The Supreme Court started to interpret the Constitution more liberally in the field of civil rights. So during the Truman presidency, it rulings in a number of cases appeared to challenge Plessy vs. Ferguson, for example, in 1946, the Morgan vs. Virginia case, where Irene Morgan refused to give up her seat on an interstate bus and was fined $100 inevitably led to the Supreme Court prohibiting segregation on interstate transport with the help on NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall. The Morgan vs. Virginia case did not lead to a change in practice however. The situation with many rulings was still very much de jure and de facto.
As a result in 1947 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched a ‘Journey of Reconciliation’. A mixed race team of 16 people (8 black and 8 white) planned to travel by bus from the northern to southern states; their aim was to draw public attention to the fact that many states were not following the Supreme Court. Once again public attention was gained but it failed to achieve change. There were other civil rights organisations such as The United Defence League (UDL), the Committee on Negro Organisation (CNO), the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) which also used the tactic of direct action in this period; the UDL in particular, who organised a very successful week-long bus boycott in Louisiana’s capital Baton Rouge in June 1953.
Black Americans also wanted to challenge segregation in schools and overall, education. Their first successful challenge to segregation in education came in 1950. The NAACP argued that Heman Sweatt, a black student wanting to study law, was entitled to an education equal to that of whites at the Law school. The Texan courts decided that they did not have to integrate the white Law school and instead set up a law school for blacks. The NAACP rejected this and went to the Supreme Court; they argued that the new law school was inferior. The Supreme Court agreed and ordered the University of Texas Law School to accept Sweatt as a student.
There was then the case of Brown vs. Topeka in 1954. The case revolved around whether the Board of Education for Topeka, Kansas had violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of Linda Brown by the failure to provide her with an elementary education close to her own home. The nearest school to her home was an all-white segregated school and she would have to go 20 blocks away to get to the nearest black school. The lawyer used by the NAACP to present this case was again Thurgood Marshall, who was later to become the first black Supreme Court justice. Once taken to The Supreme Court, they ruled unanimously that segregation was illegal in American Schools. This meant that ‘separate but equal’ as established in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case was a contradiction in terms and this case essentially ended that belief.
However, as with most court rulings regarding segregation, although Eisenhower ordered the integration of schools in Washington DC immediately after the Brown case, the rest of the south was very much slower to follow suit. Middle class whites set up White Citizens Councils to demand that segregation continued in schools. It caused a revival in the activity of the KKK and resulted in the Emmett Till case which followed a year later. He was a 14 year old black boy who was lynched in the backlash and the two white men who murdered him were found not guilty by an all white jury. After the Brown case Senator Harry F. Byrd called on white southerners to put up ‘massive resistance’ meaning that white people of the south should defend segregation with all their strength. He led 101 southern congressmen who signed the ‘Southern Manifesto’. They argued that the Brown case was unconstitutional because the constitution did not mention education. They called on the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’
In 1955, the Supreme Court followed up its earlier ruling with ‘Brown II’. This said that the change to desegregated schools was to take place ‘with all deliberate speed’. Even this was not sufficiently specific and many southern states continued to delay desegregation. Because of this, by 1957 only 750 of 6,300 southern school districts had desegregated. Eisenhower refused to comment on the Brown case. He criticised the ruling privately however, arguing that it would do nothing to change the hearts and minds of southern white racists. He believed that it was counterproductive. It had just angered white citizens and raised more opposition to civil rights. He claimed that his decision to make Earl Warren Chief Justice was ‘the biggest damned fool mistake I ever made’
Many US congress members were also opposed to racial integration and almost a fifth signed the Southern Manifesto. Even those not openly racist were reluctant to support Truman’s civil rights reforms. President Eisenhower believed that desegregation could not be forced upon the south and as such believed that change would happen in time and that it wasn’t the president’s place to enforce that change. Southern state governments, judges and police resisted change and used their power to intimidate campaigning for integration. Southern white racists were also well organised and reacted quickly and effectively to ensure the court rulings were ignored. Finally, groups such as the NAACP and CORE had not yet perfected their methods and so couldn’t affect the civil rights movements as much as desired.
In conclusion, during the period 1945-1955, campaigning methods had changed dramatically, the most common being the use of the Supreme Court to overrule southern state governments decisions however once again these de jure victories didn’t produce de facto desegregation. As a result groups such as CORE and the NAACP organised campaigns to test the implementation of these and demanded a time frame to force the southern authorities to comply with the courts rulings. Despite these efforts, the process of desegregation was slow but it was happening.
