Jeb Jennings Research Paper

Jeb Jennings
Problems In U.S. History
3/18/14

The 1950s were a political nightmare for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It seemed as if no matter what he did he was going to severely upset a large group of people. He had civil rights activists organizing large-scale protests across the United States as well as political pressure from southern whites to continue to uphold segregation in schools. Once civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. starting organizing mass protests on Washington D.C. within the black community, many white southerners became concerned. Some responded by joining the Ku Klux Klan, an extremely violent racist
Others responded in non-violent ways, such as a white restaurant owner continuing to refuse service to black people. Even in the midst of violence and oppression, the civil rights movement prevailed, and segregation in all public U.S. schools formally ended with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board. Although though segregation was over in terms of legal standards, in reality it still existed in many areas of the south. One key event that helped end school segregation in the real world was when President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock, Arkansas to escort nine African American students into a racially segregated school. Some people such as Texas resident Maxine G. Allison viewed this order as the President or the federal government imposing “forced integration” upon the state of Arkansas and its people. Allison wrote a letter to Eisenhower voicing her and her fellow southerners’ displeasure with him. The letter that she writes does an extremely accurate job
She creates imagery when using the metaphors “pouring salt in an already gaping wound inflicted on the Southern People” and “the Supreme Court first stepped on the toes of the Southern People5” when she describes how she and other southerners felt the way their government was treating them. Her uses of exclamation points make her letter seem fiery, and the quotation marks she uses do a good job emphasizing certain words such as “punch” and “force”. The word “gaping” also makes the reader feel as though the metaphorical wound the U.S. government inflicted upon the people of the south was substantially large. Allison feels as though her very own government is being hypocritical by deploying its troops on its own people. By acting hypocritical, Allison argues that the U.S. government is only fanning the flames of communism. She also uses empathy in her letter when she conveys her emotions to the President about her concern for her daughters in regards to integration. She begins this by stating that she is a mother of two daughters and that schools are often where a person ends up finding his or her spouse. Allison then poses a question, “If we allow integration on all levels-----does this mean we will have to allow mixed marriages?6”, that realistically displays how people in her position feel about interracial marriage and integration as a