Panel Examines Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Legacy to Mark 70th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education
Columbia Law legal scholars Olatunde C.A. Johnson and Jeremy Kessler joined a discussion on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s complicated record on integration in schools and the military.
Panelists at “Eisenhower and Civil Rights After 70 Years.”
Columbia Law School marked the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education with a discussion of the civil rights record of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1953 paved the way for the decision holding school segregation unconstitutional. The event on September 19 was hosted by The Eisenhower Foundation in partnership with the Law School.
Eisenhower was serving as the 13th president of Columbia University when he was elected to the U.S. presidency in 1952. In remarks opening the panel discussion, Daniel Abebe, Dean and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law, described Eisenhower’s Columbia tenure as “somewhat of a footnote” to his career as U.S. president and commander of the European Allied forces in World War II. But Eisenhower “believed deeply in the promise of American universities as a meeting place for ideas, where courageous scholarship would help break through some of the most intractable challenges of the time,” he said. “I’m proud that such critical, engaged scholarship has a home at Columbia Law School—in much the same way President Eisenhower hoped it would.”
Panelists included Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law, and Jeremy Kessler, Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law, along with Justin Driver (Yale Law School), William I. Hitchcock (University of Virginia), James F. Simon (New York Law School), and Paul B. Stephan (University of Virginia School of Law). It was moderated by Nicholas Rostow (Yale Law School).
The panel examined Eisenhower’s record on civil rights during his wartime leadership and his two terms in the White House. He took steps to integrate troops in Europe in the last years of World War II, Kessler said, for reasons that included military efficiency—but did so at the battalion level rather than the lowest, fighting-unit level.
“He was neither the most vocal integrationist within the military at the time, even in this heightened moment, nor was he the most vocal defender of segregation,” Kessler said. Integrating fighting units, Eisenhower believed, “would go too far and lead to racial strife within the units themselves”—although he also believed, Kessler said, “that the more intense the fighting was, the less racial differences became a problem.”
As president of the United States, Eisenhower appointed California Gov. Earl Warren chief justice of the United States; less than a year later, Warren wrote the single, unanimous Brown opinion. But Eisenhower’s public response to the decision was tepid, and his one meeting with civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, went badly, the panel said. However, in 1957, he signed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and two weeks later, he sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce integration of Central High School as required by Brown.
Marking the anniversary of Brown is “poignant,” Johnson said, because to date, “we haven’t fully desegregated our schools. So that’s always the conflict at the core. But I still think Brown is an important moment in signaling an aspiration to equal citizenship.” Eisenhower “understood the need to mobilize federal power for that project,” she said, “as ambivalent as he was about it.”
Johnson pointed out that one of Eisenhower’s achievements—the interstate highway system—is also part of his legacy on civil rights: The highway system furthered Eisenhower’s goals for national security but also displaced urban Black communities, destroyed Black businesses and wealth, and furthered a divide between city and suburbs. “There was a failure … to put in civil rights protections or even to show adequate concern about the communities that were being affected,” she said. “That’s part of the legacy that we grapple with. I think it’s OK to have these puzzles and these ambivalences. It’s the nature of American history around race and probably other areas, too.”