WHO KILLED CIVIL RIGHTS?
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Who Killed Civil Rights? Next month, when the political parties assemble for their quadrennial conventions, skilled...
...It was the establishment of this elaborate network of legal obstacles that led the NAACP to predict that the new act may make it even more difficult for Negroes to vote...
...The Eisenhower Administration wobbled first...
...There were all-night sessions in the Senate, designed to give the people the impression of feverish activity and a "great debate...
...Criminal remedies and private civil suits had long been recognized as unequal to the task...
...They would have been powerless to do more than delay in the face of a firmly dedicated majority...
...The Senate's pajama party produced a coalition against these provisions that was so strong it represented a majority of Democrats and Republicans...
...Time and events, we are confident, will compel them to listen...
...Ably led and tightly disciplined, they were quick to exploit every doubt, division, and weakness in the opposition camp...
...The liberal landslide of 1958 had heightened the hope for adequate civil rights legislation, but when the showdown came, most of the Senators and Representatives newly elected under the liberal label behaved and voted in much the same way as did their conservative colleagues...
...Republican leaders in Congress reflected the apathy of the Administration...
...the measure failed completely to achieve either of the two major objectives of those who sincerely sought effective legislation...
...Federal registrars, the Commission said, would apply state qualification tests, but they would do so in a proceeding no more complicated than ordinary state registration procedures...
...The Southern lawmakers, of course, contributed materially to crushing the hope for adequate legislation...
...To overcome these fatal deficiencies, five of the six members of the President's Commission—two Southern Democrats and three Republicans —proposed a new, expeditious administrative remedy...
...Civil suits instituted by the Attorney General, the principle established by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, were also proving inadequate in these ways: % Individual law suits, even when brought by several complainants, could hardly make a dent in wholesale denials of the right to vote...
...Both parties, with a few distinguished exceptions in each camp, surrendered to the South with only token resistance...
...His answer, however, was not to remedy the inadequacies of the Commission scheme, but to create an entirely new and complicated system wholly dependent on the courts for both administration and enforcement...
...The program it submitted to Congress lacked the one provision deemed most important by supporters of civil rights—enforcement authority to speed the process of integration of schools and other public facilities...
...He hated to surrender so much, he seemed to say, but it was important to pass something...
...f The demands upon Negroes to provide legal proof in a hostile atmosphere are stringent enough to deter many from even attempting to exercise their legal rights...
...But they were a small minority—in the Senate, only eighteen of one hundred members...
...The performance of the non-Southern Democrats was hardly more impressive...
...This affirmative approach was crushed in one house of Congress and ducked in the other...
...Two weeks later, Attorney General William P. Rogers criticized the plan, but did not seem to share the President's constitutional doubts...
...For ten weeks Congress toyed with the issue of civil rights...
...The first major aim of civil rights advocates was federal action to accelerate the faltering pace of public school integration...
...Two ingredients are necessary for a filibuster—a majority determined to reach speedy decision by compelling a vote, and a minority equally determined to thwart the will of the majority...
...The heart of the Commission idea— a speedy administrative remedy no more complicated than ordinary state registration procedure—was scrapped altogether...
...As Republican floor leader, Senator Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois presided with mock solemnity over the dismemberment of the bill which bore his name...
...When civil rights supporters appealed to him to use his influence on Republican legislators, he smiled, uttered encouraging words, made no commitments, and did nothing...
...The Commission concluded, after exhaustive inquiry, that existing law is inadequate to protect the right to vote...
...In sixty-five Southern counties where Negroes constitute a majority of the voting age population, none or only a handful is registered...
...When it was all over, an analysis of Johnson's votes on the many roll calls during the ten weeks the Senate considered civil rights was circulated among Southern Senators...
...There is blame enough to go around...
...What was sought, most of all, was some positive indication from Congress and the Executive that these two branches of government were prepared to support the third, the Supreme Court, in enforcing the Constitution...
...Instead, Congress piled a clumsy superstructure on top of the already inadequate judicial remedy created by the 1957 law...
...Vice President Richard M. Nixon sat sphinx-like in the Senate and outside...
...At each stage, the proceedings are subject to appeal and delay...
...ten years from now, when historians look back to this spring of racial conflict, they will record the Civil Rights Act of 1960 as the last futile stand of the segregationists against the irrepressible march toward integration represented by the student sit-ins in the South...
...The other major civil rights objective is graphically presented in the report of the President's Commission on Civil Rights...
...Before a constitutionally qualified voter who has been rejected can register under the new law, he must hurdle five formidable obstacles: One—There must be a successful law suit by the Attorney General under the 1957 Civil Rights Act...
...They recommended that, wherever the presence of racial discrimination had been established, the President would name federal officers empowered to register all qualified Negroes to vote...
...From then on, however, he maneuvered adroitly to achieve the meaningless "moderation" that was the heart of the measure that ultimately passed both houses...
...And the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sorrowfully agreed...
...The resignation of state registrars and the cunning use of every possibility for legal delay often keep litigation in the courts for years...
...The Commission's scheme was far from perfect, but every effort to improve it failed...
...In the House of Representatives, another Texan, Speaker Sam Ray-burn, played much the same game, which surprised no one...
...Five—The applicant must again provide proof, this time before the court, if the state objects to the referee's findings...
...It showed that on issues vital to the Southern racists, Johnson's decisive voice and vote were with them eighty per cent of the time...
...The press played along by featuring photographs of Senators curled up in their cots or prancing about in their pajamas, while playing down or ignoring the monumental surrender that was in the making...
...The President broke his silence in January by suggesting that the registrar plan might be unconstitutional...
...In the House of Representatives, a cynical parliamentary maneuver prevented the issue from reaching a vote...
...Their guiding leader and philosopher was Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who prefers, for political reasons, to be regarded as a Westerner rather than a Southerner...
...Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, who boasted that he had talked for twenty hours and filled ninety-two pages of the Congressional Record, reported to his constituents: "The effects of the legislation will be negligible . . ." The South, of course, had ample reason for its kindly view of the Civil Rights Act of 1960...
...For example, Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, has long had a well-deserved reputation as a militant advocate of civil rights, but this time he displayed what Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., noted Washington civil liberties lawyer, called a "disposition to compromise even before the fight had begun...
...Both parties share responsibility for the failure to mobilize a militant majority...
...Who killed civil rights...
...Nearly a century after the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees voting rights to all citizens, the President's Commission found that only one Negro in four of voting age in the South is registered to vote...
...The legislation, it said, was a "wretched remnant" of a civil rights bill that may make it more difficult, rather than easier, for Negroes to vote...
...As always, the planks will mean little, but this year they will carry unusual overtones of fraud, for both parties joined forces only recently to crush precisely the kind of reforms they will advocate in their platforms...
...As always, both parties will have a section entitled "Civil Rights," in which they will solemnly pledge themselves to fight for the elimination of racial discrimination...
...Three—Negro applicants must attempt to register with the very state officials legally adjudged guilty of discrimination...
...Such an affirmative declaration, withheld for six troubled years, would have provided urgently needed assistance for those whose rights are at stake and a firm warning to demagogues that continued defiance would be tolerated no longer...
...Six years after the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, only six per cent of Negro children have been integrated into previously all-white schools...
...Two—Proof must be provided in court that a "pattern or practice" of discrimination exists...
...The press, for instance, gave great prominence to the so-called filibuster, but in fact there was no genuine filibuster...
...What happened...
...All through the South an heroic and historic movement of Negro students was demanding an end to second-class citizenship during the very weeks that Congress was debating the civil rights issue, but both houses seemed to have been sound-proofed against the rising cry for equality...
...Next month, when the political parties assemble for their quadrennial conventions, skilled phrase-makers will whip the platforms into final form...
...Four—Proof must be presented before a court-appointed referee that the applicant has been denied registration and is qualified to vote...
...In the area of voting rights, in which it had promised bold reform, the Administration shied away from the trail-blazing registrar proposal advanced by its own Civil Rights Commission...
...What did shock supporters of civil rights was the curious conduct of avowed liberals, with the exception of a few young Representatives like James O'Hara of Michigan and Robert Kas-tenmeier of Wisconsin...
...The first of these elements was lacking in the civil rights struggle this year...
...It was the rejection of provisions to encourage and speed integration that led Senator Pat McNamara to conclude that the greatly diluted measure "will wash right out of this chamber and hardly be noticed in the mainstream of American life...
...An undeclared candidate for President, Johnson seemed to break with his Southern colleagues when he forced Senate consideration of civil rights legislation early enough in the session to assure action...
...But there was no unity and no commitment on the part of the majority...
...What emerged from Congress bore little resemblance to the new principle urged by the Commission...
...We are not much given to prophecy, but we are in a mood to predict that the surrender of the Congressional majority to the Southern racists marks the beginning of the end of a dark chapter in American history...
...Actually, the leaders of both parties were merely marking time while they groped for a compromise that they could call a civil rights bill and yet not offend the sensibilities of the Southern Senators in the Club...
...Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the entire performance was the complete detachment of Congress and the Administration from the human situation with which it was dealing...
...When it was all over, Senator Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana summed up the sentiment of the racists in Congress when he gloated to his constituents that the bill as passed was "a victory for the South...
...For more than four months after the Commission's plan had been made public, the White House and the Department of Justice had not a word to say...
...If nothing is done to increase that average of one per cent a year, it will take a hundred years to comply with the Supreme Court's mandate that integration proceed with "all deliberate speed...
...Supporters of civil rights sought to speed the process by 1) proposing that the Attorney General of the United States be permitted to bring civil actions in the federal courts to achieve desegregation of schools and other public facilities, and 2) providing federal assistance in the form of funds and technical advice to school districts prepared to desegregate, including those which might face hostile state governments and the threat of closed schools...
Vol. 24 • June 1960 • No. 6
