Limbaughs discuss integration in Cape Girardeau

Local civil rights history is similar in many respects to most of the Midwest and South, but Cape Girardeau holds the distinction of having integrated after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling rather than waiting for the U.S. Civil Rights Act 10 years later.

The story was part of an hourlong Monday afternoon presentation by U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. and his father, retired Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen Sr., who reviewed the legal, political and social scenarios of a half-century ago.

The younger Limbaugh said his grandfather, Rush Limbaugh Sr., was demoted from chairing an American Bar Association human rights committee because he supported desegregation.

"A fellow from Mississippi thought he was a little too progressive," Limbaugh told 40 people in the Oscar Hirsch Community Room at the Cape Girardeau Public Library.

"The Supreme Court said the schools should desegregate with all deliberate speed, but the southern states didn't do it."

U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. speaks about the ten year period between the Supreme Court's ruling on Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act during a presentation on Integration in Cape Girardeau and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Monday, Feb. 3, at the Cape Girardeau Public Library. Limbaugh's father, retired U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr., also spoke during the program, discussing his personal recollections of integration in Cape Girardeau. (Adam Vogler)

Limbaugh said his grandfather advocated integrating incrementally until Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in April 1963.

"This was Dr. King's response to the people who said, 'Let's go slowly,'" he said, reading. "'When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments, when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.'"

Noting the early 1960s began the television age, Limbaugh said, "The tide started to turn, and the white people of the northern states put pressure on Congress.

"Lyndon Johnson became president, and things started happening."

The elder Limbaugh said the southern states kept black people in such a disadvantageous position for a century after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1864 to maintain a source of cheap labor for the production of cotton.

"What was it like in Cape Girardeau in the 1930s, '40s and '50s?" he asked. "There was total discrimination. Education and religion were entirely white."

Limbaugh Sr. said 100 to 120 black children, kindergarten through the 12th grade, attended the John Cobb School two blocks east of the old Central High School, but to its credit the school board integrated in 1954.

"There was a little oval swimming pool in the old Fairgrounds Park," he said. "It was not very sanitary, and every 30 days they drained and cleaned it. On the 29th and 30th of each month, when it was like the Mississippi, that was the blacks' opportunity for recreation."

Limbaugh said the only movie theater for black people was the Orpheum, where they could sit in the balcony two nights a week.

Ed Pike graduated from Cape Girardeau Central High School in 1958 after enrolling as a freshman with the first black students in 1954.

"It was like 'The Invisible Man,'" Pike said, referring to a 1952 novel.

"We had problems, but we worked it out. It was the newness of it."

One of the participants, Jane Stacy, said Monday's program "was excellent."

"It brought back a lot of memories," Stacy said. "We integrated in Charleston in 1956 with eight students."

John Bierk said it would have been better had Pike, who offered other details during the question-and-answer period, been part of a panel. "It would have been nice if we had had the man who has obviously been through all this," Bierk said.

He said the judges "gave lots of information in terms of the legal aspects and the local situation.

"The local situation was probably characteristic of situations in all parts of the state," he said.

Library director Betty Martin said the program stemmed from Black History Month and the library's "citywide read" of Carolyn Maull McKinstry's book "While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing."

Pertinent address:

711 N. Clark Ave., Cape Girardeau, MO