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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our series, The Eights, A Brief History of The Culture Wars Decade by Decade. Today we're still in 1958 when James Brown there who you may think of as the king of funk and soul in the 1960s was already on the scene, but singing do up.

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1958 in music also saw the modern version of the song called We Shall Overcome.

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Not many better versions of that song than this Acapella one, by the Freedom Singers from Albany, Georgia, part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, singing it that way in April of 1960. A member of the group, Bernice Johnson, looked back years later on NPR to the lyrics coming together into the modern version.

Bernice Johnson: I remember when the organizers came to Albany, and I was saying, "I'll overcome," and I was stopped by Cordell, who says it's not "I'll" it's "we". He had gotten this lesson from Highlander and from God. I looked at him, and we'd been singing this song all of our lives, and here's this guy who just learned the song, and he was telling us how to sing it. You know what I said to myself? "If you need it, you got it." What that statement does for me is document the presence of BLACK and white people in this country fighting against injustice, and you have BLACK people accepting that need because they were also accepting that support and that help.

Brian: Bernice Johnson, looking back to her days as one of the Freedom Singers in Albany, Georgia, part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and there was, of course, plenty to overcome. In 1958 44% of whites said they would move if a BLACK family became their next-door neighbor today. That figure is only 1% according to Brookings. Maybe a lot of people aren't telling the truth, but, no doubt, it is still way down from 1958.

Only 4% of Americans approved of BLACK-white intermarriage in 1958, 4% according to Gallup. In the summer of 1958, two dozen young people from the Wichita area branch NAACP Youth Council staged what would become the first successful student-led sit-in of the civil rights movement. By August 11, 1958 according to the Wichita PBS affiliate, they had desegregated the Dockum Drugstore lunch counter, and all Rexall drugstores throughout the state of Kansas, and the movement gained a powerful new weapon in the fight for equal accommodations. Sometimes they sang this song called Leave Segregation Alone.

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A version there by the Nashville Quartet, we think from a student's sit-in in 1960. In 1958, the population of the United States was 174 million. Today we're approaching twice that much at 325. The average age of the population went down a few months from 1948 to 1958, because the baby boom, the median age was just under 30. Today, it's just under 40. Like in 1948, African-Americans still made up 10% of the national population. The Latino population edged up from 2% to 3%. But listen to this; the percentage of the population who were immigrants was about 8% in 1948.

It went down to under 6% in 1958. That could be because of decades of restrictive immigration laws, continuing to have their desired effect. There was also a deportation campaign in the mid-50s called Operation Wetback, which reduced the number of Mexican migrant farm workers who had been welcome when there was a labor shortage during World War Two. The percentage of men who were college graduates had gone up three points since 1948 from about 7% to about 10%.

The numbers for women lagged behind going from 7%, they were about even in '48, to only about 8% who had bachelor's degrees in '58. That disparity that might've also had something to do with the post-war period. Interesting that today more women than men graduate college. The federal poverty rate was first measured in 1959. According to Pew, it was a whopping 24%. A quarter of the population lived officially in poverty, and it varied wildly from state to state. The poverty rate in Mississippi was over 50%, which also gives an indication of how unevenly poverty was distributed by race.

Mississippi is still the poorest state, but the rate is down close to 20%. How to measure poverty and what to do about it is a big culture war issue and has been for a long time. The Academy Award for best picture in 1958, went to Bridge Over the River Kwai. The country was still processing World War Two. And so was the Nobel committee, the peace prize went to Dominick Pire. I don't know if I'm saying P-I-R-E right, but Dominic Pire, a Catholic friar from Belgium for his work resettling refugees after the war.

The bestselling non-fiction book during this week in 1958 was Masters of Deceit: What The Communist Bosses are Doing Now to Bring America to its Knees by the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, with a strong suggestion of Russian influence on the American left. The New York Times non-fiction bestseller today, by the way, is A Higher Loyalty by former FBI director James Comey, which suggests Russian influence on the American right.

Martin Luther King published his first book in 1958 Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. If you think of 1968 as the year Martin Luther King was assassinated, it was in '58 that someone else tried to kill him and came close. He was stabbed right here in Manhattan at a public appearance, signing autographs on copies of that book, when someone came up and stabbed him.

Martin Luther King: I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. That blade had gone through and x-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery, and once that's punctured, you drowned in your own blood. That's the end of you. It came out in the New York Times the next morning that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died.

Brian: Martin Luther King, looking back, ironically, on the night before he was successfully assassinated, 10 years later. You probably know that Brown v. Board of Education, the school desegregation ruling, came from the Supreme Court in 1954. What you may not know is that Thurgood Marshall, an NAACP lawyer, who argued Brown before he was named a Supreme Court justice had to go back to the court in '58 to argue that the ruling actually applied to the States. Little Rock Arkansas Schools in particular were holding out. Here's 30 seconds of Thurgood Marshall in 1958, making a very avant-garde argument for those days that segregation was bad for white people.

Thurgood Marshall: Therefore I'm not worried about the Negro children in the States. I don't believe they are in this case and such. I worry about the white children in Little Rock who are told, as young people, that the way to get your rights is to violate the law and defy the lawful authorities. I am worried about their future. I don't worry about the Negro kids' future. They have been struggling with democracy long enough. They know about it.

Brian: Thurgood Marshall in 1958. But he didn't convince the white mobs in Little Rock. When I say mobs, it's not just a pejorative. When the school year started in September '57, President Eisenhower had to send us troops, the US military, into Little Rock to put down the violence that had broken out as resistance to integrating the schools. Here are the first two minutes of Eisenhower's legendary announcement and hardly any of you have ever heard this before, I'm sure, on September 24th, 1957.

President Eisenhower: To make this talk I have come to the president's office in the White House. I could have spoken from Rhode Island of where I have been staying recently. But I felt that in speaking from the house of Lincoln, of Jackson, and of Wilson, my words would better convey both the sadness I feel in the action I was compelled today to make and the firmness with which I intend to pursue this course until the orders of the federal court at Little Rock can be executed without unlawful interference. In that city, under the leadership of demagogic extremists, disorderly mobs have deliberately prevented the carrying out of proper orders from a federal court.

Local authorities have not eliminated that violent opposition. Under the law, I yesterday issued a proclamation calling upon the mob to disperse. This morning, the mob again gathered in front of the Central High School of Little Rock, obviously, for the purpose of, again, preventing the carrying out of the court's order relating to the admission of Negro children to that school. Whenever normal agencies prove inadequate to the task, and it becomes necessary for the executive branch of the federal government to use its powers and authority to uphold federal courts, the President's responsibility is inescapable. In accordance with that responsibility, I have today issued an executive order.

Brian: President Eisenhower on September 24th, 1957. Also that year, Eisenhower created the United States Commission for Civil rights and my next guest served on that commission for 24 years. Dr. Mary Frances Berry was a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights from 1980 to 2004, and served as chair from 1993 to 2004. In the Carter administration, she was Assistant Secretary for Education in the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as it was known then. Now she teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania and she has a new book called History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times. Dr. Berry, we're honored to have you as part of our series, The Eights. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dr. Mary Frances Berry: Well, thank you, Brian. After listening to what you said, which reminded me of the period, I thought, "Boy, I don't have anything else to say." [laughs] That was great. That was really great.

Brian: Thank you so much. I think you have a lot else to say because you're in that period in part of the book. Relevant to the Eisenhower clip we just heard, you write about the first national event for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King's main group, in '57, a march on Washington with its main focus the violent resistance that was taking place against Brown, the desegregation ruling. Can you tell us a little bit of that history, how the SCLC came to be? Or why the Supreme Court's Brown decision wasn't just accepted as settled law?

Mary: Well, I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and going to high school when Brown was decided a segregated high school, of course, and walked down the street on the day that it was decided and saw the headline and said to my high school teacher who was with me, we were going shopping for something for the class graduation, I said, "Oh, does that mean that the children will all go to school together next year, Miss Hawkins?" She said, "Not so fast, Mary Frances. Not so fast." [laughs] She was right. That is a memory for me that is indelible.

Also, we had had, of course, the Montgomery bus boycott, which Rosa Parks after a number of people had sat down on buses and nothing had transpired, kicked off the southern Montgomery movement with boycotts which were eventually successful. The Brown decision was not implemented, but the fact that it existed meant that the lawsuit that was filed by the people in Montgomery won in the Supreme Court, because it said that segregation had to end and their boycott was successful. You had that happening. Also, SCLC was formed by the ministers after the boycott.

Martin Luther King was selected to lead the whole thing, and the prayer pilgrimage, which you mentioned in 1957 in Washington, DC was his coming out party. It was the first time Martin had made a speech at a national meeting. It was a huge meeting. What he talked about was the need for the right to vote. He said, "Give us the ballot and we won't have to ask for anything else because if you give us the ballot, then indeed the officials will be responsive to us." He wasn't exactly right, but it was an important milestone. That's when he came out as the leader and everyone acknowledged him as the leader.

Now, Eisenhower had to deal with the aftermath of these domestic incidents as well as international affairs. This was a period in which African countries became independent. Ghana first and others got their independence, and they sent representatives to the United States right there in New York to the United Nations. They set up embassies in Washington, and they went back and forth by automobile between the two. They were segregated and left out of restaurants and other public places along the highway, and there were all kinds of protests. The Ghanaian Ambassador was embarrassed. Eisenhower invited him to lunch to try to make up for it.

At the meeting of his cabinet, President Eisenhower agreed to set up a Civil Rights Commission and to ask for a Voting Rights Act in '57 and to work for that in the Congress, and that the commission would have subpoena power in order, as he said, "To put the facts on top of the table about all these events and to make recommendations that might help to solve the problems." It was international events as well as domestic events.

The commission was established after a hard fight by the segregationists in the Congress. He worked in 1958, Eisenhower did, to appoint people to it and get them through the Senate while Strom Thurmond, the Senator from South Carolina, filibustered all the time, and the commission got set up. Its first hearing was in Alabama where some of the commissioners were threatened. The woman commissioner had someone try to get in her room. It was terrible, but this was a landmark in the history of civil rights.

Brian: Listeners, we want to continue in this segment with listeners' oral history element of our series, The Eights, for today, who listening right now was involved in the Civil Rights Movement in 1958 in any way. We would love to hear a little bit of your story. 212-433-WNYC-433-9692. Call and tell us a story about your involvement back then. How is it different from racial justice activism today? 212-433-9692. Listeners, how do you remember the backlash in those days? Or maybe on the other side of the fence, you yourself or people you knew were part of that backlash. Did you, or did they change over time, or could the seeds of the modern culture wars be seen even then? 212-433-WNYC-433-9692.

Listeners, we invite you to contribute some oral history as we've been doing every day in the series so far. Today, your story of being involved in the Civil Rights Movement or the backlash to it in or around 1958. 212-433-WNYC. Let's stay in the late '50s with this for today. We'll do all kinds of things about the '60s next week, but today in or around 1958 and the '50s. 212-433-9692 as we continue with Mary Frances Berry. When we come back here--

Mary: Brian, can I just say?

Brian: Please.

Mary: My own personal recollections, I guess I was 17, I was in the bus station in Huntsville, Alabama passing through there after high school. I was out doing a road trip, as it were, and went to the segregated window where the BLACKS had to go to buy food while the bus stopped. There were police there, and state troopers, and everybody, and they said, "You can't come in here. Just get back on the bus." We said, "What's wrong?" They said, using the N-word, "That N-word woman is trying to get in the University of Alabama. She's not going to get in there. We're going to stop her because we got police out all over the state. She won't get her BA," I'll let you say BLACK A, "into that school. So get back on the bus."

We did. That was Vivian Malone, who is a relative of Eric Holder, the former attorney general of Obama, who, in fact, was trying to get in the University of Alabama. They'd called out troops and done everything else to stop her from doing it. A personal experience. A second one is that my little brother when they started sit-ins in Nashville was in elementary school, and he marched the whole class out with him in front of them down to join the movement as children did everywhere, despite the fact that teachers kept yelling at them, "Come back here, come back here." They just kept on going.

Brian: Very vivid. It's not every day we get to hear Mary Frances Berry talk about being 17.

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When we come back from a break, I want to ask how you think history should remember Eisenhower as a civil rights president compared to the presidents around him, Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ. Listeners, stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with our series, The Eights, A Brief History of the American Culture Wars Decade by Decade. We are in 1958 and our guest is Mary Frances Berry, a longtime member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights among other things. Her new book is called History Teaches Us To Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times. Dr. Berry, how should history remember Eisenhower as a civil rights president?

Mary: Eisenhower was pretty good. Today we'd call him say a moderate Republican if there are any left round today. There were a lot of BLACK people who voted for Eisenhower. I remember some of the high school teachers saying, "We're going to vote for him even though he's a Republican because it's about time we change parties. We keep having Democrats, and he seems like a reasonable person, has been a successful general," and so on. He was very good on the Little Rock crisis. Although, some people said he only took action because he hated anybody trying to oppose authority since he had been a general and a military guy.

The implementation of the desegregation of the armed forces that had started, of course, earlier kept going smoothly during his watch. Herbert Brownell, who was his attorney general and who was from New York, was one of the great civil rights attorney generals. He was the one who advised Eisenhower that he needed to put subpoena power in the law for the Civil Rights Commission so they could order people to testify in part to give cover to victims who wanted to come and were scared, and to make others come. Eisenhower, that's when he slammed the table and said, "Yes, let's get the facts on top of the table. Let's do it."

Brownell and his justice department tried to enforce the civil rights laws that were on the books even though the Voting Rights Act they got passed in '57 was fairly weak, and we needed another one later on, they did a yeoman job given the times working on-- I think he was pretty good.

Brian: Thomas in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Thomas, thanks so much for calling.

Thomas: You're welcome. I just wanted to add to the conversation. I was 10 years old in 1956 when Eisenhower was running for president. I grew up on 334 Blake Avenue in Brownsville. I remember on a Sunday afternoon we had to go up, and we waited about an hour or so and his motorcade came down Sutter Avenue between Rockaway, at that time Stone Avenue, which is now Madagascar. I just wanted to add to the conversation, you hear about Brownsville today negative, but in those days Brownsville had a positive reputation. I'm 72 years old now haven't been handcuffed or arrested in my life, but yet, I just want to add to the conversation that Brownsville has a positive side in my history.

Brian: Thank you so much for that, Thomas. Joyce in Lawrenceville, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joyce.

Joyce: Hi, I'm very interested in this conversation. I'm just enjoying it. I don't want to brag, but I was lower than you, the person who just spoke.

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I was almost 10 about the time that we're talking about, '58. I'm from Arkansas. I lived in Arkansas, and some of my friends later helped to desegregate Little Rock. They just got all the BLACK people, BLACK kids whose parents would allow them to go, and that's how they did that. So, about this time Martin Luther King decided to come to Pine Bluff, to my town. I had been following him, reading all about him, and was really excited about seeing him. My mother didn't. She was behind the times. The BLACK community was segregated pretty much in that thinking about the differences between SNCC and Martin Luther King, about taking it slow with regard to desegregation and just going with or participating in the marches and everything.

Brian: Joyce did you tell our screener that your mother wouldn't let you go see Martin Luther King at your church?

Joyce: She wouldn't let me go, and I was really, really upset. When I went to the mailbox the next day, which was on the one paved street in our community where "the street that the whites used to get through the BLACK neighborhood, that's why I thought it was paved. I decided to lay down in the streets and make the cars go around me. Don't ask me why. I was just always an obstinate child, and I just decided that's what I would do.

Joyce: One girl sit-in. Joyce, thank you so much for that wonderful memory and collection of memories. Dr. Berry, any reaction to the first two callers and in particular, Joyce raised the issue of the pace that people would push for desegregation and differences within the activist community about that pace, yes?

Mary: Well, I think that some people were afraid to do anything. I remember in Nashville when my mother was asked by a reporter what she thought about school desegregation, and they put the story on the front page. She was just walking down the street. She said, "Well, I don't think negros should go where they're not wanted." When she came home, she told us and the relatives that she had said that and she said it because she was scared. That's why she said it. It didn't have anything to do with how she actually felt. Some of the older people didn't think change would ever come.

They didn't understand that protest is an essential ingredient of politics and that you have to take risks, which is what I write about my book. You have to take risks. They were worried about what would happen to the younger people. Even with the Montgomery Bus Boycott there were some people didn't try to interrupt it, but they were scared. You had that different younger people though and children everywhere, were anxious to come out and be activists.

Brian: Now, this series is on the evolution of the American culture wars. We're looking at both progress towards social justice and the backlash to it. Here's an example of the backlash from that era. 1958 was the year that the ultra conservative John Birch Society was formed. Here's the founder Robert Welch, opening the door to labeling any movement he didn't like as communist inspired or communist infiltrated.

Robert Welch: Our immediate and most urgent anxiety, of course, is the threat of the Communist conspiracy and, well, it should be. Both internationally and within the United States the communists are much further advanced and more deeply entrenched than is realized by even most of these serious students of the danger among the anti-communists. Almost every day, I run into some whole new area where the communists have been penetrating and working quietly for years, until now, they are in virtual control of everything that is done in that slice our corner of our national life.

Brian: The founder of the John Birch Society Robert Welch in 1958. Dr. Berry, you write in your book, that the marches of that era were carefully patriotic to avoid red baiting by opponents of civil rights. Can you put the one in the context of the other?

Mary: Yes, indeed, because the clan raised the banner of racism and communism, that all the BLACK folks were doing and outside agitators who were communists were making them do whatever they were doing and the John Birch Society raised this banner. The politicians in the Congress, there were a lot of Southern segregationists in the Congress of the United States, would in their rhetoric, raise this. Every time there was a march or something, they would be out front, the symbols of patriotism, and people would speak of patriotism and people would describe what it is, the activists, what they were trying to do in terms of just implementing what the American creed required, not anything that's foreign or comes from India, Canada, or any other country.

Because in fact, the FBI harassed activists, we know that now, the history of it, and in fact, tried to disrupt, the movement and the whole argument that they gave to successive presidents that these were a bunch of communists who were trying to do this. This was very important. The other thing is that, not just the Birch Society, but the Klan. You said that there was backlash. Yes, there were bombings even, not just rhetorical backlash.

A bombing of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth's church down in Birmingham when the Birmingham people were first trying to engage in boycotts and sit-ins and voting protests. Luckily nobody was in the church so nobody was killed. It's not like the bombings we know about later, but using violence, was something that the Klan did very often.

Brian: One more call. Marsha in Poughkeepsie on WNYC. Marsha, thank you so much for calling.

Marsha: Thank you for taking me. I think this must have happened closer to '48 than '58. We had just moved to Topeka. My father was a psychologist. Our neighbors were a BLACK psychiatrist, his wife and kids. When September came, I got on a big yellow bus and went to a big brick school in town. My neighbor’s kids were picked up by a farm truck and taken to a little wooden school that was quite inadequate, outside of town and my mother flipped out.

She got organized as usual and she began what became the 1948 decision in Topeka. I believe that she and my father stayed involved with it straight through until it was determined because Dr. Clark, the psychologist who did the presentation to the Supreme Court, came to my father's funeral.

Brian: Marsha, thank you very much [crosstalk] for that memory. I'm sorry to say that we're out of time. We could do this for days, but we will continue for weeks on other years in our series, The Eights, A Brief History of the American Culture Wars Decade by Decade. We finish now with 1958 and we move on to 1968 next week on Monday. I want to thank our very special guest for today, Mary Frances Berry, whose new book is History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times. Thank you so much. You're an inspiration.

Mary: Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian: As we go out, during his days as a civil rights organizer, Andrew Young, who went on to be Mayor of Atlanta, US Ambassador to the United Nations and a Congressman, said that Nina Simone's music was the soundtrack of the movement. He said, "Every home I went to had Nina Simone. I mean, everyone. For all the people in the civil rights moment, it was an identity." So we go out with a little bit of Nina Simone from her first album released in 1958. Here's Little Girl Blue.

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