Little Rock in 1957 and the Republican President Who Sent in the 101st Airborne

Nine teenagers, a high school, and a soldier with a bayonet. That is the photograph most Americans carry in their heads when somebody says "Little Rock," and it is a good photograph, because it tells you in one frame what the fight was about. A child walks to school. The government of her own state stands in the way. And a government far away, in a city she has never visited, sends men in uniform to make sure she gets inside.

What the picture does not tell you is whose government sent the soldiers. It was a Republican one. The president was Dwight Eisenhower, the five-star general who had run the largest amphibious invasion in history and who had been elected, twice, by the votes of Americans who trusted him to keep order. The governor in the way was a Democrat. If you have ever been told that the Republican Party has nothing to say about civil rights before 1964, this is one of the stories you were not told. It is also a story about something that matters just as much to a conservative: the rule of law, and what happens when a state decides it can ignore a federal court.

Before the crisis: Brown and the Warren appointment

To understand September 1957, go back to May 17, 1954. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The opinion was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and here is a fact that gets lost: Warren was a Republican, a three-term governor of California whom Eisenhower had appointed to the Court in 1953 after the death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson.

The record on Eisenhower and Brown is mixed, and I will not dress it up. He was cautious by temperament, and he avoided publicly endorsing the decision itself. Historians have long noted that he was reluctant to say whether he thought the Court was right. But he said he would enforce the law, and he meant it. A year later, in what is called Brown II, the Court told lower courts to oversee desegregation "with all deliberate speed," leaving the details to local federal judges. That phrase created the room for resistance. Southern officials read "deliberate" as a green light for delay and ignored the word "speed."

The reaction in much of the South was fierce. In 1956 a large group of Southern members of Congress signed what became known as the Southern Manifesto, which condemned the decision as an abuse of judicial power and encouraged resistance by lawful means. The signers were overwhelmingly Southern Democrats. It is a fact worth stating as plainly as I just stated Eisenhower's hesitancy: both parties had their reluctant and their resistant figures, and the record is more complicated than a cartoon. But the individuals on the front line at Little Rock are not hard to name.

The plan in Little Rock

The Little Rock school board, to its credit, adopted a plan to begin integration in the fall of 1957 at Central High School. Nine Black students were chosen to attend. The plan was modest, gradual, and approved by a federal judge. This was the legal process working as designed.

Then Orval Faubus, the Democratic governor of Arkansas, intervened. On September 2, 1957, the night before school was to open, he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High. His stated reason was that he feared violence. The effect was that the nine students were turned away at the door by armed state troops. A governor had taken the state's own militia and used it to block a federal court order.

Think about the legal position this put everybody in. A federal district judge, Ronald Davies, ordered the school board to proceed with integration. Faubus had no authority to override that order. Under the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, the Constitution and federal law are the supreme law of the land, "anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." If a governor can use the state's guns to stop a court order he dislikes, then the order is merely advice. And if one governor can do it, so can the next, about whatever law he dislikes.

Faubus withdrew the Guard on September 20 after the court held its ground. On September 23, the nine students went into the school under police escort. A mob gathered outside, hundreds strong, and the police concluded that they could not hold the crowd. The students were taken out before the end of the day.

September 24, 1957

The president acted. On September 23 he had already issued a proclamation ordering the mob to disperse, and it did not. On September 24, he signed Executive Order 10730, which federalized the Arkansas National Guard, taking it out of Faubus's hands and putting it under federal command, and he ordered the 101st Airborne Division, the "Screaming Eagles," to Little Rock. The paratroopers numbered roughly a thousand. The legal authority came from federal statutes that allow the president to use the armed forces to suppress insurrection and enforce federal law when state authorities cannot or will not.

That same evening, he went on national television from the White House. The address was plain, almost stern. He explained that the federal court's order had been obstructed, that "mob rule" could not be allowed to override the decisions of the courts, and that he had acted because it was his duty to uphold the Constitution. He was careful to say that he was not acting on the question of whether segregation was right or wrong, but on the question of whether the law would be obeyed. For a general, it was a very lawyerly argument. And on that point, I would argue, he was dead right.

On September 25, the nine students entered Central High, escorted by soldiers. The 101st Airborne stayed in the city for weeks, and federalized Guard troops remained at the school for the rest of the school year. None of it was pleasant. It was not supposed to be. But it worked: the court order was carried out.

The steelman: was this federal overreach?

Now let me be fair to the objection, because conservatives have a tradition of worrying about federal power and some of them worried about this. The argument runs like this.

One, education is a state and local matter. The Constitution does not mention schools, and the Tenth Amendment reserves unlisted powers to the states.

Two, sending troops into an American city is an alarming precedent. The Posse Comitatus tradition and the fear of a standing army are old American suspicions.

Three, a president who can send soldiers to enforce one court order can send them to enforce any order, including one a later president likes better.

Four, the Supreme Court's reading of the 14th Amendment was a bold new interpretation, and the executive was being asked to enforce a contested one.

Those worries are real. I share the second and third. A president who reaches for the Army should have to show a very strong case. But here is how Little Rock answers them.

1. Education is a state matter, but the 14th Amendment limits what states may do within that matter. The amendment says no state shall deny any person the equal protection of the laws, and Section 5 gives Congress the power to enforce it. A state running a school is still a state. The Tenth Amendment does not protect a power the Fourteenth has taken away. For the proper range of the Tenth, see The Tenth Amendment Rule That Protects Red States Also Protects Sanctuary Cities.
2. The troops came last, not first. A federal judge issued an order. A school board complied. A governor obstructed. A mob prevented the students from attending school. Only after those steps did the president use force, and only to enforce the order. This was a narrow use of the power, with a defined purpose.
3. The principle runs in both directions. If a governor can nullify a court order, then no state is bound by any federal ruling. That would hand the same power to any state about any subject, including those where conservatives hope to win in court. A conservative who wants the Constitution enforced against a rogue bureaucrat cannot also want it enforceable only when convenient.
4. The Court said so, unanimously. In 1958, in Cooper v. Aaron, all nine justices signed an opinion saying that the states are bound by the Court's constitutional rulings, and that officials cannot nullify them. The case arose from Little Rock, after the local school board asked to postpone integration. Scholars debate how far Cooper stretches judicial supremacy, and conservatives can and do argue about that. But the narrower point, that a governor may not defy a federal court's order directed at his state, was settled.

My reading: Eisenhower used the minimum force necessary to enforce a specific order, and then he stopped. That is the posture you want from a commander in chief. The lesson for those who worry about executive power is not "never send troops." It is "send them only to enforce a lawful court order, only when everything else has failed, and say publicly why."

The Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960

The Little Rock crisis was not the only Eisenhower administration action on the matter. In 1957, Attorney General Herbert Brownell had pressed Congress for civil rights legislation, and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was signed on September 9, 1957, just weeks before the standoff. It was the first federal civil rights law since Reconstruction. It created the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department and a Civil Rights Commission, and it gave the department standing to sue to protect voting rights.

It was weaker than supporters wanted. The bill had to pass a Senate in which Southern Democrats were ready to filibuster; Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina spoke for more than twenty-four hours straight in an attempt to block it, a record for a single speech that stood for decades. The Senate's Democratic leader, Lyndon Johnson, helped steer a compromise that kept the bill alive, including a change to jury-trial provisions that critics said weakened enforcement. A half-loaf is still bread, but only if you keep baking. In 1960, Eisenhower signed another Civil Rights Act, which added provisions for federal referees to help register voters when local officials discriminated, and which made it a federal crime to obstruct federal court orders by force or threat.

None of this made the South a Republican region overnight. Quite the opposite. It is part of the Republican record because that record is real, and because the party that later argued about civil rights in the 1960s had a history to argue from. For the sequel, read The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican Votes That Broke the Filibuster; for a different angle on the same crisis from the presidents' side, see Why Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957.

Why the old story still matters

It matters for three reasons, and I will give them in order.

First, it corrects a lazy history. The idea that the Republican Party stood on the wrong side of civil rights throughout the postwar years falls apart at Little Rock. Eisenhower, the Republican Warren Court appointee, and a Republican Justice Department were enforcing the law against a Democratic governor. That does not erase the places where Republicans fell short, and it does not erase the later controversies. It does mean that anyone telling the story needs to include this chapter. The same goes for the more complicated question of how the parties changed over time, which is taken up in The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows.

Second, it shows what the rule of law demands. Conservatives like to say that the law applies to everyone, including the powerful. Little Rock was a test of that principle. The powerful man in the room, a governor with the state's guns behind him, was told no, and the order was carried out. You cannot cheer for law and order and then wave off the case where the law says something you would rather it didn't. The long principle behind this is spelled out in Equal Under the Law Means the Rule Applies to the People in Charge.

Third, it is a model of presidential restraint. The deployment was limited in purpose and in time. Eisenhower later used his farewell address to warn the country about the weight of military power in civilian life, a theme found in Eisenhower's farewell address gave two warnings and Republicans remember one. A man who knew what an army can do was careful about when to call it out.

The bottom line

• Little Rock was a Republican president enforcing a federal court order against a Democratic governor who used the National Guard to defy it. It belongs in the party's civil rights record.
• Eisenhower was cautious about Brown and never said he loved the ruling, but he said he would enforce the law, and on September 24, 1957, he did, with Executive Order 10730 and roughly a thousand paratroopers.
• The conservative worries about federal power and the Army are legitimate. The answer is the sequence: court order first, state defiance second, force last and limited.
• If you want to cite this story, cite all of it, including the hesitation and the compromises in the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. A fair account holds up better than a flattering one.
• When someone says the law must be obeyed only when it is convenient, point to Arkansas in 1957 and ask whether they would have wanted the governor or the president to win.