No self-respecting white man would abide by the Communist-dominated court decision. They will use force, violence, anything and everything they can to keep their children from becoming mixed with the niggers.
WHITE CITIZENS’ COUNCIL LEADER, Mansfield, Texas
The effigy, its head and hands painted black, its body daubed with splodges of red paint, could be seen swinging from a wire rope at the intersection of Broad and Main Streets in Mansfield – a little prairie town of fifteen hundred people (one quarter African American), in Tarrant County, Texas, twenty miles south-west of Dallas. Pinned to the straw-filled figure, which had appeared during the night of Tuesday 28 August, were signs that read ‘THIS NEGRO TRIED TO GO TO A WHITE SCHOOL’ and ‘WOULDN’T THIS BE A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE’. There was ‘lynch talk’ on the streets, and one African American woman, returning home from a shopping trip, noted that ‘You could feel the way they looked at a Negro . . . they wanted to kill one.’1 Over the next few days, as the new school year began, Mansfield was one of several southern towns to witness ugly racial clashes as the defenders of Jim Crow sought to defy court-ordered integration. As this dramatic battle for civil rights played out, President Eisenhower ensured that the federal government remained firmly on the sidelines.
A year earlier the families of three black teenagers, acting with the support of their local NAACP branch and the Association’s national officials, had filed a lawsuit to desegregate Mansfield High School.2 The town’s African Americans certainly had good reason to feel aggrieved at the quality of the educational provision on offer. Mansfield Colored School, which taught children aged six to fourteen, had no lunch programme, lacked adequate teaching materials and, despite being located on a busy road, had ‘no fence to restrain children from darting on the road while playing’. Moreover, African Americans were excluded completely from Mansfield High and forced to attend one of two black schools in Fort Worth, fifteen miles away. Because the local school board refused to provide a bus, the black teenagers had to use the Trailways public service, which dropped them twenty blocks from the school and left them with a two-hour wait for the first bus home.3 At the end of June 1956 the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ‘plaintiffs have the right to admission to, and to attend, the Mansfield High School on the same basis as members of the white race’. The court was also clear that the local school board’s refusal to admit students ‘on account of their race or color’ was ‘unlawful’. On Monday 27 August the court order decreeing the immediate desegregation of Mansfield High was issued.4
For segregationists, the prospect of black and white children sitting alongside one another in the classroom was anathema. Back in October 1955, more than a hundred people had attended a rally at the town’s Memorial Hall to hear Howard A. Beard, a local White Citizens’ Council leader, fulminate against the ‘Communistic’ NAACP and stir up fears about miscegenation. School integration, he declared, would mean that ‘our children will be guinea pigs and our days as a national race will be numbered . . . once mixed they can never be unmixed, and this [is] the surest and most certain way to destroy us.’ ‘If we don’t organize’, warned the Fort Worth salesman, ‘it will be our children who will pay the price . . . for our cowardice.’ Fired up by Beard’s rhetoric, the audience pledged themselves unanimously to preserve Jim Crow and promptly founded their own Citizens’ Council chapter to lead the fight against the integration of Mansfield High. Beard assured the crowd that desegregation could be stopped in its tracks. All it would take, he explained, was ‘grits, guts and gunpowder’.5
In the summer of 1956, as court-ordered integration loomed over the town, Mansfield’s diehard segregationists turned to fear and intimidation in their effort to hold the colour line. On 22 August a cross was burned in the heart of the black neighbourhood (a second cross was burned the following day); the father of one of the black plaintiffs was told that if his son enrolled at the previously all-white school, he would be evicted from his property; the president of the local NAACP received a series of threatening telephone calls warning him to ‘get out of town’. Meanwhile, the Citizens’ Council decided to hold a rally on the school grounds, to dissuade any African American student from registering for the new school year.6
During the early hours of Thursday 30 August – the first day of registration – a second effigy was hoisted atop the flagpole that stood proudly outside Mansfield High. By 8 a.m. a crowd of whites – mostly men, with some women and children – were gathering on the school field. Many carried signs, stating ‘NIGGER STAY OUT, WE DON’T WANT NIGGERS, THIS IS A WHITE SCHOOL’, ‘A DEAD NIGGER IS THE BEST NIGGER’ and ‘COONS EARS $1 A DOZEN’. There was plenty of talk about ‘mongrelisation’ and the need to ‘drive the NAACP out of town’. A number of the men were rumoured to be carrying weapons, and there were angry exchanges with the county sheriff when he warned against taking the law into their own hands. The crowds, which numbered as many as four hundred, spent most of the day milling about; one teenage girl doubtless spoke for many when she explained, ‘If God had wanted us to go to school together He wouldn’t have made them black and us white.’ Meanwhile, at the behest of ‘radical elements’, the city’s merchants and shopkeepers closed their businesses in a show of support (though several did so only reluctantly).
The next day the crowd was larger and the mood more ugly. An observer from the Tarrant County district attorney’s office was roughed up, watching journalists were jostled, and hate literature was passed out claiming that ‘the Jews were behind the NAACP and that school desegregation was a communist plot to mongrelize the white race’. Citizens’ Council leaders sought to intimidate business owners into cutting off credit to African Americans, and vigilantes began patrolling Mansfield’s streets to ensure that ‘anyone suspected of being sympathetic to the Negro cause’ was quickly ‘escorted out of town’.7 A third effigy now hung above the school’s front porch. Not a single black child had yet attempted to register at Mansfield High.8
Nor would they.
On the afternoon of 31 August, Allan Shivers, the state’s Democratic governor, announced that he was despatching the Texas Rangers to Mansfield to ‘see that order is kept’. But the state’s elite law enforcement officers would not be used to protect black schoolchildren, nor would they enforce the court ruling. Instead, Shivers despatched the Rangers, with their distinctive, wide-brimmed hats, to maintain segregation. Citing concern for the ‘general welfare’, he urged school board officials to transfer out of the district any pupil, ‘white or colored’, whose attendance or attempted attendance at Mansfield High School ‘would reasonably be calculated to incite violence’, and ordered the Rangers to ‘arrest anyone, white or colored, whose actions are such as to represent a threat to the peace . . .’ Shivers also had a clear message for the authorities in Washington: ‘If this course is not satisfactory . . . to the federal government, I respectfully suggest further that the Supreme Court, which is responsible for the [desegregation] order, be given the task of enforcing it.’ The governor’s willingness to defy the federal court, and the strength of local white resistance, guaranteed that – for now – segregation remained. The doors of Mansfield High would stay closed to African Americans until September 1965.9
*
Eight hundred miles away in Clinton, Tennessee, twelve African American teenagers did manage to attend classes at the previously all-white high school, but they had to run a gauntlet of hate that was, if anything, even worse than that in Mansfield. Clinton – a small mill town, nestled in the Cumberland Mountains of east Tennessee – was a relatively prosperous community which prided itself on being a calm, well-ordered kind of place, with a strong civic ethos: ‘Welcome to Clinton. A Wonderful Place to Live’, boasted the sign that greeted visitors. Clinton’s population of 3,700 or so included more than two hundred African Americans, who were concentrated into the segregated west-side neighbourhood of Foley Hill (known to whites as ‘Nigger Hill’). The nearby Oak Ridge atomic energy centre provided unskilled employment for many of the town’s black men, while African American women were likely to work as domestic help in the homes of the local white middle-class. In the absence of local provision, Clinton’s black teenagers had to travel to Knoxville, fifteen miles away, to attend high school. However, in January 1956, following a five-year legal fight, the courts finally ordered the Anderson County School Board to desegregate its three high schools, including Clinton High, by the autumn.10
As the new school year dawned, there was good reason to believe that the desegregation of Clinton High would be completed peacefully. Over the spring and summer David J. Brittain, the school’s thirty-nine-year-old principal, had organised a series of meetings to prepare teachers and students for desegregation, while the local newspaper had printed details of the school’s new policies on sports and social events to calm white fears about interracial ‘mixing’. On Monday 20 August, seven hundred students – including twelve African Americans – had attended Clinton High, without incident, to register formally for classes. The town’s white citizens were by no means enthusiastic about integration, but they did appear resigned to it. As the editor of the Clinton Courier-News explained, ‘We have never heard anyone in Clinton say he wanted integration . . . but we have heard a great many people say: “We believe in the law. We will obey the ruling of the Court. We have no other lawful choice”.’11 Then, at this critical moment, a twenty-six-year-old native of Camden, New Jersey, entered the fray.
Newsweek’s Bill Emerson later wrote that John Kasper was ‘to some people an almost spectral figure, a satanic rabble rouser licked about with flame, and smoking hate’, while for others he was ‘a sort of Citizens’ Council version of Moses come to set his people free’.12 An acolyte of the modernist poet and notorious anti-Semite Ezra Pound, Kasper – who earned a degree in English and Philosophy at Columbia University – had abandoned a PhD in order to run a right-wing bookstore in New York’s Greenwich Village. (During this time, he enjoyed friendships – and, it is said, intimate relationships – with African Americans of both sexes.) Drawn increasingly to the conspiratorial world-view of the political far right, Kasper had cut his teeth as a militant anti-Communist before forging a career as one of America’s most notorious race-baiters.13 In Clinton, he would whip up a storm of racial animosity that threatened to run out of control.
Kasper, who had arrived in Clinton late on the evening of Friday 24 August, immediately set to work – first phoning around local whites to recruit support, and then handing out provocative, racist literature on the streets (one leaflet included pictures of an African American man kissing a white woman).14 On the Saturday afternoon, a delegation of Clinton’s civic leaders, including the newspaper editor, the mayor and the chief of police, tried to persuade Kasper to leave town. The following evening, after holding a small rally, Kasper was arrested on charges of vagrancy and attempting to incite a riot. On Monday, 715 white students, together with a dozen African Americans, attended their first classes at Clinton High. Although a small number of pickets gathered outside the school in protest, there was no serious trouble. The following day, the crowd outside the school was a bit bigger and, at noon, Kasper – who had been acquitted that morning due to insufficient evidence – confronted the principal on the school grounds, demanding that he ‘get the niggers out’ or resign.15 Over the next few weeks, Brittain – a ‘gentle, scholarly’ man, popular with his students – was subjected to a harrowing ordeal: ‘the continuous midnight ringing of his telephone, the ugly voices out of the night snarling foul insults and threats whenever he lifted the receiver; the fiery crosses burned in front of his house; the boycott by active segregationists of any tradesman courageous enough to continue dealing with [him]’.16 It was to Brittain’s great credit that, despite these pressures, he held firm.17
That Tuesday evening, Kasper addressed a crowd of several hundred in the courthouse square. Accusing the local authorities of lacking ‘guts’, he argued that ‘the people’ constituted a higher authority than the Supreme Court, and pledged to fight to preserve segregation ‘however long it takes’. Over the next few days, Kasper exploited growing resentment of the town’s established leadership class (in the words of one resident, they had ‘ruled the roost too long’), and some of his most ardent followers were to be found in the ‘dingy’ mining villages and ‘little hard-scrabble farms’ that surrounded Clinton. With little else going for them, these dirt-poor whites proved determined to hold on to the advantages (whether real or imagined) that their skin colour conferred on them. Meanwhile, recent migrants from the Deep South, who had been lured to the area by the Oak Ridge atomic facility and had brought with them a visceral loathing of African Americans, could also be found cheering on Kasper as he preached his gospel of hate.18
On Wednesday morning, a crowd of 125 greeted the black students with shouts of ‘coon’, ‘nigger’ and ‘black ape’, as they arrived on the school grounds; later that afternoon, a number of black students were chased through the streets. As darkness began to fall, some eight hundred whites gathered once more at the large, ugly brick courthouse, where they witnessed Kasper defiantly tear up a temporary injunction restraining him from interfering with school desegregation. Urging the people to continue their efforts, Kasper declared that ‘no amount of injunctions, not even ten thousand of them, can stop something the people do not want and never will have’.19 Meanwhile, in Foley Hill, African American men stood guard to ward off attack, while their families took refuge in cellars. On Thursday, there was further trouble: some black students were pelted with tomatoes, while sixteen-year-old Bobby Cain was attacked as he walked to a drive-in custard stand to buy his lunch. One woman ‘clubbed him with an umbrella’, while others punched him and threatened him with knives. When Cain drew his pocketknife in self-defence he was taken into protective custody by the police.20 On the Friday, fears of further violence led to a sharp drop in school attendance (only 446 students, including ten African Americans, turned up for classes) and that evening, as news swirled around that Kasper had been found guilty of contempt and sentenced to a year in jail, the crowds that had gathered outside the courthouse were fired up by an incendiary speech from the Alabama segregationist and former radio announcer Asa Carter. After denouncing the Supreme Court and the NAACP, Carter told his audience that it was their ‘duty’ as ‘Christian, Anglo-Saxon citizens’ to protect their racial heritage, and he praised the Ku Klux Klan as ‘the reason we don’t have banana colored skin, kinky hair and think lips’. Marching through the streets, throwing firecrackers and chanting ‘We want Kasper!’ the mob attacked the cars of passing African American motorists, while a delegation headed for the mayor’s house, which they threatened to dynamite.21
The following morning, Clinton’s Board of Aldermen declared an official state of emergency and, warning of ‘bloodshed before the night is over’, requested urgent state assistance. With the overstretched police force at breaking point, they also organised an improvised auxiliary force under the leadership of Leo Grant, a former paratrooper who had seen action in Korea. No cheerleaders for integration, Clinton’s white moderates were nevertheless determined to uphold the rule of law. As one of Grant’s volunteer policemen put it: ‘Hell, it ain’t a matter of wanting or not wanting niggers in the school, it’s a matter of who’s going to run the town, the Government or that mob out there.’22
By 8 p.m., a crowd of two thousand whites that had gathered once more on the town square was facing down Leo Grant’s men, who had formed a ‘skirmish line on the lawn’. With their shotguns at the ready, the improvised police force began to move on the ‘jeering, taunting mob’, which, having ignored repeated orders to disperse, was now threatening to storm the courthouse. As lightning crackled overhead, Grant’s men fired two volleys of tear gas, scattering most of the crowd. Within minutes a group of 150 diehards had re-formed and were striding ‘menacingly toward the police’, yelling, ‘Let’s get the nigger lovers, let’s get their guns and kill them.’ At this moment, thirty-nine patrol cars, carrying a hundred state troopers, roared into town, ‘sirens shrieking and searchlights blazing’. With the help of moderate segregationists, who urged the crowds to be ‘lawful and orderly’, they were able to establish an uneasy peace.23
The following day, the Sunday morning calm was shattered as a hundred jeeps, seven M41 tanks and three armoured personnel carriers (with .50-calibre machine guns) rumbled along Clinton’s narrow roads, bringing with them more than six hundred troops of the Tennessee National Guard.24 They were there on the orders of Governor Frank G. Clement, a racial moderate and opponent of ‘massive resistance’, who justified his actions on the grounds that he could not ‘sit back and allow a lawless element to take over. If they can take over Tennessee because of one issue, they can take it over on others. It may be your home that they take over next.’25 Ironically, given this massive show of force, three thousand people – the largest crowd of the entire crisis – turned out at the courthouse that evening to denounce integration. Firecrackers were thrown at passing cars, threats were made against African Americans, a cross was burned on the school grounds, and National Guardsmen, many wearing gas masks and holding fixed bayonets, were heckled.26 Just after eight o’clock, the mob spotted a young African American sailor, James Chandler, in town to visit his girlfriend, as he walked to the bus station. Two hundred men and teenage boys, screaming, ‘Get out of town, nigger,’ set off in pursuit and quickly cornered the nineteen-year-old at a gas station. As they closed in, twelve Guardsmen arrived on the scene and, forming a protective cordon around the terrified Chandler, ushered him to safety.27
Within twenty-four hours, order had been restored: gatherings at the courthouse were banned, the use of public address systems and outdoor speaking were prohibited, an evening curfew was imposed on the courthouse square, and roadblocks and regular street patrols were organised. Trouble did not disappear overnight (indeed, it briefly spread to nearby Oliver Springs, amid false reports that the school there was about to integrate), but it did become more isolated and sporadic. Importantly, African Americans continued to attend classes at Clinton High.28 An undercurrent of tension, though, remained: black pupils were subjected to petty harassment from some of their classmates (ink was deliberately knocked over their books, for instance, and they were jostled in the corridors), and a slate of segregationist candidates appeared well placed to win the municipal elections, scheduled for 4 December.29 On the Sunday before the vote, the Rev. Paul W. Turner, the minister at the town’s First Baptist Church, preached a message of conciliation, telling his fellow whites that black students were legally and morally entitled to attend Clinton High ‘without heckling or obstruction’. Two days later, the thirty-three-year-old minister escorted six ‘nervously smiling’ black children from Foley Hill to the school, braving segregationist bystanders who accused him of being a ‘nigger-lovin’ son of a bitch’. As he left the school, Turner was accosted by a mob and subjected to a vicious beating that left his blood smeared all over the side of a parked car. News of the disgraceful attack travelled fast and prompted widespread revulsion. Over the next few hours, hundreds of citizens turned out to cast their vote for the moderate candidates – who ended up outpolling the hardline segregationists by three to one.30 As one citizen explained, Turner was ‘a symbol. What happened, happened to us all – and it waked us up.’31
On 17 May 1957 – three years to the day after the Supreme Court had issued its historic Brown ruling, and almost nine months after he had lain awake at night, trembling with fear at the prospect of attending classes at the school down the hill – Bobby Cain became the first African American to graduate from an integrated public high school anywhere in the South.32
For the gutsy Gordon family of Wheatcroft, in western Kentucky, the school desegregation crisis would play out rather differently. In early September, after a mob had sought to prevent James, aged ten, and Theresa, aged eight, from attending classes in nearby Clay, Governor Albert Chandler had despatched National Guard units to the little mining town – as well as to Sturgis, ten miles away, where crowds of whites, armed with pitchforks and shovels, had blocked the school entrance – to enforce desegregation. Louise Gordon – a ‘thin, wonderfully sassy’ twenty-eight-year-old with a ‘ready smile, and a happy twinkle in her eyes’ – had been quietly determined that her children attend the formerly allwhite school, no matter what the risk: ‘if you got the guts to go’, she explained to her young son, ‘I’ve got the guts to take ye.’ The Gordons would, though, pay a high price for their defiance: the man who supplied bottled water to their house (which had no mains supply) abruptly cancelled his deliveries; Louise’s husband was dismissed from his job at a local garage and employers within a forty-mile radius refused to take him on; dynamite was exploded in their neighbourhood; local shopkeepers refused to serve Louise, who had to travel thirty miles to purchase food and other provisions. Faced with an unrelenting campaign of intimidation, Louise made the painful decision to abandon the town of her birth and build a new life for her family outside the Bluegrass State.33
At 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday 5 September, Dwight D. Eisenhower appeared before 191 journalists who had gathered in the Executive Office Building, a block north of the White House, for one of his regular news conferences. The school crises in the South had been headline news not just in the United States but all over the world (the Soviets, naturally, had a ‘field day’ over it), so it was not surprising that questions soon turned to school desegregation.34
Eisenhower had, to the great disappointment of civil rights supporters, repeatedly refused to endorse the Brown decision, arguing that it was his job to enforce the Constitution, not to interpret it. The president had instructed the federal commissioners who ran the District of Columbia to make the nation’s capital a model of peaceful school desegregation, and pressed for an end to Jim Crow in the capital’s hotels, restaurants and other public accommodations.35 But there is little doubt that ‘Ike’ had profound reservations about the Brown ruling; in private he claimed that the court had ‘set back badly’ the ‘whole issue’ of civil rights.36 As well as expressing concerns that the court was ‘trying to reach out and control so many parts of the Federal government’, the president also had a good deal of sympathy for white southerners. As he told his cabinet, ‘these people’ had not been breaking the law during the previous sixty years (the Supreme Court had, after all, previously held segregation to be constitutional) and so it was entirely understandable that they now felt shocked and angry. ‘We cannot’, he explained, ‘erase the emotions of three generations just overnight.’37 But while the president had no difficulty in empathising with southern whites, he seemed emotionally and intellectually incapable of empathising with blacks. Indeed, Eisenhower never fully grasped the strength of African Americans’ determination to enjoy first-class citizenship under the law, nor understood their mounting frustration at the painfully slow pace of change.38 During the crisis at the University of Alabama back in February, the president had been content to leave the matter in the hands of the local authorities. It was a formula that he had no intention of abandoning.
Asked about the racist violence that had erupted over recent days, Eisenhower simply noted that ‘local governments have moved promptly to stop the violence’, before reminding the reporters – and the wider public – that, under America’s federal system, Washington only had the authority to intervene if a particular state was ‘not able to handle the matter’. Turning to Mansfield, the president explained that ‘the Texas authorities had moved in and order was restored, so the question became unimportant’. When pressed on whether Allan Shivers’s decision to send Texas Rangers to prevent school desegregation constituted ‘a surrender to mob rule’, Eisenhower argued that it was not yet clear whether the black students had been transferred out permanently ‘or until the situation was under control’. He then returned to the question of federal authority, stressing that the United States would be ‘in a bad way’ if the government in Washington exercised police powers ‘habitually’.39 The president also made a characteristic appeal to ‘people of good will’ to help the South reach an amicable solution. Tellingly, though, Eisenhower referred to ‘extremists on both sides’:
The South is full of people of good will, but they are not the ones we now hear. We hear the people that are adamant and are so filled with prejudice that they even resort to violence; and the same way on the other side of the thing, the people who want to have the whole matter settled today.40
In NAACP headquarters in New York, the president’s remarks were met with despair. Writing to the White House the next day, Thurgood Marshall – the Association’s top lawyer, and a man who had done more than anyone to help overturn the pernicious ‘separate but equal’ ruling of 1896 – accused the president of apportioning responsibility for the recent violence ‘between lawless mobs and other Americans who seek only their lawful rights in a lawful manner, often after unbelievably long periods of waiting’. This moral equivalence between segregationist ‘hate-mongers’ and ‘those of us who are trying under the most difficult conditions to obtain the rights which have been enjoyed by other Americans for . . . many years’ was, to say the least, ‘unfortunate’. Marshall and his colleagues urged Eisenhower to ‘speak out in forthright terms against anyone who openly and violently interferes with the orderly and judicial processes of the federal government’.41
The following year, Eisenhower did sign into law a landmark, if heavily emasculated, Civil Rights Act, the first such legislation since the 1870s. The president also ordered the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, when opposition to school desegregation there erupted into a carnival of lawlessness in which the governor, Orval Faubus, was clearly complicit. But he made it very clear that these were exceptional circumstances, and seemed to go out of his way to mollify white southerners. When it came to providing a clear moral stance on desegregation, there was only silence. Indeed, when Faubus subsequently closed down Little Rock’s public schools rather than see them integrated, Eisenhower claimed that he was powerless to act.42
Five years after the Brown decision, a mere 6.4 per cent of black students in the South were attending integrated schools; in the Deep South, that figure was 0.2 per cent. Eisenhower was, of course, not solely (or even, perhaps, largely) to blame for this, and his successor – John F. Kennedy – was hardly an enthusiastic interventionist.43 But Ike’s reluctance to use his enormous personal authority to press for compliance with the Constitution was striking. Twenty years later, when Roy Wilkins sat down to write his memoirs, his disappointment in Eisenhower still ran deep. The president was ‘a fine general and a good, decent man’, Wilkins acknowledged, ‘but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German now’.44