Thurgood Marshall (46 page)

B
Y THE TIME
M
ARSHALL ARRIVED
in Little Rock, the violence had already started. Daisy Bates awoke to find a cross flaming in front of her house even before schools opened in the fall of 1957. Mrs. Bates, a tall, attractive woman with curly hair, was the NAACP chapter president and with her husband published the
Arkansas State Press
, the state’s major black paper. Daisy Bates had been threatened before, but as the opening day for school approached, the segregationists became more violent. First, the cross was burned. Then a rock shattered her front window, showering her with sharp-edged glass. Bates picked up the heavy rock and found a note attached: “Stone this time. Dynamite next.”

It had been over a month since Bates had arranged for nine black students to integrate Central High School. Now every night Bates was awakened by honking horns and bright lights as people screamed, “Daisy, Daisy, did you hear the news? The coons won’t be going to Central.” Arkansas governor Orval Faubus went on television to announce that he was putting the state’s National Guard around the school to keep out the black students. If any attempt at school integration succeeded, he warned, “blood will run in the streets.”

When Central High opened on September 4, 250 armed National Guardsmen surrounded the school. Fearful black parents sent their children to Bates’s house so they could travel to school together and with adult protection. But one child, Elizabeth Eckford, took the bus to
school by herself and was surrounded by the mob. When the sixteen-year-old tried to get into the building, the soldiers lowered their bayonets at her and ordered her away. As she walked back to the bus stop, a mob gathered and began to shout, “Lynch her! Lynch her!” Grace Lorch, a white woman, finally stepped in and shielded her until she could flee. The other children, who were driven by Bates to Central High, were also turned away.
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The crisis in Little Rock became national news. Governor Faubus sent a telegram to President Eisenhower warning him that despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision and subsequent court orders “it is impossible to integrate some of our schools at this time without violence.”
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Faubus asked Eisenhower not to intervene even though the court’s order was being defied. Marshall got a call from Wiley Branton, the NAACP’s attorney in Little Rock, saying that the school board, under pressure from the governor, was trying to get the court to delay the integration of Central. Marshall took the next flight to Little Rock, where armed men escorted him to the Bateses’.

The atmosphere was tense; guards in front of the Bates home stared at every passing car to see if anyone was about to throw a rock or a bomb. Somehow Marshall—with his confident manner and comic storytelling—reassured the city’s black leaders that everything was going to be all right. Branton escorted him into the guest room, where they would be staying. Branton had his suitcase on the bed farthest from the window—and a safe distance from any rock that marauding segregationists might heave. Marshall joked with the nervous people in the house that he planned to sneak back when Branton was not paying attention and move his roommate’s gear to the bed near the window.

Three years after the
Brown
decision, the intensity of the violence and anger that confronted school integration in Little Rock caught the nation and Marshall by surprise. Events in Little Rock put the slow progress of school desegregation squarely in front of the president, the courts, the press, and the American people.

“I had thought, we’d all thought, that once we got the Brown case, the thing was going to be over,” Marshall said later, looking back on the events leading up to Little Rock with regret over his failure to anticipate what was coming.

“You see, we were always looking for that one case to end all of it.… Well [Brown] did not [solve all our problems], because we all shouted and sat down.… We should have sat down and planned.… The other
side did,” Marshall said. “The other side planned all the delaying tactics they could think of.”
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After the Supreme Court’s 1955 ruling that school boards around the nation could act in “all deliberate speed” to integrate, most school districts did drag their feet, with bogus claims that their elaborate integration plans needed more review. Little Rock, however, had been one of the cities most open to beginning integration.

In the summer of 1954, the school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, had drafted a plan. He wanted to start integration with two new high schools, then come down to the junior highs before integrating the elementary schools. The black community in Little Rock wanted speedier action but was willing to live with the superintendent’s plan. Unexpectedly, however, the school board rejected Blossom’s approach. Instead they approved a slower, smaller effort to integrate one school, Central High, in the fall of 1957.

Even after he had forced acceptance of the slower plan, Gov. Faubus saw the chance to score political points. A combative little man with a strong desire to be liked, Faubus saw himself becoming a hero throughout the South, the champion of frustrated segregationists. He claimed to reporters that he had received confidential reports indicating mobs of segregationists from all over the South were converging on Little Rock. He predicted violence and a “blood bath” if he did not halt school integration.
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Branton, a light-skinned country lawyer with a broad, handsome face, lived just outside Little Rock in Pine Bluff. Marshall liked Branton but was worried that the whirlwind approaching the state might be too much for the friendly, mild-mannered fellow. “I just figured he was a normal, local lawyer,” Marshall said, looking back on Little Rock. “And I would say to my surprise he was one of the most competent guys I ever ran across. They had crosses burning on his lawn and everything. But he was a really tough guy. Any kind of jam you got in, you’d call Wiley.”

On Saturday, September 7, 1957, the day after he arrived, Marshall was in federal district court with Branton. Under pressure from Faubus the school board had requested that Judge Ronald Davies halt the integration plan because of possible violence disrupting Central’s classes. “The threat of tension and the emotional agitation referred to in the petition [from the school board] has no bearing on this [effort to integrate the schools],” Branton told the judge. Judge Davies agreed. Later that day he ruled that the school integration plan was to go forward. With
Marshall and Branton present, the judge told a courtroom packed with the governor’s political supporters: “It must never be forgotten that I have a constitutional duty and obligation from which I shall not shrink.”
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But on Monday, September 9, the governor had the Arkansas National Guard back in place, blocking the black students from entering Central. Marshall, who had been focused on the courts, now realized that this was a political fight and President Eisenhower would have to get involved. Trying to use public opinion as leverage, Marshall had the NAACP issue a press release calling for the president to federalize the National Guard and take command away from Faubus.

Eisenhower, however, was reluctant to take action. He did not want to be labeled as the president who used troops against American citizens. He felt there was no political capital to be gained on either side of the dispute. He had confided to his secretary that the Supreme Court’s ruling in
Brown
had created “the most important problem facing the government, domestically, today.”
⁶
But Eisenhower’s only immediate action was to have the Justice Department go to court seeking an injunction to force Faubus to pull the National Guard away from the school.

Faubus, meanwhile, was growing paranoid. He had already wired the president, expressing alarm that his phone lines were tapped and that he was about to be arrested by federal agents. Eisenhower had reassured the governor that there was no plan to arrest him, but Faubus was not convinced. He asked to meet with the president in person. On Saturday, September 14, Faubus traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, the president’s summer home, to have a private talk.

Governor Faubus pleaded with Eisenhower to defy the Court and support his call for a one-year delay in the school board plan to integrate Central. The governor promised that with extra time he could calm the angry white community. Eisenhower said no. The Supreme Court’s ruling, he said flatly, had the force of law. Faubus nodded and seemed to understand. The meeting ended with handshakes and smiles. But Eisenhower, according to his secretary’s notes, was not pleased. “I got the impression,” she wrote, “that the meeting had not gone as well as had been hoped, that the Federal government would have to be as tough as possible in the situation.… The consensus is that it will backfire badly for the Governor. ”
⁷

Marshall watched Eisenhower’s polite exchange with Faubus with growing disgust. He could not believe that the president was allowing this Jim Crow politician, this yokel, to defy the federal courts. Marshall
got even more angry when Faubus continued to keep the National Guard in front of Central. Marshall could not understand why the president let Faubus run over him. Then came news reports that Eisenhower was planning a meeting on the Arkansas crisis with black political leaders, such as New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell. No one representing the children or the NAACP was asked to attend, and Marshall was incensed.

“As representative [of the] Negro pupils directly involved in litigation being discussed,” he said in a telegram to Eisenhower, “[I] would suggest you discuss matter with either parents or children involved or their lawyer before discussing matter with sundry people not directly connected with litigation involved.”
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Eisenhower did not respond. Marshall felt personally slighted. “If President Eisenhower had used his good offices to say that this is the law and it should be obeyed, that would have accomplished much,” Marshall said years later. “We hoped for it. And we found out too late that indeed, President Eisenhower was opposed to it and was working against it.… I think [Little Rock was] a black mark on President Eisenhower, and there’s nothing in his record that would correct it, in my book.”
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With Eisenhower ignoring him, Marshall went back to federal district court to ask that an injunction be issued to stop Faubus from interfering. A week later the judge directly ordered that the National Guard was not to be used to stop black children from going to Central High.

Pressure was building on Faubus, and this time he obeyed the court order. But angry mobs of Faubus’s supporters, white segregationists, remained around the school. City police could not control the crowds. On September 23 the nine black students were rushed into the building by a police escort and attended school for half a day. While the students were inside, rioting broke out, and the mob grew to more than a thousand. They began screaming, “Oh, my God, they’re in the school.” The white mob started attacking reporters and black passersby. The police chief decided he could not control the situation and ordered the black students to be packed in cars and secretly driven away.
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Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Mann, sent a telegram to the president explaining that Faubus was behind the violence: “The mob that gathered was no spontaneous assembly,” Mann said. “It was agitated, aroused, and assembled by a concerted plan of action.”
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Daisy Bates, meanwhile, telephoned the NAACP’s national office to report that the teachers and white students inside Central were “very
nice” to the black students. But Bates was worried that the mob on the street was growing and becoming more violent. “They are imported from the rural areas—real rednecks, ” she said, announcing that she did not plan to take the children back to the school the next day. “I am afraid the children may be killed.… It is vicious down here. You just don’t know.”

A day later Bates was back on the phone to New York after a group of segregationists, carrying dynamite, was stopped a block from her house. The mob at the school, she reported, continued to beat up anyone black they could get their hands on, and “if the mob can’t find a Negro to jump and beat up, they beat up all the New York reporters.” At night black neighborhoods in Little Rock went completely dark so as not to provide targets for drive-by shooters and arsonists.
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With the situation growing more violent, Mayor Mann wired the president again. In this telegram he begged for federal troops to take control of the high school: “I am pleading to you … in the interest of humanity, law and order and … democracy worldwide to provide the necessary federal troops within several hours.”
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This time the president acted. He ordered the 101st Airborne from Fort Campbell in Kentucky to go to Little Rock. And he traveled from his summer home to the White House to give a nationally televised speech. “I could have spoken from Rhode Island,” Eisenhower began, “but I felt that in speaking from the House of Lincoln, of Jackson, and of Wilson, my words would more clearly convey both the sadness I feel in the action I was compelled today to take and the firmness with which I intend to pursue this course.”
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Bates, Branton, and Marshall were elated. At the same time there was wide concern that sending armed federal troops into an American city might mark the beginning of a second Civil War. “In fact, I’ll confess to you,” Branton later said, “when Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and I looked up and I saw the 101st Airborne and all those damn Army troops, … I said, ‘My God, what have I brought on?’ ”
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Several prominent southern politicians attacked the president for using federal troops in the South. Sen. James Eastland, a Mississippi Democrat, referred to Eisenhower’s action as an attempt “to destroy the social order of the South.” And Texas senator Lyndon Johnson said, “No troops from either side [should be] patrolling our school campuses.”
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