CIVIL RIGHTS IN 1949

...Just before the year closed the city of East St...

...The genuine advance of the last decade in the protection of the right to vote continued in 1949...

...Thcsame narrow interests which blocked civil rights legislation in the 1949 session of the 81st Congress are blocking it in the 1950 session...

...Only a few states now prohibit discrimination or segregation in public housing, and none prohibits it in housing built with private funds...

...Constitution to the satisfaction of local registrars, was declared unconstitutional...

...Southern communities, however...

...The House passed two bills to remove barriers to immigration and naturalization of Orientals but action on both of them was blocked in the Senate...

...Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin outlawed dis•crimination and segregation in the public schools...

...Leading publishing houses continued to issue books on race relatione and the mass-circulation magazine* turned more and more to this subject for fiction and articles...

...IN THE FAR WEST the American people and their state legislatures continued in 1949 to suffer from pangs of conscience over their recent treatment of persons of Japanese origin...

...New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and Rhode Island enacted comprehensive fair employment practice laws which apply the modern, effective administrative technique of the model New York statute...

...This review illustrates both the advances in civil rights and the problems these advances pose...

...Massachusetts and New Jersey enacted fair educational practice laws, similar to New York's Quinn-Olliffe law, applying the FEPC enforcement technique to discrimination in admission to schools at all levels...

...2. Racists and diehard opponents of civil rights increasingly resorted to violence to prevent changes in the pattern of discrimination and segregation...

...Federal district courts, too, upheld the right of Indians to vote in Arizona and New Mexico...

...The whole country's heightened consciousness of civil rights and group relations was reflected not only in state * legislation and the violence just reviewed, but also in favorable grass roots movements throughout the country...

...The media of mass communication touched increasingly on group tolerance themes...

...ALTHOUGH SOUTHERN STATES are becoming more and more resigned to Negro participation in the Democratic primaries, some of them have not stopped trying to circumvent the directions of many Supreme Court decisions...

...The U.S...

...Supreme Court in 1938 held that such an arrangement violates the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Southern states constantly seek new means to maintain discrimination and segregation...

...The failure of Congress to overcome the Dixiecrat - Republican coalition needs no retelling...

...Connecticut and Pennsylvania, however, took steps in 1949 to prevent discrimination in public housing built with state aid...

...The first three were their producers' biggest moneymakers during the year, and Pinky was the second-biggest attraction of 1949...

...Americans have become unfortunately accustomed to violence and terrorism against Negroes in the South, as in the Groveland, Fla., affair, but such riots in the North bring home from time to time the fact that lawlessness anywhere is a threat to all of us...

...Court of Appeals upheld the decision of Judge J. Waties Waring in the second South Carolina voting case invalidating Democratic party rules designed to exclude Negroes from the party's primaries...

...The Illinois method is especially instructive...

...California, too, repealed a law which prohibited the issuance of commercial fishing licenses to Japanese aliens, while Utah extended to such aliens with fifteen years' residence in the state the right to carry arms and to hunt...

...Since the act does not forbid discrimination or segregation, it presents the states and cities of the country with the opportunity to redevelop urban areas into free housing communities or to build clean, modern, low-rental, racially-segregated ghettos...

...Civil Rights in 1949 By MORROE BERGER CHANGES IN CIVIL RIGHTS and group relations have been so important and numerous in the last five years that we need to assess their impact annually, rather than, as before World War II, every decade or so...

...Alabama passed an anti-mask law, as did at least 22 Southern cities and towns, including Augusta, Atlanta, Macon, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Knoxville and Nashville...

...As the elimination of discrimination and segregation touches long-standing patterns of behavior, opposition develops and irresponsible groups are willing to resort to extra-legal methods...

...There were four motion pictures about the Negroe, Home of the Bravt, Lott Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust...

...Oregon repealed its alien land law, which prohibited 'aliens ineligible for citizenship" (persons born in Japan) from owning land, and the California Department of Justice made that state's alien land law (part of which was invalidated by the U.S...

...One of the most significant developments in group relations has been the community self-survey, in which residents of an area gather data on the state of discrimination and civil rights in order to take remedial action...

...One of the more ominous developments in 1949 was the increasing resort to violence as reflected in lyrtchings and beatings of Negroes, as well as in mob action centered around housing and public accommodations...

...only Pennsylvania prohibits discrimination in housing built with state aid...

...SOUTHERN STATE OFFICIALS, meanwhile, carried forward their plans for the establishment of regional educational facilities in higher education which would perpetuate segregation...

...The legislature attached a rider to the public school appropriations bill declaring that the funds may not go to any school district "in which any student is excluded from or segregated at any public school because of race, color or nationality...

...More than a hundred other communities asked for the manual, and about a fourth of these actually began to plan the self-survey...

...During 1949 more than a dozen communities in the Northeast undertook such self-evaluations with the help of a guidebook prepared by the American Jewish Congress...

...For several nights mobs roamed the streets, with little interference from the police, beating up everyone they took to be a Jew...

...During 1149 there were 21 such state agencies and tl city or town agencies...

...The NAACP has appealed the case, The constitutional issue is whether or not a state may provide a certain kind of education for whites within its own borders and send a Negro to another state for the same course of study...

...Five states, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and Wisconsin passed laws prohibiting segregation in the National Guard, and a sixth, Minnesota, accomplished the same end by executive action...

...3. Americans throughout the land removed many racial and religious barriers in their churches and their social and professional organizations...

...The U.S...

...At least thirty-four Negroes were killed while in the custody of poice officials, at least 42 acts of vandalism against Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and other property were reported...

...The program designates white and Negro graduate and professional schools to which the states may send their students...

...THE INCREASING VIOLENCE indicated that recent progress in promoting minority rights is opposed b#- diehard groups willing to go to«great lengths to prevent the destruction of familiar discriminatory standards...

...showed greater courage in opposing the hooded mobs...

...This closed the famous Sipuel case, which reached the Supreme Court twice in 1948...

...A further reflection of the widespread and deep interest in civil rights has been the rapid growth of official agencies whose sole task is the improvement of group relations...

...Many communities supported voluntary and official agencies whose main job was the improvement of intergroup relations at the grass roots...

...Negroes were admitted to professional schools in the state universities of Kentucky, Texas and Arkansas...

...Louis announced it would end its 85-year-old segregation policy...

...Last year a weakened Senate anti-lynching bill was reported favorably by committee but it did not reach a vote...

...There were concerted efforts to remove color bars in national and local professional associations, and some real advances were registered here...

...That lawlessness eventually eradicates the color line was demonstrated in the revival of the Klan in the South last year...

...Church groups in both the North and South spoke out against discrimination not only in society at large but also among their own communicants...

...THE MASS MEDIA, ever attuned to current popular concerns, turned increasingly to group relations and protolerance themes...

...The House also passed a bill outlawing the poll tax, but again the bill made no headway in the Senate...

...This is a neglected aspect of civil lights which is becoming more and more important as plans to ease the housing shortage are carried out...

...The states were more active in other areas of civil rights than they were in housing...

...New York and Pennsylvania enacted legislation on discrimination in the National Guard but did not direct the prompt elimination of segregation...

...The outstanding feature of 1949 was the continued failure of the United States Congress to enact into a law even a single recommendation made by the President's Committee on Civil Rights in 1947 and by President Truman in his special civil rights message of February 2, 1948...

...The McGrath-Powell FEPC bill was reported out of committee and was ready for floor action in the House and Senate, but Congress adjourned before voting on it...

...During the first year of the plan, 207 white students and 181 Negro students attended out-of-state segregated schools of medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine...

...At least three bills were introduced to prohibit racial segregation on public carriers but none was even reported out of committee...

...Three other developments in 1949 were: 1. The states took the lead by enacting more civil rights laws than in any previous year in our history...

...Louis, Youngstown and Washington, D. C, indicated, too, that proper planning and firm action by local enforcement officers is the key to the prevention of violence and to the smooth transition to nondiscriminaory patterns of behavior...

...Negroes, too, ran for local office in five cities in Virginia and in Augusta, Ga...

...Most of the Klan attacks were upon white persons...

...leads to segregation in schools and most of the affairs of day-to-day existence...

...There are now eight states (the other three arc New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut) with effective FEPC laws, protecting a high proportion of the jobs in this country...

...Despite the unwillingness of Southern legislatures to end segregation, Oklahoma enacted a law admitting Negroes to the University of Oklahoma, on a segregated basis, to courses not available at Langston University, the state university for Negroes...

...Residential segregation, as lias been pointed out so often, Morroe Berger, a frequent Sew Lender contributor, is a specialist in the field of group relations...

...ONE PIECE of legislation which the 81st Congress did push through in 1949 was the act providing Federal assistance for housing constructed by both public and private agencies...

...Supreme Court in 1948) a dead letter by not asking for funds to enforce it...

...The regional plan won its first court test in 1949, when the Baltimore Superior Court held that Maryland could legally refuse to admit a Negro to the state universiy and could send him to Mcnairy Medical College in Tennessee...

...This is the challenge of the future...

...In the Federal courts, the infamous Boswell Amendment to the Alabama constitution, requiring persons who register to vote to be able to explain parts of the U.S...

...It calls for militant and bold moves to strike at undemocratic standards while public interest is high, but it calls, also, for careful planning in the introduction of changes and for the unstinted support of these changes by local law enforcement authorities...

...Despite this threat to future voting, Negroes in the South continued to vote in increasing numbers...

...A referendum in Texas defeated a proposal to reduce the poll tax...

...This violence, especially in the cases just mentioned, and in attacks upon Negroes in nonsegregated swimming pools in St...

...Federal efforts to repeal the poll tax failed, and so did attempts in several states...

...In Virginia the voters rejected "repeal" of the poll tax as part of a set of constitutional changes which would have granted the legislature broad powers to set up other requirements for voting registration...

...In 1949 Georgia passed a new registration law avowedly intended to reduce the number of Negro voters by the imposition of educational tests...

...The following evaluation is based upon a detailed balance¦ sheet of group relations for 1949 prepared by the American Jewish Congress and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...

...Two states, New Jersey and Connecticut, applied to discrimination in public accommodations the same enforcement techniques used in FEPC statutes...

...Tennessee repealed as much of the tax as possible without a constitutional convention, but in a referendum the voters decided by a narrow margin not to call such a convention...

...The South, of course, took no action to reduce educational segregation, but several Northern states did so...

...Among the Greekletter fraternities the trend toward free participation in the associational life of the community took its toll of racial and religious barriers...

...A disturbance which was equally frightening was the five nights of rioting in Chicago, where a Jewish union leader was falsely rumored to be planning to sell his home to a Negro...

...Three Negroes were lynched in 1949, as against only one in 1948...

...Texas enacted an anti-lynching law...

...The states, of course, cannot naturalize persons deemed by the Federal Government to be ineligible for citizenship, but several states did enlarge the rights of Japanese aliens...

...Thus far, only New York City and Sun Francisco have enacted legislation bai ring discrimination against minority groups in housing to be constructed by private enterprise with any form of public aid...

...The most serious outbreaks were the Peekskill affair, which the American Civil Liberties Union said "was fostered hugely by anti-Semitism...

...Four bills to outlaw group defamation likewise did not get beyond committee...

...In this way the clear intent of the community will not be viplaed by small diehard groups unable to adjust to the potential of democracy and to the temper of our time...