THE CONGRESS: Back Again

It was Minnesota’s fast-talking Hubert Humphrey, not yet a Senator, who insisted that a stout civil-rights plank—including an FEPC—be written into the Democratic Party’s 1948 platform. The results were awesome: the Dixiecrats walked out of the convention, the party split, and that was as far as civil rights ever got. Southern Democrats in the Sist Congress threatened to filibuster civil rights to death, and had their way. The 82nd Congress is now six months old and the Administration has so far made no effort to revive the issue. Last week Senator Humphrey, seeing that no one else was making a move, dropped into the legislative hopper the eight bills (including FEPC) which had touched off the 1948 uproar.