Washington-U.S.A.
DUSCHA, JULIUS
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By Julius Duscha Civil Rights Debate Provides Backdrop To Southern Negroes' Sit-Down Fight THE SENATE has been at its irrelevant, demagogic worst. The spectacle of the Southern...
...As the sit-down demonstrations indicate, events are moving far faster than the men trying to control them...
...If you can't fly, run," the Reverend Martin Luther King told a group of Negro students in Montgomery, Alabama...
...To welcome and to hear discussions of all sides is far different from frustrating decisions through such devices as the filibuster...
...The great majority of people are finding it difficult to separate the hot air on Capitol Hill from the substance of the debate and the political realities of the situation...
...Anyone who has talked with Negro students in the South, as this reporter did recently in the course of a survey of the sit-down movement, quickly discovers the dangerous miscalculations that the Southern whites have made of the present mood of the Southern Negro...
...The non-stop Senate sessions seem to have exhausted the patience of the country as much as they have tried the nerves of the Northern and Western Senators who had to bed down in the old Supreme Court chamber and straggle down the corridor to the Senate floor at 3 or 4 AM to answer roll calls demanded by the mischievous and well-organized Southerners...
...But that does not keep many officials from taking extremist positions and from seeing who can be the biggest segregationist when election time comes around...
...But the world is not made up of only the wise or the cynical...
...They seem to be fully prepared to follow the suggestion of the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, a Negro leader in Montgomery, "to rock this cradle of the Confederacy" and the words of King to "turn this cradle upside down and right side up...
...It is no accident that Southern filibusterers have sought at every turn and yawn of their drawling discussion to turn the debate from the issue of voting rights to some irrelevant matter such as the mystical and mythical Southern way of life...
...The views of the minority in the Senate or in any other deliberative bodv must of course be heard and should of course be considered...
...Washington is often more fascinated with the political effects of a spectacle like the civil rights filibuster than it is with the issues involved...
...Shouldn't the Senate also be able to do so...
...They have seen the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, now almost six years old, frustrated by determined white leadership in the Deep South...
...The politically cynical and the politically wise in Washington and elsewhere in the United States may know that the filibuster is in reality part of a great political game, and that in the end even a determined minority of Southern Senators will not be able to prevent enactment of a bill which at the very least will assure to Southern Negroes the voting rights...
...It is generally agreed that many of the loudest segregationists know that the fight has been lost and that the final outcome can only be delayed...
...If you can't run, walk...
...They certainly are not afraid...
...We are not afraid...
...The tragedy of the civil rights debate in Congress and of the vast ferment of change in the South is that except in a few places like Atlanta the decent, white moderates of the South are still afraid to speak out for sanity in race relations...
...Southern Negroes, particularly the new generation now in college, are impatient...
...The ways in which the Negro has been kept away from the polls in the South are impossible to defend, nor have the lunch counter sit-down demonstrations made it any easier for the Southern Senators...
...Johnson has advanced his Presidential aspirations, even though the round-the-clock gambit seems to have caused the Northern and Western Senators infinitely more trouble than it has hurt the Southern Senators...
...Can the United States tolerate the filibuster in the midst of the revolution of rising expectations...
...There is the feeling in Washington that neither a Senate minority hostile to civil rights nor a Southern white Establishment dedicated to perpetuating the second-class citizenship status of Southern Negroes can any longer control the race situation...
...if you can't walk, crawl, but whatever you do keep moving...
...Negro students have taken that old-time religion of their forefathers, added the discipline of Gandhi's nonviolent, passive resistance, preached so ably and eloquently by King, and have applied both techniques to a cause which is summed up in the only word to describe it—"Freedom...
...referring to a Supreme Court decision as "crap...
...Even some adult Negroes in the South are fearful of the consequences of the impulsive actions of some of the impatient Negro students...
...The spectacle of the Southern filibuster against civil rights legislation has lowered the prestige of the entire Government...
...The student sit-down movement is an eloquent answer to the Southern argument that only a handful of Negroes vote in Dixie because they like things exactly the way they are under the magnolia trees...
...The South ought to be seeking a gradual and orderly desegregation which would lead to the freedom and economic opportunities to which the Negro aspires, and to which he is entitled...
...The Southern attempt to prevent a vote in the Senate on a question basic to democracy—the very right to vote itself —is as indefensible as it is reprehensible...
...To most of the world the Senate debate, coupled with the wave of sit-down demonstrations in the South, must unquestionably look like a travesty upon the democratic way of life in the United States...
...Now Negroes are seeing that even such Southern liberals as Senators Lister Hill of Alabama and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee feel compelled to join the unreasoning segregationists in the civil rights debate to save their own political skins...
...Wherever reporters gather in the South there is endless speculation over who among the members of Congress, the governors and the other state officials are genuine "segs...
...But after all the speeches have been made and all the epithets have been hurled, a decision must still be arrived at through the thoroughly democratic procedure of a majority vote...
...The House, which has also been considering civil rights legislation in a sometimes electric atmosphere, is able under its rules to cut off debate without restraining the legitimate rights of its minorities...
...We are not afraid...
...the Negroes sang...
...But that doesn't matter, for the sitdown demonstrations and the boycotts, and other actions which may follow can, in the eyes of the students, lead only to greater opportunities for them throughout the South...
...There are undoubtedly few other forums which would countenance a Senator James Eastland (D.-Miss...
...The man with the most an stake in the current debate is still Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, the Democratic leader in the Senate...
...The students do not know where their protest movement will take them...
...Perhaps the Senate is indeed the last bastion of eccentricity and unlimited and uninhibited freedom of speech...
...But the time, bought through legislation and court decisions which have succeeded in delaying school desegregation, has been used only by the segregationists to inflame the passions of white Southerners...
Vol. 43 • March 1960 • No. 12
