24 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
White Primary: A device
used by southern states
to exclude blacks from
the Democratic primary,
the only election that
mattered.
Eisenhower, Dwight
(1890–1969): US presi-
dent who appointed Earl
Warren as Supreme Court
chief justice and sent
troops to integrate Cen-
tral High School, Little
Rock, Arkansas.
white primaries, and two others fretted about white southern reaction.
Chief justice Fred Vinson of Kentucky hoped that southern states would fol-
low Clarendon county’s lead in improving black schools in order to block
integration.
The deliberations over Browndragged on into the terms of a new presid-
ent and chief justice. To succeed Harry Truman, Americans chose World War
II hero Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican president in a generation.
In his first year, Eisenhower moved quietly against racism in several areas.
Among his significant actions, he banned discrimination in federal employ-
ment and ended segregation in the armed forces and the nation’s capital. His
greatest contribution to civil rights was unintended. When chief justice
Vinson died before Brownwas re-argued, Eisenhower replaced him with
California governor Earl Warren, to whom the president owed a political
debt. Eisenhower believed that Warren was a ‘statesman’ with ‘middle-of-the-
road views.’ As the Court reconsidered school segregation, the president
was deeply concerned that the South would shut down its public schools
if blacks were admitted, as several governors threatened. Moreover, having
spent his entire life with whites, Eisenhower tried to influence Warren by
defending white southerners, some of whom he knew from golfing and hunt-
ing outings. They only wanted to keep ‘their sweet little girls’ from sitting
next to ‘some big overgrown Negroes,’ the president remarked at a White
House dinner. An outraged Warren recognized that a historic moment was at
hand and so ignored the meddling Eisenhower to reverse Plessy.
On 17 May 1954, after months of cajoling his feuding colleagues, Warren
calmly read the Court’s ruling against segregated public schools. The unani-
mous opinion was short, unemotional, and non-accusatory. Drawing upon
the 14th Amendment and studies showing segregation’s damaging effects,
Warren declared that legally enforced ‘separate educational facilities are
inherently unequal’ [Doc. 2, p. 140]. With most white southerners opposed
to school desegregation, the Court let a year pass before requiring the com-
pliance of local school systems with ‘all deliberate speed.’ Without an army
of its own, the Warren Court felt it could not move too far ahead of the
American people in pushing the races together. This ambiguous directive,
known as Brown II, avoided a timetable and allowed district courts to decide
how local desegregation should proceed. It was the first time that the Supreme
Court deferred implementing a constitutional right.
The Court’s stunning decision gave most blacks a jolt of confidence. A
16-year-old black girl burst into tears when her teacher broke the news. ‘We
went on studying history,’ she remembered, ‘but things weren’t the same, and
will never be the same again.’ The Chicago Defendercalled the Brownruling
‘more important to our democracy than the atom bomb or the hydrogen
bomb.’ Thurgood Marshall predicted confidently that all forms of segregationWarren, Earl (1891–
1974): US Supreme Court
chief justice who wrote
the Browndecision.