During the 1950s, American church attendance reached its highest levels ever. President Eisenhower's comments reflected a widespread belief that church attendance and good citizenship went hand-in-hand. Eisenhower recognizes the plurality of American religious affiliation by urging citizens to attend the church "of one's choice."
John Courtney Murray (1904-1967) was an American Catholic priest and theologian who wrote extensively on issues involving the relationship between religion and society, church and state. At a time when Americans were pondering the implications of a Roman Catholic, John F. Kennedy, running for president, Murray explains why American pluralism is sympathetic to Roman Catholicism.
In Plessy v. Ferguson , decided in 1896, the Supreme Court held that "separate but equal" accommodations for different races in public facilities did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Beginning in the 1930s, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP mounted a series of legal challenges to Plessy in the field of education. The Legal Defense Fund first challenged the denial of admission to blacks in graduate and professional schools because it was easier to show that separate truly was unequal and because desegregation of graduate and professional schools was less threatening to many whites. After building up a series of Supreme Court precedents rejecting "separate but equal" facilities in higher education, the Legal Defense Fund turned its attention to elementary and secondary schools. In 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education unanimously held that segregated elementary and secondary schools were unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court's decision in Brown was vastly unpopular in the South and was met with immediate resistance. In response to the decision, nineteen southern senators and eighty-two members of the House of Representatives issued and signed the Southern Manifesto on March 12, 1956.
Rather than integrate their public schools, county officials and other supporters of segregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia, decided to shut down the schools for four years in one of the most extreme examples of massive resistance in the South to desegregation. The conflict between advocates and opponents of desegregation led to stalemate in the desegregation process and then to the full closing of the institutions.
In June 1963 Alabama governor George C. Wallace refused to allow two black students to attend the University of Alabama in contravention of a federal desegregation order. He stood in a doorway at the University and read the proclamation reprinted here. The action was largely symbolic; the door was a side door and Wallace stepped aside when asked to do so by the National Guard. The students were enrolled without incident.