960
Reviews of Books
efforts of W.E.B. Du Bois on the outside and Ralph
Bunche on the inside are perhaps the best known.
Krenn enriches this history by bringing to light the
efforts of such pioneers as Rayford Logan, Clifton
Wharton, Sr., Terence Todman, Edward Dudley,
George McGhee, Carl Rowan, Theodore Brown, and
Patricia Roberts Harris to move the nation forward.
Joining them in the struggle were a few white allies
such as Ambassador Chester Bowles and Assistant
Secretary of State for Administration John Pcurifoy,
They received no help from the law. With the
passage of the Rogers Act in 1924, appointment to the
new Foreign Service of the United States would be by
"open, competitive examination with promotion
strictly on a merit basis"(p. 45). The act was meant to
broaden the Foreign Service to include members from
places other than Harvard and elite private schools.
There were two important exceptions to the act's
democratic aspirations: African Americans and
women.
The first African American appointed to a ministerial position was Ebenezer D. Bassett, who was sent to
Haiti in 1869. Two years later, J. Milton Turner was
named minister to Liheria. Haiti and Liberia, along
with the Canary Islands, Madagascar, and the Azores,
became the "black circuit" where virtually all African
American diplomats were posted. Efforts to break
through these segregated postings produced the response that other countries would be unwilling to
accept black ambassadors. This argument held despite
the lack of any empirical evidence to support it.
Ironically, reports Krenn, when African nations began
to achieve independence in the late fifties and early
sixties, it was argued hy some that African nations
would resent being assigned African-American ambassadors!
Cold War politics had a profound impact on African
American leadership and the foreign policy establishment. Recent works by Penny Von Eschen, Gerald
Home, and Brenda Gayle Plummer examine the efforts to separate domestic civil rights from foreign
policy. Yet Krenn contends that the evidence reveals a
"great deal of consistency in the African-American
analysis of D.S. diplomacy during the Eisenhower
period" (p. 68). Particularly after the Little Rock
school desegregation conflict in 1957, the attacks in
newspapers and magazines began to take on a much
more cynical and combative tone. Not coincidentally,
Clifton Wharton, Sr., was appointed minister to Romania in 1958.
The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 brought
new hope to civil rights advocates and led to the first
White House conference with American black leaders
on US. foreign policy. Yet while Kennedy devoted
more attention to Africa than his predecessors, it was
primarily as an arena of significant Cold War rivalry.
Even this limited attention declined under Lyndon B.
Johnson, who moved Africa to the back burner and
actively resisted efforts to form an African-American
lobby on Africa. Thus, says Krenn, from Frankin
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Delano Roosevelt through Johnson, the main line of
thinking remained unchanged: "the biggest problem
facing the United States in underdeveloped regions
such as Africa was communism, not racism; therefore,
American propaganda should focus on the East-West,
not black-white struggle" (p. 132).
This book lays the foundation for further in-depth
studies on black influence in international relations.
One would have wished for more stories from some of
the diplomatic pioneers Krenn interviewed. Still, his
work helps explain why D.S. foreign policy seems
adrift in a world without the "evil empire."
CHARLES P. HENRY
University of California,
Berkeley
TIMOTHY N. THURBER. The Politics of Equality: Hubert
H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle. (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American
History.) New York: Columbia University Press. 1999.
Pp. x, 352. Cloth $46.00, paper $21.00.
Timothy N. Thurber's book is a fine contribution to the
growing body of scholarship reevaluating, yet again,
the history of American liberalism. That Hubert H.
Humphrey's commitment to civil rights provides a
fitting vehicle for such a reevaluation is no surprise,
but Thurber is unusually good at showing how politics
and government actually work. The central thread of
his argument is that while Humphrey supported equal
access to public accommodations and voting rights as
these became the dominant legislative issues in the
1950s an 1960s, he remained convinced that African
Americans needed government help to advance economically at least as much.
As mayor in the late 1940s, Humphrey brought a fair
employment practices ordinance and human rights
commission to Minneapolis. He led other "crackpots"
(as President Harry S. Truman called them) in pressing
for a strong civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic
national convention. As a senator, he urged Democrats to make jobs and civil rights priority issues, and
he served as floor manager for the Civil Rights Act of
1964. That act, along with the Voting Rights Act of
1965, provided the "ground rules by which we can wage
the struggle" for a more just society, Humphrey said
(p. 185). For Humphrey himself, the struggle got no
easier after he became Lyndon B. Johnson's vice
president in 1965. On the one hand, many AfricanAmerican activists accused him of sacrificing militancy
to ambition. On the other hand, Johnson denied
Humphrey real authority to combat job discrimination
and school segregation. Showing how government
worked-or did not work-in the world outside White
House claims and exhortations, Thurber gives a poignant account of Humphrey's efforts to prod officials
and businessmen into providing jobs for black teenagers during the volatile summers of the late 1960s.
Ironically supported by southern white segregationists,
who now saw him as a lesser threat than Robert
JUNE 2000
961
Canada and the United States
Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy, Humphrey won the
1968 presidential nomination but lost to Richard
Nixon, partly because of the white backlash against
integration, black nationalism, and urban violence.
Ironically, too, Humphrey ended his career as he
began it-as a party outsider. While Democrats in the
late 1970s grew increasingly skeptical of the welfare
state, Humphrey, who returned to the Senate in 1971,
insisted that a country with a $100 billion military
budget could "give every American a good job" (p.
237). The Humphrey-Hawkins bill, which would have
established mechanisms for providing full employment, was watered down into a symbolic admonition
when it passed in October 1978, nine months after
Humphrey's death.
This book's flaws appear when Thurber strays from
the thick record he has accumulated and indulges in
ideological or methodological asides. For instance, he
thinks Humphrey asked too little effort from the poor,
supposes that the political power wielded by conservatives went unnoticed by historians until roughly five
years ago, and cannot resist swipes at identity politics
as the bane of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, his
animus to identity politics leads him to exaggerate the
differences between the "old" liberalism and the
"new." Liberals did not write affirmative action into
law before the 1960s, but if Democratic presidents,
mayors, and ward leaders had not informally hired
men and women on the basis of religion and ethnicity,
there would have been no New Deal coalition. These
shortcomings are minor compared to Thurber's fresh
insights and reminders of the insights historians have
misplaced. During the 1950s, for example, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower received more than one third of
the African-American vote, many Republicans supported civil rights legislation, and Humphrey, among
others, feared that the Democrats would lose out
politically if they lagged behind on the issue. Although
the Cold War probably impeded the civil rights movement overall by giving segregationists the added
weapon of red baiting, this is a close judgment call,
because the anomaly of Americans preaching freedom
abroad while denying it to blacks at home provided a
powerful argument for supporters of racial equality.
As Humphrey's volatile exchanges with Fannie Lou
Hamer at the 1964 Democratic convention show, there
was no golden age of blissful relations between black
and white advocates of civil rights. Thurber also shows
that the private massaging of congressional egos, especially the ego of Senate minority leader Everett
Dirksen, played a role almost as important as public
demonstrations in passing a civil rights bill in 1964; he
highlights the significance of religious groups in lobbying for this measure. In the end, although studies of
the Vietnam War and the Cold War red scare would
show less admirable sides of Humphrey himself, he
emerges here as an unusually dccent,ambitious, mainstream politician.
LEO P. RIBUFFO
George Washington University
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Make Haste Slowly: Moderates,
Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston.
(The Centennial Series of the Association of Former
Students, Texas A&M University, number 80.) College
Station: Texas A&M University Press. 1999. Pp. xv,
226. $38.95.
WILLAM HENRY KELLAR.
In recent years, historians have published a significant
number of books examining the process of school
desegregation in local communities. Texas cities, however, have received less attention than have cities in
many other southern states. William Henry Kellar's
book helps to fill this gap by providing us with our best
understanding to date of school desegregation in
Houston, home to the country's largest de jure segregated school system in the 1950s.
Texans reacted to the Supreme Court's desegregation mandate in Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
with less defiance than did much of the South, indicative of Texas's border-state status. In the aftermath of
Supreme Court's May 1955 implementation decision
in the Brown case, school officials in a number of Texas
cities, such as San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Galveston,
Waco, and Austin, announced plans to desegregate
their schools. Although a few of these districts backed
off early decisions to cnd school segregation, several
Texas school districts, particularly in the state's mostly
white western counties, desegregated their schools in
the fall of 1955, becoming some of the first southern
school districts to do so. Several months later, only five
of Texas's twenty-two members of the House of Representatives signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing the Brown ruling. Although Governor Alan Shivers
did exploit the desegregation issue for his own political
advantage, his resistance efforts were less successful
than those of many other southern governors.
In Houston, many residents strongly opposed racial
mixing, but the city was less united in its opposition to
school desegregation than many other southern cities.
In 1957, a mere two weeks after federal district court
judge Ben Connally ruled that the Houston schools
were unconstitutionally segregated, Houston voters
elected the more racially liberal of two mayoral candidates with over sixty-three percent of the vote. One
year later, at the height of the city's struggle with the
school desegregation issue, Houston voters elected
their first African-American school board member,
Hattie Mae White, a forceful proponent of school
desegregation, and re-elected the racially liberal
Waiter Kemmerer, former president of the University
of Houston, even though African Americans comprised less than twenty-five percent of the city's population.
When Houston began its decidedly token school
integration in the fall of 1960, there was virtually no
violence, in sharp contrast to the simultaneous and far
more tumultuous desegregation of the New Orleans
schools. As Kellar notes, "Houston's business and
political leaders acquiesced in limited school desegregation, because the alternative-a city disrupted by
JUNE
2000