Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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October 1962. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, a session of the executive committee of the National Security Council breaks up at the White House. "After the meeting, the President, Ted Sorensen, Kenny O'Donnell, and I sat in his office and talked. A short time before, the President had read Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August, and he talked about the miscalculations of the Germans, the Russians, the Austrians, the French and the British. They somehow seemed to tumble into war, he said, through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority...
...Steel, he is due to appear this week in the Supreme Court for a ruling on his application to practice before it. Approval is a mere formality. However the N.A.A.C.P. finally disposes of his case, the nine white-thinking men in black are not likely to be bothered by what he said about them...
Steel stirred up the trouble by writing an article entitled Nine Men in Black Who Think White, a blunt attack on the U.S. Supreme Court that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. These days, the court is criticized most often as excessively libertarian; Steel took an opposite tack. He charged the court with maintaining the status quo and striking down only "overtly obnoxious" discrimination...
...court backed down from its historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision when it ruled a year later that the states did not have to desegregate their schools immediately, but only "with all deliberate speed." In effect, said Steel, the court was serving notice that it was "a white court which would protect the interests of white America in the maintenance of stable institutions." The justices, he said, "considered the potential damage to white Americans resulting from the diminution of privilege as more critical than continued damage to the underprivileged." They have now ordered segregation plucked out "root...
Steel also claimed that these days the court is relying on the "good faith" of racist white officials to assure that Negroes are seated on juries in state courts and enjoy other constitutional rights. In Steel's opinion, it is wrong to answer that the court has set the pace of racial progress for the rest of the Government. Instead, he contends, "a cautious Supreme Court has waltzed to the music of the white majority-one step forward, one step backward, sidestep, sidestep...