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      Bit by Bit: Civil Rights and the Eisenhower Administration

      Though many African Americans supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 in hopes that the GOP would surpass the Democratic Party on issues of civil rights, the president proved to be a lukewarm ally. He had had few interactions with African Americans in his life before the presidency. Born in Jim Crow Texas and spending nearly all his adult life in a segregated army, he was insulated from racial discrimination and black protests. He was not a white supremacist by any means, but civil rights was not an issue he spent time thinking, or talking, about unless pressed to do so. More pragmatic than ideological, Eisenhower’s self-touted brand of “Modern Republicanism” emphasized moderation and stability over rigid dogma and radical change. As such, he balked at conservative calls to overturn the New Deal, but was also skeptical of idealistic liberals who sought to upend the South’s deeply entrenched racial order. By his second term, he found it increasingly difficult to strike a moderate balance on civil rights that would placate both black and white southerners. Together, these two groups had played an important role in his 1956 victories in Texas, Louisiana, and the border South, with African Americans seeing him as a potential alternative to Democrats and whites valuing his military service and down-to-earth persona. Without decisive leadership from the White House, the Republican Party of the 1950s lacked ideological and strategic moorings, sharing the president’s hope that they could both retain black gains and expand deeper into the Democratic South.

      This balancing act became even harder to maneuver by the late 1950s, as grassroots protests like the Montgomery bus boycott mobilized African Americans across the South and launched a new phase of the civil rights movement. If Eisenhower didn’t want to rock the boat on race relations, the undercurrents of black discontent that had risen to the surface would rock it for him. As E. Frederic Morrow noted, “American Blacks were set to love President Eisenhower. But when he failed to come to grips with their hopes and aspirations, the Black community soured and the expressions of protest became physical rather than just verbal.” As black dissatisfaction morphed into nonviolent demonstrations, and white backlash against activists intensified, Eisenhower’s second term would be marred by his cautious approach that confused and offended both blacks and segregationists. Moderate support for civil rights might have been acceptable, even progressive, in the early 1950s when Eisenhower first entered the political arena, but by the end of the decade African Americans were no longer content with gradual reform. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had cast his ballot for Eisenhower in 1956, reflected the frustrations of many African Americans by the late 1950s, describing the president’s remedy for cancerous Jim Crow as “bit by bit with a tweezer because the surgeon’s knife was an instrument too radical.”¹

      Eisenhower was willing, however, to combat egregious forms of black disenfranchisement. Despite a steady rise in black voter registration in the region since the 1940s, only 25 percent of voting-age African Americans in eleven southern states voted in 1956. In Mississippi, where blacks composed over 40 percent of the state’s adult population, they made up less than 4 percent of registered voters. African Americans represented one-third of Alabama’s population, but only 8 percent of the state’s voters. Approximately 75 percent of Georgia’s voting-age African Americans were not registered. Sixteen counties in the Deep South with majority black populations had zero registered black voters, and just 5 percent of African Americans were registered in forty-nine additional black belt counties. These registration numbers were a byproduct of over sixty years of violence and intimidation. For those who risked their lives and attempted to register, local officials disenfranchised them through a legal maze of poll taxes and restrictions, including literacy tests that featured intentionally impossible questions, such as “How many bubbles are there in a cake of soap?”²

      Central to Eisenhower’s focus on eliminating voter discrimination was his belief that if black voters could be protected, they would end Jim Crow themselves at the ballot box. This would allow for state-level repeals of segregation rather than sweeping federal decrees. By targeting the most obviously unconstitutional denial of black citizenship rights, it also let him off the hook when it came to dealing directly with the social and cultural forms of discrimination that permeated the South. In January 1957, Eisenhower reintroduced voter-protection legislation similar to the failed bill from the previous year. Again written by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, the law made it a federal crime to interfere with voters in federal elections, created a new assistant attorney general to handle civil rights violations, and gave federal judges the power to issue injunctions to protect the right to vote and declare in contempt anyone who interfered. By placing this power in the hands of judges, Brownell intended to remove the matter from criminal trials,

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