Clarence Mitchell
To a remarkable extent, this youthful vanguard was strongly religious and nonviolent. The influence of the church on the militant phase of the civil rights movement is one of the movement's salient characteristics.
This black awakening paralleled a growing realization among an increasing number of white Americans that the demands of the civil rights leaders were just and that the government should act. World War II had made many thoughtful Americans aware of the contradiction inherent in fighting fascism with segregated troops. In the postwar years, the cold war rivalry for the friendship and allegiance of the world's colored peoples, who were creating a multitude of new states, added a pragmatic reason for ensuring equal treatment and opportunity for black Americans. A further inducement, and a particularly forceful one, was the size of the northern black vote, which had become the key to victory in several electorally important states and had made the civil rights cause a practical political necessity for both major parties.
The U.S. Supreme Court was the real pacesetter. Significantly broadening its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court reversed a century-old trend and called for federal intervention to protect the civil rights of the black minority in transportation, housing, voting, and the administration of justice. In the Morgan v. Virginia decision of 1946,[19-5] for example, the Court launched an attack on segregation in interstate travel. In another series of cases it proclaimed the right of Negroes to be tried only in those courts where Negroes could serve on juries and outlawed the all-white primary system, which in some one-party states had effectively barred Negroes from the elective process. The latter decision partly explains the rise in the number of qualified black voters in twelve southern states from 645,000 in 1947 to some 1.2 million by 1952. However, many difficulties remained in the way of full enfranchisement. The poll tax, literacy tests, and outright intimidation frustrated the registration of Negroes in many areas, and in some rural counties black voter registration actually declined in the early 1960's. But the Court's intervention was crucial because its decisions established the precedent for federal action that would culminate in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These judicial initiatives whittled away at segregation's hold on the Constitution, but it was the Supreme Court's rulings in the field of public education that dealt segregation a mortal blow. Its unanimous decision in the case of Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, on 17 May 1954[19-6] not only undermined segregation in the nation's schools, but by an irresistible extension of the logic employed in the case also committed the nation at its highest levels to the principle of racial equality. The Court's conclusion that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" exposed segregation in all public areas to renewed judicial scrutiny. It was, as Professor Woodward described it, the most far-reaching Court decision in a century, and it marked the beginning of the end of Jim Crow's reign in America.[19-7]
But it was only the beginning, for the Court's order that the transition to racially nondiscriminatory school systems be accomplished "with all deliberate speed"[19-8] encountered massive resistance in many places. Despite ceaseless litigation and further affirmations by the Court, and despite enforcement by federal troops in the celebrated cases of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Oxford, Mississippi, and by federal marshals in New Orleans, Louisiana,[19-9] elimination of segregated public schools was painfully slow. As late as 1962, for example, only 7.6 percent of the more than three million Negroes of school age in the southern and border states attended integrated schools.
The executive branch also took up the cause of civil rights, albeit in a more limited way than the courts. The Eisenhower administration, for instance, continued President Truman's efforts to achieve equal treatment and opportunity for black servicemen. Just before the Brown decision the administration quickly desegregated most dependent schools on military bases. It also desegregated the school system of Washington, D.C., and, with a powerful push from the Supreme Court in the case of the District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. in 1953,[19-10] abolished segregation in places of public accommodation in the nation's capital. Eisenhower also continued Truman's fight against discrimination in federal employment, including jobs covered by government contracts, by establishing watchdog committees on government employment policy and government contracts.
Independent federal agencies also began to attack racial discrimination. The Interstate Commerce Commission, with strong assistance from the courts, made a series of rulings that by 1961 had outlawed segregation in much interstate travel. The Federal Housing Authority, following the Supreme Court's abrogation of the state's power to enforce restrictive covenants in the sale of housing, began in the early 1950's to push toward a federal open-occupancy policy in public housing and all housing with federally guaranteed loans. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an investigatory agency appointed by the President under the Civil Rights Act of 1957, examined complaints of voting discrimination and denials of equal protection under the law. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy dispatched federal officials to investigate and prosecute violations of voting rights in several states.
But civil rights progress was still painfully slow in the 1950's. The fight for civil rights in that decade graphically demonstrated a political fact of life: any profound change in the nation's social system requires the concerted efforts of all three branches of the national government. In this case the Supreme Court had done its part, repeatedly attacking segregation in many spheres of national life. The executive branch, on the other hand, did not press the Court's decisions as thoroughly as some had hoped, although Eisenhower certainly did so forcibly and spectacularly with federal troops at Little Rock in 1957. The dispatch of paratroopers to Little Rock,[19-11] a memorable example of federal intervention and one popularly associated with civil rights, had, in fact, little to do with civil rights, but was rather a vivid example of the exercise of executive powers in the face of a threat to federal judicial authority. Where the Brown decision was concerned, Eisenhower's view of judicial powers was narrow and his leadership antithetical to the Court's call for "all deliberate speed." He even withheld his support in school desegregation cases. Eisenhower was quite frank about the limitations he perceived in his power and, by inference, his duty to effect civil rights reforms. Such reforms, he believed, were a matter of the heart and, as he explained to Congressman Powell in 1953, could not be achieved by means of laws or directives or the action of any one person, "no matter with how much authority and forthrightness he acts."[19-12]