Civil Rights: The Root of the Spirit

After winding for weeks through thickets of argument about states’ rights and Mrs. Murphy’s boardinghouse, the congressional hearings on the Administration’s civil rights bill finally got to simple human realities. The witness: Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advance ment of Colored People.

Stalked by Humiliation. Reading softly from a prepared statement, Wilkins urged the Senate Commerce Committee to approve the bill’s much-debated public-accommodations section, which would guarantee Negroes equal access to hotels, restaurants and similar privately owned facilities catering to the public. “The affronts and denials that this section, if enacted, would correct are intensely human and personal. Very often they harm the physical body, but always they strike at the root of the human spirit. From the time [Negroes] leave home in the morning en route to school or to work, to shopping or to visiting, until they return home at night, humiliation stalks them.

“For millions of Americans this is vacation time. Families load their automobile and trek across country. I invite the members of this committee to imagine themselves darker in color and to plan an auto trip from Norfolk, Va., to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. How far do you drive each day? Where and under what conditions can you and your family eat? Where can they use a rest room? Can you stop after a reasonable day behind the wheel, or must you drive until you reach a city where relatives or friends will accommodate you for the night? Will your children be denied a soft drink or an ice cream cone because they are not white?”

“What do you do?” interrupted Rhode Island Democrat John Pastore.

“Very often you go out of your way. You have to pick your route. If you drive to Texas you go as far west as you can before you turn south. When you travel through what we call hostile territory you take your chances. You drive and drive and drive.”

The Players in the Drama. “The Negro American,” said Wilkins, “has been waiting upon voluntary action since 1876. He has found what other Americans have discovered: voluntary action has to be sparked by something stronger than prayers, patience and lamentations. If the 13 colonies had waited for voluntary action by England, this land today would be a part of the British Commonwealth.

“The players in this drama of frustration and indignity are not commas or semicolons in a legislative thesis; they are people, human beings, citizens of the United States of America.”

Before a House Judiciary subcommittee holding hearings on the civil rights bill appeared the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, chief executive officer of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S. Blake had made civil rights news several weeks earlier when he was ar rested in Maryland for participating in an anti-discrimination demonstration (TIME, July 12). Said Witness Blake to the committee, reading a joint statement endorsed by more than two dozen leading Protestant, Catholic and Jewish organizations: “Racism is blasphemy against God.”