Despite the President's reluctance to lead in civil rights matters, major blame for the lack of substantial progress must be assigned to the third branch of government. The 1957 and 1960 civil rights laws, pallid harbingers of later powerful legislation in this field, demonstrated Congress's lukewarm commitment to civil rights reform that severely limited federal action. The reluctance of Congress to enact the reforms augured in the Brown decision convinced many Negroes that they would have to take further measures to gain their full constitutional rights. They had seen presidents and federal judges embrace principles long argued by civil rights organizations, but to little avail. Seven years after the Brown decision, Negroes were still disfranchised in large areas of the south, still endured segregated public transportation and places of public accommodation, and still encountered discrimination in employment and housing throughout the nation. Nor had favorable court decisions and federal attempts at enforcement reversed the ominous trend in black unemployment rates, which had been rising for a decade. Above all, court decisions could not spare Negroes the sense of humiliation that segregation produced. Segregation implied racial inferiority, a "constant corroding experience," as Clarence Mitchell once called it. It was segregation's seeming imperviousness to governmental action in the 1950's that caused the new generation of civil rights leaders to develop new civil rights techniques.
Their new methods forced the older leaders, temporarily at least, into eclipse. No longer could they convince their juniors of the efficacy of legal action, and the 1950's ended with the younger generation taking to the streets in the first spontaneous battles of their civil rights revolution. Under the direction of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and its charismatic founder, Martin Luther King, Jr., the strategy of massive civil disobedience, broached in 1948 by A. Philip Randolph, became a reality. Other organizations quickly joined the battle, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), also organized by Dr. King but soon destined to break away into more radical paths, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an older organization, now expanded and under its new director, James Farmer, rededicated to activism.
Rosa Parks's refusal to move to the rear of the Montgomery bus in 1955 and the ensuing successful black boycott that ended the city's segregated transportation pointed the way to a wave of nonviolent direct action that swept the country in the 1960's. Thousands of young Americans, most notably in the student-led sit-ins enveloping the south in 1960[19-13] and the scores of freedom riders bringing chaos to the transportation system in 1961, carried the civil rights struggle into all corners of the south. "We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer," Dr. King warned the nation's majority, and suffer Negroes did in the brutal resistance that met their demands. But it was not in vain, for police brutality, mob violence, and assassinations set off hundreds of demonstrations throughout the country and made civil rights a national political issue.
The stage was set for a climatic scene, and onto that stage walked the familiar figure of A. Philip Randolph, calling for a massive march on Washington to demand a redress of black grievances. This time, unlike the response to his 1940 appeal, the answer was a promise of support from both races. The churches joined in, many labor leaders, including Walter Reuther, enlisted in the demonstration, and even the President, at first opposed, gave his blessing to the national event. A quarter of a million people, about 20 percent of them white, marched to the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 to hear King appeal to the nation's conscience by reciting his dream of a just society. In the words of the Kerner Commission:
It [the march] was more than a summation of the past years of struggle and aspiration. It symbolized certain new directions: a deeper concern for the economic problems of the masses, more involvement of white moderates and new demands from the most militant, who implied that only a revolutionary change in American institutions would permit Negroes to achieve the dignity of citizens.[19-14]
Limitations on Executive Order 9981
The decade of national civil rights activity that culminated symbolically at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was closely mirrored in the Department of Defense, where the services' definition of equal treatment and opportunity underwent a marked evolution. Here, a decade that had begun with the department's placing severe limitations on its defense of black servicemen's civil rights ended with the department's joining the vanguard of the civil rights movement.
In the early 1950's the services were constantly referring to the limitations of Executive Order 9981. The Air Force could not intervene in local custom, Assistant Secretary Zuckert told Clarence Mitchell in 1951. Social change in local communities must be evolutionary, he continued, either ignoring or contrasting the Air Force's own social experience.[19-15] Defending the practice of maintaining large training camps in localities discriminating against black soldiers, the Army Chief of Staff explained to Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan that while its facilities were open to all soldiers regardless of race, the Army had no control over nearby civilian communities. There was little its commanders could do beyond urging local civic organizations to cooperate.[19-16] The Deputy Chief of Naval Personnel was even more blunt. "The housing situation at Key West is not within the control of the Navy," he told the Assistant Secretary of Defense in 1953. Housing was segregated, he admitted, but it was the Federal Housing Authority, not the Navy, that controlled the location of off-base housing for black sailors.[19-17]
These excuses for not dealing with off-base discrimination continued throughout the decade. As late as 1959, discussing a case of racial discrimination near an Army base in Germany, a Defense Department spokesman explained to Congressman James Roosevelt that "since the incident did not take place on one of our military bases, we are not in a position to offer direct relief in the situation...."[19-18] Even James Evans, the racial counselor, came to use this explanation. "Community mores with respect to race vary," Evans wrote in 1956, and "such matters are largely beyond direct purview of the Department of Defense."[19-19]
Understandably, in view of the difficulties they perceived, the services tried to avoid the whole problem. In 1954, for example, a group of forty-eight black soldiers traveling on a bus in Columbia, South Carolina, were arrested and fined when they protested the attempted arrest of one of them for failing to comply with the state's segregated seating law. In the ensuing furor, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson explained to President Eisenhower that soldiers were subject to community law and his department contemplated no investigation or disciplinary action in the case. In view of the civil rights issues involved, Wilson continued,[19-20] the Judge Advocate General of the Army discussed the matter with the Justice Department and referred related correspondence to that department "for whatever disposition it considered appropriate." "This reply," an assistant noted on Wilson's file copy of the memo for the President, "gets them off our neck, but I don't know about Brownell's [the Attorney General]."[19-21]