The BrownDecision 25would vanish by 1963, the centennial of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclama-
tion. The South, after all, had not erupted in violence after earlier desegrega-
tion decisions involving interstate commerce, the all-white primary, and higher
education. Marshall’s prediction turned out to be wildly optimistic.
Many areas outside the deep South accepted Brownwith the encourage-
ment of white moderates. Three influential southern newspaper editors –
Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Hodding Carter of the Greenville
Delta Democrat-Times, and Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer
- insisted that the decision be obeyed. Southern church organizations,
including the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, urged compli-
ance with the ruling. Businessmen hoped the new social order would mean
greater black buying power. Initial white acceptance of desegregation meant
that 70 per cent of school districts in the border states of Delaware, Kentucky,
Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia complied with Brownin a
single year. In states where segregation was decided on the local level –
Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming – the schools integrated their
classrooms quickly and peacefully.
Although attorney general Herbert Brownell strongly supported Brown,
Eisenhower pledged only to enforce it, as the Constitution required. Pri-
vately, the president fumed that the decision was a serious mistake. He con-
tended that Brownwould ‘set backprogress in the South at least fifteen years.
... Feelings run deep on this, especially where children are involved....
And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by forceis
just plain nuts.’ Eisenhower thought that school desegregation was inevitable,
but recommended that it occur very gradually, starting at the top of the edu-
cational ladder. With his eye on the 1956 election, Eisenhower reached out
to white southerners who traditionally voted Democratic. He denounced
‘extremists on both sides’ and declared that ‘you cannot change people’s
hearts merely by laws.’
Eisenhower’s neutrality on the day’s leading moral issue and the Court’s
indefinite timetable on desegregation opened the door to the greatest
defiance of the federal government since the Civil War. With many southern
voices in the church, education, the press, and the bar keeping mum, white
supremacists defended the ‘southern way of life’ against integration and mis-
cegenation. They intended nothing less than to make the federal government
back down through sheer stubbornness. Georgia governor Herman Talmadge
summarily refused compliance with Brown, recalling his state’s successful
defiance of chief justice John Marshall’s 1832 decision over Cherokee land
claims. Talmadge also signed a bill redesigning the state flag to include the
Confederacy’s Stars and Bars. South Carolina governor James Byrnes, once
a Supreme Court justice, accused his former colleagues of playing into
communist hands and destroying southern civilization. In a vitriolic, widely