Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [78]
Throughout the process Eisenhower had sat conspicuously silent. On the few occasions when he weighed in on race relations, his statements were sufficiently contradictory and middle-of-the-road that each side simply chose to hear what it wanted to hear. Privately, he expressed his feelings more clearly. “Southern whites,” he told Chief Justice Earl Warren, “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school with some big overgrown Negro.”
Many southern Democrats saw Eisenhower’s hedging as further license to defy the Supreme Court. “What he had not done was provide leadership, either moral or political,” remarked the Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose. “What he wanted—for the problem to go away—he could not have.”
On September 4, 1957, the problem exploded. In Little Rock, Arkansas, nine black students attempted to register for classes at the all-white Central High School. A seething white mob forced them to retreat and nearly lynched one of the nine, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford. Governor Orval E. Faubus sided with the mob and called out the National Guard to prevent the black teens from registering.
Ike refused to dignify the situation by getting involved and made a determined show of sticking to his routine by going forward with a scheduled vacation to Newport, Rhode Island. Two weeks later, Eisenhower was still playing golf in Newport, trying to maintain a public facade of leisurely unconcern, while Governor Faubus brazenly continued to defy the highest law of the land. Finally, on September 20, the president summoned the rebellious governor to Newport to plead with him to follow a federal court injunction not to interfere with Little Rock’s integration. “I got the impression at the time,” Faubus later said of the meeting, “that he was attempting to recall just what he was supposed to say to me, as if he were trying to remember instructions on a subject on which he was not completely assured in his own mind.”
Faubus made a vague, and as it turned out short-lived, promise to stand down, and on September 23, the nine black students were spirited into Central High School under police guard through a side door, as the crowd outside chanted, “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”
With tensions rising, and the threat of violence increasing, the nine black students were summoned to the principal’s office. A few were quietly crying but sat numbly, tugging nervously at the plaid skirts and pressed trousers their parents had purchased for the new school year. They were all excellent students, chosen by the NAACP to break Little Rock’s color barrier because of their good grades and character. They watched as worried-looking officials streamed in and out of the principal’s office. From down one of the halls came the sound of glass crashing.
From inside the principal’s office, the students could hear the alarmed officials through the partially opened door. “We’re trapped,” said one frantic voice. “Good Lord, you’re right,” said another. “We may have to let them have one of the kids so we can distract them long enough to get the others out.”
“Let one of those kids hang?” shouted another voice. “How’s that gonna look? Niggers or not, they’re children, and we got a job to do.”
Soon, the door to the principal’s office was flung open, and a tall, dark-haired man addressed the huddled teenagers. “I’m Gene Smith, Assistant Chief of the Little Rock Police Department,” he said in a calm, kind tone. His had been the voice urging that