Derek Jackson said:
WI the US President at the time of the Brown decision took a really strong moral stand on Civil Rights issues.(I do not know if Eisenhower could have been persuaded to take such a stand or who else it might have been.)
If it had been Dewey in his second term, I could see this happening, particularly since the amendment limiting presidents to two consecutive terms had just gone into effect: in 1954, Dewey would have been a lame duck, and there wouldn't have been much risk.
Possibly Ike could have been persuaded, given a more powerful voice in executive stances by the northeastern progressive wing of the GOP. There would have been nothing to lose in the south since that was still a solid bloc for the Democrats then. The midwestern, more McCarthyite wing of the party would have had to have been quieted/appeased somehow for it to happen: maybe some sort of spin that this was truly in the spirit of the constitution the president was sworn to defend?
Not sure Stevenson could have pulled this off without causing a major party rift. It probably would have put him at odds with his veep (John Sparkman of Alabama) and a sizable portion of the elders of the party. If he had, it could have been enough to cause the Democrats in 1956 to do the same sort of thing that the Republicans did in 1912, only in reverse: you'd get a conservative group bolting, and running (let's say) Sparkman for president and perhaps former Maryland senator Millard Tydings for VP. Meanwhile, facing the revolt of his own vice-president, Stevenson picks John Kennedy of Massachusetts as his running mate.
The 1956 election would have been too soon (I would think) for Rockefeller, and Taft (presumably the guy whom Stevenson defeated) would be gone, having succumbed to cancer in 1953, I believe. Ike would have probably disqualified himself on the grounds of age (66 at the time), so that would pretty much leave Dewey an open field for a third nomination (the one time the Republicans would have done that). This time, the Chicago Tribune would have gotten it right: Dewey would have been inaugurated in January 1957, with Nixon (a Dewey supporter in '48, I believe) as his VP.