It has been largely lost to history that the struggle for civil rights that occurred in America back in the 1950’s and 1960’s was motivated in part by and bore a tremendous impact on foreign relations, and the fight against the rising "Red Menace" of Communism. As developing-world nations emerged from under colonial rule and began to self-govern, the U.S. State Department undertook a concerted effort to align these nations with their own foreign policy interests. In other words, the government wanted to make sure that these countries supported "democracy" and not "communism."
Yet our own domestic policy of rampant institutional racism stood in the way; developing nations could easily see that in the United States, all humans were not, indeed, created equal. Thus, the integration of public schools presented President Eisenhower with the opportunity to demonstrate to our allies and would-be allies abroad that indeed, the United States was a so-called land of opportunity. It was crucially important for American interests abroad that we "solve" the problem of widespread racial inequality.
Hence, Eisenhower’s use of military force to integrate Little Rock Central High School and uphold Brown v. Board of Education. While Eisenhower might have personally also agreed with the merits of the decision, forcible integration was as much a gesture to those abroad as it was to those previously on the receiving end of "separate but equal."
Fifty Years Ago:
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Headline, New York Times, front page, September 5, 1947 | Letter to the Editor, New York Times, page 24, September 7, 1957. |
On September 4th, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed his state’s National Guard to support the segregationists and block the nine black students from entering the school.
On September 20th, the Governor withdrew the National Guard, but asked the black students not to go to school at once – a "cooling off" period was needed before they could integrate, he said.
On September 23rd, the police secretly brought the nine students into the school, but when mobs of segregationists learned of the move, they tried to storm the school but were repelled by police officers.
Caption: ALL EYES ON CENTRAL HIGH: The scene yesterday morning in Little Rock,Ark., before mob violence caused withdrawal of Negro students.
"Little Rock Police, Deployed at Sunrise, Press Mob Back at School Barricades." New York Times, page 1, September 24, 1957.
Perhaps lost to the passage of time is the detail that during the altercation, several black journalists were violently attacked by the crowd.
Caption: VIOLENCE IN LITTLE ROCK: Alex Wilson, Negro reporter, is kicked at Central High by white man holding brick.
Larger Version available here.
"A mob of belligerent, shrieking and hysterical demonstrators forced the withdrawal today of nine Negro students from Central High School here. Despite a heavy turnout of local and state police ... city authorities bowed to the fury of about 1,000 white supremacists."
"Students Unhurt; Return Today Unlikely—City Authorities Yield to Crowd." New York Times, page 1, September 24, 1957.
On September 24th, President Eisenhower ordered the Army to Little Rock, federalized the National Guard, and forcibly integrated the school.
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That same week, thousands of miles away in Grand Forks, ND, jazz musician Louis Armstrong was preparing for a concert, and breaking barriers of his own as the first black man to stay in the Dakota Hotel, then the finest accomodations in town. An intrepid young journalist managed to sneak into his room under the guise of delivering Armstrong’s lobster dinner, and asked him about school integration:
...soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. "It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country," a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was "two faced," and had "no guts." For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: "uneducated plow boy." The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.
( ... )
Mr. Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour to the Soviet Union for the State Department. "They ain’t so cold but what we couldn’t bruise them with happy music," he had said. Now, though, he confessed to having second thoughts. "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell," he said, offering further choice words about the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. "The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?"
( ... )
The article ran all over the country. Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze broadcast it on the evening news. The Russians, an anonymous government spokesman warned, would relish everything Mr. Armstrong had said. A radio station in Hattiesburg, Miss., threw out all of Mr. Armstrong’s records. Sammy Davis Jr. criticized Mr. Armstrong for not speaking out earlier. But Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Marian Anderson quickly backed him up.
New York Times, "The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise."
When Armstrong received word that President Eisenhower forced integration of the schools, he sent him a wire reading, "If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy. God bless you."
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Which brings me to this past week, and Bill O’Reilly’s utter and complete shock that black people behave the same way in restaurants as do white people:
O’Reilly reported that he "had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful," adding: "I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship." Later, during a discussion with National Public Radio senior correspondent and Fox News contributor Juan Williams about the effect of rap on culture, O'Reilly asserted: "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."
O'Reilly also stated: "I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the [Rev. Jesse] Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They're just trying to figure it out. 'Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.’"
Media Matters
O’Reilly is shocked, shocked to discover that black people are civilized human beings, too. Notably, for O’Reilly, his comfort with black Americans is based solely on their ability to "act white," to behave in a manner that he otherwise associates only with white people. By expressing such surprise that black people could act "respectful," O’Reilly creates a linguistic binary suggesting that the rest of the time, he thinks, quite clearly, that they don’t.
And what of that dig on Sharpton, his dinner companion, and Jackson? O’Reilly wants to erase the radical politics of race, to gloss over or ignore the decades of history delineated above, when thousands of white people protested the integration of public schools, and the government worried more that racism made them look bad in the fight against Communism than about the importance of true equality. Somehow, to O’Reilly, thinking for onesself equates to thinking like a conservative white man.
Once those nine students—and the thousands of students that followed in their footsteps--entered the all-white high school, they had to face as much racism as that which lay outside, naked behind the police barricades. Prejudiced teachers. History taught from the victorious white man’s perspective. Efforts to gloss over the contributions of black Americans to our country. O’Reilly’s up-by-your-bootstraps theory of individual progress seeks to deny this history, to suggest that really, if you can just act white enough, the problem of racism will once and for all be truly "solved."
How can anyone deny that racism is still a tremendous problem in this country? How can anyone think that the sheer act of integrating schools, desegregating water fountains, enshrining voting rights was enough to overcome decades, centuries of institutional racism? What about failing schools in minority areas? What of the consternation over considering systematic racial disadvantage in college admissions?
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Looking back at the 1950’s and 1960’s, the State Department understood that the foreign recognition of racism here in America would be detrimental to their larger efforts to "win" the Cold War. Even Republicans like Eisenhower realized that efforts to overcome these structures of inequality would benefit not only Americans (and admittedly, the government did little to actively try and overcome institutional racism), but the perception of our country as the "land of opportunity" to those abroad.
Today, conservatives and Republicans have returned to the politics of explicit racism to push their agenda at home and abroad. One of their loudest mouthpieces, O’Reilly, feels no qualms about baldly stating his shock at the civilized nature of the non-white. Their presidential candidates skip the NAACP debate, save for Tom Tancredo, who likely only attended to try and drum up anti-immigrant sentiment. Their party tries to block renewal of the Voting Rights Act; their Supreme Court nominees write decisions reversing years of judicial precedent that suggests that indeed, we need to consider institutional racism, and not only consider, but try to eradicate it.
Years ago, a more thoughtful President understood how these actions would be perceived abroad, and—even if solely for political gain—sought to overcome racism. Now, our government seeks to inflame it, to further deepen the divides along racial and cultural lines.
It’s sad, really. So while we remember the forced integration of public schools fifty years ago this week, it bears thinking about what progress has been made since then. A sizeable percentage of Americans still feel as the protesters outside that Little Rock high school, who chanted, "two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate."
Now, what are we going to do about it?