CIVIL RIGHTS: New Instrument

After encountering some wary refusals to serve, President Eisenhower last week named the six members of a bipartisan Civil Rights Commission created by this year’s Civil Rights Act. Since the commission is a new instrument of Government, no one dared predict just how much it could accomplish, but almost everyone agreed that Ike had staffed it with earnest and judicially minded men. ¶ Commission chairman: former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stanley F. Reed, 72, who retired last February. Kentuckian Reed concurred in the Supreme Court school-desegregation decision of 1954, wrote the majority opinion that outlawed the Southern white primary. Southerners could take comfort, however, from Reed’s reputation as the court’s most conservative member during his latter years on the bench. Predicted Democrat Reed: “I’m sure we’ll have plenty of trouble.” ¶ Vice chairman: Michigan State President John A. Hannah, 55. Republican Hannah served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Personnel from 1953-54, was an NRA poultry code administrator in the early 19305, became President of Michigan State in 1941 and nursed it from a modest college to a farflung, football-happy giant. As Assistant Secretary, Hannah had a hand in implementing desegregation in the armed forces. No fire-eater, he once expressed cautious sympathy for “local conditions,” calling integration a goal to be reached by an “evolutionary process.”

¶ Virginia’s former (1950 to 1954) Governor John S. Battle, 67, a resonant voice for political moderation in the Southern Democratic Party. Battle, who prevented a Southern walkout at the 1952 Democratic Convention, is a segregationist but not a violent racist, as governor made large strides in improving Virginia’s Negro schools. He promises to represent the “strong Southern view,” i.e., anti-integration, pro-law and order.

¶Assistant Secretary of Labor J. (for nothing) Ernest Wilkins, 63, first Negro ever appointed to a U.S. sub-Cabinet post. Missouri-born Republican Wilkins practiced law in Chicago, is a past president of the Cook County bar association.

¶ Robert Gerald Storey, 63, dean of Southern Methodist University’s law school, a onetime Texas assistant attorney general, executive counsel to Justice Robert H. Jackson at the Nurnberg war crimes trials, onetime president of the American Bar Association. Democrat Storey is credited with building up S.M.U.’s respected Southwestern Legal Center, which includes the university law school, a foundation for research and study, and a graduate school of U.S. and foreign law.

¶ The Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh. 40, president of Notre Dame University. Father Hesburgh lists himself as a political “independent,” has raised Notre Dame’s academic standards since taking the presidency (at 35), plugged for more emphasis -on classic liberal-arts education, is the Vatican’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The commission has a life of two years, is authorized to 1) investigate sworn charges of denials of Negro voting rights, 2) examine “legal developments constituting a denial of equal protection of the laws under the Constitution,” 3) appraise U.S. law in the civil rights field. It has no enforcement powers, but its reports and recommendations—to the public and to aw-enforcement agencies—should have considerable influence.