After WW2 ended, Eisenhower spoke to Congress in April 1948, as historian William Hitchcock writes:
Soon after he left the army, while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on universal military service, Eisenhower was invited to give his views on racial segregation in the military. His response was quite lengthy. The army, he opined, “is just one of the mirrors that holds up to our faces the United States of America … There is race prejudice in this country.”
Ike’s statements to Congress moved President Truman to issue the famous Executive Order 9981 in July 1948. Truman’s order hoped to desegregate the armed forces. Sadly, the Democrats - Truman’s own party - prevented his order from being implemented.
Reflecting on his career in the military, Eisenhower saw that segregation was not helpful. He’d integrated the soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge because he knew that it was the right thing to do: it formed the most effective fighting force and gave the Allies a chance to win.
He spoke about the segregation that was in place when he first joined the army four decades earlier, calling it “extreme” and unnecessary.
Embracing the ideas of desegregation and integration, Eisenhower believed, were signs of maturity.
As president, only two weeks after his inauguration, Ike accomplished an end to segregation in the federal government, in the armed services, and in entire area of Washington, D.C.
Eventually, Eisenhower hoped, “the human race may finally grow up,” and such concerns would disappear.
Eisenhower’s support for civil rights was reliable and immovable, but also unemotional, unsentimental, and dispassionate. He saw equal civil rights as simple justice.
His most significant actions on behalf of civil rights were accompanied by his understated and calm words. When he ordered federal soldiers to Little Rock to override the Arkansas State Police, he did not give a fiery rousing speech on the matter. He simply did it.
Eisenhower saw segregation, and the laws which supported it, as symptoms rather than causes. They were the effects of a deeper problem in society. Segregation grew organically out of certain attitudes and beliefs, as William Hitchcock writes:
These comments reveal a man who believed that racial segregation in both the army and the nation had an organic quality. It was unpleasant and probably wrong.
In the 1952 presidential election, Eisenhower ran as the Republican candidate against a segregationist ticket put forth by the Democrat Party.
The difference was clear to the voters in general, and very clear to African-American voters in particular.
In his first press conference as a candidate, held in Abilene on June 5, 1952, he declared his “unalterable support of fairness and equality among all types of American citizens.”
Pollsters were stunned by large number of Blacks who voted for Eisenhower. During his first four years in office, he earned their confidence, which played a role in his re-election in 1956.
