Eisenhower spoke less, but did more, than his White House predecessors Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, Eisenhower directly opposed President Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. Roosevelt and Stimson imposed a policy of segregation onto the U.S. Army.
As Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower wouldn’t and didn’t accept Roosvelt’s segregationist edicts. In late 1944 and early 1945, Ike defied Roosevelt, and integrated various military units as he saw fit. Later, Eisenhower would use the word “justice” to explain such actions, as historian Kasey Pipes explains:
Eisenhower’s career intersected with the civil rights movement at several key points. The first was the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. General Eisenhower, needing more troops, essentially went against war-department policy (drafted by George Marshall) and offered African-American troops the chance to fight at the front. After the war, troops who volunteered to go to the front of the line at the Bulge weren’t eager to go to the back of the bus in Birmingham. This helped build the momentum of the civil-rights movement in the postwar era. As President, Eisenhower found himself again confronted with civil-rights challenges including the two Brown rulings, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Emmett Till murder, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and, of course, Little Rock. The story of the civil-rights movement in the 1940s and 1950s can’t be told without telling the story of Eisenhower.
On September 9, 1957, Ike signed into law the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He’d worked together with Martin Luther King and Vice President Richard Nixon to get Congressional approval for the bill.
Less than two weeks later, Ike ordered the 101st Airborne, a legendary infantry division, to Little Rock, Arkansas. Eisenhower was determined to overrule the Democrat Party there, which, in the person of Governor Orval Faubus, was preventing Black students from attending a public high school.
Ike’s victory in Little Rock was a continuation of the civil rights emphasis which he'd expressed as he was first running for president.
“During the 1952 presidential campaign,” historian William Hitchcock explains, Eisenhower spoke clearly about his support for the civil rights movement, “stating that he would eagerly abolish segregation in the nation’s capital and continue to expunge it from the armed services.”
Eisenhower saw the matter clearly: He’d appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court. Under Warren’s leadership, the famous Brown vs. Board of Education cases, two of them, were decided. As president, it was Ike’s duty to carry out the Supreme Court decisions, which he did in Little Rock, as Kasey Pipes reports:
Little Rock should be remembered as a seminal moment in the civil-rights struggle — perhaps the seminal moment. If integration had failed at Little Rock, it’s hard to imagine it succeeding anywhere. And it would be great if parents, teachers, and journalists would remember that the 101st Airborne soldiers did not arrive on their own orders. Dwight D. Eisenhower had something to do with that.
Little Rock wasn’t the beginning of Ike’s civil rights engagement, and it wasn’t the end, either. Eisenhower wanted to strengthen and solidify the gains made in 1957, and so he pushed for the 1960 Civil Rights Act, which he was able to sign into law before he left office.
