Letters
Sunday, January 14, 2007; Page BW14
WHEN DESEGREGATION REALLY GOT STARTED
In his review of Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made["A Fine Balance," Dec. 17], Jeffrey Rosen separates the Supreme Court's 1954 decision on Brown v. Board of Education from White House actions, implying that opposition from President Eisenhower meant that "meaningful desegregation did not occur until a decade later." No objective observer of the 1950s would agree. After the Supreme Court decision, the Eisenhower administration created a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Commission to pursue enforcement of the desegregation ruling, and the administration took actions leading to the desegregation of Washington, D.C., and the federal workforce. In 1956, the Supreme Court declared Alabama's laws on segregation of bus and other transport to be unconstitutional. In 1957, Eisenhower oversaw the passage through Congress, despite outraged Dixiecrat opposition, of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In that same year, Eisenhower responded to the refusal of Arkansas Gov. Faubus to allow nine African American students to attend Central High School in Little Rock by dispatching 1,000 paratroops of the 101st Airborne to carry out the integration order. An additional civil rights bill was passed in 1960, setting the precedent for the more comprehensive laws that later were enacted, due to overwhelming congressional Republican support, in 1964 and 1965.
J. Michael Moore
Great Falls, Va.
Jeffrey Rosen replies:
It is now conventional wisdom among legal historians that meaningful desegregation occurred after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rather than after Brown v. Board of Education a decade earlier. In 1964, little more than 2 percent of the African American children in the South attended desegregated schools; by 1971, that number had risen to 44 percent. The definitive account of how this increase was attributable to the civil rights movement, not the courts, is Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004).
