Grant. Ike's only major accomplishment was the interstate system. Ike only integrated schools because the Supreme Court made it the law of the land, and even then, full integration wasn't seen until the early 1970s, nearly 20 years later. He wasn't some warrior on civil rights. Grant was despite the weakness of the office and the mores of the time.
Yeah but that was something that Ike very obviously wanted the Supreme Court to do. Ike knew Brown v Board was being litigated when he appointed Earl Warren, someone Ike knew was very much in favor of desegregation, as Chief Justice. That would be very strange to do if he did not want the Court to rule in favor of desegregation. Ok, you might say, maybe Eisenhower didn't have to agree with his SCOTUS pick on every issue and picked a nominee he respected even if they weren't ideologically identical. After all, Eisenhower did express his disagreements with Warren's jurisprudence down the line, particularly how favorable he was to criminal defendants.
Except Warren wasn't his only SCOTUS pick. He had four more choices, and in each case the faced heavy pressure to pick segregationist judges. All four times he doubled down. His second pick, his first choice for a pro-Brown nominee, was John Marshall Harlan II, son of the sole dissenter in Plessy. Harlan spoke very openly about his pride in his father's vote and his support for Brown. Imagine if Biden picked Rehnquist's son to replace Breyer after Dobbs, and this guy spoke at his confirmation hearing about being proud of his father's dissent in Roe and explicitly affirmed his support for Dobbs. I think that would very widely be seen as an expression of Biden's support for Dobbs. If Eisenhower ran around DC with a megaphone screaming "Brown v Board was rightly decided" it wouldn't have been any less subtle a message than appointing Harlan was.
The next three SCOTUS nominees represented the ideological spectrum - Brennan a liberal, Stewart a conservative, and Whittaker a centrist. All three saw eye to eye, however, on Brown, and made that explicitly clear at each of their confirmation hearings. Brennan's appointment is particularly remarkable - this was right before the election, and the Eisenhower campaign saw it as a big priority to try and expand its support in the formerly Solid South. Ike sacrificed his electoral goals in order to put a northeastern liberal desegregationist on the Court!
Also worth noting Ike's attorney general, Herbert Brownell, was a major advocate of desegregation, and Eisenhower's justice department filed a brief in Brown v Board in favor of desegregation. Brownell was also who Eisenhower recommended to Nixon to replace Warren as Chief Justice.
Eisenhower did have a habit of speaking out of both sides of his mouth on civil rights for political expediency and was very much a moderate in his methods. But the idea that he had no agency in Brown and just reluctantly went with what the Supreme Court forced him to do just doesn't survive scrutiny when you look at his actual actions. He had opportunity after opportunity to at least slow down the Supreme Court's embracement of civil rights, and at every one of those opportunities he instead chose to put his foot on the gas. It's like the out of context Lincoln quote about how if he could end the war without freeing any slaves he would. Sure, both men were pragmatics and had to deal with trying to gain electoral support from people who were very much not sympathetic to the cause of civil rights, but when push came to shove, their intentions really weren't ambiguous. If Eisenhower wasn't personally in support of Brown v Board, than he must have been one of the dumbest men to ever serve as president
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