Robert Church, Jr., had led a series of boycotts, pickets, and sit-ins targeting D.C. businesses that refused to serve African Americans. Attorney General Herbert Brownell assisted Terrell in the legal campaign against the city’s segregation laws, and argued alongside black lawyers when the case reached the Supreme Court in 1953. The court sided with the administration, and the city was ordered to immediately desegregate places of public accommodation.19
Figure 3. E. Frederic Morrow is congratulated following his swearing-in ceremony at the White House as administrative officer for special projects. Left to right: Bernard Shanley, Val Washington, Morrow, and New Jersey Representative William Widnall, July 11, 1955. National Park Service photo, 72-1447-3, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.
The president also fulfilled his campaign promise to rid vestiges of segregation from the armed forces. Though Truman had issued an executive order, segregated facilities still existed in much of the South. In his first year in office, Eisenhower enlisted Maxwell Rabb, a white aide sympathetic to African Americans, to ensure the desegregation of mess halls, lavatories, and drinking fountains in Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina. Additionally, he ordered forty-seven Veterans Administration hospitals to integrate their facilities, and directed schools on southern military bases to open their doors to black students. By the fall of 1954, the Department of Defense formally announced that the military’s last segregated unit had been eliminated.20
Eisenhower’s judicial appointments were his most lasting contribution to civil rights. Of particular importance were appointees to southern judicial circuits who later ensured that civil rights laws were enforced in the 1960s. Eisenhower’s tendency to take Attorney General Brownell’s advice regarding court nominees led to a steady stream of liberal appointments that included Elbert Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom, Frank M. Johnson, and other southern Republicans who had previously allied with Black-and-Tans. During his first year on the Fifth Circuit, Johnson made national headlines by ordering the desegregation of Montgomery’s public buses after the successful black boycott. Even more important were Eisenhower’s Supreme Court appointments, particularly Earl Warren, John Marshall Harlan II, and William Brennan, who played an active role in the court’s progressive decisions of the 1950s and 1960s.21
The first major decision of Chief Justice Warren was Brown v. Board of Education, a case that Eisenhower’s Justice Department had been involved with since his inauguration. Early in 1953, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall met several times with Brownell, who submitted an amicus brief that called for the overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson, the legal backbone of Jim Crow, and the integration of public schools. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the NAACP and the Justice Department, paving the way for the legal dismantling of segregation. After the decision, Eisenhower told Walter White, “we had passed, in this year, a milestone of social advance in the U.S.,” and claimed in his memoir that “there can be no question that the judgment of the Court was right.” On the other hand, Eisenhower as president never publicly endorsed Brown, a failure that perhaps emboldened opponents of the decision. White House speechwriter Arthur Larson alleged that the president privately said, “I personally think the decision was wrong,” and Earl Warren claimed the president told him that white southerners had legitimate concerns about their daughters attending school with “big overgrown Negroes.”22
Regardless of Eisenhower’s private beliefs, the RNC and black Republicans immediately attached the victory to his administration. Richard Tobin, a public relations specialist with the national committee, encouraged Republicans to tout their relationship with Warren, arguing that “in the context of the Supreme Court decisions under a Chief Justice appointed by President Eisenhower, decisions as historic as the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln, we have a wonderful story to tell.” The Minorities Division issued a press release stating, “This administration can take pride in having thrown its full weight behind the vigorous presentation of this case to the Supreme Court by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr.” E. Frederic Morrow similarly declared before a Philadelphia audience that the case was “typical of the healthy climate-of-equality that prevails in the Eisenhower Administration.”23
Because of his early administrative actions in the field of civil rights, by 1955 Eisenhower had received the most distinguished prize given by black journalists, the Russwurm Award, and the Chicago Defender’s Robert F. Abbott Memorial Award, given to the person who “did the most to extend democracy at home and abroad.” Even the NAACP’s Walter White and Roy Wilkins, whom black Republicans had criticized as Democratic partisans in 1952, praised Eisenhower’s first years in office. In his 1954 “Report of the Executive Secretary,” White argued, “we owe a debt of gratitude to President Eisenhower for his firm stand against racial segregation,” and separately, Wilkins praised the president’s “personal leadership where the executive can act.” Iowa’s largest black newspaper declared, “no president in our lifetime has struck such a blow against segregation.”24
Seeing these gains, African Americans began to warm to the GOP in the 1950s, with 63 percent of blacks approving Eisenhower’s overall performance by 1955. Polls conducted from 1952 to 1960 found that self-identified Republicans increased from approximately 10 percent of African Americans polled in 1952 to around 21 percent by 1960. Support for the Republican Party remained strong in southern cities with active Black-and-Tan organizations, especially Atlanta and Memphis. During the decade, the Republican leadership of the nominally bipartisan Atlanta Negro Voters League organized thousands of new black voters inside GOP ranks, and George W. Lee’s Lincoln League added nearly fifty thousand African Americans to Memphis voting rolls.25
Republican support among black voters was also high in the border states of Maryland and Kentucky, both of which had a history of competition between moderate Republicans and southern-leaning Democrats. In Baltimore, 44 percent of black voters were registered Republican in 1957, and over 55 percent of that year’s newly registered voters registered with the GOP. The city’s Republican mayor during World War II, Theodore McKeldin, served as governor from 1951 to 1959, and his electoral coalition relied on black voters, whom he won by frequenting black churches and embracing civil rights. In Louisville, Kentucky, 64 percent of registered black voters were Republicans in 1952. They played a significant role in securing the U.S. Senate victory of John Sherman Cooper, who ran to the left of his Democratic opponent on issues of labor, economic relief for the poor, and civil rights.26
The GOP also remained popular within the black middle class. Polls taken during the 1950s found that 30 percent of northern middle-class African Americans were registered Republicans, with numbers potentially higher in under-analyzed rural and southern black communities. Of those who provided their political affiliation in the 1950 edition of Who’s Who in Colored America, a volume that represented a cross section of over two thousand black professionals, approximately 45 percent self-identified as Democrats, 35 percent as Republican, and 20 percent as independent/other. In the mid-1950s, the NAACP’s Henry Lee Moon described “the increasing economic stratification within the Negro community with the development of a more stable and substantial middle class with Republican leanings.” Similarly, E. Frederic Morrow wrote in 1956 that there was a distinct “cleavage of class” in black communities, and that those from the professional classes “have been pre-dominantly Republican.” After a meeting with the National Negro Insurance Association, Val Washington reported high levels of Republican support from the organization’s leaders, who supported Eisenhower’s civil rights stance and were not moved by “the depression psychology which is being spread by the Democrats.”27
Support for the Republican Party was particularly strong in black fraternal organizations, most of which drew their membership from middle-class ministers, lawyers, physicians, and businessmen. Atlanta Republican leader John Wesley Dobbs, for example, was also the longstanding Grand Master of Georgia’s black Masons. The national president of Phi Beta Sigma, one of the largest black college fraternities, was a devout Republican who actively campaigned on behalf of GOP candidates. In Baltimore in 1951, members of the Knights of Pythias formed the State Allied Republican Club, which convened in local lodges and lobbied for civil rights and state