A Better America
On Sunday, April 4, 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr., stood at the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and delivered a sermon titled, “Going forward by going backward.”
“There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong,” King began. The problem was in the “hearts and souls of men.”
In 1954, America was troubled. Segregation was rampant and hate rather than love seemed to be the triumphant act of each day. People saw each other more as foes than as brothers and sisters. Skin color and hair texture determined attitudes and even law.
“Our problem,” King said, “lies in the fact that through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood, both through our moral genius we have failed to make it a brotherhood.” The only atomic bomb Americans needed to worry about “lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness.
“If our civilization is to go forward,” King preached, “we must go back and pick up those precious moral values that we have left behind” and “put God back into the center of our thinking.”
On Monday, May 17, reporters hurried into the grand marble court chamber of the Supreme Court. Without advance notice, Chief Justice Earl Warren began reading from the court’s majority opinion in Brown v. Board of Education at 12:52 p.m. “He read in a firm, clear voice and with expression,” the reporter I. F. Stone recalled.
“Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational facilities?” Warren asked. “We unanimously believe that it does.”
(“Unanimously” was not in the published version. Seeking to emphasize the unanimity of the Court on the issue, Warren scribbled the word in the margins of his reading copy.)
“When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room; no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation defies description,” Warren later recalled.
Then came the most memorable line from the opinion. “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” Warren said, effectively reversing Plessy v. Ferguson. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
The plaintiffs were “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment,” and the court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
“It was all one could do to keep from cheering, and a few of us were moved to tears,” Stone recalled. “In a showdown, American democracy has proven itself real.”
Southern congressmen were quick to denounce the opinion. South Carolina’s Burnet Maybank told the Senate he was “shocked,” while Georgia’s Elijah Forrester believed “that the aim of the leftwingers and the unAmerican groups in this country is the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon race” and “the mongrelization of the races.” Mississippi’s John Bell Williams denounced May 17 as “black Monday.”
New York’s Adam Clayton Powell advised the House not to “take this shining hour of democracy and allow it to be tarnished by the oratory of a few who are still living in the 19th century.”
“We have a better America now, a stronger America, a decent America,” Powell preached., a democracy “pure and bright and shining, with equal rights for all.”
(The next day, Williams proposed an amendment to the Constitution allowing the states to “require the maintenance of racial segregation in public schools.”)
The Tuscaloosa News termed the decision “a terrific blow to Southern custom and sentiment.” To the Huntsville Times, it was a “great shock, a crushing blow to all the customs, traditions, and modes, extending over more than 200 years, that have been built or grown up around the practice of segregation.”
“It means radical strife of the bitterest sort,” the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily wrote. “Mississippi cannot and will not try to abide by this decision.”
One mother in Cleveland, Mississippi, spoke for a great many white Southerners when she asked local officials, “Well, are we going to have niggers this fall?”
“Things,” as Bayard Rustin recalled, above all resistance, “began rapidly to move.”
By 1957, the effort to enforce the Court’s ruling slowed, obstructed by the gasps of a dying age, marking yet another battleground in the long struggle to overcome America’s worst selves.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, segregationists rallied—ultimately unsuccessfully—to prevent the integration of the city’s central high school. Parents marched on the Capitol Building, holding signs denouncing “race mixing” as “Communism.”
“Never has there been such a conspiracy of evil forces confronting free men,” a local segregationist league wrote white parents. “We must awaken, arouse, and alert those who do not as yet understand the wickedness of those forces arrayed against us.”
President Eisenhower urged compliance with the Court’s ruling and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating, in an almost amoral moderateness, that resistance damaged, above all else, America’s prestige in the global conflict against Communism.
Letters flooded the White House. A Texas mother wrote that, for the first time in her life, she was ashamed to hear the national anthem and look at the Star Spangled Banner. A Florida woman informed the president that God “does not want intermarriage nor contributing factors.”
The Black minister Gordon Blaine Hancock wrote that Little Rock was the center of a great moral struggle. “Just as Lincoln saw that the nation could not survive half slave and half free,” he wrote, “the nation cannot survive the moral erosion of race prejudice with its commitment to segregation.”
The moral crisis over integration tested the nation. But better angels are persistent forces. “Keep moving amid every obstacle,” King said in May 1957 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Soon, he concluded, “the morning stars will sing together,” quoting the Book of Job, “and the sons of God will shout for joy.”