Civil Rights

Reaching the New Frontier in civil rights largely entails settling the old one. The ideal of equal opportunity for all is unchanged, and the incoming Administration will find itself armed with a growing battery of court rulings designed to implement progress in the field.

While the battles in the courts continue, the forensic fight against segregation cannot solve the problem alone. With the exclusion of Eastern Texas, where integration has succeeded, only four hundred Negro students attended desegregated schools last spring in the former Confederacy. A higher absolute number of Negro children attended segregated schools than did so six and half years ago, when the the Supreme Court issued its historic decision.

The sit-in movement represents an unwillingness among young Southern Negroes to settle for this pace. To them, the court rulings are heartening, but applicable only in vague and uncertain terms. Seeking grounds on which to challenge discrimination on its most painful level, institutionalized discrimination, they have discovered new means of expression, new forms of protest, and new leaders.

The President, the Justice Department, and the Attorney General, if they are to make real gains, must regard civil rights with the same sense of urgency that the students have articulated. Court rulings must not be allowed to pile up in government files, but their provisions against obstructionist school boards and voting registrars must be carried out rigorously. If not, there will still be voting registrars in Georgia who can say to Justice Department officials "It makes no difference what the courts say." And they will still be right.

Kennedy cannot look to Congress for the impetus: the House Committees are clogged by Southerners, and the amazing number of Senators who are against the filibuster but vote for it seem to have made certain that majority rule will not be allowed very much sway during the next few years. Fortunately Congress does not present an insuperable obstacle, in that the mere carrying out of existing legislation would represent a significant stride.

The mechanics of implementing civil rights legislation is complex. The job of the Attorney General and the Justice Department is to prosecute the illegal rather than foster the legal. This negative fight against segregation reflects a significant feeling in the North that segregation simply exists as an irrational and immoral aspect of Southern culture.

And yet this assumption is false: there is a logic of segregation. It is logical for a local planning commission that expects no positive help from the Federal Housing Authority to bow and echo the discriminatory outlook of its community and state. It is logical for an individual to howl at Negroes attending his school when he would be ostracized for befriending them. It is the path of least resistance, and more; it is a rational alternative.

The Kennedy Administration must recognize that the positive way to deal with the pressures in Southern society for segregation is to develop pressures in the other direction. Housing Commissioner Weaver's plan for urban renewal, partially geared toward the development of integrated communities, presents an excellent method of providing forces to counter, in a positive way, the social forces driving Southerners toward discrimination.

The appointment of Weaver was an excellent first step for the new Administration to take. It is heartening to see Negro officials appointed not for the sake of patronage or filling quotas, but to get things done.

Segregation is not a regional, but a national problem, not because it disfigures America's image abroad, but because it warps and handicaps American culture at home. And just as it is not a geographically isolated problem, neither is it isolated legally or politically.

Kennedy would do well to remind the nation that the fields of civil rights and civil liberties are inseperable. In the recent case of Daisy Bates v. Little Rock, for example, the Supreme Court upheld the NAACP's right to withhold the names of its members. But in the Uphaus case, Justice Clark's majority statement bowed to the State's right to determine whether there were subversive persons in New Hampshire. Since Arkansas deems the NAACP a subversive group, Southern lawyers have been given a new legal leg to dance on, and are using it.

The United States, and particularly the South, is now 'celebrating' the Civil War centennial. In the midst of lauding this great source of sexy novels, it is likely that the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation will be forgotten. And yet "Free by '63" is still the NAACP goal.

It is true that Kennedy takes office at a time of both danger and hope. In the field of civil rights he has an equal number of problems and answers. Hopefully he will personally lend his voice to support the Southern students; impress the urgency of civil rights upon the Attorney General; tap the best Negro talent for his Administration; underline the inextricability of civil rights and civil liberties; and through positive federal development programs, show the recalcitrant South that there is something in it for them.

Kennedy could enjoy few greater accomplishments than to lay the foundations of equality throughout America.