E. Frederic Morrow and the Historical Time of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

This article considers the life and career of E. Fredrick Morrow, the first African American White House staffer, whose government service in the Eisenhower White House (1955-61) intersected with the classical phase of the civil rights movement. It argues that Morrow’s life and career illustrate an important problem with what it calls “historical time.” Historical time can be defined this way: it is the order of events and the causal forces that historians use to make sense of and organize their narratives and analyses. Morrow’s life and career illustrate the complex nature of historical time as it pertains to the events with which his life intersected. He was an important figure in Black Republican politics during the early to mid twentieth century. He was an equally important figure at the NAACP, and was an important voice in the organization’s leadership as it was debating its future strategy in the early 1940s. He earned a law degree, but surprisingly chose to burn his bridges as he left the NAACP just before its lawyers were about to begin work on the cases that would comprise Brown v. Board of Education. Morrow’s life and career, this article contends, help us make sense of these decisions as illustrations of the difficulty of constructing and narrating historical time, particularly as it relates to the civil rights movement. Indeed, this article contends, historical time helps make sense not only of Morrow’s life but also of the choices and uncertainties that beset mid-twentieth century figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who acted, planned and promised in a world in which much of the narrative that is now taken for granted concerning civil rights at mid century remained deeply contested and uncertain.