Ahead of Its Time

Legislation in recent years has gone a long way toward bolstering the Negro's rights in such fundamental areas as education and voting and toward easing his economic plight with a spate of antipoverty programs. Compared with such far-reaching laws, the 1966 civil rights bill seemed something of an anticlimax. It sought to right some blatant wrongs, most notably discrimination in the selection of juries and the sale or rental of housing. Yet, compared with the earlier legislation, the open-housing provision literally came a lot closer to home. The sad, even outrageous, but inescapable fact seems to be that the white is not yet acclimatized to the notion of having a Negro for a neighbor. So the bill last week became the first civil rights measure to be killed by Congress in nine years.

It died almost ignominiously, without even coming to a vote in the Senate. After twelve days of deliberation over a motion to take up the measure, its supporters made their second, foredoomed attempt to choke off debate, but mustered only a 52-to-41 majority for cloture--ten short of the necessary two-thirds of those present and voting. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield thereupon recited the epitaph. "It would be futile," said he, "to prolong consideration of this issue."

Simmering Summer. Bitter postmortems pinned the blame variously on the Senate's Democrats, one-third of whom voted against cloture; on the Republicans, two-thirds of whom did the same; on President Johnson, who did not twist arms with his usual vigor to line up support; on civil rights leaders, who fell to quarreling among themselves, failed to lobby effectively.

To many cartoonists and editorial writers, the man chiefly responsible was Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, who at one point observed: "Someone has to kill Cock Robin, and it might as well be me." Last week, however, Dirksen argued that the Administration had signally failed to ride to Robin's rescue. "Where was Hubert? Where was the President?" he rumbled. Pointing to the Democrats' 67-33 margin in the Senate, he added: "Had the Democrats in the Senate truly wished it, the bill would have passed."

Dirksen knew perfectly well, of course, that a solid score of those Democrats are Southern segregationists, hence that no civil rights bill stands a chance without G.O.P. support. All the same, Majority Leader Mansfield, for one, refused to make Dirksen the scapegoat. He reasoned that support for the bill had been eroded by the "rioting, marches, shootings and inflammatory statements which have characterized this simmering summer." He indicted, in particular, the evangelists of black power, "those who, in the name of racial equality or perhaps more accurately in the name of a new racial superiority, have not advocated further civil rights legislation but, in fact, have actively spoken and fought against it."

Voices of Virulence. Those strong words echoed a feeling held by many, if not most, Americans. The black-power spokesmen--notably the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Stokely Carmichael and the Congress of Racial Equality's Floyd McKissick--have broken up the civil rights coalition whose strong, united stand did much to advance meaningful legislation in the past. The voices of virulence also helped fan the riots that erupted in the nation's cities this summer. Thus Congress, which had considered previous rights bills in the context of anti-Negro violence by Southern whites, this time worked at least partly in a climate of antiwhite violence by Negroes in the North. Negro protests now sometimes seem isolated and dogmatic, as for instance during last week's furor over a handsome new school in Manhattan's East Harlem, where parents' groups, spurred on by Carmichael, demanded that a capable white principal be replaced by a Negro (see EDUCATION).

Responsible Negro leaders, in consequence, are beginning to speak out against the separatist and racist implications of the philosophy. " 'Black power' not only lacks any real value for the civil rights movement," writes Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, in the current Commentary, "but its propagation is positively harmful. It diverts the movement from a meaningful debate over strategy and tactics, it isolates the Negro community, and it encourages the growth of anti-Negro forces."

Green Power. Addressing a steelworkers' convention in Atlantic City, A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights leader and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, indicted black power as a philosophy "based upon the assumption of salvation through racial isolation." Moreover, he warned Negro leaders to "take great care against overheating the ghettos" lest they precipitate "a race war in this nation which could become catastrophic."

In Grenada, Miss., where Negro schoolchildren were savagely beaten this month for attending previously all-white schools, Dr. Martin Luther King drew applause with an appeal for white-black cooperation rather than racial rivalry. "Even we Negroes must learn," he said, "that whites and blacks in this country are tied together inseparably. Neither of us can make it alone." At one point, he gestured toward a collection plate, declared: "Green power--that's the kind of power we need."

Some civil rights strategists are beginning to wonder aloud whether the time has not come to abandon demonstrations altogether--in Randolph's words, to "shift from the streets to the conference room." Many suspect that Negro protest marches may have lost the effectiveness that they undoubtedly once had and, indeed, may only foment white hostility. B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League last week reported that in 1966 Ku Klux Klan membership has increased by 10,000, mostly in the North and the Midwest, to a nationwide total of 29,500, and concluded that irban riots and the "black-power" threat had lent credibility to its shabby hokum among those "who previously would have neither listened nor heard." Misdirected Negro militancy also gives those who might otherwise be ashamed of their anti-Negro prejudices a ready-made excuse and self-justification.

As for the 1966 bill, Lyndon Johnson indicated last week that he would disinter it when he delivers his State of the Union message in January. But, given the current climate of opinion in the U.S. and the likelihood that the 90th Congress will be a shade or two to the right of the 89th, there is scant probability that a similar bill will fare any better in 1967 than the original did.

This prospect does not surprise many responsible civil rights leaders. For one thing, few Negroes as yet have the money or overriding desire to move into solidly white neighborhoods. The 1966 civil rights bill was, in this aspect at least, ahead of its time. Before the push for open housing can really hope to succeed, the U.S. Negro will have to build up his economic power. In the immediate future, his most important goal will be the full and forceful implementation of all the Great Society and civil rights laws already on the books.

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