months, as the troops remained to protect their
rights: sensational conflicts reached the newspa-
pers and other media, but thousands of less news-
worthy incidents across the US did their damage
in obscurity.
The change in attitudes was brought about by
black leadership, championed by ardent groups of
white Americans and backed by mass black
support. Federal authorities, the presidency and
Congress were slow to act. Eisenhower, more
cautious on the issue than Truman had been,
claimed that it was a question of changing hearts
and minds, which could not be accomplished by
law or by force. So, before they could receive
justice, the African Americans would have to wait
for the gradual reformation of their fellow
citizens. Eisenhower had his eyes fixed on the
political repercussions in the South of forcing the
issue and so provided little leadership, except
where federal authority was directly challenged, as
it had been at Little Rock. In the 1960s the
Kennedy brothers and President Johnson were
to take a much more positive attitude to the
demands of the emerging black leaders.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, a Baptist
minister, rose to prominence in organising a black
boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in
1955, after Rosa Parks, a courageous black seam-
stress, had refused to give up her seat to a white
man and move to the back of the bus. The black
boycott hit the pockets of the bus company, until
a year later the Supreme Court ruled that segre-
gation of transport, state as well as interstate, was
unconstitutional. Blacks were flexing their eco-
nomic muscles and soon other businesses were
similarly placed under pressure. All aspects of seg-
regation, in schools, restaurants, housing and
political rights, became the targets of the organ-
ised protest movement in the decade that fol-
lowed.
The 1950s was the decade of the Cold War, when
for the first time the world lived under the
shadow of two countries, now called ‘superpow-
ers’, both possessing nuclear weapons. In August
1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb
and by the mid-1950s had perfected the hydro-
gen bomb. The testing of these weapons by the
nuclear countries was poisoning the environment,
though at the time few were aware of the addi-
tional cancers that were being caused. Research
and testing of the necessary intercontinental mis-
siles to deliver destruction progressed equally fast.
The Soviet Union was catching up with the US,
though not as rapidly in missiles as the Americans
supposed.
The year 1950 was crucial in the history of the
Cold War. The US administration reached the
conclusion that economic and military aid alone
were no longer enough to defend the West.
American strategy made its priority the contain-
ment of communism within the Asian mainland.
Troops were sent to Korea, the only territory on
the mainland defended by US troops, in order
to prove that communist aggression did not pay.
In September 1950 the decision was taken in
Washington to send US combat troops to Europe
as well, to form part of the military defence of
NATO; three months later Dwight D. Eisenhower
was appointed the alliance’s supreme commander.
This marked a radical new commitment. So, by the
time Eisenhower was inaugurated as president on
20 January 1953, the Cold War in Europe and the
hot war in Korea faced the US with global chal-
lenges and the prospect of huge military expendi-
tures. Now that the US had a president who was a
general of great experience, perhaps the Cold War
would be waged not emotionally but with careful
military planning. Eisenhower was a cautious man,
fully aware of the immense dangers of war, but also
conscious of the dangers inherent in constantly
preparing for a war.
The ending of the Korean War, wasteful of
both lives and resources, became an obvious pri-
ority. Eisenhower had become convinced that it
was military folly to allow the American forces to
remain bogged down in the face of the Chinese
and North Koreans. Armistice negotiations had
dragged on at Kaesong and Panmunjon since the
summer of 1951. The issue of 22,000 North
Korean and Chinese prisoners of war in UN
camps who did not wish to return home dead-
locked all negotiations, which India, as honest
broker, attempted to facilitate. Eventually on 27
July 1953, following more than three years of
war, after bitter wrangling and despite the resis-