Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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been the most patient of all people.” The president’s words, “unwittingly crush the spirit of freedom in Negroes by constantly urging forbearance and give hope to those … who would take from us even those freedoms we now enjoy.”19
The fall 1957 desegregation crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, further exposed the inadequacies of Eisenhower’s gradualist approach to race relations. As his former speechwriter, Emmet John Hughes, later wrote, Eisenhower’s “limp direction” in the field of civil rights “served almost as a pathetic and inviting prologue to Little Rock.” Prior to the crisis, the president’s rhetoric regarding school desegregation suggested to many southern whites that there was little he would do to actively enforce desegregation. In April 1956, he remarked, “civil rights extremists never stop to consider that although you can send in troops, troops can’t make anyone operate schools,” and as late as July 1957 claimed, “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops … to enforce the orders of a federal court.” As Little Rock officials prepared to implement the court-ordered desegregation of Central High in September, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state National Guard to block the nine enrolled black students from entering the school. Seeking a quiet solution, Eisenhower publicly stated, “you cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws,” and expressed his hope that the people of Little Rock would peacefully comply with the court order. He invited Faubus to join him in Newport, Rhode Island, and convinced the governor to call off the National Guard. Many of Little Rock’s white citizens, however, were not prepared to have their children attend an integrated school, and the black students faced a rabid mob as they approached Central High. Police and law enforcement personnel tepidly intervened only after the confrontation descended into violent chaos.20
As photographs of defenseless black children accosted by angry crowds circulated throughout the country, African Americans blamed Eisenhower for not denouncing violence and enforcing the court order. Roy Wilkins claimed that the president “has been absolutely and thoroughly disappointing and disillusioning” in his handling of the crisis. Helen Edmonds, who had endorsed Eisenhower at the national convention just one year earlier, reported to Val Washington that even African Americans who “formerly manifested a love for the President, are saying that they are no longer enchanted and that the seeming indecision on the Arkansas situation was the breaking point.” The crisis galvanized the nation, and threatened America’s self-portrayal as an international beacon of freedom, giving the president little choice but to act. On September 24, weeks after the crisis began, Eisenhower finally addressed the nation in a televised speech. Surrounded by portraits that strategically included both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, the president sympathized with white southerners, but claimed that even if the Supreme Court was wrong in Brown, “Our personal opinions about the decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement; the responsibility and authority of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution are very clear.” He then federalized Arkansas’s National Guard and sent a thousand troops from the 101st Airborne Division to supervise the desegregation of Central High. Though some whites harassed the black students throughout the rest of the school year, the continued presence of armed soldiers, the first federal troops dispatched to the South since Reconstruction, were a visible sign of Eisenhower’s reluctant action to preserve the credibility of the federal judiciary. Little Rock would hardly become an integration success story, however, as Governor Faubus closed all four of Little Rock’s high schools for the 1958–1959 school year.21
Little Rock illustrated the Republican electoral quandary. On the one hand, Republicans saw significant gains among African Americans in Eisenhower’s reelection effort. On the other hand, with his decisive southern wins in 1952 and 1956, the GOP believed they could form a new and potentially permanent coalition of businessmen, fiscal conservatives, and middle-class suburbanites in the South. Early in 1957, Meade Alcorn, a former state legislator from Connecticut and recently named chairman of the Republican National Committee, created a Southern Division, often called “Operation Dixie,” to expand the party in the South. The division’s director, I. Lee Potter, a real estate investor and state chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, embodied the attitude of young southern Republicans. Though he could be described as a moderate by southern standards, believing the rabid racism of Democrats damaged southern economic progress, he publicly declared “our party is for segregation” soon after taking charge of Operation Dixie. Revealing Republican priorities, Potter received the third highest budget of any special division of the national committee, behind only Young Republicans and the Women’s Division. His initial six-month budget was $20,000, which doubled by 1960.22
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