The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Eisenhower and Brown v. Board of Education

IKE dragged his feet on any effort at enforcement not because he thought Brown wrongly decided - as it was, both by claiming the constitution forbade compulsory segregation and by claiming it required compulsory integration - but because his sympathies were with the people who wanted segregation to continue.

He gets more credit than he deserves as an anti-segregationist, say, from the likes of Ann Coulter.  

Newton thinks segregation a terrible moral injustice America had a duty to end.

He thinks Brown a dazzling moral victory.

But then, who today could write otherwise in a mainstream history and expect to keep his job?

Of course, if you wrote otherwise, yours could never be accepted as a mainstream history. 

And no mainstream publisher would touch it.

Reading Eisenhower, The White House Years.

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