Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”

Context

In 1892 Homer Plessy was arrested for traveling in a “whites only” railroad car in his native state of Louisiana. In an effort to strike down segregation laws, Plessy, who was classified as seven-eighths white (“octoroon” in the idiom of his day), might have traveled without notice. As part of a preplanned strategy, however, he bought a first-class ticket and sat down in a “whites only” car. When confronted by the conductor, he refused to move and was arrested. A group of black professionals then challenged the constitutionality of the state’s segregation law by appealing Plessy’s conviction. In 1896 the case of Plessy v. Ferguson reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in an eight-to-one decision, the constitutionality of the segregation law was upheld. The decision in Plessy provided the legal foundation (“separate but equal”) for the broader system of enforced racial segregation that came to characterize the America South.

The 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregated schooling was inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional, marked the crowning achievement of the NAACP’s use of litigation to bring change to the South’s racial order. Beginning in the 1930s the NAACP filed lawsuits that led to equal rates of pay for black and white teachers and opened up graduate schools to African American students, before launching an all-out assault on the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision that the “separate but equal” system was constitutional. The Brown ruling actually involved five separate challenges to school segregation (from Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia) and numerous plaintiffs. The cases were consolidated as Brown v. Board of Education (the Brown in question being Oliver Brown, an African American who wanted his daughter, Linda, to attend her local all-white school).

Those who hoped that the Brown decision might lead to the rapid demise of segregation were to be disappointed. Encouraged by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s lukewarm reaction to the ruling (in that he refused to state publicly whether he agreed with the justices) and by the court’s rather weak enforcement decree in 1955 ( Brown II) and alarmed by the NAACP’s determination to press actively for speedy desegregation, white southerners mobilized to maintain the racial status quo. White Citizens’ Councils, white supremacist organizations that sprang up across the South in the wake of the Brown decision, lobbied politicians, supported candidates for office who promised to resist desegregation, published alarmist tracts, and used intimidation in an effort to cement white opposition to civil rights. Many of the region’s leading politicians began to play the race card for political gain—pledging defiance of the Brown ruling and championing segregation. On March 12, 1956, all but three of the South’s senators, along with the overwhelming majority of its congressional representatives, signed the “Southern Manifesto,” which denounced the Brown ruling as an act of judicial tyranny, upheld the right of the states to govern their internal affairs, and pledged to use all lawful means to reverse the decision. Partly as a result of Massive Resistance, the policy declared by U.S. senator Harry Byrd, Sr., in 1956 to unite the white South in opposition to integration, progress on school desegregation proved painfully slow, and as late as 1963–1964 little more than 1 percent of black children in the South were attending school with whites.

Little Rock was not the only place where a southern governor sought to prevent school desegregation. (Texas governor Allan Shivers had used state troopers to prevent integration in Mansfield in August 1956.) Still, Little Rock was certainly the most famous. On September 2, 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered National Guard troops to Little Rock’s Central High School to prevent nine black schoolchildren from attending classes. Faubus justified his actions—and his defiance of the federal court ruling that had ordered the school’s desegregation—on the ground that he was preserving domestic order. On September 4 the black children attempted to attend class but were turned away by the National Guard troops as a hostile mob shoved and jostled the students and shouted abuse. One of the nine black children, Elizabeth Eckford, who had arrived at Central High before the others, had actually been pursued by angry whites who threatened to lynch her, before being spirited away by a sympathetic white woman, Grace Lorch. A subsequent series of tense negotiations involving Faubus, the U.S. Justice Department, and President Eisenhower failed to resolve the crisis, leaving the matter in the hands of the courts.

On September 20 a federal judge granted an injunction preventing any further interference with the desegregation of Central High, and Faubus ordered that the National Guard be withdrawn. He then flew to Georgia for a meeting of southern governors knowing that by having stoked racial tensions the withdrawal of the troops would likely lead to a breakdown of law and order. On September 23 a mob of angry whites surrounded Central High, and at 11 am the black children were removed from the school for their own safety. The following morning white segregationists again assembled to prevent integration––and with the local police unwilling to intervene and the situation deteriorating, Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Wilson Mann, sent a telegram to the White House requesting that federal troops be deployed as a matter of urgency. That evening, Eisenhower announced that he would send one thousand paratroopers serving with the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to enforce federal law; he also placed the Arkansas National Guard under the control of the federal government. On September 25 federal troops escorted the nine black children to classes in Central High. The school desegregation crisis made Faubus, who had previously been a racial moderate, something of a hero to white segregationists. He easily won reelection in 1958 and eventually left the governor’s mansion, undefeated, in 1967.

In his television and radio address to the nation explaining his decision to send federal troops to Little Rock, President Eisenhower emphasized the importance of upholding the federal court ruling and maintaining the rule of law. However, he also drew attention to the international repercussions of the crisis, arguing that Little Rock had implications for America’s efforts to lead the “free world” in the cold war struggle against international Communism. The respective global positioning of the Soviet Union and United States would come to the forefront of the public consciousness when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, less than two weeks later, on October 4, 1957. In his address, the president noted that America’s enemies had been “gloating” over the Little Rock incident, using it to discredit U.S. claims to support democracy and freedom, and the resulting damage done to America’s standing in the world was considerable. Indeed, the American government was well aware that its domestic record on race relations was an issue of international significance, particularly because the Soviet Union used the persistence of racial discrimination to try to undermine America’s democratic credibility. Moreover, civil rights leaders were eager to exploit this vulnerability to create pressure for meaningful civil rights reform at home; Wilkins’s speech to the Commonwealth Club, delivered a month after the Little Rock crisis, demonstrates as much.