it. >> thank you very much. we'll try and start the next pan pan until literally four or five minutes. we'll bring some chairs up and bring our next group of panelists up. good afternoon, everybody. good morning, late early day, whatever. i always think it's nice if you are marking the occasion, and we are, of presidents' day, to say a little bit of something about the presidents for whom this day is named. and that's george washington and abraham lincoln, i found something from george washington i thought was appropriate for our conversation. let me share it with you. george washington, we should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience. and i think no better way to discuss this, because we got some useful lessons out of the presidency and the civil rights

movement, and certainly we profited dearly by experience and that's george washington on this presidents' day. so our task is to answer a couple of questions. this discussion is about truman and eisenhower, and the questions on your book will say what prompted president truman to issue the 1948 executive order to desegregate the armed forces, declaring that there should be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services? and similarly, how did president eisenhower decide to call in the united states army to little rock and to federalize the arkansas national guard? now, we're going to answer those questions. the first thing to do is to put this in context, so i'm going to ask our historians, both carol and david, to do that right now. and that is to say, as i look at this time period with truman and eisenhower, it struck me that two wars really frame the civil rights movement and the interaction and the response of the presidents. so, if you would, david, actually, carol, if you would, talk to me about truman

and at that time where we were as a nation and while this world war ii, these african-americans coming back after world war ii started to make a difference in how people thought about civil rights. >> when you think about it, the second world war was an amazing war because it was the war against the nazis. it was a war where both roosevelt and churchill had issued the atlantic charter, and that atlantic charter talked about the four freedoms. african-americans works were dealing with double-digit unemployment, who were dealing with massive jim crow, dealing with the systematic denial of the right to education, who were basically dealing with the systematic denial of the basic and civil and human rights looked at the freedoms and you start getting mass mobilization and organization within their organization such as the naacp. and you also got veterans, veterans who were fighting in this war, understanding that when you are fighting against the nazis, you

know, this is the era of the double "v" campaign and this doesn't mean peace. this is the double "v" campaign. victory against the nazis overseas and the nazis at home, and this is what is framing and stealing these veterans then coming back to the united states determined that the u.s. will live up to what is called its vaunted democracy, will live up to its bill of rights. these veterans were not playing. and when you begin to think about some of the key leaders in the civil rights movement, these are black veterans coming out of the second world war. >> david? >> well, i'd go to president truman right away, i think, because carol understands that international perspective so much better than i ever would. but president truman i think did issue the executive order in 1948 for two basic reasons. one was his own personal conviction. the other was he was in the fight of his life for an election. and he issues it on july 26th, 1948, and calculation of black votes in that is apparent.

i don't mean that's the only motivation. these are complicated people, eisenhower and truman, and they do things for multiple reasons. and i think from -- from an african-american perspective, all of these guys don't quite get it sometimes, but they still were in a political context where they were trying to do things, so truman issued that order in 1948. the story i'll want to get into, when we have time, is that he didn't enforce it very well until we got into korea and then they began to be some desegregation in the armed forces in korea, but four years later, most of the american combat units were still segregated. dwight eisenhower did most of that, and frankly i think it's a disgrace to my profession that the textbooks still say truman did it without mentioning eisenhower when eisenhower came in, most of the units were still segregated, and by october of 1954 there wasn't a single segregated combat unit left. >> so, ernie, i'm just going to

ask you from a personal standpoint if you, as a young man then, remember the impact of uncles, brothers, whomever coming back from the war and a change in a sentiment at that time. >> well, i had an experience, my dad actually fought in world war i, and he went to france, and i always wanted to know why would you go to the army and then come back home, and you couldn't vote, the world was segregated, and that was an atmosphere that i grew up in. and i think that the returning veterans, african-american veterans in the south, really had a lot to do. it's what i think is one of the untold stories about the civil rights movement, is that these men for the most part came back home after freeing germany, and

when they came back home, they met the same issues. as they say s.o.s., same old stuff. >> thank you for the stuff. >> yeah. >> and that that really was sort of an underpinning, that in many of these communities you found activism resulting from that, and in my case, in little rock, the weekly paper, the bates, daisy bates and her husband l.c. ran, he was a veteran of world war ii, and you felt the impact of that. >> okay. >> it was something -- and the other point about it is that it probably -- it spurred activism in a lot of ways. my mother was a schoolteacher, and she was part of the suit

that -- for equal pay between black and white teachers. in fact, a lot of the public school dede cases arose out of equal teacher pay activity, and the lawyer that organized the case in the '40s in little rock was marshall, thurgood marshall. and you get brushed again, that thurgood marshall couldn't stay in the holiday inn or the sheraton or whatever in little rock. he was staying at various houses, and they stayed -- he stayed at our house for a couple of times. so being involved in it -- in this unintended consequences out of the return of black veterans, i think, had a lot to do with spurring the modern civil rights movement. >> callie, permit me to dramatize that briefly. >> mm-hmm.

>> when an african-american veteran came back to visit the nation's capital, even as late as 1953, a black person could not attend a movie, buy a meal, get a hotel room or find a restroom in downtown washington, d.c., the capital, and, again, i'll be dwight eisenhower's advocate because he desegregated all that within about a year and a half, most of it was gone not in the entire district but the downtown area. but this was a horrendous thing for veterans to come back and face. >> i think veterans are really important. as we're talking about the presidents, what we also understand with these veterans is when they were coming back from the second world war, they were facing not only this kind of discrimination, but they were facing massive violence. >> mm-hmm. >> the lynchings that occurred in 1946 against black veterans were absolutely horrific, and what also made it absolutely horrific was that the local governments, the state governments and the federal

government were all looking at each other going -- and you've got men who are in uniform actually being killed and slaughtered. and this is also part of what is pushing president truman, who is a veteran, and he just turned with the quadruple lynching in monroe, georgia, and says something is fundamentally wrong. >> and when you say violence, i think you should be very specific. we're talking about eyes gouged out, castration. >> yes. >> this is not a mere shooting, as if that were bad enough. >> no, no, no. this is the blow torch lynching of john jones down in mendon, louisiana. there is the quadruple lynching of two veterans and two women in monroe, georgia, where they were taken out to a clearing and then lined up and just slaughtered. when you read the autopsy reports, they talk about at least 60 bullets in each body. it -- it just kept -- and this was what was driving, part of

what was driving the black community as they are looking, and i go to the frederick douglass quote, that power concedes nothing without a demand. it never has, and it never will, so when we talk about the presidents in this civil rights struggle, it's also important to understand that they are in complete conversation with a completely mobilized black community that refuses to take it any longer. [ applause ] >> so i said at the beginning there's the civil rights -- the thought process and what was happening with the presidents, both truman and eisenhower were informed by two wars. the first was world war ii. the second is the cold war. we don't think about that in terms of civil rights, and carol anderson, you're here to put this straight because actually what was happening externally shaping where the presidents had to go in terms of thinking about civil rights, so explain that, if you would. >> and part of that is -- i see

the cold war as basically a double-edged sword. mary dudziak in her book talked about how the cold war forced the united states to have to deal with issues of civil rights because the soviets were having a field day. every time a person was lynched, every time there was a case of southern justice, every time a diplomat from ethiopia or haiti tried to come over and couldn't find a place to stay in new york city, the soviets were like, see, this is what this vaunted democracy looks like, and the u.s. is going, oh, man. so on one hand you get movement on the part of the u.s. government saying we have got to address our unfinished business of democracy. on the other hand, what the cold war did was it limited the range of the options that were available to, in fact, really create true equality in the united states because what was on the table as the naacp looked at it was the issue of human rights, so not just what we understand as our bill of

rights, but also the right to education, the right to housing, the right to health care, and the right to employment. when you're looking at the conditions of black america, what centuries of slavery and jim crow had done, they had systematically denied african-americans their basic human rights, but what the powerful southern democrats did was to link their racism with anti-communism and to say that the right to health care is socialist medicine, it's communistic and the right to education is nothing but communism and so by having human rights framed as communistic and then by putting enormous pressure on the naacp to back off on this human rights frame it, in fact, led to a civil rights movement and not a human rights movement. >> so, now, with those two wars in context, let's talk about a truman coming from where he's coming from and coming off what

we know about fdr, how he moved towards even getting to the point, you mentioned his veterans of being veterans, you thinking of desegregating the army and you talked about desegregating the army and to talk about when they think about civil rights and truman we sort of stick him there, there's a broad picture so if you would discuss that. >> part of that picture, dave, is absolutely right. truman was in a battle for his electoral life in that 1948 campaign, and clark clifford made it clear the only way to win that election is get that black vote, the black vote that moved up north to the electorally powerful -- electoral college powerful states so that was part of it. the other part of what truman was dealing with was he had the sense of justice, and he saw the injustice. but he's also tied into the missouri resistance. when you talk about the complexity of these presidents in a way they are trying to balance all of these things, this is what he's dealing with so you get on one part movement

where his justice department is filing amicus curiae briefs with the supreme court in the shelly v. kramer case that dealt with restrictive covenants that limited where african-americans would buy a home so to in fact get the federal government to weigh in on the side of this was phenomenal, so you get that kind of movement. you get the president's commission on civil rights which emerged out of these series of lynchings in 1946 where truman is just like enough already. we've got to do something. so you do get movement. you don't get it as far as it needs to go. and i think -- >> that would be legislation, is that what you mean? >> you would get it in terms of -- you weren't going to get anything via legislation because the southern democrats controlled about 63 of the key seats in congress.

they weren't having it, so anything you were going to try to do legislatively, you weren't going to be able to get it through mississippi, louisiana, south carolina or georgia, alabama. they had that thing on lockdown, so it required the president to move around via executive orders. so you do get the executive order for desegregating the military as well as the federal bureaucracy but the desegging the military was long and slow and it was the battlefields of korea that made the army go, okay, we've got to do something. so i become fascinated though by a president who is the commander in chief where in fact his generals are defying a direct order to in fact desegregate. i mean, that -- that gives you some sense of the power, how the structural racism that is embedded in these institutions and then what some of the presidents and particularly these black organizations are fighting against. >> why is it that we don't know about the other stuff that

truman was doing? it may be limited but really all i knew about, and maybe i'm ignorant, is just he tried to desegregate the military, that's it. i never heard his name connected with anything else having to do with civil rights. >> and i think it's because when we think of civil rights we often run to the mid-1950s and think of rosa parks and martin luther king, so when you get a prelude, you get a quick snapshot, deseg the military because we know the military is important and then folks immediately run to the mid-1950s, and i think that that is part of the issue. but you do get a lot of groundwork happening here, and we can't understand what we see in the '50s unless we understand the groundwork of what was happening in the '30s and '40s. >> all right. let's move to the '50s. ernie, did you want to say something? >> yes, i was just going to say that that backdrop was, you

know, the reason that going back to reading this weekly newspaper to reading this weekly newspaper in little rock, this backdrop of soldiers being maimed and killed and other incidents was part of your political consciousness. and that was, you know, that was in the back of my head, you read all of this and something is wrong. i didn't know -- i was a kid like many of these young people. i didn't know how i was going to change, it by knew it was wrong, and that if i had a chance to be a part of this change agent, i wanted to be there. i mean, it -- and i thought everybody else was with me on that plane. the great lesson of life i learned when i signed up to transfer school and all my buddies said they were going to be with me and the moment of truth came, i'm standing there by myself.

what's wrong with this picture? >> yes, exactly. >> but it was all of this that we were looking at. it just didn't -- i mean, part of the problem today is that everybody thinks that dr. king made the speech on the steps. >> and that was it? >> that was it. everybody held hands. >> and my hope is that events like this get people to bore down deeper to understand what else was going on and why, you know, we felt we could step forward, and we had the support of family, that we could do something different. >> well, we're going to get to your moment -- big moment in the sunshine in just a minute, ernie green, but did i want to highlight something for people who don't know, because i don't assume everybody knows. emmett till was 14 years old. he's part of the whole lynching thing that was going on. he was lynched in mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

those people that lynched him later said that they did it, but it was, of course, after the trial, and it was a rigged trial, but this was a signifying moment in the lives of so many young men like ernie green to know that if the country is going to change, this has got to stop. so that's an important, very important, significant moment in the long spectrum of the civil rights movement. so now on to you. if i could get a sense from you, because what we've heard now is what truman did, and i come over to what eisenhower, how he was working, and eisenhower has a bad rap. in your book you try to change the rap on him, and the rap was all he did was sit there and when little rock came, he did one big thing and that's it. that's the whole civil rights history. you have a book that says otherwise, but one of the points i wanted to do that i think is maybe connecting is i'm not certain that either man thought that social equality was something to be achieved, so they were not about the business

of trying to have social equality between blacks and whites, and yet their actions moved them in a direction that had to sustain or support a through all this violence and >> yeah. a lot of it wasn't behind the scenes. that's part of the mythology, but let's take the transition from truman to eisenhower quickly is truman provided, particularly for the black community, some rhetoric that was important to them. they have had so little to count on in any way, shape or form through all this violence and all the problems that african-americans came to hang on presidential statements as being important. that's something eisenhower didn't give them much. eisenhower had not won the war in europe by making speeches. rhetoric was not his thing. he was a man of action, not

words, and too much superficial scholarship done on eisenhower looking what the he said instead of what he did. you know, this is a man who appointed five anti-segregation justices to the supreme court, five, not just earl warren, all of them, anti-segregation. and he -- eisenhower's criticism of eisenhower when he came into office, excuse me, eisenhower's criticism of truman when he came into office was that the federal government hadn't even used the authority it had. and his pet example was the district of columbia, and eisenhower pledged on october 8th, 1952, that he would eliminate every vestige of segregation in the district of columbia. and within his first year in office much of that happened. truman didn't do that. eisenhower did. truman didn't do -- truman deserves credit for the executive order on desegregating the armed forces, by eisenhower in fact implemented most of it and had the prestige in the armed forces to make it happen. and he did make it happen in a variety of ways. he desegregated bases in the south. he desegregated federally

controlled schools for military dependants in the south before the brown decision, and everybody who thinks that eisenhower was anti-brown really haven't done their homework, and you mentioned about my book. my book is not an opinion piece. there's not a phrase in it that's not rooted in a document or in compelling circumstantial evidence. that doesn't mean there isn't argument that can be had about motivation, but there's some things facts that aren't hidden hand facts as the phrase has become, supreme court appointments. eisenhower refused to appoint judges to federal courts who were known segregationists, refused to do that. john f. kennedy when he came in appointed those right and left, and i have to say to you, folks, i have a son named for jfk, if you want to know where i come from, okay? and, you know, it's going -- i

have fun handing in the program, but, you know, facts are facts, so eisenhower did a lot. he didn't do some things that people would have liked to have seen him do, but we'll get back to little rock, because i don't want to preempt ernie talking about that, but little rock is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what eisenhower was doing. >> could he have -- you know, later on we'll be discussing jfk and lyndon johnson, but -- and so the conversation is that had not kennedy laid out what could have happened that johnson picked it up, if truman had not begun the process of desegregating the military, even though you say eisenhower was critical of him not taking it far enough, could he have done what he did? >> no. i think he stood on truman's shoulders. the legislation was first introduced in 1956, didn't go anywhere, reintroduced in 1957, legislation that in the history

books gets credit for passing. that legislation was built essentially on the foundation that truman had laid with his commission to declare these rights presented by the civil rights commission, the civil rights division and the justice department. those kind of reforms. eisenhower picked those up, and those were essentially truman proposals initially. he could never get through the congress, and truman deserves credit for proposing it, but would i like to point out to everybody eisenhower is the one that got the first legislation in 82 years, civil rights legislation in 82 years. it was a weak bill. it was insipid in many respects because lyndon johnson and the southern democrats took the heart out of it, particularly the power to sue in federal court on segregation, they took that out, but it still laid the foundation for what happened in 1946 and '65. >> when i said hidden hand, that's often the terminology

with president eisenhower the way he operated, hidden hand, not out front, behind closed doors, not in front, and i want to go back and underscore the federal judge appointments because he was very thoughtful as you point out in very clear term in thinking about the judges that he wanted to appoint, and i don't think we always in, terms of thinking about civil rights movement, understand the power of those federal judges, so this was, in fact, quite significant the placing of those judges, the appointing of those judges. >> yeah. i think it's the most important thing. little rock is the most dramatic, but the most important thing that eisenhower did was to appoint federal judges committed to defending brown, and he appointed them particularly in the fourth and fifth circuits in the south, and he appointed men like frank johnson who was the federal judge in alabama who in 1965 cleared the way for martin luther king's "entourage" to go from selma to montgomery. frank johnson has spent 44 years

on the federal bench, so he would appoint those kind of judges. he appointed ronald davies who is the presiding federal judge in little rock. we'll get back to that, and he appointed, of course, five men to the supreme court, earl warn, john marshall harlan, william brennan, potter stewart, charles evans whitaker, probably his weakest appointment, all five of them committed to the enforcement of brown. and william brennan, any of you know your supreme court history, was not a far right conservative in any way, shape or form. eisenhower actually nominated him when he was in the midst of an election campaign in the fall of '56, and he did that partly for political reasons, too. he wanted a catholic, so a catholic democrat, but eisenhower's judicial appointments lasted decades

later, and felix frankfurter said that the supreme court during this era was the eisenhower court. we all know it as the warren court, but it was the eisenhower court, and i'll tell you one of the great myths was that eisenhower didn't know what earl warren stood for. that is factually incorrect. he knew him well. his attorney general brownell socialized with warren and had run two presidential campaigns for him. knew exactly who he was so these books that float around and say eisenhower didn't know who warren was and how he stood on race is ridiculous. there was a tension between these two guys, and we can talk about that if you want to, but it was not race. it was presidential politics. >> we can come back to that. i want to now get to eisenhower's some say finest moment with regards to civil rights and that's, of course, what happened at little rock. gang, remember, we've said neither truman nor eisenhower looking for social equality, yet we now, as you have articulated very well, understand what eisenhower was doing that, he

had the power to do, so here he is at a situation at little rock, and his hand is forced, but before we get to what he did, ernie green, tell us the story of little rock, so there you were standing alone. your buddies abandoned you. >> i -- everybody's got a favorite teacher story. one of those magic moments. he had a -- at the black high school that i attended before going to central, my 11th grade history teacher whose name was gwendolyn scott, she taught black history. i'm sure if the little rock school board knew what she was doing they would have arrested. because we studied, you know, rebellions, the protest movement, the beginning of the naacp, all of this, and it just seemed to me, that again, going

back to -- till was in my consciousness. montgomery bus boycott began around december '55. i remember that when the brown decision was handed down. i didn't, you know, i didn't know the nuances of the decision. i only knew the next morning in our local newspaper. it said that this court decision was going to change the face of the south, and i said good. the south that i saw at that time as a 13, 12, 13-year-old it was something, segregated fountains, buses, limited jobs, all of that. we didn't get our street paved until i think -- until the supreme court decision was handed down. there were no more new school buildings built for black folks after may 17th, 1954 than any