Master of the Senate (141 page)

These hundreds of thousands of black veterans had fought to make the world safe for democracy, not Jim Crow, and upon their return, they determined, many of them, to do something about what they found, to secure in their own country the freedoms for which they had fought overseas.

Among these Negro veterans, there was, in addition, anew sense of possibility, a sense that, as Egerton puts it, “things
would
be different—they had to be.” Many joined an organization dedicated to making things different: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; by the end of 1946, the NAACP had more than a thousand branches, with a membership totaling nearly half a million. In the courts, in the years after the war, the effort to challenge school segregation in the South was steadily widening, and victories were coming faster and faster—many of them won by a black lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, whose triumphs were beginning to turn him into a legend—and with each victory the feeling grew stronger that the argument should not be merely that separate facilities be equal, but that facilities should not be separate: that the lawyers should push the courts to declare illegal the very separation of the races itself. The momentum for faster change was sweeping before it those Negroes who had argued for moderation. “A lot of the black communities around the country had the bit between their teeth by then,” said one of the leading black civil rights attorneys, William Hastie. “It would have been futile to try damming the tide of human emotion that had been let loose.”

The tide was not rising only among blacks. Widespread though racism remained among white Americans, the war had made more of them aware of—and uneasy about—their country’s broken promises. And their understanding had been given an intellectual underpinning: Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental
An American Dilemma
, published near the end of the war, which documented the pervasiveness of white racism in America and disproved the clichés about the innate inferiority of Negroes on which that racism was based, and which made readers grasp the terrible gulf between America’s behavior and the ideals on which America had been founded; and whose scathing import—that America had blamed the black man for what it had done to him—was working its way, gradually but steadily, into America’s consciousness. And in 1947 their understanding had been personified in a popular hero, a hero with dark black skin, gleaming white teeth, and a flaming will; even if you were white, when you saw the bat held high and then whipping through the ball, when you saw the speed on the base paths, and when you saw the dignity with which Jack Roosevelt Robinson held himself in the face of the curses and the scorn and the runners coming into second base with their spikes high, you had to think at least a little about America’s shattered promises. The Brooklyn Dodgers were in the
National League, but three months later, rooting for the Washington Senators of the American League became less of an unalloyed joy for Richard Russell; if he wanted to watch the Senators play the Cleveland Indians, he had to watch a black man on the same field as whites: Larry Doby had joined Jackie in the big leagues. In 1950, Jackie Robinson would be on the cover of
Life
magazine—the first black on
Life’s
cover in all its seven hundred issues. Race was becoming, faster and faster, an open topic of discussion in America; there was, in Egerton’s words, “a spreading sense of outrage that discrimination based solely on skin color was locking people out of jobs, housing….” During the years since V-J Day, support for civil rights, for the end of Jim Crow, had been rising all across the North, the demand quickening. A tide of opinion for equality and social justice had been rising—rising slowly, but rising. And the tide had been swelled by a hard pragmatic consideration: Negroes in the North had much less difficulty in voting than those in the South, and, led by the newly militant, better-educated, black veterans, more of them were doing so, particularly in the big northern states whose electoral votes were crucial in political calculations.

During the first seven years of the postwar era, moreover, there had been a President in the White House who had been determined to harness that tide, a President who not only reiterated the requests of his predecessor, twice passed by the House but twice rejected by the Senate, for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and for the abolition of the poll tax, but who had also proposed, in 1946 and 1947 and 1948, what Franklin Roosevelt had not—after commissioning the study that would be called, in a phrase out of the Declaration of Independence, “To Secure These Rights,” this President whose “very stomach turned over” at the beating of Negro veterans, asked Congress to secure those rights by making lynching a federal crime, banning discrimination in schools, hotels, restaurants, and theaters, and passing legislation protecting the Negroes’ right to vote.

But the tide had risen before, and had been blocked before, by the Senate, and now, as it rose again, the Senate blocked it again: with the defeat, in 1946 and again in 1947 and 1948, of the anti-lynching legislation and the anti-poll tax legislation and the anti-discrimination legislation, the tide broke helplessly against the dam that had stood athwart it for so long. And in the 1949 civil rights battle in which Lyndon Johnson had delivered his “We of the South” maiden speech which Richard Russell had called “one of the ablest I have ever heard,” the dam had been made even stronger and higher than before by Russell’s strengthening of the rules against cloture. And after that southern victory, when in 1950 and in 1951 and 1952, civil rights legislation had been proposed in the Senate, it had seldom even reached the floor.

D
URING THE YEARS SINCE 1952
, despite the presence in the White House of a new President whose lack of enthusiasm for civil rights made the Executive
Branch almost as high a barrier to the cause as the legislative, the rising tide had for a time apparently found another channel through which it could flow toward justice. All during the early 1950s, four separate school desegregation cases, which had been lumped together under the title
Brown v. Board of Education
, had been rising, slowly but steadily, through the federal court system toward the highest court. That court was scheduled to begin hearing arguments on the
Brown
case on December 7, 1953, and that morning, when the trolleys pulled up on Constitution Avenue and congressional employees stepped off and walked toward their offices in the Capitol, they noticed, through the winter-bare trees, in front of the smaller white marble temple of the Supreme Court Building to their left, a long line of men and women waiting for admittance to the Court’s session that day. Most of them wore hats against the thirty-degree cold, and almost all of the faces under the hats were black. Some of those men and women had been in line all night. “I have a feeling that the Supreme Court is going to end segregation,” one of them explained to a reporter.

For three days that December, the Supreme Court heard arguments on
Brown
, and five months later, on May 17, 1954, the Court ruled that separation of races in schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s pledge of equal protection of the law, “that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal…. To separate them [Negro children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority…that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The Court’s Chief Justice understood as Lyndon Johnson understood the importance of unanimity, and Earl Warren had obtained it—even from Justice Stanley F. Reed of border-state Kentucky. Reed, who had been the last holdout, was looking down from the bench at Thurgood Marshall, who had led the fight in
Brown
, when Warren uttered the words, “So say we all.” Reed “was looking me right straight in the face, because he wanted to see my reaction when I realized he hadn’t dissented,” the great black attorney would recall. The two men exchanged nods, barely perceptible. But there were tears on the Justice’s face. All across the United States black men and women knelt to give thanks to God.

T
HEIR THANKS WERE PREMATURE.
In education as in voting, determination spawned defiance. Against the Court’s decision, the Old Confederacy rose in rage.

With the hooded Ku Klux Klan somewhat in disrepute because of its reputation for redneck violence, a new organization, the White Citizens Councils, sprang up, with a membership that included prominent citizens—the pillars of scores of southern communities—and with a philosophy that ostensibly repudiated violence and secrecy in favor of a new “reasonableness” (although its leaders’ “reasonableness” was somewhat undercut by their rhetoric, which had
an unfortunate tendency to slip back into a more-familiar mode; in a Council-published book that sold widely throughout the South, the movement’s intellectual leader, Tom P. Brady, a Yale-educated Mississippi circuit court judge, denounced the Court’s refusal to recognize the physiological differences that made Negroes unsuitable for education—“The Supreme Court refuses to recognize that it cannot by a mandate shrink the size of a Negro’s skull which is one-eighth of an inch thicker than a white man’s”—as well as its lack of appreciation of all the white man had done for the Negro. “The American Negro,” he wrote, “was divorced from Africa and saved from savagery. In spite of his basic inferiority he was forced to do that which he would not do for himself. He was compelled to lay aside cannibalism, his barbaric savage custom. He was transported from aboriginal ignorance and superstition. He was given a language…. His soul was quickened. He was introduced to God! The veneer had been rubbed on, but the inside is fundamentally the same…. You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him and teach him to use a knife and fork, but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development, if ever, before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy”). The first White Citizens Council was formed, in Indianola, Mississippi, two months after the
Brown
decision; within months, hundreds of chapters, with tens of thousands of members, had sprung up all across the South.

And with education as with voting, defiance was made law—formally written into statute books. Southern school boards, state legislatures, attorneys general and governors wrote laws and regulations designed to frustrate the Supreme Court ruling and keep white children safe from contamination by black children.

These laws and regulations accomplished their purpose. Although the border states moved at once to comply with the Court’s ruling—by the fall of 1954, classes were widely integrated in Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia and Missouri; the next year, Kentucky began to comply—when, in May, 1955, a year after its first ruling, the Supreme Court decreed that its ruling should be implemented “with all deliberate speed,” integration was still limited to the border states. And the reaction to that decree was the passage by southern legislatures of still more laws designed to frustrate it. Afraid that federal courts might attempt to accomplish integration by ordering the transfer of students to other schools, the South Carolina State Legislature in 1955 authorized local school boards to reassign transferred pupils to their original schools. The new law also stated that if a school accepted a pupil who had not been assigned by the school board—even if that pupil had been transferred there under a federal court order—the school board was authorized to deny state funds to that school. And South Carolina legislators boasted that if a federal court ruled unconstitutional this method of circumventing the Supreme Court decision, they would simply pass another law, authorizing the school board to close the school—or as many schools as it wished. A board could close
all
its schools, the Legislature explained. White parents would then have the option of sending
their children to school in another—unintegrated—district. And if a suit was then instituted to force integration in
that
district,
that
district’s board could then close its schools. As one writer put it, “A separate suit might therefore be required for every school district in the state.” And of course, whites could always set up a private school of their own. Since blacks couldn’t afford to follow suit, the end result of the integration suits would be that blacks would have no schools at all. In other southern states, there were even broader pieces of legislation. Georgia amended its state constitution so that it no longer required the state to maintain a public school system.

If laws were not sufficient to accomplish the purpose, other methods—“economic pressures”—were employed. In August, 1955, fifty-three Negroes petitioned the school board in Yazoo City, Mississippi, to allow their children to attend white schools. The local White Citizens Council published the names of the petition’s signers, in a full-page ad in the
Yazoo City Herald.
One of the fifty-three was fired from his job. Another, who had spent twenty years building up a plumbing business, found that no white customer would hire him, and he lost his business. The day he had to close down, he tried to buy a loaf of bread in a store, and the storekeeper told him he had just tripled the price. Another signer, a grocer, found that his wholesalers would no longer supply him. A banker told him the bank didn’t want his money, and ordered him to close his account. A woman who had signed tried to buy food, but when she got to the counter, the clerk refused to accept her money, and she had to return the food to the shelves. Soon there were only two names left on the petition, and the Yazoo City schools remained segregated. And there were more subtle methods. When a similar petition was filed in Jackson, Mississippi, Citizens Council leaders met in a Jackson hotel room, telephoned for room service, and let the Negro waiters who brought the food overhear them as they said that the petition’s signers were going to be investigated by a grand jury. “That was the end of the petition,” a Council leader said. “No fuss and fury. We’re not trying to raise hell. We just want separate but equal schools.”