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190 As a representative of the United States government in India, Rush H. Limbaugh had learned firsthand how others perceived the US in light of discrimination against nonwhite persons. The Cold War arms race and propaganda war between the East and West was then fully engaged and the United States presented itself to the rest of the world as a bulwark against the tyranny of communism. The United States undermined this message by failing to provide equal protection to the rights and liberties of all its citizens. Throughout the United States’ history, many of its greatest statesmen have recognized that to the extent the nation failed to attain its ideals, it was vulnerable to just criticism and attack. Thus during the 1858 United States senatorial campaign, Abraham Lincoln observed that slavery “deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world–enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites–causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty–criticising [sic] the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.” In the same way, during the 1950s and 1960s, critics of the United States, especially its Cold War antagonists, pointed to Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory practices to undermine its message to the rest of the world.1 Living in southeast Missouri where “there was absolute segregation in . . . [the] public schools and use of municipal facilities,” these issues had concerned Limbaugh for some time. While serving as chairman of the Cape Girardeau County Republicans in the 1920s and 1930s, despite the prevailing prejudices of the time, he had encouraged the participation of African Americans in the Republican Party and the political process. To facilitate this, Limbaugh helped blacks form a Lincoln Club in Cape Girardeau, even writing the organization’s constitution. As a candidate for the office of mayor, he had spoken at African American churches, actively seeking votes. Outside of politics, during a Billy Sunday revival of the mid-1920s in Cape Girardeau, Limbaugh helped organize a special evangelical service for African Americans at which he expressed Civil Libertarian Chapter Ten Civil Libertarian 191 his belief that their participation in the community was important. Moreover, Limbaugh and Bee were horrified by the senseless acts of violence occasionally committed against African Americans, such as the 1942 lynching of Cleo Wright in the nearby town of Sikeston. Thus later, when Cape Girardeau’s school board voted to integrate the public schools a short time before the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Limbaugh rejoiced that one of the principal props of discrimination in his community had been removed. This decision also meant that his son Stephen, then a young lawyer beginning his professional and public career, had the distinction of being the last commencement speaker at John S. Cobb High School, Cape Girardeau’s all-black high school.2 After the Brown decision in 1954, Limbaugh supported the prompt integration of schools, although he believed the Court should have based its decision upon the privileges or immunities and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment as expressed in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). By the fall of 1956, only 723 of 10,000 southern school districts had complied with the Court’s ruling, and resistance to integration was well organized and determined. The most notable of these efforts was led by Arkansas Democratic Governor Orval Faubus, who intervened to prevent the integration of a public high school in Little Rock. Without Faubus’ intervention, the high school would have been integrated according to a plan proposed by the Little Rock school board and accepted by a federal district court. In an effort to derail the planned integration of the high schools, a group petitioned the Arkansas State Chancery Court. Faubus appeared and argued “that desegregation in Little Rock might lead to violence .” The court issued a restraining order. “The next day, however, on the petition of the Little Rock school board, the United States District Court issued an order to prevent anyone’s interfering” with the planned integration. At that time, District Judge Ronald N. Davies from North Dakota was on assigned temporary duty in Arkansas when this matter came before the federal court. Davies...

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