Civil Rights: Trigger of Hope

In the dusty courthojase squares and drowsy side streets of the Deep South, a continent away from the roiling slums of Los Angeles, other Negroes last week played out a quiet drama that rated few headlines. It will loom large in U.S. his tory, nonetheless. For in the Old Con federacy, under protection of the newly adopted Voting Rights Act, black Amer icans were finally claiming freedom’s fundamental right. They were register ing to vote.

In a way, the opposed tableaux — riot ing and registering — were interwoven. Denied for nearly a century the en franchisement that was vouchsafed them by the 15th Amendment, deprived as well of all the benefits that flow from political power, the Deep South’s Ne groes have for decades sought a better life elsewhere: in the slums of Harlem, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C. —and Los Angeles. Now there was at least a hope of change and perhaps a reason to stay. With Dispatch. Grasping at that hope, thousands of Negroes were flocking to register in the nine counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi where the Gov ernment has posted federal examiners to implement the voting law. They came last week in battered autos and char tered buses and on foot. They stood in the shimmering heat of midsummer, and they waited. Even when registrars as sured them, “We’ll be here past today —we’ll be here a long time,” they still waited. They had, after all, waited a long while for this moment. Their patience was rewarded. In four days, 41 federal registrars added 6,998 Negro voters to the rolls in counties where there had previously been only 3,857. Beamed U.S. Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, 43, who played a central role in drafting the Voting Rights Act and was now direct ing the effort to make it work: “We’re doing very well.” Katzenbach had good reason to feel elated. Normally, congressional bills, like architects’ blueprints, take a madden ingly long time to move from drafting board to concrete reality. Not this bill. When President Johnson signed it Aug. 6, he promised to enforce it with “dis patch,” and Katzenbach went at the job with crackling alacrity. Dead-End Counties. Under the law’s “automatic trigger” formula, the Gov ernment is empowered to send federal examiners into Alabama, Alaska, Geor gia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Caro lina and Virginia, plus 26 North Caro lina counties and Arizona’s Apache County, where literacy tests have been in use and where less than 50% of the voting-age population took part in the 1964 elections. The urgent problem was: Which counties to choose? Justice Department lawyers labored over briefs and memos detailing the voting histories of key counties. A few worked on suits that were filed last week against the poll taxes in Alabama, Texas and Virginia; Mississippi, the only other state still requiring a poll tax for state and local elections, had already been slapped with a suit just 25 hours after Lyndon Johnson signed the act. Armed with a stack of memos, Katzenbach spent a full day conferring with his aides as the list of target counties grew from ten to 18 to 24, then shrank again. At first they marked Georgia’s Sumter County for action, largely because of the recent demonstrations in Americus. But when fast-moving state officials sent Negro registrars to the town and in two days reported 647 Negro enrollments, Sumter was dropped. Alabama’s Dallas County, home of Selma and of Sheriff Jim Clark, was a surefire candidate for the list. Another notorious “dead-end county,” in Justice Department parlance, was Alabama’s Lowndes, where a white civil rights worker, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, was murdered last spring—and where, until March, not a single Negro was registered. Top priority went to Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, where Segregationist Boss Leander Perez has kept civil rights workers at a safe distance by converting a swampy, snake-infested onetime Spanish fort on the Mississippi River into a concentration camp in anticipation of “racial demonstrators.” Said Katzenbach: “If you are going to send examiners into Louisiana and don’t send them into Plaquemines, then they can say you haven’t any guts.” Same as Whites. In the nine gut counties he finally selected—four in Alabama, three in Louisiana, two in Mississippi—Katzenbach said, the percentage of eligible white citizens on the voting rolls ranges from 65% to 100% —and “in some cases to more than 100% .” The percentage of Negroes registered ranges from 2% to 10%Then Katzenbach gently squeezed the trigger. Federal examiners, all of them Southerners who were employed by the U.S. Civil Service Commission, were sent into each designated county to open offices and begin processing applicants. Their instructions were clear and un mistakable: Register all Negroes except convicted felons or those who fail to meet age or residence requirements. “All Negroes?” a newsman asked Katzenbach. “Negroes who can’t read or write?” “Absolutely,” he replied. “Treat them the same as whites. If they have been registering illiterate whites, then register illiterate Negroes.” Katzenbach’s instructions were fol lowed to the letter. Hundreds of Ne groes simply answered registrars’ questions, signed an “X” in a couple of places and were put on the rolls. In Alabama’s Marengo County, a registrar estimated that two-thirds of the first 50 applicants could neither read nor write. They were enrolled. It was a far cry from the days when Negro college graduates were contemptuously rejected by ill-educated Southern registrars for imagined failure to interpret a fine constitutional point. Surprisingly, there was little outright protest against and no overt interference with last week’s registration effort. On the steps of Selma’s courthouse, Sheriff Clark glowered across the square at the crowds of Negroes and snarled, “I’m nauseated.” Selma’s Circuit Judge James Hare, a plantation-bred racist, dolefully described the coming of the registrars as “the second Reconstruction.” And in Louisiana’s East Feliciana Parish, where less than 5% of the 4,102 voting-age Negroes are on the rolls, one white lounger turned to a friend as the registration lines formed and sneered: “You got any cats, dogs or mules to bring in and register?” But there was little heckling and no violence.Law of the Land. Smoothly as Katzenbach’s operation went in the selected dead-end counties, he conceded that things were “pretty bleak” elsewhere —and civil rights leaders were quick to complain. Martin Luther King objected: “Our experience with the South compels us to say that if the cautious restraint persists, much of the purpose of the act can be defeated.” King seemed to have a point, but Katzenbach stood fast. Defending his decision to send registrars to only two of the 82 counties in Mississippi, where the rate of Negro registration is the lowest in the South (6.7% v. 23% for runner-up Alabama), Katzenbach said: “There have been some signs of com pliance in Mississippi lately, and we didn’t want to kill it. Also, we filed our first poll-tax suit in Mississippi, and you don’t want to hit one state too hard.” The Attorney General guessed right. Though officials in South Carolina, Al abama and Louisiana are all filing suits to overturn the voting act, Mississippi’s Governor Paul Johnson announced that he had no intention of following them into court. Said he: “Unwise and un fair as we believe this act to be, it is not the edict of a dictatorial President or the questionable interpretation of a court; it is an act of Congress. The Voting Rights Act is the law of the land and is binding upon Mississippi and all her citizens.” False Currency. Eventually the Jus tice Department may well have to ex pand its force of registrars severalfold. Explains Katzenbach: “The whole idea is to generate compliance. If we don’t get that compliance, we’ll appoint new examiners in a lot of new areas.” In time, whether achieved by local compliance or federal intervention, the entrance of Negro voters into the American mainstream can significantly alter the attitudes and the politics of the South. The change is unlikely to be volcanic, but it is inevitable. Of Dixie’s 5,000,000 voting-age Negroes, 3,000,-000 are still unregistered; enfranchising even one-third of that enormous reser voir would insure such a change. It may not prove dramatic or im mediate, but few politicians profess to be unconcerned. Democrats, despite their party’s long history of racism in the South, have visions of recruiting the great majority of new Negro voters with bread-and-butter issues. The G.O.P. — and the two-party system —will probably gain strength in the grow ing suburbs and, in the short run, from disaffected rural white Democrats. But in the long run, both parties and the nation as a whole can only benefit from the demise of color as the focal issue of Southern life. Last week for the first time it was possible to envisage a new kind of dialogue in Southern politics — an intelligent, realistic inquiry into the social and economic issues that for a century have been pushed out of cir culation by the false currency of racism.