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 governments were all looking at each other going -- and you have men in uniform actually being killed and slaughtered much 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 weren't 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 had a great amount of power on 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 know, of thinking about desegregating the army. and you talked about desegregating the army and when you talk about civil rights and truman, we sort of stick him there. there's a broad picture, so if you would with 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 as they're trying to balance away all of these things, you get 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 could buy a home, so to get the federal government to weigh-in on the side. this was phenomenal. so you 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 desegregating the military was long and slow. and it was the battlefields of korea, that made the army go, okay, we 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 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, emmet till, and 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 whole 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 social equality was something to be achieved. so they were not about the business of trying to have social equality between black and whites, and yet, their actions moved them in a direction that had to sustain or support a burgeoning movement, a civil rights movement. so if you could speak to that. and show us what eisenhower was doing behind the scenes. >> it wasn't behind the scenes. that's part of the mythology. let's take the transition from truman to eisenhower quickly. is truman provided for the black community some rhetoric that was important to them.

they had so little to count on through all the violence and economic problems that african-americans came the 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 things. he was a man of action, not a man of 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 forceses, but eisenhower in fact imp 789ed 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 happen, that johnson could not have 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. eisenhower introduced legislation, particularly introduced it first in 1956, didn't go anywhere. he reintroduced it in 1957, legislation that in the history books gets credit for passing. but eisenhower and his attorney general brown proposed it. 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 i would 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 of the attorney general to sue in federal court for school desegregation. they took that out. but it still laid the foundation for what happened in 1964 and '6. >> 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 terms in thinking about those 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 warren, john marshall harlan, william brennan, potter stewart, charles evans whittaker is 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. he knew exactly who he was. and these books that float around and say that eisenhower didn't know who warren was or 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. now, gang, remember, we've said that 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. >> well, i -- everybody's got a favorite teacher story. one of those magic moments. we had a the -- 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 her, 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, 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. because i wanted to change the face of the south. 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 time in the history of the country. all of that, you know, is what you're processing, so the way that little rock was a series, was a challenge from the state naacp daisy bates, and there's a documentary that i think public television has been doing on mrs. bates, but the moment came that i had a chance to say that i wanted to transfer. i wanted to transfer because you saw this huge building. you passed it every day.

you knew that i came out of a family of teachers, and they always complained about the resources that central had as compared to what we had, the hand-me-down books, so -- and i figured i wanted to get the best college education i could, so if i want to central, and they had more of what we wanted to have, that this was going to be a good thing. the summer occurs, and it's kind of bumping along, and i get an invitation, my mother and i, to go down to the superintendent's office to indicate that i've been accepted as one of the students to transfer to central that fall. i thought it was going to be a fairly quiet day. and up until -- and so did most people in little rock, and the night before school was to open, the good governor orville faubus comes on television and says that he's calling out the national guard to keep us out of school. and i'm thinking oh, my

goodness, you know, i'm a senior. i want to graduate, and i'm walking into this huge unknown. and that first day the pictures on the brochure of elizabeth and the mob behind her, it dawned on me that maybe this was something other than my going to school, that there's some other issues going on here, and that i said i wanted to be a part of the change in the south. well, my moment came. and for three weeks, in fact, most people didn't think eisenhower was going to step forward and do anything. i don't think up until the last minute -- we were talking earlier. i had an opportunity to sit with herbert brownell back in the '80s. we were at the eisenhower -- eisenhower library. and i said, you know, eisenhower

really didn't need to send 1,000 paratroopers with the 101st airborne. he could have sent 50, 100 or 200, that they would have done the job, but he said that eisenhower, he had just won world war ii, he was the president of a major university without a phd. he was the darling of both political parties to be the standard bearer for president and he wanted to show faubus who was in charge, that he was tired of having this second-rate governor, as he saw him, push him around. and so on the 25th of september, when they finally sent the troops and we went to school with, you know, a convoy of jeeps and army station wagons and helicopters flying over, you got the feeling you were going to get into school that day.

but -- but -- but i -- i -- i think, again, unintended consequences that that was really, at left in my mind, the first time that the federal government had really stepped forward to support that decision and to show african-american communities that they were uphold their rights, so when i bump into people like john lewis and others, you know, they said little rock was an important part of their consciousness, so each of these steps and places became, you know, kind of stepping stones. one led to the other, and we never expected, any of us, the nine of us, that what we were doing was -- was going to be earth-shattering and that 56 years later i'm still talking about getting to high school.

but the -- the interest of all nine of us was really to pursue the best education, public education we thought that was our right, and we had came from families that education was important and that they thought we had the right to be there. >> right. >> and that that was really what i think eisenhower -- i never had a chance to meet him, never, you know, looked beyond that year of the presidential politics, but one important thing was at my graduation, there was a young minister from montgomery, alabama, speaking in pine bluff, arkansas, and the night that i graduated, dr. king came up, sat with my family and was in the audience, so, you know, this -- all of this connection -- connectivity of

how the charlayne story and others, and we all, you know, were doing our individual thing, trying to improve what we thought was the best options for us. >> now understanding it's 56 years later and you have the benefit of hindsight, let's go back to your young self and for history sake in this conference you have to answer the question of were you frightened? i mean, it's a situation where now we have all the troops showing up to protect you. >> sure, i was frighten -- well, we weren't frightened. we were frightened on the side of the unknown. when the governor called out the national guard to keep us out, yeah, we were frightened, and -- and the unknown was, you know, will i complete school that year? i didn't know whether it was going to collapse on me, but when president eisenhower sent the troops, i mean, that sent one hell of a message.

the most difficult times for us is when we withdrew the troops from his side, and then we had to deal with students and harassment and the throwing of food and cursing and locker room being steamed up and glass being broken, and, you know, i mean, but, again, it came -- something in the back of my head said, you know, if they want to fight this hard to keep you out, something else is going on here. >> yes. >> and -- and giving up on it at this point is not -- not an option, and that i think is really the nine of us, we worked with each other. we became a close-knit unit, a family, and that was really what helped us get through that year. >> little rock nine, ernie green, thank you so much.

[ applause ] i'm going to move over -- >> thank you. >> i will add one other thing, that during that period one of -- louis armstrong spoke out strongly. >> the singer. >> the singer. >> the musician. >> the trumpet player, the musician, and he spoke out and admonished eisenhower to send some protection in to help us. >> he did indeed. >> there weren't a lot of people standing up at that point, and i really think the image that we have of somebody like armstrong, that he would step out of character and stand up. >> david nichols, i want you to pick up the thread. ernie talked to herbert brownell wh