Why did President Eisenhower send the Army into Little Rock, Arkansas?

Through all of these Supreme Court decisions and during the Montgomery boycott and other peaceful protests that followed, the Eisenhower White House stood as a vacuum of moral leadership on the civil rights issue. While the Cold War general was making the world “safe for democracy,” his own vision of a free society seemed to have no room for blacks.

Apparently fearfulrift gold of alienating the powerful bloc of “Dixiecrats,” the southern Democratic congressmen whose votes he needed, Eisenhower was ambiguous in his public comments. He promised to uphold the laws of the land, but refrained from endorsing the Court’s rulings. At the time, a word of leadership or outrage at Jim Crow conditions from this popular president might have given the civil rights movement additional vigor and force. Instead, Eisenhower was ultimately forced to act, with great reluctance, in a showdown that was more about presidential power than about the rights of black children.

In September 1957, the governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubus, posted 270 fully armed men from the Arkansas National Guard outside Little Rock Central High School. Their duty was to prevent nine black children from entering the previously all-white school. On American television and all over the world, people watched with revulsion as the children tried to enter school and were turned away by the guard as an angry, jeering mob spat and cursed at them, all under the watchful eyes of the guardsmen. A federal district court order forced Faubus to allow the children into the school, but the governor withdrew the Arkansas state guard, leaving the protection of the black children to a small contingent of resentful local policemen, some of whom refused to carry out the order.

Finally, Eisenhower,tera gold to defend the sovereignty of the federal court, had to order 1,100 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to Little Rock and place the state national guard under his direct orders. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. troops were in the South to protect the rights of blacks. Eisenhower had not acted out of concern for the students’ rights or safety, but because herift platinum
believed that he couldn’t allow the force of federal law to be ignored. The troops remained in Little Rock Central High for the rest of the school year, and eight of the black students stayed through the year despite curses, harassment, and abuse. Whatever else it proved, Little Rock showed that the civil rights movement was going to need the full force of the federal government to enforce the laws that the Supreme Court had created.