Fifties (69 page)

As late as April, Reed was still holding out, but Warren was lunching regularly with him, and often including Burton and Minton, Truman appointees who were closer to Reed than the others. Finally, the Chief Justice made his move: “Stan, you’re all by yourself in this now,” he said. “You’ve got to decide whether it’s really the best thing for the country.” In the end he caved in; all he asked was for a decision that made the dismantling gradual, rather than violent and quick. “There were many considerations that pointed to a dissent. They did not add up to a balance against the Court’s opinion. The factors looking toward a fair treatment for Negroes are more important than the weight of history,” Reed wrote Frankfurter a few days after the
Brown
decision.

Warren’s decision reflected the nature of compromise. It sacrificed brilliance for simplicity and deliberately sought not to offend. Jackson’s clerk, Barrett Prettyman, thought it the work of a skilled politician who knew exactly how far he could push people before their backs were up. The 9–0 decision was a great personal triumph. Frankfurter, not often given to praise, wrote: “Dear Chief: This is a day that will live in glory. It’s also a great day in the history of the court, and not the least for the course of deliberation which brought about the result. I congratulate you.” (Frankfurter’s benign view of Warren did not last long; soon he decided that Warren was going too far in the cause of civil liberties.) So it was that on May 17, 1954, Earl Warren read the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court on an issue that had haunted America for almost a century: “We conclude that in the field of public opinion the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Not all black leaders were satisfied, although almost everyone was stunned that it was a unanimous decision. The question of compliance still existed, and a year later in a second case, largely known as
Brown II,
the Court outlined what it expected.

The
Brown
v.
Board of Education
decision not only legally ended segregation, it deprived segregationist practices of their moral legitimacy as well. It was therefore perhaps the single most important moment in the decade, the moment that separated the old order from the new and helped create the tumultuous era just arriving. It instantaneously broadened the concept of freedom, and by and large it placed the Court on a path that tilted it to establish rights to outsiders; it granted them not only greater rights and freedoms but moral
legitimacy, which they had previously lacked. This had a profound effect on the growing and increasingly powerful communications industry in the United States. Because of
Brown,
reporters for the national press, print and now television, felt emboldened to cover stories of racial prejudice. Those blacks who went into the streets in search of greater freedom found that in this new era, they were not only covered but treated with respect and courtesy by journalists.
Brown
v.
Board of Education
was just the beginning of a startling new period of change, not just in the area of civil rights, but in all aspects of social behavior. One era was ending and another beginning.

That Earl Warren found the President less than enthusiastic about the cause of civil rights in the South would have come as no surprise to Frederic Morrow, the first black special assistant ever to work in the White House. Morrow had worked for the NAACP as a field secretary and then for CBS in the public affairs department. After twenty years of the liberal policies of Roosevelt and Truman, he was the rarest of things—a black Republican.

In 1952 he had been asked to be the liaison between the black community and the campaign of Dwight Eisenhower. Morrow had some doubts about the job, but had accepted it, only to endure a series of endless humiliations, some large and some small, during the campaign. In Los Angeles, the rest of the campaign party was placed in the Ambassador Hotel’s best rooms, but he was given a virtual closet, obviously reserved for chauffeurs and servants of guests; in San Francisco, hotel security men, watching him leave for dinner with a group of Republican co-workers, decided that Morrow had snuck a white woman into his room, and literally smashed open his door at 3
A.M.
to uncover the evidence—only to find him sleeping alone. In Salt Lake City, a young white woman running the elevator again and again refused to let him on. He was, he later reflected, angry; but given the attitude of the people he worked for, he felt it important not to embarrass a man who might be President of the United States.

He stayed with the campaign because he believed in the historic process itself. He was the grandson of people who had fled slavery and someone had to carry this special burden, someone had to be first. For some reason, he decided, he was chosen. In addition, he liked the candidate himself. That was not to say that he had a lot of contact with Eisenhower. His role was not so much to offer advice—
for this was a campaign largely run by men who did not want advice from a black man on behalf of other blacks—but rather it was to be visible at certain times and invisible at others. Yet Morrow was determined at some point to take up with the candidate his testimony, just before the invasion of Japan began, that the Army fought better as a segregated entity and that it was the wrong time to integrate the Army. He finally had a chance to talk with Ike about it one day in October 1952 on a train ride back from an appearance at West Point. Morrow told Eisenhower of his own bitterness at having had to serve in segregated units and how much other blacks resented the way in which they had been treated in what was ostensibly a war fought on behalf of democratic ideals. Ike answered that his field commanders had convinced him that the battle of Japan was about to take place and that it was not a time for social experiments. They were, of course, Eisenhower seemed to note with regret, almost all Southerners. Then he looked at Morrow and asked if it was true that his father was a minister. Yes, said Morrow. His father as well as his grandfather. “Does he ever talk to you about forgiveness?” Ike asked. Yes, Morrow answered. Often. “Well, that’s what I’m doing now,” Dwight Eisenhower said. Then the candidate talked about his own prejudice toward black soldiers early in his career. It was rooted in an assignment right after his graduation from West Point, when he had been in charge of a black Illinois National Guard unit. Poorly trained, poorly educated, often led by second-rate white officers, they had performed poorly for him. Dwight Eisenhower said that he was working to overcome his own prejudices, and Morrow finally decided he was a good man, a prisoner of his own isolation and the beliefs of his generation, but decent nonetheless.

After Ike was elected, Morrow believed he had been promised a job in the White House. He duly resigned from CBS, was given a warm farewell party, and moved to Washington. He was stunned by what he found in Washington. New York City in early 1953 might not have been, in racial terms, the most enlightened city in the world, but it was nonetheless relatively open and legally integrated. There was a general belief that life for black people was getting better there. Washington, by contrast, was a Southern city, segregated not just by tradition and culture but by law. White cab drivers would not pick up a black man: When Morrow went to Washington from New York, he had to have a friend meet him with a car at Union Station. Blacks could not eat in white restaurants or stay at white hotels. There was virtually no integrated housing, as he soon discovered from a prolonged search for a decent apartment. Even when the
resources of the White House were summoned on his behalf, little turned up. Finally it was decided to pressure the owner of a big residential hotel, who was said to be a major contributor to the Eisenhower campaign. The owner said that yes, he would offer Morrow an apartment but Morrow would have to use the freight elevator to get to his room and he could not use the main lobby, nor could he eat in the building’s restaurant. I am supposed to work in the White House, for the President of the United States, and I can barely find a place to live and eat, Morrow thought. In the end, with a great deal of effort, he found a small room in a rare integrated building on Rhode Island and Thirteenth.

Another thing he found, to his shock, was that the promised job with the Eisenhower administration did not exist. There were powerful men in the new administration who were sharply opposed to the idea of a black presidential assistant. At first there was some haggling over money, and then even when that had been ironed out, the job offer was not forthcoming. Eventually, a call came to Morrow from the White House: Nothing was available. Some of the opposition to him, he thought, was generational—men of a certain age did not want a black peer; some was political, for Ike had done surprisingly well in breaking into the Democratic South, virtually doubling the number of votes the GOP had received during the Democratic thirties and forties.

It was, Morrow later said, one of the most humiliating moments in his life. He had announced to all his friends that he was going to be in the White House and now found himself outside it. Eventually, he took a minor position as an adviser in the Commerce Department; he was told there was still a possibility that something might open up in the White House. It did—two years later. In the summer of 1955 he was given a job in the Executive Office Building. Almost from the first, he found himself walking on eggshells. He was isolated and given little encouragement from the administration. None of the young women in the office stenographic pool wanted to serve as his secretary, and when one young woman volunteered, in Morrow’s phrase, “impelled by a sense of Christian duty,” she arrived in his office and burst into tears. That was not an auspicious beginning. When staff members from the White House came by to see him at his apartment, he asked them to come in pairs so there would be as little gossip as possible and so it would not seem that white women were visiting him.

He quickly found that there were certain rules for survival in his new, precarious position. It was important
not
to presume anything:
That is, if he was invited to be with a certain White House official or group one day, he was not to presume that he would be invited the next day. It also meant that if he was invited to ride in a certain car, he should not presume that the other passengers all wanted him to be in the car nor did they agree that the White House should have a black aide.

He always had to be prepared to be insulted. When Morrow represented the President at a Lincoln Day ceremony in Topeka, Kansas, a woman came over near the end of the reception and told him, “Boy, I am ready to go now; go outside and get me a taxi.” When he went to a social gathering at Vice-President Nixon’s, another woman, slightly under the influence of liquor, in Morrow’s view, asked him to get her coat and complained sharply when he seemed slow about it. When in 1958 he asked to go over and hear the final arguments being held before the Supreme Court on the Little Rock school integration case, at first he could not get in. He was told to see J. Lee Rankin, the solicitor general, who would get him in. Morrow did as requested, and Rankin immediately handed him his briefcase and said, “You are now my messenger.” Even his colleagues in the White House, he noticed, tended to ignore him when their wives were present.

Morrow was willing to accept the personal indignities, for he believed he was opening one more door. He was all too aware of the administration’s lack of true interest in the advancement of black people. What was most difficult for him was his lack of access to the President, as an ever widening gulf separated the President from the dramatic changes taking place in civil rights. Ike’s growing isolation, his unwillingness to meet with moderate, legitimate black leaders, only made Morrow’s job more difficult. Morrow found himself constantly having to defend administration actions he did not necessarily agree with in order to keep what little legitimacy he had in the White House. More and more, the national black leadership was writing off Eisenhower. At times Morrow felt he was being used by the White House as a kind of pacifier for black people.

His closest friend in the White House was Max Rabb, the White House man on minorities, yet even Rabb could be hard on him. “Max,” Morrow wrote in early 1956, “gave me a tongue-lashing on the Negro’s attitude on securing his civil rights. He felt that despite what the administration has done in this area, Negroes had not demonstrated any kind of gratitude and that most of the responsible officials in the White House had become completely disgusted with the whole matter. He said that there was a feeling that Negroes were
being too aggressive in their demands; that an ugliness and surliness of manner was beginning to show through. He felt the leaders’ demands were intemperate ones and had driven most of the liberals to cover. He said Negroes had made no effort to carry along with them the white friends they had gained and that what they were insisting on at the present time so far exceeded what reasonable white people would grant that he was afraid their white friends were becoming few and far between ...” That from the administration man most sensitive to minority issues.

When it came time to leave the White House, Morrow did not, as most White House assistants do, have an easy time finding a job. No jobs seemed to be available for a man with his experience. He was sent by a colleague to see a Washington lawyer who was a prominent power broker of the time and who was a close friend of the President. The lawyer wanted to know how much Morrow made. At that time his salary was around ten thousand dollars a year. The idea, Morrow later reflected, that a black could make more than fifty dollars a week seemed to surprise and offend the lawyer. It was clearly one more sign to him that the racial thing was getting out of control, and the lawyer took time out to lecture Morrow on the evils of the
Brown
decision and the fact that white people like himself, normally inclined to think kindly of black progress, were now turning away from integration. Nor was there a lot of help in finding a job for someone the power broker called a “nice colored boy.” Perhaps selling used cars? Perhaps working for Coke in public relations? He knew of three Negro boys who had jobs like this, although their combined salaries did not equal, as he quickly pointed out, Morrow’s White House pay. Morrow left the man’s office badly shaken. It was, he thought, as if the Civil War had never taken place. Some three years later he found a job in the private sector with Bank of America. Some thirty years later, by then in his eighties, Frederic Morrow, living in retirement in New York City, could not control the anger he felt over the hard times of prolonged unemployment in the early 1960s. He often could not sleep as he pondered how those years had burned up a large part of his limited savings.