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The Eisenhower Civil Rights Program |
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During Dwight D. Eisenhower'sfirst three years in office - 1953 to 1955 - he presented no civil rights bills to Congress. The president and his cabinet members were well aware that Eisenhower's predecessor in office, Democrat Harry S. Truman, had not only failed to get a civil rights bill from Congress but had ruined his relationships with the southern Democrats by his efforts to get a bill passed. Eisenhower also believed that strongly held political opinions - such as a firm belief in racial segregation - could not easily be changed, even by U.S. Government legislation. Eisenhower told a new conference in 1954: "I believe there are certain things that are not best handled by punitive or compulsory Federal law."
Although he declined to ask Congress for a civil rights bill in his first years in office, President Eisenhower was quietly determined to eliminate racial discrimination in those areas where the president had clear-cut authority and there was no question of overriding states' rights. Eisenhower therefore issued executive orders ending any segregationist practices that remained in the District of Columbia, in the military, and in the U.S. Government bureaucracy. He was the first president to appoint a black, Frederic Morrow, to an executive position on the White House staff. Eisenhower's record of achievement in the civil rights field was sufficiently impressive that he gained considerable support among black voters when he successfully ran for reelection to the presidency in 1956.
Eisenhower's policy of minimizing legislative requests and maximizing executive action was followed by his successor as president, John F. Kennedy. It can even be argued that President Kennedy, by delaying signing an executive order to racially integrate public housing in the United States for more than two years, was less willing to use executive action on behalf of civil rights than Eisenhower was. To Kennedy's credit, following the violent and well-publicized racial demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963, he sent a major civil rights bill to Congress and worked diligently for its passage.
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