RACES: North of the Line, Too

Letting out the first growl of its life, the year-old federal Civil Rights Commission announced last week that it will use its subpoena powers to gather in witnesses and records for public hearings on denial of voting rights to Alabama Negroes. Place and time of hearings: Montgomery, Ala., starting in early December. In a strained attempt to prove its fair-mindedness, the commission added that it was pursuing an investigation north of the Mason-Dixon line, too. Some Puerto Ricans, the commission explained, have charged that New York City’s literacy test denies voting rights to citizens who cannot read and write English. By clumsily pairing New York’s court-upheld, same-for-all literacy test with Alabama’s discrimination against Negroes, the Civil Rights Commission leaned so far backward to prove its fairness that it almost lost its balance.