Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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observed that “civil rights in the Eisenhower Administration was handled like a bad dream, or like something that’s not very nice, and you shield yourself from it as long as you possibly can.” Many civil rights leaders echoed this sentiment. Fred Shuttlesworth declared African Americans had “no friend in Ike,” who “saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing, and he did nothing until he had to.” Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed that while Eisenhower was “a man of genuine integrity and good will … I don’t think he feels like being a crusader for integration.” The president instead favored gradual change, where “you just wait 50 or 100 years and it will work itself out.” Roy Wilkins bemoaned that while Eisenhower “made inroads into the Negro vote,” his administration “demonstrated their ineptitude in expanding their gains … acting as though they were ashamed to be forthright on the issues.”12
As the administration’s highest profile African American, Morrow implored the president to take a stronger stand against southern violence. Following the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in August 1955, he suggested that the administration “issue some kind of statement deploring the breakdown of law and order in Mississippi, and stating that it is un-American and undemocratic and contrary to the American way.” To his dismay, he found that “there seems to be complete fright when it is suggested that such action be taken,” and warned, “it is things like the refusal of the Republicans to issue any kind of fear-allaying statement on conditions in Mississippi that contributes to the Negro’s thinking that the Republican Party deserts him in crisis.” Morrow, Val Washington, James Nabrit, J. Ernest Wilkins, and Maxwell Rabb concluded after a strategy meeting that “the Republicans missed the ball when no prominent member of the administration spoke out against the Till matter.” Rabb, a white advisor who had the closest ear of the group to the president, claimed to have a difficult time getting anyone “close to the President to go along with this kind of thing on the matter of civil rights.” Morrow could only conclude “there seems to be some uncanny fear that to alienate the South on this matter of race will be disastrous.” Even Sherman Adams, Morrow’s closest ally inside the White House, opposed issuing a statement condemning southern violence, claiming, “Eisenhower is the President of all the country and could not make speeches designed to influence or castigate any segment of the American public.”13
African Americans from across the country joined Morrow in urging the president to speak out against racial violence. Morrow described daily “sacks of mail” brought to his office “berating the president for his failure to denounce the breakdown of law and order.” The editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, William Nunn, warned party officials that his paper was “swamped” with letters from readers who “feel that a miscarriage of justice such as this should call for some official statement from the Justice Department.” Roy Wilkins told Val Washington that if the administration had simply “made a move and been rebuffed it could have collected some kudos for effort…. But it said and did nothing.” Realistically, a presidential statement would have had a minimal effect on curbing southern violence, but symbolically to African Americans Eisenhower’s silence proved his apathy to their suffering.14
The Eisenhower administration’s muted response occurred during a decade of sustained terrorism against southern blacks. The Ku Klux Klan grew exponentially in the 1950s, having significantly more members and committing more acts of violence than it had in decades. On Christmas night 1951, activist Harry T. Moore and his wife were killed after a bomb exploded outside his Florida home. In 1955, two of Mississippi’s leading civil rights workers, Rev. George W. Lee and Lamar Smith, were murdered for encouraging blacks to register to vote. Lee, no relation to George W. Lee of Memphis, was the first African American since Reconstruction to register to vote in Belzoni, Mississippi. During the Montgomery bus boycott, Klansmen bombed the homes and businesses of activists, and murdered a black truck driver who they believed had a white girlfriend. In 1956, Fred Shuttlesworth was nearly killed in Birmingham after sixteen sticks of dynamite were set off underneath his bedroom.15
Figure 5. President Eisenhower meets with E. Frederic Morrow in the White House, October 4, 1956. National Park Service photo, 72-1908, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.
A distraught E. Frederic Morrow wrote in his diary that though “the bombings and the racial strife in the country continues…. There does not seem to be leadership forthcoming from anywhere.” When juxtaposed to the presidential proclamations against Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe, he observed, “Hungarians seem to be getting a better break in their efforts to find freedom” than black citizens of America. Roy Wilkins believed that “the ‘soft’ and ‘slow’ policy of the President” bore “some blame for the tensions and ugliness now breaking out all over,” and Martin Luther King, Jr., feared that Eisenhower’s inability “to render positive leadership in this area … will serve to push the moderates more and more in the background.” Soon after King became head of the newly created Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization joined with Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and other civil rights leaders in announcing a large-scale demonstration in Washington, D.C. A primary intent of the 1957 “Prayer Pilgrimage,” scheduled on the third anniversary of Brown, was to condemn Eisenhower’s silence on racial violence. Speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King denounced the president as “all too silent and apathetic.”16
Much to the chagrin of black Republicans, on the few occasions when Eisenhower mentioned civil rights, he emphasized gradualism. In a letter to Roy Wilkins, he repeated his standard response when addressing the issue, arguing that “laws on the statute book are not enough … patience and forbearance and wisdom are required of all of us if we are to solve effectively the perplexing problems of this trying period of adjustment.” Such language was seen as antiquated not only by civil rights leaders, but by black Republicans as well. Throughout his time in the White House, E. Frederic Morrow constantly reminded members of the administration that most blacks “are against any talk of moderation and the use of the term ‘gradualism’ is fatal when addressing any Negro audience.” George W. Lee of Memphis told Young Republicans in Atlanta, “we would have been in a devil of a fix if gradualism had been employed” during Reconstruction, when Republicans used “rapid right now action” to push through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Jackie Robinson, who would become the best-known black Republican of the 1960s, asked the president, to “whom you are referring when you say we must be patient,” reminding him that African Americans “have patiently waited all these years for the rights supposedly guaranteed us under our Constitution.”17
After “much sparring behind the scenes” and “several conferences” with Sherman Adams, Morrow convinced the president to speak before the Negro Publishers Association’s annual meeting in May 1958. Recognizing Eisenhower’s unpopular rhetoric, Morrow prepared a “fact sheet” on the terms and phrases to avoid when speaking to black audiences. During the limousine ride with the president to the event, he again emphasized black discomfort with Eisenhower’s standard responses. After receiving loud cheers from a crowd of nearly four hundred leading black newspaper publishers, editors, and journalists, many of whom were sympathetic to the GOP, Eisenhower began his speech by describing a variety of domestic and international issues confronting the nation. As he transitioned to the topic of civil rights, he set aside his prepared remarks to speak extemporaneously, and told the audience that “you people” need to have “patience and forbearance,” as “there are no revolutionary cures” to combat discrimination. Upon hearing the president repeat this string of objectionable phrases, Morrow observed, “the audience reacted as if a time bomb had exploded. Their contorted and pained faces expressed their disbelief and disdain. Sitting on the platform next to the President, I could feel life draining from me.”18
The reaction of black Republicans to the speech was overwhelmingly negative. The chairman of the meeting, William O. Walker, whose Cleveland Call and Post had consistently been one of the most loyal Republican newspapers in the country, declined to accompany Eisenhower out of the room, complaining that this was “the kind of advice we have been getting” since the Brown decision. The Iowa Bystander, another