Q&A

Although the image remains of the 1950s as led by a president indifferent to the needs of African Americans, David A. Nichols, in his boldly revisionist A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (see review, p. 71), shows that Ike not only supported equal opportunity and legal protection for all Americans but also made possible the civil rights legislation of JFK and LBJ. Nichols explores how Eisenhower overcame daunting political resistance to improve the conditions of African Americans at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement.

Why has it taken so long for Eisenhower's civil rights leadership to be recognized?

The research had not been done, partly because scholars focused myopically on presidential words. Ike was a man of deeds rather than words. Historians neglected important documents, and others became available only recently. And many observers viewed the 1950s through the prism of the dramatic 1960s, mistakenly assuming that the Eisenhower era was quiet and uneventful.

Chief Justice Earl Warren's assertion in his memoirs that Eisenhower was opposed to Brown v. Board of Education has been pivotal. Warren virtually ignored Ike's appointment of four additional pro-Brown justices to his own court. Most historians took Warren at his word.

You state that Eisenhower failed to use the presidential “bully pulpit” to calm and inspire African Americans. Why didn't he see the importance of presidential rhetoric?

With rare exceptions, white politicians in the 1950s did not inspire African Americans with their rhetoric. While Eisenhower was reluctant to moralize, so were LBJ and JFK.

Ike was a military man. He had not won the war in Europe by making speeches. He believed that quiet action, epitomized by his judicial appointments, was more consequential than passionate statements. Still, he said more than most scholars recognize. He pledged in his first State of the Union message “to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces,” and he delivered on that pledge.

How important were Eisenhower's Supreme Court appointments to the civil rights cause?

They were of immeasurable importance. He appointed five men to the court, none of whom was a segregationist sympathizer. He appointed Earl Warren, fully knowing that Warren was liberal on race; John Marshall Harlan II, namesake and grandson of the lone justice who had dissented from the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896; William Brennan, a liberal force on the court for three decades; and Potter Stewart, who openly supported Brown.

You show that neither JFK nor LBJ was pro–civil rights during Eisenhower's administration. Did Ike battle with them?

JFK was not a senatorial power broker. Unlike Eisenhower, he appointed numerous segregationist judges early in his presidency. Johnson, as majority leader after 1954, ruled the Senate as few have. He and Eisenhower clashed over the 1957 civil rights bill. Johnson wanted a cosmetic bill that would enhance his presidential ambitions without alienating his Southern base. Eisenhower and Attorney General Herbert Brownell proposed comprehensive legislation, but LBJ threatened to kill the bill unless Ike dropped a provision enhancing the powers of the attorney general, including the authority to pursue school desegregation. Johnson further angered Ike by insisting on a jury trial for the prosecution of voting rights violations, when he knew that all-white Southern juries would make the law unenforceable.

Today, African Americans are unlikely to be Republicans. Why did they desert the party when Eisenhower had done so much for civil rights? Could he have done more?

African Americans had already deserted the Republican Party during the Great Depression, and Eisenhower's policies were insufficiently successful to lure them back. Some blacks appreciated Eisenhower's efforts, notably New York's Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who endorsed and campaigned for him in 1956. Martin Luther King Jr. strongly supported Eisenhower's intervention in Little Rock when Democratic leaders did not. But approximately 70 percent of the black vote remained loyal to the Democratic Party, and it increased in the wake of the 1964–65 civil rights acts and the efforts of post-Eisenhower Republicans to court segregationists in the South.