middle class. In 1955, CORE went into the South and provided nonviolence training in Montgomery. Soon thereafter, CORE hired a small staff to work in the South for the Martin Luther King followers.

Eisenhower did not mean to make a radical change in the American societies. But following the Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King led the non-violence reformation, and was encouraged by the Christian institutions from the south and the organizations of the whites from the north. Eisenhower did little to help the civil rights movement for the blacks.