The shared experience of the Second World
War began to shift attitudes. Black and white sol-
diers had died for the same cause. In particular
they had fought against the ‘master race’ and all its
crimes against those it held to be ‘inferior races’.
But black GIs stationed in the Nazi citadel of
Nürnberg at the end of the war could not share
their quarters with white GIs; and most of their
officers were white. This of course reflected the
superior and inferior racial attitudes that still
prevailed in the US. Not until the Vietnam War
were black servicemen truly integrated in the
armed services, yet at home black and white
Americans did not mix socially and were segre-
gated in schools, for housing, on transport and,
generally, in worship. In a thousand and one ways
a black American was made to feel separate and
inferior. In the nation’s capital a black person
could not enter a good restaurant and expect to be
served. This became particularly embarrassing
when black diplomats from the newly independ-
ent African nations were being sent to Washing-
ton. Segregation, moreover, was a gift the Soviet
Union did not fail to exploit, for example by
honouring the great black American singer Paul
Robeson, who spoke up for black equality and
expressed his admiration for the USSR.
During the 1950s and 1960s agitation in the
South by African Americans and by whites, many
of the latter college students from the east, made
headlines. Police truncheoning defenceless civil-
ians, bombings and riots presented the dark side
of American civilisation. But more and more
whites supported black protests against injustice,
and those with faith in the American people and
institutions believed they would overcome the
entrenched prejudice. The success of the civil
rights movement in changing laws and proce-
dures – making itself felt slowly, despite many set-
backs, in the 1950s before gathering force in the
1960s – provided striking evidence that tradi-
tional discrimination had to yield to reform. The
bastions of ‘Jim Crow’, discriminatory anti-black
practices in the South, began falling one by one.
The US shares with many other countries the
problems caused by racial or religious intolerance.
But few could have foretold the changes in atti-
tudes that have taken place in the US within just
one generation. Black Americans now wield
significant political power. Even so, practical as
opposed to legal discrimination in education, job
opportunities and housing remain to be over-
come. In conditions of unemployment and reces-
sion African Americans continue to suffer far
more severely than their fellow citizens.
The landmarks of black protest in the 1950s
and 1960s are clearly delineated. Lawyers of the
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People won a Supreme Court ruling in
1954 that swept away the segregationist sub-
terfuge of ‘separate but equal’ in public school-
ing. There would no longer be any justification
for separating children solely on account of their
race, a principle already applicable to higher edu-
cation. But a ruling, no matter how valuable, is
one thing, its enforcement – in a country where
state rights and community control over local ser-
vices is strong – quite another. Integration was
fiercely resisted everywhere; racial prejudice, of
course, played a large part, but resistance was also
sparked by social and educational tensions as
better-off families found themselves being forced
to share their facilities with the deprived. The
bussing of children between the more affluent
parts of a city and the worse off aroused fierce
resentment, for example, when it proved more
difficult to maintain the educational standards of
mixed social groups. The real test came in the
South on the issue of whether local communities
could defy Supreme Court rulings when African
Americans were courageous enough to insist on
the rights accorded by them. The struggle could
not just be left to lawyers. In 1956 a black girl
was prevented by force and intimidation from
entering the University of Alabama. In the fol-
lowing year there was a dramatic confrontation
between federal authorities and the State of
Arkansas when school officials at Little Rock
demanded that nine black girls be prevented from
entering the Central High School. Governor
Orval Faubus backed the school officials, and only
when Eisenhower reluctantly met the challenge
by ordering federal troops to ensure the black
children’s safety in entering the school did the
state authorities back off. The crisis as far as the
children were concerned festered on for many
1
THE EISENHOWER YEARS 489
